A Gift for Your Classroom: Free Poster Download

As you and your students return to the classroom, we know that creating an inviting, reflective learning environment is a top priority. One way to generate a thoughtful atmosphere is with relevant photos, student work, and posters. To that end, we are excited to share six new classroom poster designs available for download and self-printing. 

As the first set to be offered since Facing History & Ourselves underwent an update of our visual identity in 2021, our design team had several goals for this project: 

• Provide appealing and evergreen content, appropriate for a variety of classroom settings and teaching subjects, 
• Complement other Facing History classroom resources and materials;
• Reflect the world and our classrooms by featuring people with a variety of identities, perspectives, and experiences; 
• Convey that anyone and everyone can be an upstander.

Developed with educator and staff feedback, our vibrant 19 in. x 27 in. posters feature historical and contemporary upstanders such as Rosa Parks, Mahatma Gandhi, Malala Yousafzai, Elie Weisel, and Harvey Milk, plus representation of our highly requested Facing History journey.  

Student Upstanders

A notable new feature in this set of designs is the inclusion of Facing History alum upstanders – students who have participated in Facing History classrooms throughout their high school education and experienced transformational learning along the way. Excerpted from past speeches and interviews, their insightful quotes provide current students with perspectives from peers who they may be able to relate to as everyday champions of progress and positive change. 

Get to know our student upstanders better by watching the clips below from past speaking engagements.

People Make Choices. Choices Make History. 

We also dedicated a poster to our tagline, a statement of purpose that ties together individual choice, the impact of our choices on others, and the power we have to shape the future. Including our tagline on this poster serves as a call to action for students to reflect on the importance of thinking critically, growing emotionally, and acting ethically with examples of prominent figures who embody what it means to be an upstander. 

The Facing History Journey

The Facing History Journey is a key component of our pedagogy and follows an intentional progression of themes to help students make connections between history and the consequences of our actions and beliefs today. Though it is part of our training and curriculum for educators to implement in their classrooms, we framed the concept in this poster specifically for a student audience. The simplified descriptions of each phase of the journey and addition of reflection questions are intended to help students examine the role they play in bringing about a more just, equitable, and compassionate world.

The Powerful Voice of George Takei

As a friend of Facing History and the author of this year’s All Community Read They Called Us Enemy, activist and actor George Takei was an obvious choice to feature on one of our posters. With many notable quotes from his decades of advocacy, we included one thematically aligned with the ignoble chapter in US history at the center of his graphic memoir about his years spent in a Japanese-American internment camp.

Whether you hang one or all six in your classroom, these eye-catching motivational posters will inspire your students to reflect on their agency, responsibility, and the impact of their choices on the world around them.