My student, Genevieve, interviews Rachel Lloyd, founder and director of GEMS, about her memoir Girls Like Us at our annual GEMS assembly in 2011 (photo courtesy, Laura Hahn).

In the spring of 2009, I was searching for something to make my then new high school feminism course have a sense of purpose. I wanted to teach students not just feminist theory and literature but how to learn and care strongly about an issue to mobilize them into action and advocacy.

My students wanted more out of the course, too. One after another, they–both girls and guys–shared in their course evaluations that they wanted to learn about a current issue involving girls and women that they could rally around. I took their request seriously.

That spring, I chanced upon a screening of Very Young Girls (2008) at Bluestockings, a radical feminist bookstore on the Lower East Side of New York. The film documents the work that Rachel Lloyd, founder and chief executive officer of GEMS (Girls Educational and Mentoring Services), has done to stop the cycle of commercial sexual exploitation of children in New York’s streets. Founded in 1998 in Lloyd’s own kitchen, GEMS is the only agency in New York State specifically designed to serve girls and young women who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking.

Among many services that provide prevention and outreach, GEMS ultimately helps girls and young women leave their exploiters–or their pimps–to live new lives of survival and support and eventually, of leadership and vision.

After attending that one screening, my entire course changed.

In the years since watching Very Young Girls, I have developed an entire unit that helps my students understand not just what CSEC is but what they can do to help end it. As part of the unit, they watch the film and invite GEMS outreach workers to teach them about the myths and facts about CSEC. Instead of writing a paper to end the unit, my students hold an annual assembly to teach their high school peers what they have learned. Each assembly is written, produced, and delivered by each member of the class.

At the end of each assembly, my students rally their peers to support GEMS. Without fail, the students, faculty, and even the administration have supported GEMS in a variety of ways, from donating baby clothing to the children of the girls who have been exploited; to sponsoring a coffeehouse fundraiser; to purchasing Lloyd’s memoir, Girls Like Us (2011), in which she tells her own story of being trafficked in Europe and how she came to found GEMS in New York.

One of the best assemblies was the year the students interviewed Lloyd about her memoir in an Oprah-book-club-style conversation (see photo above). Each student had a question to ask Lloyd about her work with GEMS; needless to say, after the assembly, the line to purchase her memoir went out the door of our school.

My high school feminism student, Ayana, organizes baby clothes to deliver to the children of GEMS girls in 2009  (photo credit: Ileana Jiménez).

Following each assembly, my students write blog posts sharing what it meant to them to learn about CSEC, while educating the wider public what they can do on behalf of GEMS.

For many of my students, learning about CSEC provides them the first opportunity to become advocates. They learn the relevant vocabulary that surrounds the issue and equally as important, learn how to dismantle previous notions and assumptions about certain words they previously thought they understood, such as “prostitute.” When outreach workers come to my class, they teach my students that girls who are sold by their pimps are not prostitutes but instead are sexually exploited children.

In turn, my students teach both their peers and their wider reading public how to shift the language away from blaming girls for being “in the life” and instead teach them to understand that exploited girls are being trafficked through means of coercion and manipulation. Blogging on their site F to the Third Power becomes one way to advocate and instruct on these crucial differences. One boy, Nathaniel, wrote:

“[O]ne thing would be to raise awareness about the commercial sexual exploitation of children. Get the word out there that this is happening and that this is serious; explain the severity of the issue. When you hear the word ‘prostitute,’ try to shift the language, for these girls are not in the life by choice.”

Once Lloyd’s memoir came out, I knew it would be an integral part of teaching students about CSEC. As an English teacher, it provided me with a book-length text to pair with the film and more importantly, an opportunity to probe further with my students the ways in which race, class, gender, and sexuality intersect to create the conditions that make CSEC the result of a system of interlocking oppressions—poverty, lack of education, sexual and emotional abuse–and how this system needs to be eradicated through anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-violence education. It is this type of education that my high school feminism class provides.

A powerful account of Lloyd’s experiences of being trafficked in Europe, Lloyd intersperses stories about the girls she has supported throughout her 15 years at GEMS. Throughout the narrative, Lloyd instructs her reader on the social, economic, and legal issues that surround girls who are sexually exploited.

She also lifts the veil on the ways in which the media privileges the stories of white girls and women who have been kidnapped, raped, and exploited such as Chandra Levy and JonBenét Ramsey and overlooks the stories of girls of color who have suffered the same. Lloyd knows that race and class play a factor in these whitewashed media narratives:

“It is clear that race and class make a difference in how much of a victim we believe you are. Many of these attitudes go back to slavery, when black women and girls were blamed for the sexual violence of their owners.”

Lloyd links today’s commercial sexual exploitation of children to the history of slavery in the U.S. to share an essential truth: slavery is not over.

One of the most powerful moments in the memoir is when Lloyd speaks directly to a pimp, asking him to consider how his exploitation of girls is akin to white slaveowners selling, owning, and sexually abusing female slaves:

“In over two hours of intense conversation, it’s only when I make the comparison to slavery and tell him that he put the mother of his child on the auction block and that he’s no different from any of the while slaveholders that he’s grown up loathing, that something registers. He’s quiet for a long time and when he finally looks up he has tears in his eyes.”

For teachers wondering where this text might “fit” in their curriculum, this scene should convince us. Each year, we teach the history of American slavery. But too frequently, we miss the opportunity to teach students that slavery is still going on today in the form of sexual exploitation, not to mention other forms of human trafficking.

We owe it to our students to tell them the full story and to engage in being part of disrupting this violent narrative to create a new story of life and survival for the millions of girls and young women who are exploited each year, many of whom are the same age as our students.

From appearing in a music video to support GEMS to leading school assemblies, my students are committed to eradicating the commercial sexual exploitation of children. I do all of this from within the limitations as well as rich opportunities that an English elective on feminism affords. You can do it in your classroom in ways that best fits your school needs and program. Regardless of your approach, I urge you to watch the film. Read the memoir. Create a unit. Teach justice. Make change.

This post was written in honor of Rachel Lloyd, who celebrates her birthday today as well as the 15th anniversary of founding GEMS. Mark her birthday and support her GEMS fundraising campaign.

The students in my feminism class read Rachel Lloyd’s memoir, Girls Like Us, about the commercial sexual exploitation of children. (Photo credit: Steve Neiman).

My high school feminism students, Josey Stuart and Noel Diggs, (front) and Emily Morenike Carpenter from Girls for Gender Equity spoke on a panel addressing the findings in the AAUW report, Crossing the Line: Sexual Harassment at School. (photo credit: Ileana Jiménez).

This year’s 57th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women taking place currently in New York from March 4-15 is focusing on the elimination and prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls with a particular focus on the equal sharing of responsibilities between women and men.

As part of a series of UN parallel events taking place in various venues was a panel sponsored by the AAUW (American Association of University Women) highlighting the findings of their important study Crossing the Line: Sexual Harassment at School. As Crossing the Line co-author Holly Kearl noted: “The AAUW was one of the first organizations to talk about sexual harassment in schools in 1993, and they continue to be a leading voice on the topic.”

Holly invited my high school feminism class students Josey Stuart and Noel Diggs to sit on the panel along with Emily Morenike Carpenter from Girls for Gender Equity; all students shared their insights on how to address sexual harassment in schools.

Josey mentioned that “to learn, you need to be in a safe environment, you need to feel like you’re able to express yourself, you can’t be focused on the constant fear of being harassed,” while Noel highlighted the importance of teaching students to shift their language away from misogynist messages such as “bagging” girls sexually and using words such as “gay” in negative contexts.

Emily noted that “instead of having faculty talk down to students and saying ‘this is what sexual harassment is,’ we can have students define and talk about sexual harassment in a way that gives them agency and supports their voice.”

Holly highlighted that “48% of students experienced sexual harassment during the 2010-11 school year, including more girls than boys, especially in the upper grades. 30% experienced cyber-harassment and most of them were also harassed in person. Nearly one in three students witnessed harassment happening, including more girls than boys.”

During my portion of the panel I highlighted:

• Collaborating with advocacy and activist organizations such as the Center for Anti-Violence Education to teach students self-defense; Girls for Gender Equity to address sexual harassment in schools via interactive workshops; Men Can Stop Rape to engage young men; and Stop Street Harassment to teach high school students methods to combat the issue via blogging and social media;
• Learning about intersectionality: As the AAUW report shows, the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality can cause some students to fare worse than others when they experience sexual harassment. In my own classroom, teaching students how to analyze various systems of oppression, including sexism, racism, and homophobia, leads students to build respect for each other and in the end, decreases incidents of gender-based violence in schools.
• Building consciousness for boys and working with them as allies. We cannot overlook the importance of bringing young men into the conversation in terms of helping them understand societal messages about masculinity and hyper-masculinity that leads to the kind of homophobia, transphobia, sexual harassment, and other gender-based violence we see in schools and on the streets.
• Creating trans-inclusive schools is key to creating a gender justice framework that takes into account the experiences of transgender students in schools. Professional development for teachers on preferred gender pronouns, gender inclusive bathrooms, and the social and emotional transitions that transgender youth go through creates safer school environments for all.

The executive summary of Crossing the Line: Sexual Harassment at School.

Melissa Guardaro, Kathleen Cha, Gloria Blackwell, Noel Diggs, Linda Hallman, Holly Kearl, Josey Stuart, Emily Morenike Carpenter, and Ileana Jiménez (Feminist Teacher) at the Crossing the Line panel. (photo credit: Beckie Weinheimer)

Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga and I at the MAKERS: Women Who Make America premiere in New York (photo credit, Ileana Jiménez).

In the spring of 1994 during my first year in college, Cherríe Moraga changed my life forever. Her essay “A Long Line of Vendidas” from Loving in the War Years gave me the language I would forever use to understand my brownness, my queer identity, and my feminism.

“To be a woman fully necessitated my claiming the race of my mother. My brother’s sex was white. Mine, brown.”

I recently met Moraga at the red carpet premiere of the MAKERS documentary Women Who Make America in New York. As I watched the first hour of the film during the premiere, I was excited to see a shot of the now classic 1980 photo of Moraga with Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith wearing their Kitchen Table: Woman of Color Press t-shirts. Kitchen Table was the first woman of color independent press that became well-known for publishing the groundbreaking collection This Bridge Called My Back.

Edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Moraga in 1983, the pieces in Bridge paved the way for how we breathe, speak, and love feminism today. We only need mention these women’s names and we all immediately recognize the bridge they built for our collective feminist consciousness.

Anzaldúa, Lorde, Moraga, and Barbara Smith (who is also featured in MAKERS) were the women who revolutionized feminism. They were the ones who brought an analysis of race, class, and ethnicity to our critical discussions of gender and sexuality. They were the ones who taught us how to bring this intersectional lens to issues of education, immigration, labor, reproductive rights, and much more.

Indeed, they created the feminism we so revere and rally around today.

Without Moraga and her sisters of color, we wouldn’t have multi-issue organizing; we wouldn’t have queer theory; and we certainly wouldn’t have African-American studies, Asian-American Studies, Latino Studies, Native American Studies, or any other interdisciplinary studies.

Today, both white and women of color say “intersectionality” with such ease that we consider it a cherished birthmark on our feminist bodies. We always need to remember, however, who gave us our feminist DNA.

Even Gloria Steinem cautioned the audience at the MAKERS premiere that we need to remember that our most radical and most change-making roots came from women of color. Steinem underscored her point by quoting Paula Gunn Allen from the Laguna-Pueblo tribe: “The root of oppression is the loss of memory.”

Teaching is the antidote to memory loss. In my high school course on feminism and activism, Moraga’s name is household. My students read and love “La Güera.” My students also write blog posts on their class site F to the Third Power acknowledging her contribution to their thinking.

One student writes: “I came to the conclusion that all those issues I wanted to fight for, such as racism, sexism, and homophobia, are deeply connected to the work of feminism,” was a result of reading Moraga and the works of other women of color.

If you want to bring Moraga’s work to your classroom, consider teaching “La Güera” and  “A Long Line of Vendidas” when you talk about women of color and feminism.

Consider pairing her play Hungry Woman alongside your study of Medea.

Speaking of her plays, while I spoke to Moraga at the premiere, she shared that her scripts are not often produced. Let’s put an end to that. Consider mounting a play from her first dramatic collection Heroes and Other Saints or her latest play, New Fire, at your school or university.

Finally, consider teaching her book The Last Generation when you design your unit on the banning of ethnic studies in Arizona. Each essay in this collection is Moraga’s beautiful call-to-action for the preservation and re-imagining of Aztlan, the ancestral land of the Aztecs later seized by white Europeans. Nothing will demonstrate more powerfully to your students how much teaching feminism and ethnic studies together can make all the difference in creating equity and justice in our schools and ultimately, in our nation.

By teaching Moraga’s work and that of her bridge sisters, you will find the answer to where today’s feminism found its fierce language and where the fierce future of feminism lies for us all.

The MAKERS documentary premieres on February 26 on PBS. The video featuring Moraga will be released on the MAKERS site within the next few months.

I presented at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in 2012 (photo credit: Veronica Arreola).

I have an exciting line-up of presentations and speaking engagements this spring. Please join me at one of these events and make teaching for social justice through feminism and activism a reality. Let me know if you’ll be there!

• The Educating Girls Conference sponsored by the New York State Association of Independent Schools (NYSAIS) is today, Tuesday, January 22 in New York. My workshop is titled Teaching Feminism in High School. 
• The annual Feminist & Scholar Conference sponsored by the Barnard Center for Research on Women this year is titled Utopia to be held on Saturday, March 2 in New York. My workshop is titled Creating a New Feminist Framework for K-12 Education. Register for free here.
• The first annual Distinguished Fulbright Alumni Conference sponsored by the Institute of International Education will be held on April 4-6 in Washington, D.C. I will be on a panel moderated by the United States Department of State.
• The Gender and Education Association’s (GEA) annual conference will be held in London from April 23-26. I will be on a panel titled Feminist Activism and Pedagogy in Diverse Contexts.
• My fellow panelists from London and I will do a similar presentation at the annual American Education Research Association’s (AERA) conference the following week in San Francisco, April 27-May 1.

  If your school, college, or organization is interested in having me present or consult at your institution please contact me.

My national television debut on the Melissa Harris-Perry Show (photo credit: Cheryl Coward).

2012 was a fantastic year for me as a feminist teacher, activist, and blogger. Take a look at my top five moments this year. 

1. Appeared on the Melissa Harris-Perry Show to talk about teaching women’s studies to high school students as well as to advocate for safe and inclusive schools (August 2012).
2. Featured in The Atlantic during the Aspen Ideas Festival for teaching students how to engage in public discourse via blogging (July 2012).
3. Presented best practices on teaching high school feminism to a full room of scholars and activists at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Oakland. Among several topics, I highlighted my students’ work on the first International Day of the Girl (October-November 2012).
4. Supported my students Emma and Carina as they led a SPARK petition challenging Teen Vogue to stop photoshopping images of women and girls and to start including more diverse models (July 2012).
   

   My students Emma and Carina (far left) led the SPARK petition against Teen Vogue (photo courtesy SPARK).

5. Record number of six boys sign up for my high school feminism class. Two boys credit sisters who have taken women’s studies classes–including mine–as the number one reason for taking my class. This year, students wrote phenomenal blog posts on their feminist blog, F to the Third Power, including their vision for the future of feminism (September-December 2012).
   

   Students in my high school feminism class 2012 (photo Ileana Jiménez).

Earlier this fall, my high school feminism students and I created an It’s My Vote video designed to encourage young women to vote in this year’s election. The American Association of University Women’s Action Fund sponsored the campaign and we were featured on their site.

As an educator-activist, nothing is more important to me than teaching young people the importance of civic engagement. In our video, I share the story of how each year, my Puerto Rican mom brought me to the polls in the Bronx to pull the lever for her while carrying me in her arms; my students then talk about why voting matters to them as young women.

In the same way that my mom carried me to the polls to share her voice, today and everyday, I carry the responsibility of teaching my students that they too must carry the legacy of change in their hands both for themselves and their communities.

The students in my high school feminism class marked this year’s first International Day of the Girl by leading a phenomenal school-wide assembly for their peers. We partnered with 10×10 Educate Girls to learn about the state of girls’ education globally as well as with our partner school in India, the all-girls Shri Shikshayatan School in Kolkata.

In addition to sharing information about girls education globally, my students showed videos from a range of organizations including those from 10×10 and the Girl Effect. The young women and men in the class highlighted statistics on girls education and several girls shared personal stories about growing up at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the U.S.

Across the globe, high school girls at Shri Shikshayatan sponsored a day of panels related to infanticide or sex selective abortion, trafficking, and the education of girls in India.

My students documented reflections on leading their International Day of the Girl assembly on their blog F to the Third Power, citing learning about intersectionality–or the theory that categories of oppression such as racism, classism, and sexism are interlocking–as the most important concept that helped provide them a lens for understanding both social justice feminism as well as themselves.

We’re looking forward to continuing our partnership with the girls and teachers at Shri Shikshayatan, and are hoping to visit their school in the future. Until then, our classes will continue the dialogue about gender and equity in both countries, as we foster a critical and action-based understanding about the need for global education for girls and their communities to create social and economic justice.

Feminist Magazine, KPFK 90.7, Pacifica Radio

Over the summer, I joined the exciting roster of new commentators at Feminist Magazine on KPFK Pacifica radio. I will be sharing perspectives on social justice and feminism in education.

If you missed my first commentary in July, I’ve posted the audio archive here as well as the transcript below. Watch my Twitter and Facebook feeds for updates on upcoming commentary dates.

Transcript of my first commentary on the invisibility of teachers as leaders in the media and the need to re-position our voices in political and educational discourse follows below.

I’m Ileana Jiménez. It’s a pleasure to be on Feminist Magazine on KPFK Pacifica as a regular commentator on education. I blog at feministteacher.com and tweet at @feministteacher on the intersection of education and equity, activism and justice.

Teachers love a frame and I’m going to provide a frame. The focus of my first commentary is teachers and our invisibility in the media. I see this first topic as an entry point into future segments on education that I’ll be sharing with you.

Teachers are not often invited to be a part of the media whether it’s on broadcast news, the radio, or online, but we’re quite frequently framed as scapegoats on  issues such as blocking education reform to not stopping bullying.

We’re talked about a great deal, but we aren’t the ones doing the talking on platforms where it matters. To make matters worse, for how much we’re charged for the academic lives of children and young people, we’re often accused of entering teaching from the lowest ranks of our college graduating classes and are seen as having little preparation in our content areas. In short, we’re not seen as intellectuals who contribute to the larger public good.

The opposite could not be more true. Today’s corps of teachers are incredibly committed and smart. We’re changemakers and visionaries. In fact, teachers are so tired of not being in the media that we are creating spaces in social media to hear each other.

Anyone can take a look at Twitter and see teachers sharing advice with each other on hashtags called  #ntchat for new teachers or #engchat  for English teachers or #globaled for global views on education or #edtech for incorporating technology in the classroom. You an also find us at #BlackEd and #LatinoEd for issues on education relating to African-American and Latino communities.

One of my favorite conversations on Twitter is the #ethnicstudies hashtag, which follows the ban of ethnic studies in high schools in Arizona and what educators and activists are doing to counter these bans not just in Arizona but across the country.

There’s a strong sense of solidarity among teachers on issues that affect how and what we teach and what we find important to share with young people about their cultures and communities, their identities and futures.  On all of these hashtags, teachers are creating community, smart and intellectual communities at that, for making schools that much more cutting edge.

We need more teachers to be in the media shaping public discourse on education. Our larger culture looks too often to policymakers and politicians for the pulse of education, but they aren’t the ones working with our young people everyday, nor are they the ones with 24-hour teaching jobs that entails not just grading and designing curricula but taking care of young people facing racism, sexism, homophobia as well as other issues such as violence, assault, and even homelessness.

With our election cycle nearing, education will most likely be a part of what both candidates will address. However, teachers themselves won’t be the commentators, we won’t be the pundits, and we won’t be the ones shaping policy. Teacher work sits at the intersection of education and civil rights. We see what needs to be addressed in our classrooms and our communities. It’s time we’re also the ones that are looked to for our expertise.

As part of our upcoming conversations, I’ll be sharing my work on feminist teaching in high school classrooms as well as at upcoming events such as the National Women’s Studies Association conference that I’ll let you know more about. Until then keep fighting the good fight.

Krystle Merchant teaches a high school women’s history class at an all-girls school outside of Washington, D.C. (photo courtesy, Krystle Merchant)

The following guest blog by Krystle Merchant is the final post in a three-part series on teaching for social justice featuring the work of educators in primary, middle, and high school classrooms.

Krystle Merchant is a teacher and proud feminist at an all-girls high school in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. 

As a young, black female history teacher at a private school in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., I often feel pressured to speak to colleagues and parents on behalf of many different communities. As a result, I try to educate girls to be willing and able to do the same as adult women, regardless of which communities they represent. This is especially true in my Women in the United States senior history elective, where I draw my students’ attention to their current and future experiences as women, the importance of gender to the meaning of history, and the construction of the historical narrative.

On the first day of class, we start with a simple survey. The first question, “Are you a feminist?,” always gets a qualified answer. Even seniors at an all-girls high school, who are choosing to take a course in women’s history, do not feel comfortable identifying as feminists. The term is so deeply connected to negative stereotypes of women, that even when they give a good working definition of feminism, they do not want to associate themselves with the term.

To chip away at their internalized barrier to feminism, I ask my girls to identify, follow, and respond regularly to a feminist blog such as the fbomb, Feministing, and Feminists for Choice. From there, the course proceeds by reviewing much of the same content covered in their junior year survey course on U.S. History.

However, rather than discussing notable American women or women’s contributions to the usual textbook topics, we talk about periodization, access to power, and production. The latter term “production” refers to the sources available for our study and whether they were produced by women. Women’s societal status at any given time determined the kinds of information they could produce and whether that information became accessible for later study.

We ask questions about women’s roles, specifically identifying where they have contributed, created, and critiqued. We also think about where women’s images and roles have been defined for them. Rather than using wars and presidential administrations to determine important eras and breaking points for our study, we look at expectations placed on women such as Linda Kerber’s Republican motherhood, women’s roles on the frontier, and the invention of discreet sanitary products. 

Instead of a textbook, I provide a variety of primary and secondary sources that have come out of the development of women’s history as an academic field, as well as posts from the blogs the girls follow. Sources such as Ellen Carol DuBois and Lynn Dumenil’s Through Women’s Eyes: An American History Through Documents, Kerber’s Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, and Miriam Schneir’s Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings provide a mix of government documents, organizational statements, letters, essays, reviews, and photos.

Where women are excluded from traditional text types, we talk about power and agency. Where they produce the texts, we discuss the importance of gender to the author’s interpretations.

At the end of the semester, we conclude with a unit titled “Us, Women” in which we investigate feminism and women’s experiences in the U.S. today. Through the blog posts they’ve collected throughout the semester, we discuss issues of body image, women’s civic participation, buying power, and the meaning of feminism for teenage girls. Since each girl chooses a different blog at the outset, we usually get a variety of perspectives on each of the major issues of the unit.

Finally, we retake the survey from the first day. “What is feminism?” I ask. “It’s the process of advocating for the social, political, and economic equality of women,” they respond.

“Are you a feminist?,” I ask. “Of course,” they say.

Follow Krystle Merchant on Twitter. 

Dena Simmons teaches middle school students social justice and activism (photo courtesy, Dena Simmons).

The following guest blog by Dena Simmons is the second in a three-part series on teaching for social justice featuring the work of educators in primary, middle, and high school classrooms.

Dena Simmons is an activist, an educator, and student. Born to a resilient mother who escaped Antigua to come to the U.S., Simmons was raised in the Bronx and hopes to stay there. After graduating with honors from Middlebury College, Simmons returned to the Bronx as a middle school teacher. In 2007, she traveled to Antigua as a health volunteer for the Directorate of Gender Affairs to provide better health services for Dominican sex workers. She received a Fulbright grant to study the collaboration between schools and health agencies to prevent teen pregnancy in the Dominican Republic. She is also a 2004 Harry S. Truman Scholar and 2010 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow. She is currently studying for her Doctorate of Education at Columbia University, Teachers College. Her research is focused on teacher preparedness as it relates to bullying in the middle school setting.

At the beginning of each school year, I become overwhelmed with happiness and excitement at the thought of teaching and preparing the next generation of activists.

As I reflect on some social justice practices I do in the middle school classroom, the first and most important practice that comes to mind is the act of learning who my students, their parents/guardians, and community are.

On the first day of school, I present students with a survey so that they have the opportunity to tell me about themselves, their hobbies, the languages they speak at home, their favorite foods, favorite books, their academic and social strengths and areas of growth, and so on.  I use the information students share with me to incorporate their experiences into my instruction so that it is culturally responsive and student-centered.

I also send students home with an introductory letter and parent survey as a way to communicate to parents that our work in educating their children is a collaborative effort and that I am interested in who they are and what they have to offer.

Too often, we enter our classrooms focusing on our students’ deficits, needs, and problems.  Instead, we should focus on what they do bring to the classroom and build off of it.  In addition to having students fill out a survey, I also do an activity with them called “hands, head, heart, and home” where through making posters, students share with their classmates and me their hands (what they are good at doing), head (what they are knowledgeable about), heart (what they are passionate about), and home (what organizations and places in their community they consider to be important).

Each student then presents his or her poster to the class. I hang up each poster around the room as a reminder of our class’s identity and resources. This activity allows students to have a voice and to share with their classmates and me the many resources they bring to school each day.

Along with learning about students and their families, it is important to know the assets of the community in which we work. Before teaching in a new school community (or one in which we’ve already been teaching), I recommend doing an asset mapping activity, which includes identifying institutions and organizations (social, political, economic, educational, health, religious, and so on) in the school community with whom we can partner in an effort to make educating our youth the collaborative effort it should be.

In essence, providing students and their families with the opportunity to highlight themselves and mapping the assets of our students and the larger community allow us to be effective instructors and activists, as we are able to:

• Use what we learn to build meaningful relationships with students, parents, and community members and to include them in educating our youth;
• Plan engaging units and lessons that incorporate student interests and cultures; and
• Foster student socio-emotional health.

Additionally, I have used community assets and outside organizations to bring athletic, arts, music, and social justice programming to my students, especially considering the depletion of such programming in our schools because of the current culture of test-based accountability.

For example, when teaching in the South Bronx, I’ve asked AmeriCorps volunteers at Bronx Lebanon Hospital to teach my students lessons on nutrition, substance and alcohol abuse, safe sex practices and sexuality, and other health education topics.  Since my school did not have a health education program, I used a community asset to fill a gap in my students’ education.

To bring dance instruction to my class, I invited Columbia University students to teach my class West African dance while we learned about the African slave trade and the history of African Americans through reading Walter Dean Myers’ Now Is Your Time!: The African American Struggle for Freedom.

I’ve also partnered with the Studio in a School program to bring art classes to my students.  Through my role on the advisory board of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), I have also brought VTS to my school to strengthen students’ critical thinking skills through discussing pieces of art.

My work has also included inviting a DreamYard artist to my classroom so that my students have instruction in writing and in performing spoken word pieces that allow them to express their life experiences and to use poetry as a form of activism.

In addition, I’ve connected with outside social justice groups and reached out to my circle of friends during some of my social justice lessons.  During a unit on workers’ rights, for instance, I invited two representatives from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to speak to my students about their experience working on farms as well as the need for fair wages.

When I’ve taught a unit on transforming marginality in the Bronx into empowerment, I read parts of Jonathan Kozol’s Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation to expose students to the unfair reality and injustices in the Bronx.  As part of that unit, we also watched my friend Emily Abt’s documentary, All of Us, which examines power and HIV in relationships and highlights health injustices in the Bronx.

I’ve used these mediums not only to expose the many inequalities in the health and education systems in the Bronx to my students, but also to equip them with the necessary knowledge to recognize injustice when they see it so that they can combat it.

During this unit, we discuss ways to empower community members. As an authentic performance assessment at the end of the unit, students write blog posts, create mini-documentaries or public service announcements about a problem they have identified in their community along with suggested solutions.

By connecting with the community and other outside resources, I’ve transformed what education is “supposed” to look like for the brown and black children in the South Bronx by bringing the world to my students, by making their education about what they wanted to learn, not by what politicians with little to no education background think looks good in headlines.

Essentially, building relationships with students, their families, community members, and other social justice groups is key.  Educating our children should be a collaborative responsibility, an act of solidarity.

In fact, as Maureen Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin declare in Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: “the process of attaining the goal of social justice . . . should also be democratic and participatory, inclusive, and affirming of human agency and human capacities for working collaboratively to create change.”

As teachers, our role is to guide students and to create a community where students feel safe to learn. Thus, our instruction must honor students’ experiences and cultures and build upon their assets in the name of culturally responsive instruction. Through honoring our students’ lives, we create a classroom culture that supports all students, making them feel safe, loved, and part of our community.

Once a student has these fundamental needs met, they can accomplish their academic goals—of course, with their crew of family, friends, school faculty and staff, and community members cheering them on.

As social justice educators, it is important not only to teach our students to fight injustice, but also to challenge how education happens in this country by doing everything we can to make our instruction validating and comprehensive, emancipatory and empowering.

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