What Is a Family?

A biology teacher describes inclusive teaching about families; sexual, reproductive, and parenting behaviors; and models of heredity.

To the Past, with Love

The letters are sweet and encouraging — had they been delivered, they could have changed their recipients’ lives.

The Voice of a Seed

I hope that centering Indigenous voices in the classroom and school garden will teach my students the value of Indigenous ways of knowing. As they develop an awareness of the social injustice and resilience that characterizes the stories of Indigenous peoples and their food cultures, I want them to be dissatisfied with the absence of Native narratives and seek out the voices of the tribes themselves.

Reproductive Justice and Our Classrooms

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.

As She Rises

I recently stumbled across a podcast that made a wonderful addition to my students’ study of the climate crisis — As She Rises.

Choreographing for Justice

An elementary teacher helps her students express themselves about social justice issues like the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter through movement and dance, and helps them see how dance can celebrate diversity.

Poetic Pauses During the Pandemic

Christensen describes how poetry can be used in this moment to be something concrete — that can be felt, touched, or smelled — but also something to stir our students’ imaginations, allowing them to dream.

Sin Fronteras

Alexander and their middle school students use the powerful poem “To live in the borderlands means you,” by Gloria Anzaldúa, to explore the borderlands of their own lives. 

Necessary Trouble

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.

Teaching the Green New Deal: The Prequel

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 […]

Reparations Can Be Won — and Must Be Taught

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.

Honoring Exonerees

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.

Protesting Pipelines

There is something about oil and gas pipelines. The way you can look at a map of hundreds of thousands of miles of the terrible tubes, seeing how tightly the […]

A Field Trip to the Future

“What’s the point of museums?” I ask one day to kick off class. I teach English at a public high school in Fall River, a deindustrialized city on Massachusetts’ southeastern […]

Teaching the Radical Rosa Parks

My wife Linda and I began our COVID-19 shelter-in-place pretty early in the pandemic. I went to my last in-person meeting on Wednesday, March 11. The next day, we canceled […]

“Song for Tamir Rice”

Tamir Elijah Rice was a 12-year-old murdered by a white Cleveland police officer in 2014 who was responding to a 911 call about a male pointing a gun at random […]