Fires in Our Lives
Advice for Teachers from Today’s High School Students
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A sequel to the classic Fires in the Bathroom that illuminates what adolescents most need from teachers in today's upsetting times
The context in which adolescents are learning has shifted radically since students first offered blunt advice to high school teachers in the groundbreaking Fires in the Bathroom, a perennial bestseller. Now their world is changing at warp speed, and classrooms too are seething with anxiety. This sequel raises the voices of diverse youth around the nation as they live through the mind-bending quandaries of this era and ask their teachers to notice.
In Fires in Our Lives, Kathleen Cushman and her co-authors Kristien Zenkov and Meagan Call-Cummings (both leaders in bringing student voices to teacher education) present new first-person testimony on how today's youth experience the risks and challenges of high school. The students who speak here need their teachers more than ever as they navigate cultural, social, and political borders in their communities. Reinforced by classroom examples and supplemented with helpful takeaways, Fires in Our Lives offers a compelling dialogue about students' emotions, ideas, and developing agency.
In a world that sorely needs the thoughtful participation of its rising generation, this new staple belongs on every high school teacher's bookshelf.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cushman (Fires in the Bathroom), cofounder of the nonprofit What Kids Can Do, and educators Zenkov and Call-Cummings examine how today's "social, political, economic, and climatic crises" are stressing students in this well-intentioned yet familiar account. In interviews, public high schoolers across a wide range of demographics convey their search for belonging and their complex social identities. Answering the students' call for the "genuine interest and supportive actions of teachers" who will make learning relevant to their lives, the authors provide tool kits for preparing students "to act as civic agents" on such issues as climate change, gun violence, immigration, and voter engagement. These guides include advice on how to calculate one's carbon "foodprint," conversation starters for debating gun control, prompts for exploring the connection between politics and math, and guidelines for using plural pronouns to refer to gender nonbinary people. Unfortunately, the authors don't provide much analysis of how the education system (rather than individual teachers) can change to better meet students' needs and foster their engagement in real-world issues. Still, this is an accurate and useful snapshot of what today's teenagers are up to and up against.
