What if all groups marginalized by our history books—including women and LGBTQ people—were central to the content we teach and learn?

What if age-appropriate, supportive discussions of sexuality were welcome across grade levels and subject areas?

What if LGBTQ teachers and family members were embraced by schools as essential to the diversity that makes a community strong?

Questions like these inspired our new book, Rethinking Sexism, Gender, and Sexuality. RSGS is a collection of inspiring stories about how to integrate feminist and LGBTQ content into curriculum, make it part of a vision for social justice, and create class­rooms and schools that nurture all children and their families.

If you want to know more about Rethinking Sexism, Gender, and Sexuality, check out the Table of Contents and the Introduction.

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/ProdDetails.asp?ID=9780942961591&d=toc

How do we relate to these current events as educators who face classrooms of young people searching for answers? Rethinking Schools asks teachers to take the time and space needed to help our students learn, heal, and grow during this time. Encouraging dialogue about these and other deaths at the hands of police, the grand jury decisions, and the Black Lives Matter movement; placing the protests in the context of freedom movements throughout our history; and supporting our students as they process their thoughts and feelings are critical at this challenging time.

From our Upcoming Issue:

Happening Yesterday, Happened Tomorrow
By Renée Watson

http://rethinkingschools.org/static/archive/29_02/RS29_02_watson.pdf

This article will appear in the winter 2014-15 issue of Rethinking Schools, but is especially urgent given the decision of the grand jury not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, and the national protests in response.
From our Archives:

Dear White Teacher…
By Chrysanthius Lathan

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/29_01/29_01_lathan.shtml

An African American middle school teacher calls on white teachers to think before they routinely send black children to black teachers when there is a problem.
Trayvon Martin and My Students
By Linda Christensen

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/28_02/28_02_christensen.shtml

President Obama’s speech about the Zimmerman acquittal in Trayvon Martin’s murder-and Cornel West’s response-are rich sources for students learning how to analyze, evaluate, and critique.
A Message from a Black Mom to Her Son
By Dyan Watson

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/26_03/26_03_watson.shtml

An African American mother and teacher educator uses examples from her own childhood to describe how she hopes her child will be treated by teachers, and what she fears.
From our Blog:

This Is a Test: Educating to End the School-to-Grave Pipeline in Ferguson and Beyond
By Jesse Hagopian

http://rethinkingschoolsblog.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/this-is-a-test-educating-to-end-the-school-to-grave-pipeline-in-ferguson-and-beyond/

Teach About Mike Brown. But Don’t Stop There.
By Renée Watson

http://rethinkingschoolsblog.wordpress.com/2014/08/25/teach-about-mike-brown-but-dont-stop-there/

You can also continue the conversation with us and your peers on Twitter @RethinkSchools or on our Facebook page where we will post links to additional materials and conversations about these issues. Feel free to also share materials that you have used.

With the events in Ferguson as only the most recent example, it’s clear that dealing with racism is a critical piece of education, for students and teachers. The theme for our fall issue is Teaching in Black and White.

We lead with Renée Watson’s poem–and the history behind it–about being invisible, yet stereotyped, as an African American student bused to a predominantly white school with “Black Like Me.”

In “Dear White Teacher,” African American middle school teacher Chrysanthius Lathan challenges white teachers to think before they routinely send black children to black teachers when there is a problem.

Then Michelle Kenney describes how she prepares her students to read August Wilson’s Fences in “Teaching the N-Word.”

http://www.rethinkingschools.org//ProdDetails.asp?ID=RTSVOL29N1&d=etoc

We’ve received many good articles in response to our first call for submissions, but we still need the voices of practicing bilingual educators, students, and activists.

We’ve extended our deadline to July 10th.

We are looking for articles that show how you integrate social justice themes into your classroom curriculum, how you confront issues of equity and access in your classroom and school community, or how you deal with the pressures of assessment and standardization without sacrificing the integrity of your bilingual teaching.

In this book, we are defining bilingual education as occurring in instructional settings where teaching and learning take place in two languages with the objective of developing long-term biliteracy. We are particularly interested in articles that describe K-12 bilingual classroom teaching and curriculum–those that are social justice oriented, story-rich, replicable and critical.

We are especially looking for articles about:

• teaching in bilingual classrooms from a social justice perspective
• anti-bias lessons/units (teaching about gender, race, class, ableism, etc.)
• social justice lessons across the curriculum (particularly in math and science)
• special education in bilingual contexts
• helping students value and use non-dominant languages
• perspectives from a diverse range of bilingual programs (especially programs that incorporate African American English, ASL, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, or Russian)
• family involvement
• effects of testing or CCSS on your bilingual program

Students’ voices are important; make sure we can hear them! We especially encourage submissions from teachers and students of color, particularly those who speak a language other than English as their first language.

Please remember that Rethinking Schools is not an academic journal. We want the writing to be lively, conversational, and to avoid the kind of needless jargon that infects so much academic writing. Please approach your writing as a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, filled with anecdotes and the voices of teachers, parents, and/or students.

Traditional academic/scholarly articles will not be considered for this book.

The best way to understand what works for Rethinking Schools is to read through several issues of the magazine with an eye to how the authors show specifically what they do in the classroom and how they integrate information about the topic into the article. Specific models you might want to look at include “Sin Fronteras Boy” by Grace Cornell Gonzales and “Aquí y Allá: Exploring Our Lives Through Poetry-Here and There” by Elizabeth Schlessman Barbian. As a model of writing for the magazine, see anything by Linda Christensen.

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/index.shtml

Before you begin writing, check out the submission guidelines.

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/about/guidelines.shtml

Submission deadline: July 10th