Individual Lesson View
Abolitionists
From: Zinn Education Project
Grade Level: (MS), HS,
Remote Ready: With Modifications for Part 2
Time: 1-2 Class Periods for All Activities
Length of Reading: Pages
Who Fought to End Slavery?
Meet the Abolitionists. This lesson comes in 2 parts. The first is a role-playing activity where each student is an abolitionist, and the second is "talk-back" journaling exercise based on an 8 page reading on the Abolition Movement.
Role play: Each student is assigned one of 21 abolitionist historical characters. Students read their paragraph-long bio, slap on a name tag, and engage in a meet and greet as their character, asking provided questions and writing down answers. The class discusses their findings using provided discussion questions.
Reading and talk back: Students read 8 pages from Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the Abolition Movement." Students then write a "talk-back" journal. They pick out several sections from the reading that they found interesting, important, confusing, or peculiar. Then they detail their reactions. The class discusses what they've written as well as student questions and provided questions.
Image: “Thus saith the Lord, Execute judgement in the MORNING, and deliver him that is spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor,” in Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1838, Vol 1., Number 3, Page 1, N. Southard editor. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/americanantislav1838chil/page/n1/mode/2up. Accessed 6.10.2020.
[um_bookmarks_button post_id=””]
Click the Bookmark Icon above to save this lesson plan to your profile!
Grade Level: (MS), HS
- HS=High School
- Though HS is the specified grade level, this lesson would be excellent for middle school students as well.
Remote Ready: With Modifications
- We don’t believe the first activity, a meet-and-greet, would be possible online. If you’ve found a work-around, please let us know.
- However, the second activity involving a reading and a written response is totally possible remotely. We suggest having students post work in your LMS for easy grading.
Role Play Icon
This activity involves asking students to portray historical figures
Secondary Source Icon
This activity contains secondary sources
Group Work Icon
This activity calls for working in pairs or groups or having a group discussion.
Writing Icon
This icon represents a long writing assignment such as an essay or a several paragraph response to a prompt. Almost all activities require students to answer questions, but that's not what this icon represents.
Reviews of This Lesson Plan
We would really appreciate your thoughts on this lesson at the bottom of the page. With that said, please review this lesson ONLY if you’ve used it yourself and can comment authoritatively about how it works. Thank you for bringing broken links and other issues to our attention; if we can fix those issues, we might delete the comment so as not to confuse readers. We reserve the right to delete comments that are offensive, un-helpful, or political.