English

The Day of Silence

A high school teacher navigates the tensions that arise in conversations with students about the Day of Silence, and how to bridge divides.

Peacekeepers and Peacemakers

Green and her students critique the idea that good citizens follow rules, and then study activists who make — rather than keep — peace in the face of injustice.

Goodbye to Ari Bloomekatz

This fall, Rethinking Schools’ managing editor Ari Bloomekatz accepted the position of executive editor at the venerable social justice magazine In These Times. We will miss Ari’s humor, imagination, warmth, […]

The Resurgence of Teacher Unions

Inouye and Potter share organizing strategies from the 2019 United Teachers Los Angeles and Chicago Teachers Union strikes, which centered common good demands.

Medical Apartheid: Teaching the Tuskegee Syphilis Study

Students in a bioethics class are horrified to learn about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, during which African American men were denied treatment for syphilis. They draw connections to other medical injustices and write their own codes of ethics for medical research.

All American Boys

Two authors collaborated to write a nuanced novel from the perspectives of two young men—Rashad, who is Black, and Quinn, who is white. The novel gives teachers a powerful tool to discuss police brutality and racism with students.

In Our Hands

In the introduction to her new anthology, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, Jesmyn Ward quotes James Baldwin: “Everything now, we must assume, is in our […]

My So-Called Public School

A teacher uses her own school to illustrate how school foundations perpetuate inequality within districts and states.

My Night at the Planetarium

My Night in the Planetarium:A True Story About a Child, a Play, and the Art of ResistanceBy Innosanto NagaraSeven Stories Press, 2016 In difficult times, stories are vital. They are […]

Who’s Stealing Our Jobs?

As a way to deal with racial tensions between his Black and Latina/o students, a high school teacher examines the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Mexican Teachers Fight Corporate Reform

“What they’re doing to us is subtle genocide,” Euterio Garcia, an Indigenous teacher from Oaxaca, Mexico, told reporter Shirin Hess. “I am a bilingual teacher for Chinanteco and Spanish. I […]

What’s Your Story?

A high school English teacher and a media arts teacher team up to teach a unit on identity. Students combine personal writing with vivid photography, creating large banners that become public art.

Fighting to Teach Climate Justice

There remains a huge gulf between the human and ecological consequences of the climate crisis and the puny attention given to the crisis in the school curriculum. The few paragraphs […]

Racism, Xenophobia, and the Election

As teachers and students return to classrooms this fall, together we have to try to make sense of a tumultuous presidential campaign and a summer of racial violence that have […]