Teaching about Ukraine
Dear Rethinking Schools friends, Like you, we are angry and fearful about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is already causing immense suffering — which will only increase. These are […]
Dear Rethinking Schools friends, Like you, we are angry and fearful about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is already causing immense suffering — which will only increase. These are […]
A high school social studies teacher argues for rethinking how we teach civics so that students learn that organizing, activism, and civil disobedience are as important as the Constitution.
A film tackles the U.S. occupation of Japan.
photo: AP PHOTO/AMES TRIBUNE, NIRMALENDU MAJUMDAR A British parent confronts the realities of U.S. schooling By Andrew Gumbel Sooner or later, anyone who lives abroad reaches a defining moment when […]
A review of The Librarian of Basra by Jeanette Winter (Harcourt, 2004)
By Julie Treick O’Neill A review of the film Maquilapolis [City of Factories]
The American Empire has always been a bipartisan project—Democrats and Republicans have taken turns extending it
Iraq’s children have been more gravely affected by the U.S. occupation than any other segment of the population.”
When texts don’t talk about racism
California teachers take a stand against the NCLB-aided military blitz on in-school recruiting.
Suggestions from a 5th-grade teacher on bringing the War in Iraq into the curriculum.
Getting us out of the war in Iraq and NCLB requires challenging the premises that got us into these messes in the first place.
Preparing high schoolers for the Regents exam while studying the War in Iraq.
How the myth built up around Columbus has helped condition kids to accept imperial adventures like the Iraq war.
The Dec. 26 tsunami swept away the lives of more than 200,000 people and ravaged the livelihoods of millions more. Throughout the world teachers and students discussed the tsunami and […]
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.
A high school teacher uses the #MeToo movement and students’ own experiences with apologies to interrogate the government’s 1993 apology to Native Hawaiians for the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i.
In May 2016, while I was carrying out ethnographic research in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, a Form 4 (12th grade) history teacher asked me if I would teach his students about U.S. democracy. We flipped through the history and government textbook to one of the last chapters where the national curriculum outlined political systems in Kenya, England, India, and the United States. It was a peculiar moment to put the U.S. democratic system on display.
A high school teacher critiques the textbook treatment of the Cold War and U.S. imperialism. She describes her approach to the “curricular conundrum” that the Cold War presents because it lasted so long, and was so far-flung. “”If we are ever to create a different world, one in which the United States does not cast an outsized and militarized shadow across the globe, we need our students to understand how and why that shadow was created in the first place.”
A teacher uses poetry and the creation of found poems as a way to get her students to think beyond the simple “two sides to every story” narrative of the Vietnam War.
Recently, a Rethinking Schools editor was a chaperone on a field trip when he overheard a 2nd-grade student talking about how he wanted to “nuke the world.” Taken aback, he […]
Ninth graders explore a plan to strip-mine coal in Wyoming and Montana, send it by train to the Northwest, then ship it to Asia to be burned.
A high school teacher uses a role-play to explore the economic dimensions of the war in Iraq.
By Moé Yonamine “Don’t cry here,” an 86-year-old Okinawan grandmother I had never met before told me. She stood next to me and took my hand. I had been visiting […]
During his four years in office, President Trump pushed the United States closer toward war with Iran. After barely a month in office, President Joe Biden carried out airstrikes in […]