The following passage is from TSJ Member Sana to give you an overview of what it means to exhibit at the Curriculum Fair. Please sign up at: http://bit.ly/tsjexhibitor

This is a short account of my experience exhibiting at the TSJ Curriculum Fair.

Last year was my first year exhibiting, and like many, I was very apprehensive at first.  However, with the encouragement of my dear friend, Jonah, active member of TSJ, I worked up the courage.  Still a little worried about how I could possibly contribute to the fair, I enlisted the help of my co-teacher Mary.  We brainstormed how we could or already had incorporated social justice ideals such as anti-racist, multilingual, student-centered, etc. education in the classroom.  We realized we were implementing social justice principles while teaching the novel, Monster by Walter Dean Myers through our discussions of the injustices youth of color, specifically African Americans, face with the judicial system.

We looked at the TSJ exhibitor application, which mentioned that most exhibitors put up science-fair-like boards to exhibit their work. The board didn't take that long to put together, but to ground it in the TSJ principles, I am going to have my students put the board together this year.

The next step was to make copies of the worksheets we distributed to students. Also, we put student responses on our boards to help their voices be heard. We were finally ready and excited to exhibit at the fair. The day of the fair we arrived around 9 a.m. and put up our board and copies, which took a whole 5 minutes. During the fair we were at our exhibit, but we weren't chained down to the exhibit, so we were able to enjoy the curriculum fair as well.

I hope you end up exhibiting because although you may think you have nothing to offer, the very fact that you are reading this shows your heart is in the right place and have things to share!

--Sana Jafri
Fore more info about this year's fair and to sign up to be an exhibitor, click here.