Christopher Columbus and the Iraq War
How the myth built up around Columbus has helped condition kids to accept imperial adventures like the Iraq war.
Commentary
Our House Is on Fire — Time to Teach Climate Justice
In the latest installment of our regular column “Earth, Justice, and Our Classrooms,” Rethinking Schools curriculum editor Bill Bigelow writes about global youth activism around climate justice and the urgency of the crisis, and introduces readers to the Zinn Education Project’s Teach Climate Justice campaign.
“Because Our Islands Are Our Life”
A high school ethnic studies teacher describes how students in the Pacific Island Club used poetry to refocus the narrative surrounding climate justice onto frontline communities.
Teacher Unions Take on the Climate Crisis
As young people across the country join the global movement to mobilize school strikes to demand climate action, one group is starting to think more seriously about how to best support those efforts: their teachers.
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.
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.
The 2020 Presidential Election: Educators Speak Out
We asked a group of radical educators to weigh in on what they hoped would be part of any 2020 presidential candidate’s education platform.
Students “Warrior Up” for Climate Justice
The third installment of our new environmental justice column celebrates the annual two-day Climate Justice Fair at Madison High School in Portland.
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.
Teaching the Truth About Climate Change Is Up to Us, Because Textbooks Lie
The second installment of our new environmental justice column focuses on one part of a resolution passed by the Portland, Oregon, school board that mandates the school district not use text material that doubts “the severity of the climate crisis or its root in human activities.”