Meagan Call-Cummings

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.

Critical Participatory Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Guide brings to life key principles of this collaborative research method for students, practitioners, and research collectives. The authors encourage readers to uncover new possibilities in research guided by the emancipatory roots of CPI to deconstruct inequitable conditions and practices. Weaving together theoretical perspectives, a variety of tools for data collection and analysis, and numerous practical examples, the authors offer a complete picture of the research process from start to finish. This thoughtful and thorough book prepares readers to co-create knowledge effectively and ethically. By addressing the underlying principles common to a variety of action and participatory research methods, readers learn to design and carry out research with, not on, communities. With examples from public health, social work, psychology, education, criminal justice, conflict resolution, and more, the text is suited to a wide variety of graduate-level courses and better reflects the interdisciplinary nature of participatory research with collectives of all sizes and compositions.

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.