Articles by Bill Bigelow

Source: Yes Magazine

“The United States of Energy” was a colorful series of lessons on the advantages of coal, aimed at 4th-graders—and sponsored by Big Coal. Here’s how educators and activists worked together to get it out of classrooms.

While developing activities on coal and the climate crisis in 2011 for Rethinking Schools magazine, I ran across a curriculum, The United States of Energy, from Scholastic, the venerable education publisher.

It was a colorful series of lessons, aimed at fourth-graders, which explored the various sources for energy in the United States. The material on coal discussed its many “advantages.” But when I looked for discussion of the disadvantages … nothing. read more

Source: Common Dreams

This past January, almost exactly 20 years after its publication, Tucson schools banned the book I co-edited with Bob Peterson, Rethinking Columbus. It was one of a number of books adopted by Tucson’s celebrated Mexican American Studies program—a program long targeted by conservative Arizona politicians.

The school district sought to crush the Mexican American Studies program; our book itself was not the target, it just got caught in the crushing. Nonetheless, Tucson’s—and Arizona’s—attack on Mexican American Studies and Rethinking Columbus shares a common root: the attempt to silence stories that unsettle today’s unequal power arrangements. read more