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 a new addition to our existing suite of classroom poster designs available for download and self-printing.

In 2023, we offered the first set 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, Marsha P. Johnson, Harvey Milk, and Holocaust survivor and Nobel-prize-winning author Elie Wiesel. Also available is representation of our highly requested Facing History Learning Journey. Our 2024 addition features our “5 Be”s encouraging students to engage in ways that foster a sense of community and belonging, and our 2025 addition includes journal prompts to help foster reflection and connection, particularly as you and students get to know one another at the beginning of the school year.

Student Upstander

A notable feature in this set of designs is the inclusion of a Facing History alum upstander – a student who has 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 upstander better by watching the clip below from a past speaking engagement.

Journal Prompts for Reflection & Connection

Support student reflection, engagement, and expression through journaling activities. The ready-made prompts featured on this poster are suitable for any classroom, and pair especially well with Facing History’s Borders & Beloning ELA collection. This collection invites students to explore the human need for belonging and the factors that shape it.

Learn more about Journaling as a teaching strategy.

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 Learning 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 our 2023-2024 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.

Honoring the Legacy of Elie Wiesel

Throughout his remarkable life, Elie Wiesel gave powerful, poignant testimony of his experience as a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buna Werke concentration camps during WWII. Originally published in Yiddish, his memoir And the World Would Remain Silent was later translated in English as titled Night and is considered a seminal work on this pivotal period of history. Wiesel’s legacy is also a prominent fixture in Facing History’s Holocaust education curriculum, particularly in our Legacy and Memory materials. 

In the clip below, Wiesel describes the importance of fighting indifference, which he considered an even greater threat to humankind than hate.

Whether you hang one or all eight 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.