Carrie Supple in Buea, Cameroon
April 2009

Welcome and thank you for visiting Teaching for Solidarity.  My name is Carrie Supple and I’ve been a teacher, project organiser, writer, community activist, grants officer and volunteer for 40 years, mainly in the UK and have spent some time in Israel, the USA and Cameroon.

The aim of Teaching for Solidarity: is to be part of the many ways we can work together to create a more just and humane society, where we look after each other.

 ‘Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation.’ (Martin Luther King)

What Teaching for Solidarity offers: This site brings together materials to support teachers, trainers and community workers who want to build solidarity and cohesion.  From my own experience, I know how difficult it can be to locate or develop appropriate resources.  Here you will find links to materials and projects I’ve co-created with colleagues, family and friends. I hope you find them useful. Please let me know.

The roots of Teaching for Solidarity: In 1992 I was working with young people in St. Paul’s Way School, Tower Hamlets, East London.  I showed the film Where Shall We Go? (see ‘Learning About The Holocaust’ on this website) featuring Holocaust survivors in dialogue with teenagers from schools in the North East of England.  Two comments made by St. Paul’s Way pupils have stayed with me because they were so moving and insightful.  One said of the survivors’ testimony, ‘Their words got inside me and made me think of my family’. And another, ‘It made me think it is my business to speak out when ‘others’ are persecuted’.

Educators everywhere struggle with how to affect attitudes and actions.  How do we develop the instinct to feel and demonstrate solidarity? I have been inspired by, amongst many others, the concept of tikkun olam (our shared responsibility to repair, or heal the world) in Judaism and the African concept of Ubuntu ‘a commitment to the community, a sense that my connectedness is bound up with your connectedness’ and by many examples in history of solidarity in the face of injustice, especially the ongoing US civil rights movement.  I am constantly in awe of the phenomenally brave people on every continent who show what to me is unimaginable courage in struggling for freedom for all. This site is for them.

The resources Most are downloadable and free.  One or two are for sale via the publishers.  I’ve included a few links to relevant organisations but I have not necessarily tried to include all the best known and there are an infinite number of great sites.  I have not updated the resources except for in obvious cases.

I’ve enjoyed producing the site and not having to satisfy anyone else’s ‘line’, policy or communications and branding department.  If you have resources or know of sites you think would fit the aim of Teaching for Solidarity.  I do hope you find them useful and am keen to hear feedback. You can email me at Carriesupple1@gmail.com.  The projects appear in the chronological order in which they were produced.  With huge thanks to everyone who advised on the design and content.

‘We don’t have to engage in grand heroic actions to participate in the process of change.  Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world’ (Howard Zinn).