This graphic novel brings to life William Ayers's bestselling memoir To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, Third Edition. From Ayers's early days teaching kindergarten, readers follow this renowned educational theorist on his voyage of discovery and surprise. We meet fellow travelers from schools across the country and watch students grow across a year and a lifetime.

To Teach is a vivid, honest portrayal of the everyday magic of teaching, and what it means to be a good teacher--debunking myths perpetuated on film and other starry-eyed hero/teacher fictions. Illuminated by the evocative and wry drawings of Ryan Alexander-Tanner, this literary comics memoir is both engaging and insightful. These illustrated stories remind us how curiosity, a sense of adventure, and a healthy dose of reflection can guide us all to learn the most from this world. This dynamic book will speak to comic fans, memoir readers, and educators of all stripes.

To Teach is the now-classic story of one teacher's odyssey into the ethical and intellectual heart of teaching. For almost two decades, it has inspired teachers across the country to follow their own paths, face their own challenges, and become the teachers they long to be. Since the second edition, there have been dramatic shifts to the educational landscape: the rise and fall of NCLB, major federal intervention in education, the Seattle and Louisville Supreme Court decisions, the unprecedented involvement of philanthropic organizations and big city mayors in school reform, the financial crisis, and much more. This new third edition is essential reading amidst today's public policy debates and school reform initiatives that stress the importance of good teaching.

To help bring this popular story to a new generation of teachers, Teachers College Press is publishing an exciting companion volume, To Teach: The Journey, in Comics. In this graphic novel, Ayers and talented young artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner bring the celebrated memoir to life. The third edition of To Teach, paired with the new graphic novel, offers a unique teaching and learning experience that broadens and deepens our understanding of what teaching can be. Together, these resources will capture the imaginations of pre- and in-service teachers who are ready to follow their own Yellow Brick Roads.

The third edition of To Teach offers today's teachers:

• Inspiration to help them reconnect with their highest aspirations and hopes.
• A practical guide to teaching as a moral practice.
• An antidote to teaching as a linear, connect-the-dots enterprise.
• A study guide that is available online at www.tcpress.com.

Praise for the Second Edition!

An imaginative, elegant, and inspiring book...essential reading for anyone who believes that teachers can change lives. --Michèle Foster, Claremont Graduate University

To Teach is one of the few books about teaching that does not disappoint. --From the Foreword by Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin-Madison

William Ayers creates a wise and beautiful account of what teaching is and might be....He leaves us with fresh awareness of what the teaching project signifies. He provokes us, each in our own fashion, to move further in our own quests. --Maxine Greene, Teachers College, Columbia University

No one since John Holt has written so thoughtfully about the things that actually happen in the classroom. Ayers has been there and he knows, and he shares what he has learned with tremendous sensitivity. The book, I'm sure, will be required reading in every school in the nation. --Jonathan Kozol

Bill Ayers speaks as teacher, parent, and student: as compassionate observer and passionate advocate of his three sons and of all of our children. What is unique is the way in which the personal and professional merge seamlessly. . . . Ayers is a wonderful story teller. --Herbert Kohl

Ayers' riveting description of his unfolding journey as a teacher will be a helpful guide to teachers at all stages of their careers. --Teaching Education

Education activist William Ayers invites new and prospective teachers to consider the deepest dimensions of a life in teaching. Should I become a teacher? How can I get to know my students? What commitments come with me into the classroom? How do I develop my unique teaching signature? In his new book, about Becoming A Teacher, Ayers muses on 10 such questions (and a little more) to shape and structure an indispensable guide that features hands-on advice and concrete examples of classroom practice, including curriculum-making, building relationships with students and parents, fostering an effective learning environment, and teaching toward freedom. This brilliant and concise text offers a conception of teaching as both practical art and essentially ethical practice.

Book Features:

• Specific strategies for becoming a successful classroom teacher.
• Foregrounds the ethical and intellectual qualities of excellent teaching.
• Recognizes the complexity of teaching even as it provides a map to achieve excellence.
• Accessible without oversimplifying the content and reducing teaching to something anemic and superficial.

To Teach is both the story of a new teacher's voyage into the classroom and a guide to the values and commitments that can animate a steady and meaningful life in teaching. There are stumbling blocks in every teacher's journey and today's specific, unprecedented challenges can seem insurmountable. In this new edition, Ayers discusses important events that have shaped education since the last edition was published, including a global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. He also discusses the heightened politicization of teaching as a profession that has resulted in insidious book banning, as well as the continuing influence of mass incarceration on schooling. For over 3 decades, this classic text has inspired teachers across the country to follow their own paths, face their own challenges, and become the teachers they long to be. This engaging teacher's odyssey is a road map to the beating heart of teaching, emphasizing the joy in the journey and the pleasure in a life lived in the company of children and youth.

Book Features:

• A primer for new teachers trying to develop the skills and commitments needed to be effective in the classroom.
• An incitement to K-12 teachers to reimagine their teaching and rethink their practice.
• Also available as a graphic novel, To Teach: The Journey, in Comics, featuring the drawings of talented artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner.

In Teaching Toward Freedom, Ayers illuminates the hope as well as the conflict that characterize the entire project of education: how it can be used in authoritarian and dehumanizing ways in the service of the state, the church, or a restrictive existing social order-an idea he abhors-or, as he envisions it, as an undertaking to help students become more fully human, more engaged, more participatory, more free. Drawing on his own classroom experiences and those of his many colleagues, as well as on popular culture, film, poetry, and novels, Ayers redraws the lines concerning how we teach and why, and the surprising things we uncover when we allow students to become visible, vocal authors of their own texts and creators of their own lives.

Committed and aware teachers, Ayers argues, must endeavor to accomplish two crucial tasks. One is to convince students . . . that there is no such thing as receiving an education as a passive receptor or an inert vessel-in that direction lies nothing but subservience, indoctrination, and worse. All real education is and must always be self-education. The second task is to demonstrate to students . . . that they are valued, that their humanity is honored, and that their growth, enlightenment, and liberation are the paramount concern. We take the side of the student. . . . This lucid and inspiring book will help teachers at every level to realize that ideal.

A Kind and Just Parent gives us a transformative view of kids caught up in the justice system that we could never get from nightly news and newspaper stories. William Ayers has spent five years as teacher and observer in Chicago's Juvenile Court prison, the nation's first and largest institution of juvenile justice, founded by legendary reformer Jane Addams to act as a kind and just parent for kids in need. Today, immensely confused and confusing, it serves as a perfect microcosm of the way American justice deals with children.

Through brilliant storytelling, Ayers captures the lives and personalities of young people caught up in the juvenile justice system. The book follows a year in the life of the prison school. Its characters are three dimensional: funny, quirky, sometimes violent, and often vulnerable. We see young people talking about their lives, analyzing their own situations, and thinking about their friends and their futures. We watch them throughout a school year and meet some remarkable teachers. From the intimate perspective of a teacher, Ayers gives us portraits, history, and analysis that help us to understand not only what brought these kids into the court system, but why people find it hard to think straight about them, and what we might do to keep their younger brothers and sisters from landing in the same place.

Unsentimental yet wrenching, A Kind and Just Parent is a riveting look at kids and crime. It will change the way Americans think about juvenile crime and juvenile justice.

A Light in Dark Times features a list of extraordinary contributors who have been deeply influenced by Professor Greene's progressive philosophies. While Maxine Greene is the focus for this collection, each chapter is an encounter with her ideas by an educator concerned with his or her own works and projects. In essence, each featured author takes off from Maxine Greene and then moves forward.

This unique and fascinating collection of essays will--as Maxine Greene has--influence a wide range of worlds: arts and aesthetics, literature and literacy studies, cultural studies, school change and improvement, the teaching of literacy, teacher education, philosophy of education, peace and social justice, women's studies, and civil rights.

Contributors: William Ayers - Jean Anyon, Louise Berman - Leon Botstein - Deborah P. Britzman - Linda Darling-Hammond - Karen Ernst - Michelle Fine - Norm Fruchter - Madeleine R. Grumet - Sandra Hollingsworth - Mary-Ellen Jacobs - Herbert Kohl - Wendy Kohli - Craig Kridel - Peter McLaren - Maureen Miletta - Janet L. Miller - Sonia Nieto - Nel Noddings - Jo Anne Pagano - Frank Pignatelli - William F. Pinar - Kathleen Reilly - Jonathan G. Silin - Sheila Slater - Candy Systra - Carlos Alberto Torres - Mark Weiss

Zero tolerance began as a prohibition against guns, but it has quickly expanded into a frenzy of punishment and tougher disciplinary measures in American schools. Ironically, as this timely collection makes clear, recent research indicates that as schools adopt more zero tolerance policies they in fact become less safe, in part because the first casualties of these measures are the central, critical relationships between teacher and student and between school and community.

Zero Tolerance assembles prominent educators and intellectuals, including the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., Michelle Fine, and Patricia Williams, along with teachers, students, and community activists, to show that the vast majority of students expelled from schools under new disciplinary measures are sent home for nonviolent violations; that the rush to judge and punish disproportionately affects black and Latino children; and that the new disciplinary ethos is eroding constitutional protections of privacy, free speech, and due process. Sure to become the focus of controversy, Zero Tolerance presents a passionate, multifaceted argument against the militarization of our schools.

Democracy and Education has been the leading voice of the nineties for engaged teaching. Teaching for Social Justice collects the best of the journal.

Featuring a unique mix of hands-on, historical, and inspirational writings, the topics covered include education through social action, writing and community building, and adult literacy. An extensive teacher file and resource section survey teaching tools from curricula to activist-oriented websites. Next in The New Press's award-winning education publishing program, Teaching for Social Justice engages parents, citizens, students, and teachers in a conversation about the basis for education in a democracy.

This book is an invitation to become one of those passionate and transformative teachers, someone who can join with others to rescue teaching from the heavy hand of the test-obsessed technocrats, and change the world--or, at the very least, change the people who will change the world.

How do we see our schools and the project of education? Is this the best we can do? What would we like our schools to become? How might we get there? In this provocative book, Bill Ayers invites us to dream of schools in which each child is of infinite and incalculable value. Blending personal anecdotes with critique of the state of education, this beautifully written little book is filled with big ideas that explore the challenges and opportunities for an education system that desperately needs repair.

Teaching with Conscience in an Imperfect World is an urgent call to action and a plan to help educators stretch toward something new and dramatically better--schools that are more joyful and more just, more balanced and more guided by the power of love.

Book Features:

• Promotes meaningful discussions in teacher education courses.
• Addresses problems with our current education system and how they came to be.
• Advocates, with illustrations, for schooling that promotes critical thinking and engaged learning.
• Critiques school reform efforts, such as high-stakes testing, curriculum standardization, and dated performance metrics.
• Urges teachers to see students as full and equal human beings with agency and capacity.
• Offers 21 gestures toward the kind of schools all children and youth deserve.

Of the approximately 50 million public school students in the United States, more than half are in urban schools. A contemporary companion to City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row, this new and timely collection has been compiled by four of the country's most prominent urban educators. Contributors including Sandra Cisneros, Jonathan Kozol, Sapphire, and Patricia J. Williams provide some of the best writing on life in city schools and neighborhoods. Young people and practicing teachers, poets and scholars, social critics and journalists offer unique takes on topics ranging from culturally relevant teaching and scripted curricula to the criminalization of youth, gentrification, and the inequities of school funding.

In the words of Sonia Nieto, City Kids, City Schools challenge[s] the conventional wisdom of what it means to teach in urban schools.

Teaching Toward Democracy examines the contested space of schooling and school reform with a focus on the unique challenges and opportunities that teaching in a democratic society provides. Chapters are written in the spirit of notes, conversations and letters the nationally recognized team of authors wish they received in their journeys into teaching. Building on the conversational and accessible approach, this revised edition includes additional dialogues amongst the authors to further explore how they have individually and collectively reflected on the qualities of mind that teachers explore and work to develop as they become more effective educators. Inspiring and uplifting, Teaching Toward Democracy adds to the repertoire of skills teachers can access in their classrooms and encourages the confidence to locate themselves within the noble tradition of teaching as democratic work.

Three distinguished educators, scholars, and activists flip the script on many enduring and popular myths about teachers, teachers' unions, and education that permeate our culture. By unpacking these myths, and underscoring the necessity of strong and vital public schools as a common good, the authors challenge readers--whether parents, community members, policy makers, union activists, or educators themselves--to rethink their assumptions.

Teaching Toward Democracy examines the contested space of schooling and school reform with a focus on the unique challenges and opportunities that teaching in a democratic society provides. Chapters are written in the spirit of notes, conversations and letters the nationally recognized team of authors wish they received in their journeys into teaching. Building on the conversational and accessible approach, this revised edition includes additional dialogues amongst the authors to further explore how they have individually and collectively reflected on the qualities of mind that teachers explore and work to develop as they become more effective educators. Inspiring and uplifting, Teaching Toward Democracy adds to the repertoire of skills teachers can access in their classrooms and encourages the confidence to locate themselves within the noble tradition of teaching as democratic work.

These essays follow a veteran teacher educator and school reform activist as he tries to understand an enterprise he calls mysterious and immeasurable. By focusing on the authentic experiences of teaching and learning that he has lived over the past 15 years, Bill Ayers reconsiders, argues, reflects, and searches for ways to break through the routine and the ordinary to see teaching as the important and extraordinary work it is. Covering a range of issues--standards, equity, testing, professionalism--this book shows us teaching as an achingly personal calling, and ultimately as a social and a political act. With these essays, Bill Ayers invites teachers into a wonderful conversation about the meaning of teaching as craft, as art, as vocation. He reminds us that an active kind of hope is at the core of teaching--seeing things both as they are and as they could be.

This graphic novel brings to life William Ayers's bestselling memoir To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, Third Edition. From Ayers's early days teaching kindergarten, readers follow this renowned educational theorist on his voyage of discovery and surprise. We meet fellow travelers from schools across the country and watch students grow across a year and a lifetime.

To Teach is a vivid, honest portrayal of the everyday magic of teaching, and what it means to be a good teacher--debunking myths perpetuated on film and other starry-eyed hero/teacher fictions. Illuminated by the evocative and wry drawings of Ryan Alexander-Tanner, this literary comics memoir is both engaging and insightful. These illustrated stories remind us how curiosity, a sense of adventure, and a healthy dose of reflection can guide us all to learn the most from this world. This dynamic book will speak to comic fans, memoir readers, and educators of all stripes.

Education activist William Ayers invites new and prospective teachers to consider the deepest dimensions of a life in teaching. Should I become a teacher? How can I get to know my students? What commitments come with me into the classroom? How do I develop my unique teaching signature? In his new book, about Becoming A Teacher, Ayers muses on 10 such questions (and a little more) to shape and structure an indispensable guide that features hands-on advice and concrete examples of classroom practice, including curriculum-making, building relationships with students and parents, fostering an effective learning environment, and teaching toward freedom. This brilliant and concise text offers a conception of teaching as both practical art and essentially ethical practice.

Book Features:

• Specific strategies for becoming a successful classroom teacher.
• Foregrounds the ethical and intellectual qualities of excellent teaching.
• Recognizes the complexity of teaching even as it provides a map to achieve excellence.
• Accessible without oversimplifying the content and reducing teaching to something anemic and superficial.