Bill Bigelow, renowned curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine and co-director of the Zinn Education Project, will join writer Mark Nowak, founding director of the Worker Writers School and Professor of English at Manhattanville College, in a public conversation about critical pedagogy in the classroom. Using Nowak’s book Coal Mountain Elementary, which Howard Zinn called […]
When students are scared, uncomfortable, unseen, or not served by systems, they act out. Restorative justice practices quell the fear, bridge the comfort, make visible those who hid behind masks before the fear manifested in disruption. Too much of what educators do in schools is reactive to "behavior" issues, expecting we can put band-aids on […]
Black Mothers Speak About Raising and Teaching Black Lives in White Spaces Free Live Virtual Event Oct. 8, 2020, 4:30-6 p.m. PST Join Oregon Episcopal School’s Director for Inclusion Dyan Watson, and educators Kara Hinderlie Stroman, and Natalie Labosierre as they share their experiences in raising, educating, and supporting Black children in mostly White spaces. Through […]
Save the date for the virtual 13th Annual Northwest Teaching for Social Justice Conference on Saturday, October 17, 2020. This year's keynote speakers are Chenjerai Kumanyika and Demetrius Noble. Check the NWTSJ website for more details later this summer. Sponsors for the conference include Puget Sound Rethinking Schools, Social Equity Educators (Seattle), the Oregon Writing […]
As the country re-examines its relationship with “monuments,” with history, with art and public space, we, as educators, must examine our roles as curators of art analysis in our classrooms. Contemporary art interacts with society in ways that are both reactive and predictive. In this workshop we will use the art of Hank Willis Thomas […]
EVENT DETAILS This workshop will demonstrate activities for teaching about climate justice with the resistance of Indigenous Pacific Island peoples at the forefront. Participants will explore both historical and recent experiences of different island territories and nations through engaging in role play and in connecting with the Pacific Climate Warriors movement through poetry. Moé Yonamine teaches […]
Participants will examine two strategies to use in social justice units that are active and engaging as well as how to use warm-ups to connect to students’ lives. We will discuss what to highlight and what to avoid when teaching about injustices across content areas. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study will be the model and we will also look at a brief history of the study.
In a time of incredible isolation, LGBTQ+ students are cooped up in homes that may or may not allow them to be their authentic selves. They may be dealing with teachers and learning management systems that cannot get their names or pronouns right. They may have peers who find ways to bully them online. What are educators doing to create online spaces that welcome and normalize LGBTQ+ lives? In this workshop, we will queer the curriculum in order to show all Youth that being LGBTQ+ is normal.
Through poetry, we invite our students’ lives — the “landscape and bread” of their homes, their ancestors, their struggles and joys — into classrooms as subjects worthy of study. While students learn the language of the academy about stanzas and line breaks, similes and metaphors, they must first learn that poetry can be playful, that it can use ordinary, everyday language, and sound like their grandma or their aunts laughing together on the front porch, that it can be written in house slippers. In this poetry workshop, participants will reclaim any part of our lives that society has degraded, humiliated, or shamed, and raise it up, share it, and sing praises to the “unanimous blood/of those who struggle,” as the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton urged us in his poem “Like You.”
