Clear the blackboard.

Here are some lessons about life: all of our lives, that is, not just the ones in this class, or that community or even just this country. It's time to learn about social justice, which starts in the classroom if teacher Donna Bryan has anything to say about it.

At Coxsackie-Athens High School, the 10th-grade English teacher has started an after-school club devoted to social justice; has created a Web site to collect stories of prejudice, and six years ago changed her curriculum to combine literature with social justice.

Students read Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, George Orwell's 1984 and Art Spiegelman's Mouse, a graphic novel memoir of a Holocaust survivor.

Research assignments involve such topics as human trafficking, extraordinary rendition and historical dissonance.

Her motivation for changing the curriculum? She said students think prejudice is historical.

Once students are shown where to look and how to become aware of problems, Bryan said, they yearn for justice. Perhaps that is because as teens, they know what it is like to be marginalized in a cast of thousands.

"Their sensibilities are naturally tuned in to what's right and what is wrong, said Bryan, a member of the Coxsackie Teachers Association, led by Sharon Carloni.

"So much is hidden from them by media, by school curriculum, by family dynamics. They are thirsty for knowledge."

The World of Difference after-school club is an outlet. It takes on social justice concerns and prejudice with X-ray vision.

It started two years ago with five students; now there are 20.

Using a grant from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the club set up an interactive Web site to solicit stories from the public about incidents of prejudice. (Contact bryand@coxsackie-athens.org)

The club is collecting and posting these stories, and hopes to publish a book about them.

"For every story we get we put a bean of a different color in a jar," said Bryan of the Human Bean Project. "It's a visual to remind of us how prejudice affects everybody."

Club members are also busy planning a film festival. In June, they went to The Human Rights Watch film festival in Manhattan.

Another of their projects is lining up a "sister school" project in Tanzania to create friendships and cultural exchange.

To raise money for the project, members sell Equal Exchange and Fair Trade products, with profits going to the club.

NYSUT Secretary-Treasurer Lee Cutler, who oversees the union's social justice advocacy, visited the Coxsackie high school last fall to talk about the importance of unions, why social justice is important, and what he sees in his travels.

"You need to realize you have power," he told students. "You're like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, who doesn't realize she has the power in her shoes all along."