Rethinking Schools

Classroom educators publish a journal packed with practical lesson plans and plenty of attitude.

By Alain Jehlen

In a classroom in Milwaukee, Rita Tenorio hands out color samples to her first graders and asks them to find the closest match to their own skin. In Paterson, New Jersey, Stan Karp listens to students from around the world read "Where I'm From" poems. "I'm from that broken Corona bottle on the dirty sidewalk," says one. "I am from the most beautiful island in the world, where people smile before they say hello," says another.

And in a staged "incident" in Portland, Oregon, social studies teacher Bill Bigelow picks up a girl's purse, declares that it belongs to him, and starts sorting through its contents. When students protest, Bigelow rephrases what's happening: "I discovered this purse. Now it's mine, right?" And so he begins a unit on Christopher Columbus.

Three provocative lessons spread across 3,000 miles, connected by their approach to learning and by a community of public school teachers that has grown up around a quarterly named Rethinking Schools, probably the only education journal in America written and edited by K-12 educators.

It's a magazine with a point of view: "We want to prepare kids to be active citizens for a multiracial democracy at the same time that we teach academic skills, like understanding place value in large numbers, or how to write a quality poem," says Milwaukee fifth-grade teacher Bob Peterson, one of the founders. "Social issues affect our students, so we shouldn't ignore them. Bring them up, examine them, use them in teaching."

Now in its 18th year, Rethinking Schools reflects its authors--passionately committed to their vision of education, and very practical in approach because most of them teach every day.

Photos by Peter Zuzga

In the most recent cover story, Linda Christensen, a former English teacher who is now a language arts coordinator for the Portland, Oregon, high schools, tackles the thorny question of how to teach writing to students who have not learned Standard English at home. Christensen fills her article with detailed examples from her own teaching to show what she feels is the wrong way and the right way to help students learn "the language of power" without disrespecting their home language or shutting down their ability to express ideas. Her approach: First get the students' expressive juices flowing, regardless of grammar and spelling. Then work on just one rule at a time and urge students to do the correcting, so they won't "feel like [a] target in the crosshairs of the teacher's red pen."

Rethinking Schools is the brainchild of a group of Milwaukee teachers who initially had come together to help each other do a better job teaching low-income, urban children. Some had been involved in the civil rights and peace movements. They didn't see their classrooms reflected in the newspapers or in education periodicals, so they launched their own journal.

"We started on my kitchen table with an Apple IIe and a can of rubber cement," says Peterson. "The first couple of years, we never had the money to pay the printer."

They gave out free copies at teachers' meetings around the country, and made contact with other classroom educators for whom the articles filled a void.

Today, there's a cramped office, six paid staff, and a yearly budget around $800,000. But the writing and editing is still done by volunteer educators.

In 1991, they branched out into book publishing, just as teachers were preparing for the 500th anniversary of Columbus' landing. Hungry for an alternative view of that event, educators snapped up Rethinking Columbus, loaded with source material and lesson plans on the European conquest of the Americas. Total sales have passed the 250,000 mark, giving Columbus by far the widest circulation of any Rethinking publication. The group has also published books on school reform, student testing, teaching about globalization, and other subjects, and maintains a listserv with 500 subscribers.

The magazine itself, with a new design this year, has more than 10,000 subscribers in all 50 states, 11 Canadian provinces, and 15 other countries.

"Rethinking Schools makes me feel I'm not alone," says Bigelow in Portland. "I'm part of an ongoing conversation about how we teach. More than just lesson plans, it's the support that keeps me hopeful."

Portland boasts a Rethinking Schools discussion group that usually draws 60 to 70 people, and a local listserv with over 600.

In Milwaukee, Rethinking Schools teachers actively participate in their NEA-affiliated Association and in school board elections. They have joined with community allies to create a two-way bilingual public elementary school, La Escuela Fratney, in a building that had been slated for conversion to a professional development center. Four Rethinking Schools editors, including Peterson and Tenorio, teach at Fratney with students who are mostly minority and low-income. And they keep the lessons creative.

In one on percentages, Peterson's fifth-grade students talked about violence in their neighborhoods and about public opinion polls on a gun control bill before the Wisconsin legislature. They then polled themselves on the same bill, calculated the results, and found they were 77 percent in favor. Peterson says the time spent discussing violence and guns didn't detract from learning math. Rather, it helped students learn better because "they see the importance of math in the real world. It's not just to get a better test grade."

With her first graders, Tenorio teaches about race and science. "Contrary to what adults often believe, young children are not ?colorblind,'" she wrote in Rethinking Schools.

It's a mistake, she believes, to tell children that race isn't important, that what really counts is inside, because they know race does matter in their lives. So she encourages students to talk about their experiences--have they heard anyone say something mean about somebody's skin color? "They've never done it themselves," she says they report. "But a sister did, or they heard it at the park." Tenorio also teaches about melanin and why some people have darker skin than others. Students match their own skin to paint samples, and they mix four colors--black, white, yellow, and red--to produce their own skin tone.

"First graders may not understand the history and politics of race, but they can understand that their skin color is made of the same four colors as everyone else's," she says.

Her class brims with students of all colors and social classes. "I have the children of doctors and lawyers and others whose parents have to work three part-time jobs with no benefits," she says. "Their life experiences are not the same. But I want them to see that each person's experience is just as significant and valid as their own."

For more, visit www.rethinkingschools.org, which features downloadable articles from the magazine; collections of articles on topics such as "Bilingual Education" and "War, Terrorism, and our Classrooms"; and the book catalog.