Wolfe-Rocca shares the results of the first-ever comprehensive review of state standards on Reconstruction, noting that Zinn Education Project researchers found that the standards fail to define the era or outline its crucial themes. The article also offers what the Zinn Education Project proposes for state and district standards.
Kaler-Jones invites young Black women to gather their loved ones’ oral histories; together they find threads of resistance, solidarity, and racial justice.
A high school teacher and her students question “Who owns and controls hip-hop?” — and put the hip-hop industry on trial.
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.
Nearly every child in the United States learns about Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The March on Washington, where King delivered this speech, is one of […]
Christensen argues that the tight reliance on the format of the literary analysis hinders students’ imaginations, and that they should instead write “unbound” essays of risk-taking and experimentation.
In an article introducing the student-friendly short video, A Message from the Future, about life after the Green New Deal, Naomi Klein points out: Almost every vision of the future […]
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The story of how activists, teachers, and, organizers won mandatory curriculum in the Chicago Public Schools for 8th and 10th grades about one the darkest chapters in the city’s history — the widespread torture of Black men under Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge.
A high school teacher helps her students explore how DNA testing is used to free innocent people from prison and how science can support justice.
Let’s bring the election of 2020 into our classrooms and help our students learn about democracy — and those who would subvert it.
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This year marks the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 15th Amendment, which promised “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or […]
International Movement for Public Education Privatization, standardized tests, funding cuts, attacks on teachers’ unions and contracts—the issues that are central to teacher activism in the United States are international. In […]
Back in the 1980s, I taught an elective class at Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon, called Literature and Social Change. It centered around the questions “What is a good […]
A high school social studies teacher argues for rethinking how we teach civics so that students learn that organizing, activism, and civil disobedience are as important as the Constitution.
A film tackles the U.S. occupation of Japan.
Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and RhymesWritten and Directed by Byron HurtMedia Education Foundation, 200660 mins, DVD The Hip-Hop Education Guidebook Volume 1: A Sourcebook of Inspiration and Practical ApplicationEdited by Marcella […]
Media depictions of San Francisco show idyllic images of fog pouring under the Golden Gate Bridge or happy tourists riding cable cars, but rarely the mostly nonwhite neighborhoods of the […]
I wish I could say my colleagues Cresslyn Clay, Colin Pierce, and I had it all worked out from the beginning, and that we carefully crafted each nuance that prompted […]
High school students learn about the conflict over the pipeline by participating in a role play.
“Every man in my family has been locked up. Most days I feel like it doesn’t matter what I do, how hard I try—that’s my fate, too.”—11th-grade African American student, […]
A master teacher faces a classroom revolt. She realizes that, no matter how imminent the high-stakes test, stopping the school-to-prison pipeline begins in the classroom with student-centered, meaningful curriculum.
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 […]
Several years ago, I taught a unit on power in my 9th-grade social studies classes at Berkeley High School in California’s Bay Area. It’s a diverse school—rich folks from the […]
