Kristien Zenkov

How can teachers help students navigate tough topics in an increasingly politicized world? Featuring perspectives from teachers and students across the country, this unique book provides hope, applicable knowledge, and practical skills for teachers to address a range of current issues—including race, LGBTQIA+ advocacy, diversity and equity, civic engagement, ability and disability, school safety, social-emotional learning, immigration, and environmental justice. Each chapter addresses one of those controversial issues and examines how teachers are grappling with it in their own classrooms. Each chapter is also informed by youths’ insights, drawn from the authors’ work with the Youth Research Council and the Through Students’ Eyes project. Features include suggested resources, reflection questions, and talking points to support teachers in framing discussions of the topic positively and accurately. With the voices and skills in this book, you’ll be able to work with these issues no matter your own teaching contexts.

A sequel to the classic Fires in the Bathroom that illuminates what adolescents most need from teachers in today's upsetting times The context in which adolescents are learning has shifted radically since students first offered blunt advice to high school teachers in the groundbreaking Fires in the Bathroom, a perennial bestseller. Now their world is changing at warp speed, and classrooms too are seething with anxiety. This sequel raises the voices of diverse youth around the nation as they live through the mind-bending quandaries of this era and ask their teachers to notice. In Fires in Our Lives, Kathleen Cushman and her co-authors Kristien Zenkov and Meagan Call-Cummings (both leaders in bringing student voices to teacher education) present new first-person testimony on how today's youth experience the risks and challenges of high school. The students who speak here need their teachers more than ever as they navigate cultural, social, and political borders in their communities. Reinforced by classroom examples and supplemented with helpful takeaways, Fires in Our Lives offers a compelling dialogue about students' emotions, ideas, and developing agency. In a world that sorely needs the thoughtful participation of its rising generation, this new staple belongs on every high school teacher's bookshelf.

Today’s educators—pre- and in-service teachers and teacher educators serve increasing percentages of adolescents who have limited relationships to school. These young people are often our most diverse youth; they are frequently English Language Learners (ELLs) and immigrants, and they are too often part of multi-generational dropout and disengagement trends. Teachers are desperate for pedagogical philosophies, curricula, and practices that will support them with helping young people appreciate the value of school, engage or re-engage youth with this most foundational of our public institutions and aid adolescents in the development of the core literacy and writing skills they need to be successful in school and beyond. This volume will assist teachers in recognizing the increasing diversity of their students who often look very different from and have life and school experiences that are very different than those of the educators who serve them. Current and future educators must utilize relevant curricula and creative pedagogies that honor students’ diverse cultures and school and community experiences, while respecting our highest ideals for educational equity and social justice. With this volume, the authors respond to the quickly shifting demographics of schools’ student populations and the disengagement trends teachers frequently encounter but rarely know how to address. We offer compelling, relationship-driven pedagogical principles and instructional strategies that appeal to diverse youths’ voices and cultures and rely on broad, visually- and technology-based notions of literacy.

Today’s educators—pre- and in-service teachers and teacher educators serve increasing percentages of adolescents who have limited relationships to school. These young people are often our most diverse youth; they are frequently English Language Learners (ELLs) and immigrants, and they are too often part of multi-generational dropout and disengagement trends. Teachers are desperate for pedagogical philosophies, curricula, and practices that will support them with helping young people appreciate the value of school, engage or re-engage youth with this most foundational of our public institutions and aid adolescents in the development of the core literacy and writing skills they need to be successful in school and beyond. This volume will assist teachers in recognizing the increasing diversity of their students who often look very different from and have life and school experiences that are very different than those of the educators who serve them. Current and future educators must utilize relevant curricula and creative pedagogies that honor students’ diverse cultures and school and community experiences, while respecting our highest ideals for educational equity and social justice. With this volume, the authors respond to the quickly shifting demographics of schools’ student populations and the disengagement trends teachers frequently encounter but rarely know how to address. We offer compelling, relationship-driven pedagogical principles and instructional strategies that appeal to diverse youths’ voices and cultures and rely on broad, visually- and technology-based notions of literacy.