Teacher Resources: Religion

TeachUNICEF offers educational materials and resources to teachers and youth service professionals interested in global education, interconnectedness, and children's humanitarian issues. Teaching Materials cover grades PK-12, are interdisciplinary, and include lesson plans, stories, online magazines, and multimedia. For instance the UNICEF ACT (Action for Children Today) magazine explores current global issues, such as Ebola, migration, and hunger, and includes articles as well as downloadable lesson plans. The site makes finding resources easy with a Select a Topic drop down menu on the landing page, covering areas such as Armed Conflict, Child Labor, Child Trafficking, Children with Disabilities, Education, Global Citizenship, and many others. For educators looking to broaden students' minds to global issues, this site will be a true boon.

With archival material from the earliest Edison films to footage of present day debates, discussions, and events, the Library of Congress YouTube channel can serve educators of history, literature, music, and other subjects. The channel opens with a featured video, which, at the time of this writing, includes an excellent 33-minute film highlighting the Rosa Parks Collection at the LOC. Readers interested in specific thematic topics, will find that the Playlists here are plentiful. For instance, the Webcasts from the Library of Congress II category features 463 videos including discussions with Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera and a new look at romance fiction in the digital age. Other categories include Topics in Science, Law and the Library, Music and the Brain, Hidden Treasures at the Library of Congress, and many others.

This slew of intercultural resources from AFS-USA (formerly the American Field Service) offers lesson plans in Cultural Studies, Global Awareness, Human Rights, STEM Education, Social Activism, and Intercultural Learning. Each lesson plan is well-defined and easily implemented, with an overview, objectives, time for the lesson, materials, and a description of the activity. For example, under Cultural Studies, the lesson on Generalizations and Stereotypes takes approximately 45 minutes. Upon completion, students should be able to define the notion of culture, recognize stereotypes, and distinguish aspects of different cultures, among other objectives. Other lesson plans include Exploring Islamic Traditions, Microfinance, and a lesson on the "iceberg" analogy of how hidden dimensions of culture manifest.

This project from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University offers students and teachers a closer look at constructions of childhood and youth throughout world history. Completed in 2010, the collected materials are sorted into four categories: Website Reviews, Primary Sources, Case Studies, and Teaching Modules. Each section is then organized by region, ranging from Africa to Latin America to the Pacific Basin. For instance, within Primary Sources, readers will find data tables on Meiji Era School Attendance, primary source text from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and photographs of sculptures, such as the small terra-cotta statue, Ancient Greek Adolescent Girls at Play. Each resource is accompanied by an informative annotation, source information, and guidelines for how to cite it. While some of the external links have not been maintained, there are numerous resources here to inspire learning. Educators, especially, will find the Teaching Modules section helpful as it provides lesson plans, strategies, and document-based questions on a number of topics, including Ancient China, Age of Consent Laws, and Health in Early Modern England.