Resistance & Resilience — Grade 8
In this unit, students explore how people across cultures and centuries have resisted injustice and found strength in adversity. Through texts spanning the African American literary tradition, Latina storytelling, global activism, and the immigrant experience, students examine what it means to push back against systems that try to silence, diminish, or erase. Every lesson asks: what does it cost to resist, and what does it cost not to?
What gives people the courage to resist injustice — and what forms can that resistance take?
📚 Recommended Anchor Texts
Lessons
Dreams Deferred, Dreams Reclaimed
The poetry of Black resistance and the refusal to be diminished
The House That Holds Us
Place, belonging, and the strength found in community
The Weapon of Words
Education as liberation from Frederick Douglass to Malala Yousafzai
Still We Rise
Contemporary voices of survival, healing, and hope
Writing Assignment
My Resistance, My Resilience
Unit Writing Assignment · Unlocks with full unit purchase
Standards Alignment
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