What Is a Family?
A biology teacher describes inclusive teaching about families; sexual, reproductive, and parenting behaviors; and models of heredity.
Curriculum Articles
“We Cannot Create What We Cannot Imagine”
To imagine a better future, high school students role-play activists at a visioning conference and then create murals.
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.
Expanding Intersectional Queer History in the Elementary Grades
A 5th- and 6th-grade teacher asks her students to wrestle with what “identity” and “intersectionality” mean.
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.
Action Research for Environmental Justice in the Kindergarten Classroom
A kindergarten teacher helps students investigate issues of environmental justice — like access to green space — in their communities.
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.
Teaching for Peace in a Time of War
Like you, we are angry and fearful about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and these are terrifying times for our students. As Ukrainian educator Igor Tsyvgintsev reminds us, “The entire curriculum of school studies comes down to humaneness.”
“Who Spent Two Months in Jail for Participating in the Freedom Rides?!”
A 5th-grade teacher devises a mixer activity to help her students understand that the Civil Rights Movement was not fueled only by great leaders, but also by ordinary people who became change makers and organized with others.
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.
The People v. the Hip-Hop Industry
A high school teacher and her students question “Who owns and controls hip-hop?” — and put the hip-hop industry on trial.
Listening Between the Lines
A music teacher stories her tense journey to listen to and include a parent in her child’s education.
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 […]
The Teaching for Black Lives Starter Pack
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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.
Who’s to Blame?
A middle school teacher organizes a tribunal for her students on responsibility for the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. Among those on trial are Mother Nature, Gen Z/Millennials, the Healthcare Industry, Racism and White Supremacy, the Chinese Government, the U.S. Government, and the Capitalist System.
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 […]