Practical, rich in story, and analytically sharp, Rethinking Multicultural Education can help current and future educators as they seek to bring racial and cultural justice into their own classrooms.
An 8th-grade teacher creates inclusive resources about human reproduction with his students.
A high school social studies teacher describes his mixer lesson in which students learn about the radical Ida B. Wells by taking on roles from various times in her life.
Christensen has students reimagine literature and their own stories to talk back to and disrupt injustice — and build solidarity.
Swinehart highlights the work of Leah Penniman to teach about the connection between food and racial justice.
A high school teacher has students problematize the conditions of their school to learn about funding disparities and the disastrous effects of district debt.
A biology teacher describes inclusive teaching about families; sexual, reproductive, and parenting behaviors; and models of heredity.
To imagine a better future, high school students role-play activists at a visioning conference and then create murals.
The letters are sweet and encouraging — had they been delivered, they could have changed their recipients’ lives.
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.
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.
I recently stumbled across a podcast that made a wonderful addition to my students’ study of the climate crisis — As She Rises.
A kindergarten teacher helps students investigate issues of environmental justice — like access to green space — in their communities.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
A high school teacher and her students question “Who owns and controls hip-hop?” — and put the hip-hop industry on trial.
A music teacher stories her tense journey to listen to and include a parent in her child’s education.
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.
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 […]
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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.
