Cuentos del corazón (Stories from the Heart): Fall Issue

October 14, 2015

Letter from the Editors

​Nothing reveals our attitudes about our students more clearly than the stance we take toward their home languages. Do we advocate for students’ right to education in their home language? Do we welcome their multilingual “stories from the heart,” and use them to anchor our curriculum, or do we demand English-only conformity?

These articles are evidence that the movement for bilingual and bicultural education...

Stories from the Heart​​

An after-school writing project for students and their families
By Jessica Singer Early and Tracey Flores
​Second graders and their families write together, countering Arizona’s English-only, segregated, and anti-immigrant school policies.
Spanish Version: Cuentos del corazón: Una clase de escritura después de la escuela para estudiantes bilingües y sus familias
Ground your curriculum in your students lives

English-Only to the Core

What the Common Core means for emergent bilingual youth 
By Jeff Bale
Is the Common Core better than current approaches to English language learners—or the next salvo in more than a decade of attacks on bilingual programs?

CCSS will further erode bilingual education and linguistic justice

“¿Qué es desportar?”

Teaching from students’ lives
By Sandra L. Osorio

An early elementary school teacher realizes she needs to dump the scripted curriculum and basal reader, find Latina/o literature in Spanish, and make space for her students’ thoughts and feelings.
“¿Qué es deportar?”: Enseñar a partir de las vidas de los estudiantes
Schools were and are one front in an anti racist battle

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>>Features

Who Made the New Deal?

Part I: What Caused the Great Depression?
By Adam Sanchez​
High school students play the Widget Boom Game to understand how overproduction and underconsumption helped cause the Great Depression.

Baby Mamas in Literature and Life

By Abby Kindelsperger
Inspired by students’ responses to her own pregnancy, a high school English teacher develops a unit based on teen pregnancy and motherhood—rejecting the usual deficit-based narrative of teen parenting.

A Midsummer Night’s Gender Diversity

By Lauren Porosoff
Middle schoolers explore how Shakespeare plays with gender expression and expectations in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The Hidden Agenda of High School Assemblies

By Jessica Richter-Furman
A high school teacher realizes that, despite her school’s diverse student body, the students on the stage at assemblies are virtually all white and male. She sets out to understand why and to change the pattern.

we need to do everything we can to defend public education

DEPARTMENTS

Education Action

Books and Authors​

​By Renée Watson

Good Stuff

Beyond Magenta

​Reviewed by Melissa Bollow Tempel

Resource
Our picks for books, videos, websites, and other social justice education resources.