Thursday, April 19, 2012

Milwaukee: Anti-Racist Conference Held This Saturday « Larry Miller's Blog: Educate All Students!

Milwaukee: Anti-Racist Conference Held This Saturday « Larry Miller's Blog: Educate All Students!:


Milwaukee: Anti-Racist Conference Held This Saturday

Rethinking Schools editor Linda Christensen will keynote the Milwaukee Educators’ Network for Social Justice annual Anti-racist, Anti-bias Teaching Conference this Saturday, April 21. It will be held at the beautiful Indian Community School in Franklin, Wisconsin. Editor Melissa Bollow Tempel will lead a workshop on “Creating a Gender Sensitive Learning Environment,” one of almost 20 workshops.
Rethinking Schools is a co-sponsor and will be running a booth. Both our new books, Rethinking Elementary Education and Pencils Down, will be available at special conference rates.
To register:   www.ensj.org.


Teaching About the Environment: Where is the Urgency in Education About the Climate Crisis?

Changing the Climate in School

Posted: 04/17/2012  Bill Bigelow and Bill McKibben
Maybe you’ve heard. We are facing a climate crisis that threatens life on our planet. Climate scientists are unequivocal: We are changing the world in deep, measurable, dangerous ways — and the pace of this change will accelerate dramatically in the decades to come.
Then again, if you’ve been a middle school or high school student recently, you may not know this.
That’s because the gap between our climate emergency and the attention paid to climate change in the school curriculum is immense. Individual teachers around the country are doing outstanding work, but the educational establishment is not. Look at our textbooks. The widely used Pearson/Prentice Hall text, Physical Science: Concepts in Action, waits until page 782 to tell high school students about climate change, but then only in four oh-by-the-way paragraphs. A photo of a bustling city includes the caption: “Carbon dioxide emissions from motor