The Day of Silence
A high school teacher navigates the tensions that arise in conversations with students about the Day of Silence, and how to bridge divides.
Youth Activism
Oakland Youth to Teachers’ Retirement System: “Divest Now!”
It was a letter to the CalSTRS board, demanding that they dump the pension fund’s investments in oil and gas companies. It was signed “From the many young climate justice activists who will continue to be at every one of your meetings until you divest.”
Compassion, Solidarity, Care: Detroit-Area Youth Respond to the Pandemic
Just as workers are going to need unions, young people need to be organizing as students to make collective demands on the system as well as to meet their needs in an emergency.
Necessary Trouble
Wolfe-Rocca describes her mixer around the “Valve Turners,” a group of climate disobedience activists who put their bodies on the line to stop the harm of pipelines.
Writing for Justice
An elementary school teacher takes us inside his classroom to see how he builds on his students’ lives and passions to help them create persuasive essays.
Haniyah’s Story
Haniyah wrote this article as a 17-year-old participant in Project WHAT! a program of Community Works West, based in Berkeley, Calif. The young people in Project WHAT! all have family […]
Chicago’s Peace Warriors
A group of students from Chicago’s North Lawndale College Preparatory High were in the middle of a weeklong summer training to become Peace Warriors—peer nonviolence leaders. Suddenly, a sophomore named […]
Science for the People
Ninth graders develop science literacy as they become neighborhood environmental experts and activists.
Acting In and On the World
Oregon students and teachers learn life lessons by participating in the ‘Theater of the Oppressed’.
‘Use Another Word’
One school’s campaign against put-downs.
The War in Iraq and Daily Classroom Life
Suggestions from a 5th-grade teacher on bringing the War in Iraq into the curriculum.
Youth Take the Lead on High School Reform Issues
Sistas and Brothas United.
Teaching About Global Warming in Truck Country
Helping kids who’ve grown up in the truck culture” examine climate change.
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Students Galvanize for Immigrant Rights
Viviana, who had only lived in the United States for two years, walked nervously to the speaker’s podium at a press conference on the steps of her high school. Although […]
Tackling Tracking
A teacher finds that small school reform presents opportunities to teach about tracking and inequality.
Holding Nyla
Nyla* came into our Head Start classroom wheeled by her special aassistant and surrounded by three early intervention (EI) specialists. I could barely see her for the equipment, adults, and […]
Teaching About Toxins
A Rethinking Schools editor explores the environment’s effects on her students’ health in the classroom.
Racial Justice Is Not a Choice
High-stakes tests have not only failed to achieve racial equality in schooling, they’ve also made it worse for students of color.
The Green New Deal and Our Schools
So often, the climate crisis is presented in frightening, threatening terms: rising seas, superstorms, raging wildfires, unlivable temperatures, species extinction, disappearing glaciers, dying coral, climate refugees. These are real. But the paradox is that this dystopian possibility is forcing us to imagine an entirely different kind of society. Schools have a central role to play in devising new alternatives and equipping young people to bring those alternatives to life. This is the work we’ve been assigned.
Women of the Day
A high school teacher looks at how a daily activity focusing on the representation of women helped transform her classroom.
“Because Our Islands Are Our Life”
A high school ethnic studies teacher describes how students in the Pacific Island Club used poetry to refocus the narrative surrounding climate justice onto frontline communities.
Creating Bias Detectives, Blowing Up Stereotypes, and Writing Essays that Matter
“Part of the work of teaching students to read is teaching them to question not only the written word, but also the author,” Christensen writes in her article about teaching students how to confront writers whose stories erase the full truth and misrepresent people and places.
Teacher Unions Take on the Climate Crisis
As young people across the country join the global movement to mobilize school strikes to demand climate action, one group is starting to think more seriously about how to best support those efforts: their teachers.
The 2020 Presidential Election: Educators Speak Out
We asked a group of radical educators to weigh in on what they hoped would be part of any 2020 presidential candidate’s education platform.
Why I Don’t Teach the Hero’s Journey
A high school English teacher deconstructs “Hero’s Journey” curriculum, shows its patriarchal prejudice, and talks about teaching collective rather than only individual transformation.