Teachers at a, mostly white, independent school met monthly for a year, discussing how to talk with children from pre-K through eighth grade about race. They looked at interactions that arose spontaneously in the classroom, from younger children's comments about skin color to racially tinged remarks in the older classes. Faculty members, who all…

The author, a professor of English education, reads to his nine-year-old son nightly, and has for many years. The mutually cherished and fulfilling routine is strained to the breaking point because of the author's growing concern about his son's prospects for being admitted into a "good" public middle school. The narrative offers…

This autoethnographic narrative explores the challenges and successes of employing critical pedagogy in an eighth-grade history classroom. Using the threads of teacher, scholar, and individual, the author shares the intellectual and emotional progression through hope, frustration, humility, and growth that this endeavor demanded. Further, this…

Richard Locke began his first full-time job teaching seventh grade social studies at Francis W. Parker School in Chicago a quarter of a century before writing this article. Here he writes that as a young inexperienced teacher just out of college he was filled with enthusiasm and convinced that education could play a progressive role in society.…