About Us

Our Approach

Engagement: Our curriculum units are curated to provide materials that adolescents will want to interact with. Our assignments center students’ creating their own understanding of the complex choices that characters make as well as interpreting challenging historical and contemporary issues. Texts include culturally relevant themes and issues that teens can apply to their own lives. We center materials that focus on the topics of justice, power, and previously silenced perspectives.

Access: All of our materials are prepared with diverse classrooms of adolescents in mind. We choose contemporary novels that we believe should be in more students’ hands. We provide ideas for activities that work especially well with multi language learners. Most of our texts have lower lexile levels but high text complexity.

Perspective: Students are better able to take charge of their own learning and bring it into their world if instructional units include texts that are in dialogue with each other and discuss multiple perspectives. To this end, we strive to include primary sources that are from the lenses and in the words and voices of those who have differing perspectives or who have not been included or who have been silenced in the historical dialogue or canon before.

Create context: We believe that rich primary sources when brought together with contemporary literary and young adult fiction provide the perspectives, voices, and imaginative space for students to immerse themselves in and connect to as they create understandings that endure.