What Are You Reading?

Fall 2004

Social justice teachers share their tips for keeping up with world events

	Photo: Joseph Blough

By Terry Burant

Of all the images in Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11, the clips of television newscasts made the strongest impression on me. From Katie Couric saying "Navy SEALs rock!" to American servicemen in Iraq to the recanting of the 2000 presidential election, I left the theater disturbed by the cheerleading and misinformation disguised as news. And I began wondering how people seek and find information about political events that matter.

I went home grateful that I haven't owned a television in years; yet, I worried that my lack of regular contact with television newscasts keeps me from understanding what my students see. After all, I want to know which messages I need to disrupt and question. I began to reconsider the sources I use for news as well as my weekly routines of paying attention.

I also asked myself the following questions: What if network news, Fox News, or Channel One are the only news sources that most students tune into in a given day? How do students learn about alternative sources of information and multiple perspectives on political events throughout the world? What role do critical teachers play in providing alternative views to their students? What do my critical teacher colleagues read every week? What sorts of reading routines have they developed for themselves that fit into their lives as teachers?

In the slower rhythm of summer, I reflected on the ways the pace of the school year overwhelms me. I'm an assistant professor at Marquette University, and when school's in full swing, navigating a myriad of news sources often takes a back seat to the daily demands of teaching and the joys of interacting with my students and colleagues.

But teaching introductory courses in teacher education means I want to nurture critical habits of mind in my students. I want the hopeful teachers-to-be in my classroom to start thinking like critical teachers, to search for and critique multiple perspectives. I want them to realize that they will have central roles to play in shaping policies at the school, local, state, and national levels.

Particularly at this time, when blind nationalism seems to substitute for being a "good" American, when any critique of U.S. military activities calls forth accusations of not being patriotic or supportive of the troops, when corporations fill school hallways with ads for their products, and when news comes packaged in McNugget-sized bites with videogame graphics, it is essential for teachers to gather information about political activity from a wider variety of sources.

As a result of these wide-ranging, film-inspired musings, I spent the latter part of summer asking teachers to briefly describe their news-seeking patterns. I wanted them to share their favorite regular sources for finding alternative perspectives to bring into their classrooms and schools. And I asked them to give me a snapshot of how they fit news-seeking activity into their busy school days. I also asked for a few examples of how they organize their classrooms to provide students access to alternative media. While certainly not a scientific poll, their answers collectively provide some basic and useful suggestions for progressive teachers, as well as a quick go-to guide of easily accessed sources. Here's a summary of their advice:

Subscribe to a handful of journals or newspapers, including the local daily paper.

Most teachers I spoke with subscribed to two or three papers, magazines, or journals. Favorites included The Nation, The Progressive, Mother Jones , the Sunday New York Times, The Washington Post , and publications serving their local ethnic and/or racial communities. Many also read publications of professional organizations or discipline-specific journals. Others subscribed to lesser-known periodicals, like The Ecologist (recommended by Bob Peterson and Bill Bigelow, editors of Rethinking Schools ), In These Times, and The Internationalist . Peterson also describes Harper's Index as a "fun resource for math and work with numbers as it's a monthly compilation of political, outrageous, and sometimes unbelievable statistics, all referenced." The actual physical presence of a regular publication delivered to your door and sitting next to your couch or toilet is a simple way of developing a reading routine.

Remind your friends to save their progressive publications and donate them to you.

Considering teacher salaries and time demands, many teachers talked about not being able to subscribe to all the sources they'd like. They ask friends and family members to regularly drop off old issues of alternative sources. Bringing these to your classroom and creating a classroom library, as well as using pieces from these sources for bulletin board displays helps your students notice alternative sources. Nicki Elder, an English teacher from Wyoming explained, "I am part of the learning community in my classroom, so my classroom is full of posters from Food Not Bombs, Amnesty International, Rock the Vote , and other social change websites." She added, "You can go to other rooms at my high school and see nothing but military recruitment posters, so I don't think it's a problem for me to promote alternative views that really aren't so radical when you really think about it."

Find a few columnists to regularly read and follow.

Get to know the favorite columnists of your teacher friends so you can alert one another to important pieces you might have missed. Steve Bialostok, a literacy educator at the University of Wyoming, reads "anything and everything by Frank Rich" and often sends links to his teacher friends around the country. Others suggested any column by Paul Krugman, a New York Times op-ed columnist, for critiques of the economic policies of the current administration.

Bookmark and check favorite online sources two or three times during the school week.

Enlist students in this task. Make this one of your classroom community's jobs or responsibilities. Set up your classroom computers so that these sites are the ones that show up when you start up your Internet browser.

Several teachers recommended The Nation's web site (www.thenation.com) as the best place to begin looking for alternative sites to bookmark and consult. Their site links to 50 alternative media sources. During a quick browse of The Nation's list of links, I found several new sites to bookmark including www.TVNewsLies.org, a site full of political cartoons perfect for putting on an overhead as a way to begin a class discussion; the unofficial website of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (www.pkarchive.org); and www.arc.org/C_Lines, the website of Colorlines magazine, a quarterly journal created by people of color. Bob Peterson regularly checks www.counterpunch.org for its self-described "muckraking" and provocative perspectives. Colleagues from England suggested www.peacejam.org, www.Americaforsale.org (a site that provides links to archived stories on news sites), and Google's alternative directory (http://directory.google.com/Top/News/Alternative).

Spend some uninterrupted time with plain, old-fashioned books each week.

The New York Times Book Review, Utne , and the mailing list of your local independent bookstore are excellent places to search for current books of interest. Create and participate in a book discussion group.

Consult a wide range of sources, including those from perspectives radically different from your own.

David Rubin, a 30-year veteran social studies teacher in Tucson, spends time each summer scouring for op-ed pieces from around the country to use in his government courses. "While it isn't always pleasant to read syndicated columnists like Charles Krauthammer or Cal Thomas, it's an important intellectual exercise for me to suspend judgment and follow the argument of someone with whom I radically disagree," he explains. If I see a book at a used bookstore or a neighborhood rummage sale that is politically and ideologically distasteful to me, yet one that I know would be important for me to read (Hernstein and Murray's The Bell Curve comes to mind here), I buy it only if I can use my loose change to do so.

Subscribe to a listserv or daily email message service.

While listservs can quickly become a time drain, they can also provide summaries, particularly of political activities that demand timely responses. [Many Rethinking Schools readers use its critical teaching listserv as a way to stay connected to social justice teaching around the country. See page 59 for how to sign up for the service.] Jennifer Firer, a veteran English teacher and department director of a large, suburban, Chicago-area high school, includes a few minutes with the Smart Briefs emails from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (www.ascd.org) in her daily routine. "These emails give me short reports on political activity relevant to schooling that I can quickly wade through in a few minutes when I get to work each day," she explains. "Later, if I see something I need to know more about — especially something about the No Child Left Behind act — I can search for more in-depth coverage from other progressive sources."

Suggest alternative sources for your school librarian to purchase.

Colleagues at Tucson High rave about their librarian's eye for multicultural literature as well as her school subscriptions to progressive publications. While certainly useful for students, delivery to your school can make your library a more compelling destination for your own education.

Include cartoons, photographs, images, and articles from nontraditional sources in your reading routine.

Ann Frkovich, an English teacher in Milwaukee, teaches a course called "The Literature of Rebellion and Social Change." To gather materials for this course, she browses satirical publications like The Onion (www.theonion.com) and popular culture magazines like Rolling Stone for articles that capture her students' interests. Last spring, she used a piece from Rolling Stone on homeless teenagers to connect to the larger issues of homelessness, particularly as it related to children in Milwaukee. David Rubin of Tucson High consistently uses the weekly cartoon "This Modern World" by Tom Tomorrow and downloads it from www.workingforchange.com. He also periodically buys Adbusters, a glossy magazine that critiques corporate culture and examines social issues. Other teachers regularly read "Boondocks" and "Doonesbury" cartoons and post them in their classrooms or use them as curriculum materials.

Create and nurture a network of teachers and other politically minded colleagues and friends.

The teachers I spoke with had fairly large circles of smart and politically engaged people they communicated with and counted on as sources of news. The conclave of progressive teachers at Tucson High gathers almost every day in one of their classrooms during their 30-minute "lunch hour" to talk politics, share sources, and plan organizing strategies — particularly for school-level policy changes. Hands-down, the majority of teachers I talked to preferred gathering information to share in their classroom from their teaching and activist communities.

Turning Over a New Leaf

With all this advice in mind, what will I do differently in order to stay informed and engaged, particularly in this important election season? Like an athlete recommitting to a sport, I plan to sit down with my schedule and pencil in several hours a week for sacred library time. While I consistently use news articles on current, local school-related issues to help my students understand the structure and governance of public education, this year I vow to search for more visual images and plan to use the political cartoons I stumbled on while researching the websites and print sources recommended to me.

I know there will be days when I barely have time to brush my teeth, throw a few pistachios in a baggie to eat on the bus, and get out the door in time for my first meeting or class. As much as I'd like to do so, I know that it might be hard to connect to online sources on busier days. So I'll continue to rely on my progressive network of friends, regardless of their professions, to alert me to critical websites, articles, and events.

Their wisdom and background knowledge is a useful filter. One of the most important things I plan to do in this new school year is cultivate and nurture these relationships. Reminding my friends and family members to keep those stories coming transforms my work as an educator into a true community effort, a collective political act.

Terry Burant (terry.burant@marquette.edu) is an assistant professor in the department of educational policy and leadership at Marquette University in Milwaukee and a Rethinking Schools editorial associate.

Fall 2004