Social Class Archives

Plotting Inequalities, Building Resistance

Media depictions of San Francisco show idyllic images of fog pouring under the Golden Gate Bridge or happy tourists riding cable cars, but rarely the mostly nonwhite neighborhoods of the […]

Review: Our Dignity Can Defeat Anyone

By Julie Treick O’Neill A review of the film Maquilapolis [City of Factories]

You’re Asian, How Could You Fail Math?

Have you ever sat next to an Asian student in class and wondered how she managed to consistently get straight A’s while you struggled to maintain a B-minus average? -from Top […]

Kid Nation

CBS goes overboard with this painful exploitation of children.

Living Algebra, Living Wage

Eighth graders finally get what they ask for: an algebra lesson for the real world.”

Can’t Buy Me Love

Linda Christensen gets students to write critically about clothes, class, and consumption.

Lies My Spanish Textbooks Tell

Latinos dance, they sing, they happily play baseball. And what great food!

Teaching About Global Warming in Truck Country

Helping kids who’ve grown up in the truck culture” examine climate change.

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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 […]

Field Trip

A teacher observes social inequities during a class trip.

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.

The Green New Deal and Our Schools

So often, the climate crisis is presented in frightening, threatening terms: rising seas, superstorms, raging wildfires, unlivable temperatures, species extinction, disappearing glaciers, dying coral, climate refugees. These are real. But the paradox is that this dystopian possibility is forcing us to imagine an entirely different kind of society. Schools have a central role to play in devising new alternatives and equipping young people to bring those alternatives to life. This is the work we’ve been assigned.

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.

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.

40 Acres and a Mule

A high school teacher uses a role play so students can imagine life during Reconstruction, the possibilities of the post-Civil War era, and the difficult decisions that Black communities had to wrestle with.

Honor Their Names

Students’ names are the first thing teachers know about the young people who enter our classrooms; they can signal country of origin, gender, language. Students’ names provide the first moment when a teacher can demonstrate their warmth and humanity, their commitment to seeing and welcoming students’ languages and cultures into the classroom.

Tax the Rich, Fight Climate Change

The latest installment of our Earth, Justice, and Our Classrooms column looks to a piece of very good news that national media missed following the 2018 midterm elections. By a margin of almost two-to-one, tens of thousands of Portland, Oregon, voters approved an imaginative clean energy initiative that offers a model for the rest of the country — at the ballot box, but also in our classrooms.