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.” 

On Jan. 11, 2021, at 4:00 pm PT / 7:00 pm ET, the Zinn Education Project will host a Teach the Black Freedom Struggle people’s history class with Professor Jeanne Theoharis, who will speak about Rosa Parks’ activism prior to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, her trip to the Highlander Folk School, and the decades she dedicated to […]

Join Teacher Unions and Social Justice co-editors Jesse Hagopian, Michael Charney, and Bob Peterson along with contributors Michelle Gunderson and Arlene Inouye for the launch of a new Rethinking Schools book on the promise of social justice teacher unionism. >> CLICK HERE TO REGISTER Editors and contributors will participate in a 75-minute conversation about building […]

The Wisconsin Education Association Council Invites you to "Using Restorative Practices in Schools." Restorative Practices values relationships and is centered on creating a sustainable community of engaged learners through the implementation of classroom circles. This 6-week course is interactive and reflective as evidenced in powerful group chats, didactic discussion, and reflective personal writing. Participants will […]

About the Event  Renee Watson is a New York Times bestselling writer, educator, Rethinking Schools contributor and community activist. Her children's and young adult novels have won several awards and entertained countless readers around the world. So we are excited and honored to be hosting the launch event for Renee Watson's newest book Love is […]

Join award-winning author, Renée Watson, and Rethinking Schools editor, Linda Christensen, for a conversation about teaching and writing poetry. They will discuss creating generative spaces for students to take risks as writers, finding poetry models that move students into writing, as well as tough questions about revising and grading poetry. Dyan Watson, Rethinking Schools editor, will introduce the evening.

May 10, 2021: How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America | Clint Smith is a poet, staff writer at The Atlantic, and teaches writing and literature in the D.C. Central Detention Facility. Smith, in conversation with Cierra Kaler-Jones, will talk about his new book, How the Word Is Passed, an examination of how monuments […]

REGISTER HERE About the Event As educators and students go back to school this fall, they face multiple crises: a still-raging pandemic, right-wing censorship of educational content, and — despite billions in federal aid — a chronic lack of funding. Join us as we hear from union leaders, teachers, and community activists about how they are […]

On November 8, 2021, author Dave Zirin — the people’s sports writer—will join educator Jesse Hagopian in dialogue for the Zinn Education Project’s Teach the Black Freedom Struggle online people’s history class to discuss his new book, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World. The Zinn Education Project is a collaboration between Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change. This […]

On Monday, December 6, The Zinn Education Project is hosting Jarvis Givens for a talk on his book Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching in conversation with Jesse Hagopian and Cierra Kaler-Jones. The current assault on critical race theory and antiracist pedagogy by right-wing is unintelligible without the insights offered in Fugitive Pedagogy and […]