Resources

Summer 2009

Curriculum Resources

How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate: Scientists and Kids Explore Global Warming
By Lynne Cherry and Garry Braasch
(Dawn Publications, 2008)
66 pp. $18.95 Hardback
Science is not just for scientists. That's the premise of this excellent introduction to the science behind understanding climate change. The book argues for "citizen scientists," and shows how young people throughout North America are collecting data to help describe our changing planet. How We Know... manages to be both sobering and hopeful—no small trick in these climate-scary times.

Planning to Change the World: A Plan Book for Social Justice Teachers 2009-2010
Edited by Tara Mack and Bree Picower
New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) and Education for Liberation Network
Approx. 130 pp. $16.00
www.justiceplanbook.com
Every teacher needs a plan book, so why not get one that supports our aspirations to link education and social justice? All plan books start with blank space to fill in with daily lesson plans. Most plan books also stop there. Planning to Change the World is filled with inspirational quotes from educators and activists, lesson ideas, website information for valuable curriculum, significant dates and anniversaries, and short narratives from social justice teachers.

Real World Math: Engaging Students through Global Issues
(Facing the Future, 2009)
www.facingthefuture.org
Teachers Guide 148 pp. $29.95
Student Workbook 75 pp. $14.95
This two-part resource contains 15 lessons to help teachers inject real world issues into middle school algebra and geometry classes. The topics include waste and recycling, poverty, carbon emissions, and solar power. Each lesson is clearly laid out with critical thinking questions, objectives, key concepts, materials lists and teacher instructions. The student workbook includes handouts. Extension and action project ideas are also included. This resource would have been even more powerful had issues like racial disparities and the need for institutional change been woven into the lessons. Despite that shortcoming, however, the data, urls, resources and teaching ideas make this an invaluable resource for the middle school math teacher who wants to connect the world and the classroom.

Studs Terkel's Working: a graphic adaptation
By Studs Terkel, Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle
(New Press, 2009)
208 pp. $22.95
Studs Terkel's classic collection of interviews with people about their labor has been adapted to comic book form. This graphic adaptation of Working can be a great introduction to labor history and to the full collection of Studs Terkel's groundbreaking work. Honoring the diversity of voices in the book, the editors invited an array of graphic artists to illustrate the stories. The varied approaches they have taken to portray the oral histories could inspire students seeking to illustrate their own texts. The book is marred only by some contributors including so much of the original interview that in places the text is dense and hard to read.

Picture Books

Grace for President
By Kelly DiPucchio, illustrated by LeUyen Pham
(Hyperion Books for Children, 2008)
40 pp. $15.99
Grace for President chronicles the political campaign of Grace Campbell, an elementary school student who, when she learns that not a single U.S. president has been a woman, decides to be the first. Her teacher stages a mock presidential election. LeUyen Pham's illustrations show Grace to be full of spirit and character, and DiPucchio's text gives a clear basic explanation of the U.S. electoral college. While one of the book's strengths is that the heroine is a girl of color, it would have been nice if some of the adults were, too, and if the text had made explicit reference to issues of race.

Education Books

Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media, and Democratic Possibilities
By Patricia Hill Collins
(Beacon Press; 2009)
256 pp. $27.95
Patricia Hill Collins provides a strong argument for the need to focus not on "frameworks of reform and fitting in" but instead how to "tell a sustained story of practicing resistance." She outlines the ways in which young people are influenced by racism and the media, highlighting the role that schools can play to help challenge oppressive messages and make democracy a reality.

Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds:
The Teachers of WritersCorps in Poetry and Prose
Edited by Chad Sweeney with foreword by Martín Espada
(City Lights Foundation, 2009)
240 pp. $17.95
An amazing collection of 50 short essays by accomplished writers who teach creative writing to low-income youth in public schools, homeless shelters, and juvenile detention centers. Based in San Francisco, Washington D.C., and New York City, the WritersCorps program builds on the tradition of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), created 75 years ago during the Great Depression. The essays are an inspiring blend of teaching vignettes, semi-autobiographical reflections, poetry, and testimony about the power of the written word for young people. The book demonstrates the key role a federally funded program can have on students'—and teachers'—lives. Instead of pouring millions of dollars into more testing programs and scripted curriculum, the U.S. Department of Education should fund the replication of this and similar programs in thousands of cities and rural areas. That would provide genuine help for our country's artists, youth and schools. In the book's foreword, poet Martín Espada sums up the book's power, "This anthology is more than a record of WritersCorps. It is a chronicle of our times. It is a newspaper fluttering on the tomb of an escaped slave."

The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History
By Derrick Alridge
(Teacher College Press, 2008)
190 pp. $24.95
Combining biography, analysis, and research, this comprehensive interpretation of Du Bois' educational thinking moves beyond the "debates" between Booker T. Washington and Du Bois. Drawing on primary sources and contrasting Du Bois' thinking with that of other educators during Du Bois' long career as an educator and activist, this book will be of interest to those unfamiliar with Du Bois as well as to
historians.

DVDs

Flow: How Did a Handful of Corporations Steal Our Water?
Directed by Irena Salina (2008)
Oscilloscope Pictures $23.99
84 min. www.oscilloscope.net
Flow is the best film on global water conflicts that we are aware of. The film travels the world, highlighting the fundamental injustice of treating water as if it were simply a commodity. From South Africa to India to the United States, bad things happen when we turn over this essential resource to profit-making enterprises. At 84 minutes, it's very long for classroom use, but because it is divided into short country and issue segments, it can (and should) be used with high school, and possibly middle school, students. And for teachers, the film helps us consider needed elements of a water curriculum—whether in social studies, science, or health classes. Water will become an increasingly important source of global conflict in the years ahead. Here's an excellent introduction for our students, and for us.

Compiled by Bill Bigelow, Deborah Menkart, Bob Peterson and Katie Seitz.