Sin Fronteras Boy
Fourth-grade English language learners use wikis to study border issues and gain literacy skills.
Bilingual Education
Putting a Human Face on the Immigration Debate
For those of us working with immigrant populations, we have in our students living examples that we can use to bring the immigration issue to the forefront and teach all of our students.
TV Selfishness and Violence Explode During ‘War On Terror
Six years into the ‘War on Terror
Polar Bears on Mission Street
San Francisco fourth graders learn about global warming and take action to save the polar bears.
Edwina Left Behind
Edwina did what was asked of her. Did Alaska do everything it could for her?
Language Lessons
Using native Spanish speakers to instruct their classmates in more than just verbs and pronunciation.
Lies My Spanish Textbooks Tell
Latinos dance, they sing, they happily play baseball. And what great food!
Welcoming Kalenna
When I was a child, our home was filled with the sounds of Spanish, mariachi music, and boisterous conversations. At home, my Nana cooked enchiladas, menudo, and tamales. During family celebrations we broke piñatas, danced, and […]
Testing Lang
Lang was a student of mine last year, an eight-year-old with big brown eyes and a shy, quiet nature. He hated writing; putting pencil to paper was a brutal task […]
Strawberry Fields Forever?
When I was a child, my mother couldn’t help us with our homework. She had gone to work as a maid in a Mexican hacienda at age 11 and hadn’t learned to […]
The Struggle for Bilingual Education
Organizer and advocate Tony Báez has been fighting for improved bilingual education programs for decades. In this interview, he talks about the current state of bilingual education and describes how parents and educators won a maintenance K-12 bilingual program in the Milwaukee Public Schools.
“No One is Going to Tell Us What is Right”
A journalist explores the way Indigenous language and community is connected to the classroom in several communities in Alaska, and explores how educators there have built new frameworks to fight against Eurocentric curriculum.
Advocating for Arabic
The executive director of San Francisco’s Arab Resource and Organizing Center describes the successes and obstacles for a community-based campaign to offer Arabic language instruction in the district’s schools.
Language Is a Human Right
Educator Debbie Wei, co-founder of a folk arts-based school in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, describes her journey—from growing up as the child of Chinese immigrants who never spoke to her in their native language, to advocating for heritage language programs.
Cuentos del corazón
Los estudiantes de segundo grado escriben junto con sus familias, desafiando las políticas monolingües, anti-inmigrantes, y de segregación de Arizona.
Bilingual Education: Stories from the Heart
As always, Rethinking Schools has several new books in process. This issue we feature three articles destined for one of these: Rethinking Bilingual Education, edited by Grace Cornell Gonzales, Elizabeth […]
“¿Qué es deportar?”
Una maestra de primaria se da cuenta que debe dejar a un lado el guión y la antología de su currículo para encontrar literatura latina en español y abrir un espacio a las vidas de sus estudiantes.
English-Only to the Core
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?
Cuentos del corazón/Stories from the Heart
Second graders and their families write together, countering Arizona’s English-only, segregated, and anti-immigrant school policies.
“¿Qué es deportar?”
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.