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.”
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.
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.
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 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 […]
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 […]
Ninth graders develop science literacy as they become neighborhood environmental experts and activists.
Oregon students and teachers learn life lessons by participating in the ‘Theater of the Oppressed’.
Suggestions from a 5th-grade teacher on bringing the War in Iraq into the curriculum.
One school’s campaign against put-downs.
Sistas and Brothas United.
Helping kids who’ve grown up in the truck culture” examine climate change.
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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 […]
A teacher finds that small school reform presents opportunities to teach about tracking and inequality.
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 […]
A Rethinking Schools editor explores the environment’s effects on her students’ health in the classroom.
High-stakes tests have not only failed to achieve racial equality in schooling, they’ve also made it worse for students of color.
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.
“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.
A high school teacher looks at how a daily activity focusing on the representation of women helped transform her classroom.
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.
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 latest installment of our Earth, Justice, and Our Classrooms column looks to a piece of very good news that national media missed following the 2018 midterm elections. By a margin of almost two-to-one, tens of thousands of Portland, Oregon, voters approved an imaginative clean energy initiative that offers a model for the rest of the country — at the ballot box, but also in our classrooms.
A Connecticut educator who taught English to incarcerated young men for 20 years describes what happened when she introduced her students to the Canadian “Leap Manifesto.”
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.
