Celebrating Transgender Students in Our Classrooms and in Our Schools
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?
On Behalf of Their Name
Using They/Them Pronouns Because They Need Us To
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.
Teaching Them into Existence
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.
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.
“What Kind Are You?”
Transgender Characters in Children’s Literature
A school librarian describes children’s books with strong transgender characters and themes.
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.”
You Need Rank and File to Win: How Arizona Teachers Built a Movement
An elementary teacher who helped organize Arizona educators to strike explains how their movement formed and operated, and how it can inspire other teachers’ movements.
My First Year as a Teacher of Color
Teaching Against the Grain
A teacher of color writes about obstacles he faced during his first year in the classroom and the support he received — and did not receive — from other teachers and administrators.
Deportations on Trial
Mexican Americans During the Great Depression
A social studies teacher describes the role play trial she developed around a largely forgotten period: when during the Great Depression the United States deported thousands of Mexican American families.
Who Is Allowed to Teach Spanish in Our Public Schools?
Documenting the Consequences of the edTPA
The director of a world language teacher preparation program argues for an end to the edTPA because it bars native Spanish speakers from public school classrooms.
Tax the Rich, Fight Climate Change
Column: Earth, Justice, and Our Classrooms
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.
Our picks for books, videos, websites, and other social justice education resources 33.2
Check out these valuable resources, reviewed by Rethinking Schools editors and Teaching for Change colleagues.
