Many Stenhouse titles focus on building tolerant, accepting communities inside and outside the classroom, helping students see beyond themselves and the immediate world around them. Preview these titles online to find the one that best fits your students:
If you were inspired to become a teacher because you wanted to change the world, and instead find yourself limited by teach-to-the-test pressures, Black Ants and Buddhists by Mary Cowhey will make you think hard about how you spend your time with students. It offers no easy answers, just a wealth of insight into the challenges of helping students think critically about the world, and starting points for conversations about diversity and controversy in your classroom, as well as in the larger community.
Social and emotional learning is at the heart of good teaching, but as standards and testing requirements consume classroom time and divert teachers’ focus, these critical skills often get sidelined. In Sharing the Blue Crayon, Mary Anne Buckley shows teachers how to incorporate social and emotional learning into a busy day and then extend these skills to literacy lessons for young children. Through simple activities such as read-alouds, sing-alongs, murals, and performances, students learn how to get along in a group, empathize with others, develop self-control, and give and receive feedback, all while becoming confident readers and writers.
As Mary Shorey and coauthor Penny Silvers write in Many Texts, Many Voices, “Critical literacy requires that the reader/consumer examine multiple perspectives and ask, ‘Whose interests are being served?’ and ‘Whose voice is heard—or silenced?’…Rather than an addition to a lesson or curriculum, critical literacy is a way of thinking, communicating, analyzing, and living a literate life. Critical literacy also implies the possibility of taking some kind of social action in order to support a belief, make a difference, or simply help during a time of need.”
We dream of a time when all students will be confident, capable readers and writers. When we teach students to read as writers using mentor texts, we awaken that dream and make it real. Imagine the power of providing students with books that show them their faces, their culture, their lives on every page. And imagine how every classroom’s collection of mentor texts can grow by adding books that celebrate diversity. In Dream Wakers: Mentor Texts That Celebrate Latino Culture, Ruth Culham focuses her love of children’s literature—and her decades of work developing the traits of writing—on books that celebrate Latino life and culture. She provides a wide variety of ideas to teach writing using some of the richest and most beautiful children’s books available.
Imagine if going to school meant more than preparing kids for a test, teaching a canned curriculum, and training students for their future as workers. What if school were also about cultivating students to be caring, community-involved citizens and critical, creative thinkers who love to read? In Caring Hearts & Critical Minds, teacher-author Steven Wolk shows teachers how to help students become better readers as well as better people. “I want [my students] to be thinkers and have rich conversations regarding critical issues in the text and be able to formulate opinions regarding these issues,” says Leslie Rector, a sixth-grade teacher who collaborated with Wolk on some of the units featured in this book.
In today’s globally connected world, it is essential for students to have an understanding of multiple cultures and perspectives. In this edited collection, Kathy Short, Deanna Day, and Jean Schroeder bring together fourteen educators who use global children’s literature to help students explore their own cultural identities. Teaching Globally lays out why this kind of global curriculum is important and how to make space for it within district and state mandates.
Creating Caring Classrooms is committed to building respectful relationships among students, teachers, and the school community. Through active, engaging, imaginative, and open-ended activities, students will be encouraged to explore events, ideas, themes, texts, stories, and relationships from different perspectives and then represent those new understandings in innovative and creative ways. Teachers will learn how to establish inclusive classrooms, initiate and maintain respectful dialogue, promote collaboration over competition, and confront difficult issues such as bullying and exclusion.
Teaching Fairly in an Unfair World helps teachers redefine an inclusive curriculum by questioning what is taught, how it is taught, to whom, and under what conditions. It offers teachers a wealth of challenging, open-ended pursuits that give students “voice” and help them better understand their world. It explores opportunities for students to connect with social justice issues in the real world through imagined experiences found in short stories, novels, plays, picture books, graphic novels, and primary source documents, such as letters.
