Marissa Friedman — Activism Beyond the Classroom

Raised in the suburbs in Connecticut, Marissa has lived in New York, Boston, and Paris before moving to Philadelphia for graduate school. After studying history and literature in college, she merged her love of history with her passion for education and justice by writing history curriculum for middle school students that focused on challenging dominant narratives and highlighting diverse voices. At the Penn Graduate School of Education, Marissa is pursuing her master's degree in Education, Culture, and Society, studying the history of how the Civil War has been taught (and mistaught) to students throughout history.

Writings

Featured

Community Engagement

Learning How to Protest, or Maybe Not

Community Engagement

This is not a blog post where I tell a story about my journey of transformation. Instead, this post details how I tried—and failed—to engage in civil disobedience, and how this failure has begun to help me figure out what kind of activism beyond the classroom most inspires me, instead.

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Community Engagement

Opinion

What Do We Choose to Memorialize?

Opinion

What we choose to memorialize is important. I want us to reclaim the monument for those whom the monument has often ignored, erased, dehumanized. Given the power we confer upon monuments in our society, their establishment can serve as a tool to reassert what we recognize, centralize, and legitimize, and ultimately confer our values onto, as a society. In 2013, the city of Philadelphia closed 23 schools for the 2013-2014 school year. Shuttered due to low enrollment and failing test scores, many of these schools played central roles in their communities. t did not have to be this way, and it does not have to still. What would happen if we memorialized these spaces, rather than letting them fade into obscurity?