Yes, resistance is futile, but we resist anyway. We resist change, we resist new things and we resist anything that might create chaos in our lives.
But education is always changing and always have new things and a lot of times those changes makes chaos in our lives.
But sometimes it is for the best of our students, our community and our way of life.
Take for instance "The Breadwinner". A book about how a young girl had to change in order to help her family survive. When we get deeper into the story, we start to feel the fear, apprehension and other tensions that exists for young Parvana.
Using this story as a basis to help students understand what life is like in other countries is appropriate and it shows how we have to deal with the issues of not just race in bias, but sex as well. I would also probably have a lesson plan that relates to women in America and the issues surrounding fair wages and bias around employment of certain jobs such as construction workers, firefighters, police and even the military.
Here is a link to a lesson plan that specifically can be used for Middle School students on the breadwinner. I found that it delved deeply into doing a compare and contrast into a week of life of the main character and the student themselves.
It shows how the "Breadwinner" can be used to create critical thinking and start discussions on how life is in other places different from their own experiences. What would they do in Parvana's place? How would they deal with the issues she faced and if they thought what she did was right? It also gives students a way to develop their language skills as they learn about the intricacies of another culture and their beliefs. They could develop new insight into how something that might not be important to us is very important to another culture and its way of life.
Here is a video that I would show my students before they read the book.
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