Can’t Buy Me Love
Linda Christensen gets students to write critically about clothes, class, and consumption.
Curriculum Articles
Raised by Women
Building classroom relationships through poetry.
On the Question of Mexicanidad
Encouraging prospective teachers to examine their cultural heritage.
The War in Iraq and Daily Classroom Life
Suggestions from a 5th-grade teacher on bringing the War in Iraq into the curriculum.
Test Prep and the War
Preparing high schoolers for the Regents exam while studying the War in Iraq.
Reconstructing Race
“Is Mr. Smith a White Guy?” I then changed the topic, volunteering to be a contemporary example. “OK, so the next question is: Is Mr. Smith a white man? Yes […]
Teaching About Global Warming in Truck Country
Helping kids who’ve grown up in the truck culture” examine climate change.
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The Recruitment Minefield
Emiliano Santiago. Not many of our students know his name. But they should. Santiago joined the Oregon Army National Guard on June 28, 1996, shortly after his high school graduation […]
Integrals and Equity
An AP calculus class at a prestigious boarding school doesn’t seem a likely venue for student reflection on privilege and wealth. But when I taught a group of academically inclined […]
Tackling Tracking
A teacher finds that small school reform presents opportunities to teach about tracking and inequality.
Exploring Our Urban Wilderness
My students’ home terrain consists — at least on the surface — of houses, streets, schools, and stores. Like many urban kids, the bit of unpaved, unfenced nature my second […]
Lessons from a Garden Spider
An ordinary spider assists a multilingual third-grade classroom.
Beyond Pink and Blue
A unit on gender stereotypes inspires students to take action.
Forgive and Remember
Teaching forgiveness through poetry and art.
Teaching About Toxins
A Rethinking Schools editor explores the environment’s effects on her students’ health in the classroom.
Macaroni Social Justice
A 3rd-grade teacher uses thousands of pieces of macaroni to facilitate a lesson about fractions and to spur classroom conversations about wealth inequality.
Why We Should Teach Reconstruction
Unfortunately, the transformative history of Reconstruction has been buried. First by a racist tale masquerading as history and now under a top-down narrative focused on white elites. It’s long overdue we unearth the groundswell of activity that brought down the slavers of the South and set a new standard for freedom we are still struggling to achieve today.
Women of the Day
A high school teacher looks at how a daily activity focusing on the representation of women helped transform her classroom.
Creating Bias Detectives, Blowing Up Stereotypes, and Writing Essays that Matter
“Part of the work of teaching students to read is teaching them to question not only the written word, but also the author,” Christensen writes in her article about teaching students how to confront writers whose stories erase the full truth and misrepresent people and places.
As an Arab American Muslim Mother, Here Is the Education I Want for My Children
A Palestinian American mother describes the alienation that she felt in school, and how she draws on her experiences to imagine the schooling she wants for her children.
Teach the Fossil Fuel Industry — Our Students’ Enemy
“Climate justice” education means a lot of things. But one key aspect is that we involve students in probing the social and economic roots of the crisis.
Despite National Outrage, Scholastic Defends Children’s Books Celebrating Trump
After reviews and hundreds of letters, Scholastic continues to defend its books praising President Trump.
Climate Change, Gender, and Nuclear Bombs
In the spring 2011 issue of Rethinking Schools we editorialized about the immense gulf between our terrible environmental crisis — especially the climate crisis — and the adequacy of schools’ curricular response. Seven years later, we still see this gap between crisis and curriculum — which is why we are launching this regular “Earth, Justice, and Our Classrooms” column: to offer encouragement and resources for teachers to help students explore the roots and consequences of the crisis and figure out how to respond.
What We Don’t Learn About the Black Panther Party — but Should
The history of the Black Panther Party holds vital lessons for today’s movement for Black lives and all movements to confront racism, inequality, and police violence. But our textbooks distort the significance of the Panthers — or exclude them completely.
Elementary Student T-Shirt Workers Go on Strike
An elementary school teacher uses his students’ T-shirts to launch a lesson about child labor, basic economics, factories, unions, and strikes. “When I was a child, I remember ‘playing pretend’ with my cousins. We could be anyone we imagined, and in that moment, we were those people. Why not use that energy and imagination as a resource? When we use our imagination to walk in another’s shoes, that’s where real learning begins.”