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.
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.
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.
Role plays can offer students engaging ways to learn, but require careful contextualization and follow-up. This article offers some cautions and guidance about using them.
Sanchez describes a role play about the demise of Reconstruction that helps students get beyond the question “Was Reconstruction a success or failure?”
A doctoral student tells the story of her experience with a dangerous role play — poorly conceptualized and taught — when she was an undergrad.
hooks’ influence on social justice education was so immense and so longstanding that we may not even recognize all the ways she touched our vision of the world — and our classrooms.
Wolfe-Rocca shares the results of the first-ever comprehensive review of state standards on Reconstruction, noting that Zinn Education Project researchers found that the standards fail to define the era or outline its crucial themes. The article also offers what the Zinn Education Project proposes for state and district standards.
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.
Reflecting on educator and organizer Thomas Nikundiwe’s legacy reminds us to strive for liberatory learning.
Rethinking Schools editors and staff mourn the loss of Bob Moses (1935–2021), the extraordinary Civil Rights Movement activist and educator. Moses was a central organizer in Mississippi for the Student […]
Green and her students “cover” the standards by doing a representational inquiry and discover that most of the people they are supposed to learn about are white men.
Kaler-Jones invites young Black women to gather their loved ones’ oral histories; together they find threads of resistance, solidarity, and racial justice.
Christensen and Watson discuss powerful strategies for teaching writing — and deeply grounding curriculum in students’ lives through poetry.
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.
A piece of our worth was stolen on Jan. 6, 2021. A mob brandishing the flag of the Confederacy as well as the campaign flags of the outgoing president stormed […]
Nearly every child in the United States learns about Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The March on Washington, where King delivered this speech, is one of […]
Christensen argues that the tight reliance on the format of the literary analysis hinders students’ imaginations, and that they should instead write “unbound” essays of risk-taking and experimentation.
Matt Reed, a teacher at Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon, was worried about one of his 9th-grade students. Portland Public Schools, he explained, had been all-remote since March 13, […]
One month after taking office, the Biden administration faced its first major education policy test. It failed miserably. Despite a campaign promise to end standardized testing in public schools (See […]