Thriving In A Public School is a collection of stories spanning two decades of teaching and learning at Horlick High School in Racine, Wisconsin. Those years were spent organizing students to take action in profound ways, action that changed not only the course of their lives, but the culture of their school and their communities.
The basic premise of this book is that learning is a political act, that it does not take place in a vacuum but rather is part of a social construct.
By engaging in activism, students developed a political understanding of the obstacles to their success and found pathways to affect change. In this book, we see how their actions influenced political growth. This political growth had far-reaching implications on both a personal and collective level. It allowed for academic success and impacted the students' life choices and career paths.
Thriving shares stories and testimonies of the author's organizing, highlighting the intersection of students and teachers in that work. By underscoring some of the major events in which the students and teachers were involved, Thriving shows how these activities provided agency for students to organize for power.
You will see the progression of the students' empowerment at Horlick High School. The book illustrates how it evolved from organizing events connecting classroom learning to community concerns to the establishment of student organizations that built power and affected change.
The book is a positive force, steeped in optimism and hope, propelled forward by the strength of the youth.