Plan and deliver a curriculum to help your students connect with the humanity of others!

In the wake of 2020, we need today’s young learners to be prepared to develop solutions to a host of entrenched and complex issues, including systemic racism, massive environmental problems, deep political divisions, and future pandemics that will severely test the effectiveness and equity of our health policies. What better place to start that preparation than with a social studies curriculum that enables elementary students to envision and build a better world?

In this engaging guide two experienced social studies educators unpack the oppressions that so often characterize the elementary curriculum—normalization, idealization, heroification, and dramatization—and show how common pitfalls can be replaced with creative solutions. Whether you’re a classroom teacher, methods student, or curriculum coordinator, this is a book that can transform your understanding of the social studies disciplines and their power to disrupt the narratives that maintain current inequities.

This collection of groundbreaking essays brings together a diverse group of experts who are researching, theorizing, and enacting anti-oppressive education in “elite” schooling environments—that is, schools imbued with wealth and whiteness. This volume explores how those who are in a position of power can be educated to take active steps that reduce and disrupt oppression. Each essayist, writing with practitioners in mind, responds to one of four guiding questions from their unique point of view as an educator, student, or researcher: Why does this work matter? What is needed to start and sustain it? What does it look like in practice? What are the common pitfalls and how can they be avoided? Readers are encouraged to mull over various perspectives and experiences to find answers that fit their own contexts. This important book addresses the need to educate for social justice within economically privileged settings where power can be leveraged and repurposed for the benefit of a diverse society.

Book Features:

• Identifies ethical and effective pedagogical and curricular approaches to use with students in “elite” school settings.
• Examines what it means to work or learn in “elite” educational spaces for those who hold nondominant identities.
• Explores the special obligations and responsibilities these schools require furthering justice.
• Looks at how teachers can navigate the unique challenges that arise, the conditions needed to support them, and what counts as success for anti-oppressive education in “elite” schools.

Contributors include Diane Goodman, Paul Gorski, Adam Howard, and Tania D. Mitchell.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2013!

Educating Activist Allies offers a fresh take on critical education studies through an analysis of social justice pedagogy in schools serving communities privileged by race and class. By documenting the practices of socially committed teachers at an urban private academy and a suburban public school, Katy Swalwell helps educators and educational theorists better understand the challenges and opportunities inherent in this work. She also examines how students responded to their teachers’ efforts in ways that both undermined and realized the goals of social justice pedagogy. This analysis serves as the foundation for the development of a curricular framework helping students to foster an "Activist Ally" identity: the skills, knowledge, and dispositions necessary to negotiate privilege in ways that promote justice. Educating Activist Allies provides a powerful introduction to the ways in which social justice curricula can and should be enacted in communities of privilege.