Teaching When the World Is on Fire: Authentic Classroom Advice, from Climate Justice to Black Lives Matter

This book is so poignant and relevant. Even though it was written before covid and the current BLM protests, so much of it is directly applicable to how we as teachers can respond to injustice.

This book is a collection of short essays on various topics that, while not directly connected with teaching content in the classroom, have become important to the lives and careers of twenty-first century teachers: politics, safety, race, gender, sex, climate, and culture.As with any book that is a collection of different writers, this one varies in quality and interest. For me, as a high school teacher, I found too much of this to be more directed towards teachers of younger students, a problem I find with many books on teaching. On the other hand, I found “Climate Science Meets a Stubborn Obstacle: Students” by Amy Harmon to be a standout and I also enjoyed “Teaching Politics in the Age of Trump” by Justin Christensen.The world of teaching is very different than the one in which started in the field 30 years ago. It always behooves us to keep up with current teaching trends, but teaching is about more than academics now, and these are topics that we now ignore to detriment of life and career.

An excellent collection of writings about teaching today. The writings are grouped by topic and confront today's toughest issues. The footnotes are a valuable resource for further reading and research.

“Teaching When the World Is On Fire”, edited by Lisa Delpit, is an extraordinarily useful series of vitally important essays by a number of contemporary educators. As I’ve said in previous reviews, it is the type of book that I profoundly wish had been available before I retired from my own teaching career or even before my teacher-daughter recently retired as well. As it is, I am asking her to pass it on to former colleagues at her previous Junior High School in Chinle, Arizona.The reader should certainly begin at the Table of Contents which is divided into sections with the titles “Politics Matters”, “Safety Matters”, “Race Matters”, “Gender and Sex Ed Matter”, “Climate Matters”, and “Culture Matters”. This allows immediate access to those areas of greatest concern to individual or school situations. In addition, of course, the individual essays represent a tremendous diversity of viewpoints and specific topic areas. Some are very short, others longer, and the material as a whole offers a great variety of fruitful topics for group consideration in training sessions and the like. This is another of those books for which double the five stars ought to be possible, one set for readability and another for vital importance!

I teach writing and literature to freshmen in a college where the majority of the student body has experienced a great deal of trauma and hardship. My students are insightful and aware, but they also frequently express anxiety and a sense of powerlessness about the troubling events in the world around them. One of the most challenging and, I think, important questions I've faced as an educator is how to address these tough topics in the most constructive, open, and inclusive manner possible. Although I've been given much pedagogical training in my discipline, I feel I still have much to learn about handling these sensitive subjects as they come up, particularly since they impact my students in a direct and personal way.I dove into "Teaching When the World Is on Fire" hoping that it would offer practical advice and teaching strategies. The book is not so much of a "how-to," though, and I suppose this makes sense, considering there are no simple "right answers" about how to approach this complex subject matter. Instead, the book offers a wide variety of essays on a range of subjects by teachers in various grades and educational settings. Although I teach college rather than K-12, I still found much of the content relevant and applicable to my own teaching.Topics include things like hate speech, school safety in an age of mass shootings and police presence in schools, race, gender and sexual harassment, and climate change. With essays like "Teaching Politics in the Age of Trump," some readers may find the book biased toward a liberal ideology, and it does have that clear leaning, but I think it provides important perspectives to help understand the ways that many students are affected by the current political climate. I'll never forget, the day after the 2016 election, coming to class and finding students in tears; many wrote in their journals that they felt silenced or fearful as students of color, young women, religious minorities, immigrants, LGBT students, and/or students with disabilities. This book won't tell you how to respond in such a situation, but it will remind you you're not alone and will give you a chance to reflect on how other teachers have approached tough conversations and situations.In these other teachers' approaches, you will indeed also find some concrete advice. One of my favorite essays in the book was T. Elijah Hawkes' "School Justice: Teaching Politically Fraught Topics." Hawkes' essay addresses the paradox many educators feel between a curriculum that prizes social justice and equality vs. a school system that can (generally inadvertently, I think) perpetuate disparity and inequality. This is certainly something I and my colleagues struggle with at my very diverse university. Here again, there are of course no easy answers, but Hawkes does list - with detailed discussion and personal examples - a number of approaches that can help promote trust, mutual respect, and empowerment in the classroom.I still would have liked more hands-on teaching strategies, especially as a relatively new teacher, but I really appreciated the variety of perspectives and experiences this collection had to offer. I would recommend it as a part of any educator's bookshelf.

This is a difficult book to read, in the best sense of the word. The book is a collection of essays from teachers and scholars in the education and related fields edited by Lisa Delpit, the author of Other People’s Children. The essays covers topics on politics, Safety, Race, Gender, Climate and Culture. It ends with an appendix of books on immigration for younger readers. While the overall stance of the materials are certainly on one side of today’s politics, I hope that people from any sides will read this collection. You do not have to agree to the content, but you should be aware of these important matters. Ignoring these topics in Education, or providing a one sided view on these topics in school, is not a good thing — they authors argue.The book also has a lot of practical ideas for teachers and administrators to involve students and the community in these discussions without bias, and who can argue that is not a good thing!