An Unfortunate Misunderstanding
Helping create an independent charter school seems like a dream job. But teachers, parents, and children soon confront all-too-familiar charter school woes.
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Creative Conflict
A high school drama teacher searches for ways to encourage students to write about their lives without replicating stereotypes.
“Hey, Mom, I Forgive You”
An English teacher builds community as her students write a poem about forgiving or not forgiving. She starts with her own story.
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A Pure Medley
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Stand and Be Counter
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An Unnatural Disaster
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Saving Mango Street
When her small, rural hometown bans The House on Mango Street from the middle school curriculum, a college student organizes her former classmates to get the ruling overturned.
From Tucson to Palestine
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Precious Knowledge: Teaching Solidarity with Tucson
A high school history teacher centers a study of social movements on the fight over the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson. His students spread the knowledge.
Your Struggle Is My Struggle
One of Carberry’s students explains how the film Precious Knowledge changed her feelings about herself and her family.
Stealing and Selling Nature
A history teacher argues that students need to know the environmental history of our current crises including how nature was turned into a commodity to be bought and sold.
Learning in the Digital Age: Control or Connection?
A teacher educator explores the contradictory nature of technology in education.
Books About Contemporary Palestine for Children
It’s difficult to find accurate books on Palestine for young readers. A former teacher educator describes resources for K-8 students, including picture books, nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.
Immigration, Sports, and Resistance
After Carlos Borja built an award-winning track team, he was fired for refusing to oust his assistant coach, who was undocumented.
King Corn
King Corn follows an acre of corn to market and a future as ethanol, food sweeteners, and animal feed. The journey anchors a curriculum on the international food crisis and how much choice we have over what we eat.
Taking Teacher Quality Seriously
If test-based evaluation of teachers is unfair and unreliable, whats a better approach? A negotiated union/district plan in Montgomery County, Maryland, offers an alternative.
Professional Development
Race to the Top timelines create pressure on winning states to farm out professional development. Is online “canned” PD the wave of the future?
Burned Out of Homes and History
Through historical documents, novels, videos, and a role play, high school language arts students learn about the racist riot that destroyed the African American section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. They turn their understanding into poetry and historical fiction.
Plotting Inequalities, Building Resistance
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Who’s Crazy? Students Critique the The Gods Must Be Crazy
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Playing Smart
Scripted curriculum de-skills teachers and rewards students for passivity, not critical thinking. A teacher educator urges teachers to organize and fight back.
Sin Fronteras Boy
Fourth-grade English language learners use wikis to study border issues and gain literacy skills.
Dirty Oil and Shovel-Ready Jobs
High school students learn about the conflict over the pipeline by participating in a role play.
Patterns and Punctuation – Learning to Question Language
A 5th-grade teacher adapts student-generated science inquiry to punctuation. Her goal: to help students see punctuation as part of the creative process, not a series of rules to memorize.
‘Before Today, I Was Afraid of Trees’ – Rethinking Nature Deficit Disorder
A high school chemistry teacher takes his students to a city park to tap maple trees for syrup. How can we build student comfort with the natural world without seeing city-raised students as “deficient”?