I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban

Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Just Like Malala: How Everyone, Everywhere Can Inspire Change”

In this activity, students will brainstorm the ways in which they can create meaningful change in their own lives and communities, inspired by the activist work of Malala Yousafzai.

As you’ve learned, in I Am Malala, the two primary pillars of Malala’s activism are (1) educating girls and women and (2) bringing about peace to the Middle East, particularly the Swat Valley. In this activity, you will break into small groups and research the current social justice projects that Malala is working on through her organization, the Malala Fund. You will then consider ways in which you could contribute to social change related to those injustices (or related injustices). This activity should be broken up into three phases:

• Reflect. Reflect upon the text of I Am Malala. What are Malala’s core values? Review sections of the text in which those core values are illustrated. Did you find yourself being inspired to work toward righting a particular wrong while reading the text? Spend roughly 30-45 minutes reflecting in your small groups.
• Research. Next, read through a few recent sections of Assembly, which is the online publication by the Malala Fund that gives girls around the world a platform to share their stories. In each issue, girls step forward and write about their experiences with girls’ education, gender equality, climate change, STEM, and activism. Identify an area that means something to your small group, which will be your focus for the next step.
• Action. Finally, develop a potential plan of action—obviously, you won’t be able to “solve” the problem—but figure out one, small step that you and your group could take to help alleviate the area you’ve chosen as your focus.

As a class, discuss the process of going through this activity. Which of Malala’s core values did people most often identify in their small groups? What did they learn in Assembly that interested and/or surprised them? Finally, share with the class what sort of action that you and your small group could plan on taking to create social change.

Teaching Suggestion: Before you begin this exercise, you may want to brush up on the American Federation of Teachers’ guidelines around teaching student activism, called Youth Making a Difference. It might also be helpful to have students read the following articles on student/youth activism, to help them generate ideas on what their plan of action might be: (1) Stanford Business’ Malala Yousafzai on How Everyone Can Inspire Change, (2) Youth Celebrate Diversity’s Local Actions for Students to Engage in Activism, (3) The Advocates for Youth’s Youth Activist Toolkit, and (4)The University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Safe Activism & Expressive Activities: Taking Action to Effect Change.