On this episode of PalTalk, we sit down with educator, author, and organizer Jesse Hagopian, who has spent over twenty years in the classroom, including more than a decade at Seattle’s Garfield High School, where he helped lead the historic 2013 boycott of the MAP test.

Jesse is an editor at Rethinking Schools, an organizer with the Black Lives Matter at School movement, and the author of Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education, winner of the NCTE David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English. He is also a co-editor of the new teaching guide Teaching Palestine: Lessons, Stories, Voices.

We talk about what a social justice classroom looks like, why high-stakes testing fails students, the wave of book bans and laws targeting antiracist education, and why Palestine has long been one of the great silences in school curriculum. Jesse also shares what keeps him hopeful and what all of us can do to defend the freedom to learn.

📚 Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education by Jesse Hagopian

📚 Teaching Palestine: Lessons, Stories, Voices, edited by Bill Bigelow, Jesse Hagopian, Suzanna Kassouf, Adam Sanchez, and Samia Shoman (Rethinking Schools)