What Makes a Baby, Really?
An 8th-grade teacher creates inclusive resources about human reproduction with his students.
An 8th-grade teacher creates inclusive resources about human reproduction with his students.
Jody Sokolower interviews Melissa Bollow Tempel, the Wisconsin teacher — and former Rethinking Schools editor — fired for speaking out about her district’s decision to refuse to allow her 1st-grade students to sing “Rainbowland.”
A biology teacher describes inclusive teaching about families; sexual, reproductive, and parenting behaviors; and models of heredity.
A high school teacher navigates the tensions that arise in conversations with students about the Day of Silence, and how to bridge divides.
The letters are sweet and encouraging — had they been delivered, they could have changed their recipients’ lives.
“Do you feel like a boy?” “No, mom. I’m a girl.” My daughter’s statement could not have been more direct, honest, and clear. In that moment I glimpsed how deeply gender-expansive people feel who they are, no matter what society has labeled them as at birth.
There is no end-point in the fight for justice and equality, no moment when the argument is finally settled. As Angela Davis has said, “Freedom is a constant struggle.” Although that proposition seems exhausting, it is also hopeful. If our wins are never wholly secure, then neither must our losses be permanent. The struggle for reproductive justice continues, and our curriculum must nurture our students’ capacity to envision and participate in its next stages.
A 5th- and 6th-grade teacher asks her students to wrestle with what “identity” and “intersectionality” mean.
The Right has declared war on trans youth. Recent headlines offer a sickening taste of what reactionary governors and state legislators have been cooking up in their laboratories of transphobic […]
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 […]
A transgender middle school teacher wrestles with a school and community that tries to hide their identity.
While we were excited to support the opening of the educational closet
Two Chicago educators question the premier teacher education accrediting agency’s removal of social justice and sexual orientation language from its standards.
School funding systems mirror—and reproduce—the inequality we see all around us.
Last spring, my second graders gathered on the rug, discussing the impending 50th anniversary of the historic Brown vs. Board of Education decision. I asked how their lives would have […]
“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.
A writer interrogates school culture and our collective role in the suicide of a gay 15-year-old 9th grader in Alabama.
A teacher creates a welcome poems lesson to celebrate the diversity of students — and with students.
A biology teacher focuses on how rethinking classroom language around gender and reproduction can impact inclusion.
A high school English teacher (also the QSA staff advisor) wrestles with the suicide of a transgender student and calls on heterosexual and cisgender teachers to integrate LGBTQ authors, themes, and history into their classrooms.
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.
The staff advisor for their high school’s Queer-Straight Alliance delves into the complexities of a student-led training for teachers on the importance of using students’ preferred pronouns.
What can teachers, schools, and districts do to meet the needs of trans students? To make them visible? To keep them alive? To celebrate them?
A school librarian describes children’s books with strong transgender characters and themes.
Trump supporter Carl Paladino’s racism, misogyny, and transphobia galvanized community members to oust him from the Buffalo School Board. Their struggle also laid the groundwork for new coalitions and progressive change.