How Should We Sing Happy Birthday?
A kindergarten teacher looks at birthday celebrations in her classroom and whether all of her students’ home languages and rituals are being uplifted.
High School
Our House Is on Fire — Time to Teach Climate Justice
In the latest installment of our regular column “Earth, Justice, and Our Classrooms,” Rethinking Schools curriculum editor Bill Bigelow writes about global youth activism around climate justice and the urgency of the crisis, and introduces readers to the Zinn Education Project’s Teach Climate Justice campaign.
Our picks for books, videos, websites, and other social justice resources 33.3
Check out these valuable resources, reviewed by Rethinking Schools editors and Teaching for Change colleagues.
When Showing Up Isn’t Showing Up
A language arts teacher describes a school board debate in which she merely showed up, instead of showing up and fighting for communities of color.
Why We Should Teach Reconstruction
Unfortunately, the transformative history of Reconstruction has been buried. First by a racist tale masquerading as history and now under a top-down narrative focused on white elites. It’s long overdue we unearth the groundswell of activity that brought down the slavers of the South and set a new standard for freedom we are still struggling to achieve today.
Women of the Day
A high school teacher looks at how a daily activity focusing on the representation of women helped transform her classroom.
Creating Bias Detectives, Blowing Up Stereotypes, and Writing Essays that Matter
“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.
How We Failed Nigel Shelby and Allowed the Abuse He Endured
A writer interrogates school culture and our collective role in the suicide of a gay 15-year-old 9th grader in Alabama.
Teacher Unions Take on the Climate Crisis
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.
Queering Black History and Getting Free
A Black freedom organizer demands that teachers and activists radically change their frameworks around Black history by lifting up the stories of Black LGBTQ people like Marsha P. Johnson.
Tax the Rich, Fight Climate Change
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.
Teaching Social Activism in Prison
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.”
“Who Made History? We Made History!”
Fred Glass reviews Eric Blanc’s Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics
Diversity Is What Makes It Interesting to Study Living Things
A biology teacher focuses on how rethinking classroom language around gender and reproduction can impact inclusion.
Jesse Hagopian talks with Gillian Russom: How Los Angeles Teachers Organized and What They Won
Rethinking Schools editor Jesse Hagopian interviews Gillian Russom, a teacher and leader with UTLA, about how the Los Angeles teachers’ strike was organized, what it won, and what it could mean for the future of the #RedForEd movement.
Sharing Our Real Selves
A special education teacher talks about the importance of sharing her own stories — and complexities — with students.
Teach the Fossil Fuel Industry — Our Students’ Enemy
“Climate justice” education means a lot of things. But one key aspect is that we involve students in probing the social and economic roots of the crisis.
The 2020 Presidential Election: Educators Speak Out
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.
Vivian Gussin Paley: An Appreciation
She was most at home in the company of little ones, exploring and questioning, checking things out, conducting everyday experiments arm-in-arm and shoulder-to-shoulder with the young. Children recognized her as a fellow traveler, took to her naturally, and invited her to join them on their endless searches and excursions. She never refused them, and willingly followed along — their magical, luminescent teacher. On July 26, 2019, the light went out, and Vivian Gussin Paley passed away.
Walk the Line
A Los Angeles teacher paints an intimate self-portrait of what it was actually like on the picket line during one of the most important public sector strikes in recent years.
Welcome Poems Trump Hate
A teacher creates a welcome poems lesson to celebrate the diversity of students — and with students.
“We Did What Had to Be Done”
I worked with ArtXpress — a program for teens through the Milwaukee Art Museum — as an intern for three weeks over the summer. Our mission was to choose a […]
Transforming Teacher Unions in a Post-Janus World
Bob Peterson analyzes the Janus decision’s impact on teacher unions, talks with union leaders from across the country about how they are responding to it, and argues that the damage of the decision can be countered through the upsurge of progressive activism engendered by the victory of Donald Trump.
“Did Any of You Just Search for ‘Physicist’?”
A physics teacher uses student research and other exercises to urge his high school class to wrestle with race, privilege, and representation.
“Love Is Shining in My Heart for You, Dear Haiti”
“Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world.” That’s the only thing this Haitian American teacher remembers being taught in school about her family’s country of origin. She calls for a revolution in how educators teach Haiti.