A FREE Virtual Book Talk
Thursday, March 16, 2023
5:30 pm Pacific / 8:30 pm Eastern
Jessica Lander is an award-winning teacher, writer, and author. She teaches history and civics to recent immigrant students in a Massachusetts public high school and has won numerous awards for her teaching, including being named a Top 50 Finalist for the Global Teacher Prize in 2021, presented by the Varkey Foundation and being named a Massachusetts Teacher of the Year Finalist in 2022, presented by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Jessica writes frequently about education policy and teaching. She is the author of Making Americans: Stories of Historic Struggles, New Ideas, and Inspiration in Immigrant Education, a co-author of Powerful Partnerships: A Teacher’s Guide to Engaging Families for Student Success and the author of Driving Backwards.
Setting out from her classroom, Jessica Lander takes the reader on a powerful and urgent journey—told through captivating stories of the past, the present, and the personal—to understand what it takes for immigrant students to become Americans.
She brings to life historic struggles to improve immigrant education—the Nebraska teacher arrested for teaching an eleven-year-old boy in German who took his case to the Supreme Court; the California families who overturned school segregation for Mexican-American children; and the Texas families who risked deportation to establish the right for undocumented children to attend public schools.
She visits innovative classrooms across the country—a school for refugee girls in Georgia; five schools in Aurora, Colorado that created a community-wide network of organizations and people to support newcomer children; and a North Carolina district of more than 100 schools who re-thought how they teach their immigrant-origin students.
She shares inspiring stories of her own students' immigrant journeys and how they created their own American identities—a boy who escaped Baghdad and found a home in his school’s ROTC program, the daughter of Cambodian genocide survivors who dreamed of becoming a computer scientist, and an orphan boy who escaped violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and created a new community here.
Together, the stories and insights chart a course for educators and policymakers—and for everyone who cares about America’s future.
Making Americans is a landmark book, providing a clear vision of how schools can help nurture a sense of belonging in newcomers, with benefits for all students. It is a catalyst for communities across America to reimagine immigrant education.
Indie Unbound: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780807006658
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807006653?tag=bpress-20
Register Here:
A Zoom link will be sent to the email you provided ahead of the event. For questions, email programs@aiisf.org.