May 05 Column: How I teach about the Holocaust as living memory fades By Lauren Porosoff Lauren Porosoff, a sixth grade English teacher in New York City, discusses how teaching about the Holocaust has changed since she was a child in the 1980s. Continue reading
Apr 29 Column: This little known site is the birthplace of the student civil rights movement By Jeff Feinstein The Moton Museum in Farmville, Virginia, recently commemorated the 65th anniversary of the 1951 Moton Student Strike. A few years after the strike, Moton High provided a majority of the plaintiffs in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school… Continue reading
Apr 21 Many of my students see NC’s bathroom bill as ‘state-sanctioned bullying’ By Eric Grant Last month, North Carolina's lawmakers passed House Bill 2 which requires people to use the public bathroom that matches the gender on their birth certificate. How are students and school communities affected by so-called transgender "Bathroom bills"?… Continue reading
Apr 15 Teachers’ Lounge: Teaching politics in the age of Trump By Justin Christensen Presidential elections give teachers a chance to engage students in lessons about the electoral process, but some of the behavior exhibited during this primary season has posed a challenge for teachers. Continue reading
Apr 08 How ‘Hamilton’ helps me teach about xenophobia and immigration By Brian Mooney Because of his students’ cultural identities, their responses to Donald Trump and the pro-immigration message of "Hamilton," one teacher decided to create a project that would synthesize these ideas in ways that are culturally responsive while reaching far beyond the… Continue reading
Mar 29 How I use comic books as a learning tool in my social studies classroom By Tim Smyth Comic books have had a long history of tackling social issues. Teacher Tim Smyth says comic books and graphic novels are powerful vehicles to engage students in both history and current events. Continue reading
Mar 07 Flint teacher: ‘I want answers’ By Todd Beard I wanted to believe in the science and social studies that I teach my students -- that Flint's water had been tested by scientists and there is a system of checks and balances that makes our public systems work, right?… Continue reading
Mar 02 Syrian children in Turkey heal through storytelling By Wendy Pearlman Professor Wendy Pearlman of Northwestern University describes her experiences teaching refugee children. Despite the trauma caused by a conflict that has claimed more than 200,000 lives and created 4.39 million Syrians refugees abroad, the students demonstrated resilience and a hunger… Continue reading
Feb 24 Syrian teacher flees carnage only to find new challenges in Turkey By Ola Said A Human Rights Watch study states about 400,000 Syrian refugee children in Turkey are not in school because of such obstacles including language barriers, economic hardship and social integration. Ola Said, a Syrian refugee teacher who lives along the Syrian-Turkish… Continue reading
Feb 11 Why I’m lucky to be a teacher in Flint. Yes, Flint. By Eric Strommer Even though the water crisis is beyond all reason and should have never come to pass, our students and families are finding ways to get through. Continue reading