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About UsThe Student Press Initiative (SPI) is a program of the Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. SPI’s philosophy is grounded in real classroom practices that are developed, tested, and shared by teachers interested in implementing publishing projects in their own classrooms. Our curriculum-based publication and mentoring program has reached hundreds of teachers and, since its inception in Fall 2004, SPI has published over 40 books and multi-media projects representing the original writing of over three thousand 8th—12th grade students. SPI is a New York City-based organization with adjunct projects in Maine, New Orleans and Pennsylvania. SPI’s website offers teachers across the nation access to a range of literacy resources, books, online publishing services and educational software.
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Print: $13.32 About Face: Portraits of Activism, is a student journalism project in which twelfth grade writers profile over 30 social activists in New York City. The book grows out of a 15-week study of the history of social change. This twelfth grade curriculum investigates community leaders and those working to create social change and positive impact on our society in both historical and contemporary contexts. Copies of About Face were distributed to select ninth grade social studies classrooms around New York City. One of the goals of SPI is to find innovative ways to use each of our student publications as a text for further learning in other classrooms. Subjects profiled in the first issue include filmmaker Spike Lee, television journalist Anderson Cooper and historian Eric Foner.
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Print: $13.92 This is SPI's third publication with incarcerated youth at Horizon Academy. The previous collaborations have held as an arch concern the belief that the pathways to expression afforded by these publications remain uninterrupted and uninflected, particularly in regards to the language utilized in that expression. The interviews providing the basis for this collection of narratives were conducted in Spanish, and their subsequent English translations were drawn from textual transcripts. While translation introduces a conspicuous obstacle into the enterprise of linguistically precise oral history, another concern central to the mission of these books is broadening a legitimate audience base for stories that usually are left unaccessed by nature of their authors, their locations, their content, and, in this case, their language.
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Print: $11.19 Beacon Science, modeled after scholarly journals in the field, represents self-selected topics of study for students enrolled in Senior Science Seminar at Beacon High School. After conducting lengthy laboratory experiments and writing reviews of literature, students publish their findings in the annual issue of Beacon Science. Topics in this issue range from Pavlovian conditioning to the use of nicotine as an herbicide.
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Print: $11.18 Beacon Science, modeled after scholarly journals in the field, represents self-selected topics of study for students enrolled in Senior Science Seminar at Beacon High School. After conducting lengthy laboratory experiments and writing reviews of literature, students publish their findings in the annual issue of Beacon Science.
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Print: $10.92 Chalk Bored reflects students’ perspectives on teaching and learning in largely traditional classroom settings. After a field experience where ninth grade students assumed the role of teacher in a first grade language arts classroom, students began to examine the teaching and learning process from the other side of the desk.
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Print: $11.92 This book marks the third collaboration between the Student Press Initiative of Columbia, Teachers College and Horizon Academy’s interred student population. The previous works have held as an arch concern the belief that the pathways to expression afforded by these publications remain uninterrupted and uninflected, particularly in regards to the language utilized in that expression. The interviews providing the basis for this collection of narratives were conducted in Spanish, and their subsequent English translations were drawn from textual transcripts. While translation introduces a conspicuous obstacle into the enterprise of linguistically precise oral history, another concern central to the mission of these books is broadening a legitimate audience base for stories that usually are left unaccessed by nature of their authors, their locations, their content, and, in this case, their language.
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Print: $14.99 Enter the neighborhoods, families, thoughts, hopes and dreams of ninth grade students in Brooklyn, NY. Grounded in an investigation of representation of self and others, students paired up to generate in-depth narratives of one another. Scaffolded by a variety of interview techniques, model profiles, and writing workshops described in the book’s introduction, students were guided through the thrills and challenges of profile writing. Popular cultural references and the use of photographic portraiture helped make multi-dimensional for students the tensions and assumptions that grow out of unexamined representations and images. Using this knowledge, students designed still-life images, which accompany and make more tangible the lessons learned through this classroom project. Artistically detailed, and rich in the literary elements of profile writing, each piece offers reflective insights and wisdom, embodying the experiences of students in the text they themselves have written.
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Print: $11.92 While countless books have been written about Bosnia-Herzegovina; its people, its politics, its culture, and its wars, the Facing Memory Project brings us the memories and perspectives of young people, offering readers a glimpse at life experiences that surpass some of the more traditional, scholarly and political commentaries emerging from this volatile region.
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Print: $12.92 Filling in the Blanks is a book written for new teachers and teacher educators offering the student perspective on the classroom learning experience. In it, 126 thirteen-year-olds give carefully crafted reflections on what they value as learners. SPI worked with the school to assemble a panel of nine new teachers to exchange perspectives with the student-authors as they drafted.
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Print: $13.46 Eleventh grade students and senior citizens participated in weekly icebreaker and storytelling exercises which culminated in the students interviewing and writing the seniors’ oral histories.
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Print: $13.67 Advisories around the city—and most likely the country—are full of students and teachers who don’t necessarily have the resources to help them identify issues that are of true importance to young people today. There is a need for this and the students, themselves, are in the perfect position to provide this resource. They know what they, and their peers, need and want to talk about. Their voices ought to be heard.
This is the idea behind For Every Voice, A Different Truth. For an entire year, these 10th grade NYC public school students interviewed, researched and wrote a book for use in high school advisories. Call it a guide or call it a handbook, it is full of topics and issues that they determined to be relevant and, perhaps most importantly, ones that would generate much needed discussion. Their writing, as well as the questions they pose, is designed to provoke inquiry and empower individuals in classrooms to begin to talk about the issues that matter.
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Print: $9.92 The overarching goal of this project was to capture the spirit of reform in the tenth grade Global History classes as students analyzed various historical figures through the lens of social reform. While all the figures may not fit neatly into our minds as social reformers, it is important to note that individuals enact change for a host of different reasons. Thus, students focused not only on the goals of the reformers, but on the methods of reform as they analyzed and evaluated their historical figures. For example, a student might evaluate Robespierre’s role in the French Revolution and not only note the goals of the revolution for France, but also focus on the means of change—in this case public murder by guillotine. The tenth grade students’ Regents Exam in June requires students’ writing to move from description to evaluation and in many ways this project taught students the tools and skills necessary to develop analytical and evaluative skills through writing.
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Print: $15.45 Download: FREE Killing the Sky 2 is the result of the second year of collaboration between The Student Press Initiative and Horizon Academy, the Department of Corrections/Department of Education high school at Rikers Island in New York City.
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Print: $15.65 Killing the Sky grows out of a unique collaboration
between The Student Press Initiative and Horizon
Academy, the Department of Correction/Department of Education high school at Rikers Island in New York.
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Print: $6.70 Download: FREE Linking Literature is a book of student-written oral histories that explore thematic connections between historical literary texts and our contemporary society. Using Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as an entry point, students record and craft oral histories that capture people’s very real experiences around themes of justice, empathy and innocence. This collection of 32 oral histories is the result of a two-month long process during which students tackled the sometimes daunting challenges that come with interviewing, transcribing, edited and drafting. They also came to discover that often there is little difference between fiction and reality. Subjects range from the unknown to the famous, and include Holocaust survivors, local political figures and renowned journalist Bill Moyers.
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MagpieMagpie (book)
Print: $13.23 Who’s Changing My Hood is a contemporary iteration of DeWitt Clinton High School’s renowned literary publication, The Magpie, which was once authored by then student James Baldwin. For this addition, SPI worked with students to publish a series of profiles of community activists to coincide with a borough-wide student conference on the power of writing.
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Print: $14.92 Project Notes is a detailed narrative curriculum series in which SPI teachers articulate the processes of teaching for publication. Dr. Robert Coles, James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard says of the first book in the series, “Here is an important and stirring effort to connect the moral and social imagination of young people to their storytelling imaginations and capabilities—and to do so with the encouragement of their teachers. Here is human inwardness given the classroom’s sanctioned enablement—students become their own teachers, eager to tell others what they have observed and considered (their narrative growth thereby tendered, become an instrument of heightened awareness and reflection in others—their teachers as well as their fellow students)."
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Print: $9.92 These stories range from simple to complex, humorous to wise. They are not always happy, but they are all true. And even though each writer speaks in a voice uniquely their own, each voice is resilient and strong. Whether we are students or teachers, parents or administrators, Real Talk tells us we can count on our young people to think, to make meaning from their lives, and always, to keep looking ahead.
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Print: $12.92 The Shakes is the product of 9th grade students' exploration of social issues in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Students first entered into an in-depth analysis of the content and form of both Shakespeare’s language and rap music. They went on to explore how both the Bard and rappers use devices like imagery, hyperbole, allusion, and metaphor to both entertain and critique society. Students then crafted thoughtful argumentative essays and used them to co-author verses for rap songs—a new genre of music students called Academic Rap. The result is an album that contains four songs, uniting the theaters of Elizabethan England with a classroom in Manhattan.
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Print: $13.92 What does student voice mean and where should it come from? Twenty seniors, members of the first graduating class of Pablo Neruda Academy, a new small school in the Stevenson High School Campus in the Bronx, New York, answered this question by investigating the small schools movement from their own unique perspective in a year-long partnership with Teachers College, Columbia University’s Student Press Initiative. In addition to doing a great deal of research and field work, the students explored this topic by communicating with leading figures in the field of urban education and school reform including academics, researchers, policymakers and practitioners. The content of that communication appears inside the pages of this book, along with other artifacts of our year-long journey, each student’s culminating reflection about their experience in a new small high school, and student recommendations for the small school community at large.
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Print: $12.90 Long Creek is a juvenile detention facility and the young writers published here, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty, began by telling their stories to a team of oral historians and teachers. Students and teachers then worked intensively and collaboratively to revise, edit, and transform transcripts into drafts.
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Print: $13.37 Imagine your grandparent marching with Martin Luther King Jr. on the heated streets of Washington D.C. during the Civil Rights movement, or earning a whopping $2.72 a week in 1926 when a frankfurter and soda were 2 cents, or making your own bath soap from scratch in a coal-stove kitchen. Imagine Bronx teens actively listening, documenting, and contemplating these stories as they connect with elders in their community. Imagine the bonds that are formed, the spark, the journey…
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Print: $11.92 A Collection of Profiles of Educators Written by Graduate Students at
Teachers College, Columbia University
The Profiles of Educators Series is a biannual project culminating from a Teaching of Writing course taught by Erick Gordon at Teachers College. Graduate students in this course study the methods of teaching writing for publication by publishing themselves. The collection offers a glimpse into the lives of outstanding educators ranging from college professors to yoga instructors, each bound by their desire to partake in a journey of teaching and learning.
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Print: $9.92 A Collection of Profiles of Educators Written by Graduate Students at Teachers College, Columbia University.
The Profiles of Educators Series is a biannual project culminating from a Teaching of Writing course taught by Erick Gordon at Teachers College, Columbia University. Graduate students in this course study the methods of teaching writing for publication by publishing themselves. This highlights the Student Press Initiative’s overall experiential learning approach to professional development: learn by doing. The work focuses upon the genre of profile writing. In end-of-the-semester reflections, many of the students name this as the most challenging and rewarding piece of writing they’ve ever done.
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Print: $11.05 Heritage High School in New York City took their classroom studies into the real world. While studying relationships between weather-related variables in science class, the students researched several raw data sets based on historical atmospheric data during the school year and compared the results with school attendance data. During the process the students wrote research proposals, created graphs, and analyzed the data, finally coming to a conclusion surprisingly not in line with their original hypothesis. Based on this discovery, students crafted a proposal to their principal suggesting a change in school culture. Rain or shine, fair or foul—what keeps students from their appointed rounds?
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Print: $9.92 What we have in common as New Yorkers is that we know of the local bodegas, pizzerias, subway stations, and firehouses. But, what do we know of who makes a living at these places and what they are all about?
When this project started I felt this would be an ample opportunity for my students to become acquainted with and get to know persons raised in, working in, and living in Queens. This is the place where, for the most part of their lives, they experience their livelihood. The students would interview a variety of people that represent the everyday citizen. These citizens help make up how Queens functions today. Who are these people? What is their story? The students were asked to gather all their interview information, edit their work, and then create s story in narrative form in order to share with the public their interviewee’s contribution to their home, a part of our city and our country: a little place known as Queens, New York.
--Christina Massie, Teacher
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Print: $14.77 A collection of student written profiles, Writers Unblocked offers readers a glimpse into the lives of people from all professions who identify first and foremost as writers; television producers, college students, architects, magazine contributors, comedians, and editors, to name a few. Through the process of this project, students came to identify themselves as writers and part of a larger literary community. Students experimented with symbolism, metaphor and composition through the drafting and re-drafting of text and through the use of still-life photography projects—all of which are included in this masterful collection of students’ reflections on writers and writing.
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Print: $12.95
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Download: FREE Download for Free |
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Print: $12.95 Download: $7.50
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BrazilBrazil (book)
Print: $6.00
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Print: $11.32 Seniors from the New York City Lab School offer creative prose and poetry.
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Print: $9.10 Download: FREE
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Print: $11.33 Download: FREE
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Print: $15.56
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Print: $11.92
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Print: $11.78 This book, Yesterday’s Issues, Today’s Perspectives, Tomorrow’s Lessons, revolves around eight historical events and the controversial issues and different points of view that come along with them. These issues are surrounded by passionate arguments and strongly held differences of opinion. In a country where freedom of speech is so strongly valued and exercised, the fact that no two people will ever think exactly alike is obvious but can also become problematic.
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Print: $9.92
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Print: $11.28
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Print: $13.98
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Print: $11.30
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Print: $9.92 Download: FREE
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Print: $11.58
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![Nubes a Mi Alrededor: Oral Histories from Horizon Academy, Rikers Island [Hardcover]](http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_63/2481000/2481024/2/preview/detail_2481024.jpg) |
Hardcover Print: $22.96
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![This Is Where I Need To Be: Oral Histories of Muslim Youth in NYC [Hardcover]](http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_63/2456000/2456135/1/preview/detail_2456135.jpg) |
Download: FREE Hardcover Print: $23.02 This is Where I Need to Be: Oral Histories of Muslim Youth in NYC is a groundbreaking collection of oral history narratives from the lives of ordinary Muslim youth as told by Muslim youth. Trained in the methods of oral history at Teachers College, Columbia University, a dozen Muslim teenagers set out to document stories from the real-life experiences and feelings of their Muslim peers in public high schools. The result is an amazing collection of twenty-three oral histories. These are voices of teenagers living ordinary lives at a time when being Muslim in America can provoke "extraordinary" reactions from classmates and teachers, from friends and strangers, or even from one's own family and kin. Whatever you think you know about Muslims in America, these stories rise above news-cycle stereotypes and open a personal window onto what it means to be young and Muslim.
[Hardcover edition provides great durability for classroom sets]
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Print: $11.92 A Collection of Profiles of Educators Written by Graduate Students at Teachers College, Columbia University The Profiles of Educators Series is a biannual project culminating from a Teaching of Writing course taught by Erick Gordon at Teachers College. Graduate students in this course study the methods of teaching writing for publication by publishing themselves. The collection offers a glimpse into the lives of outstanding educators ranging from college professors to yoga instructors, each bound by their desire to partake in a journey of teaching and learning.
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Print: $11.89
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Print: $23.12
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Print: $12.94 Download: $7.50 This is Where I Need to Be: Oral Histories of Muslim Youth in NYC is a groundbreaking collection of oral history narratives from the lives of ordinary Muslim youth as told by Muslim youth. Trained in the methods of oral history at Teachers College, Columbia University, a dozen Muslim teenagers set out to document stories from the real-life experiences and feelings of their Muslim peers in public high schools. The result is an amazing collection of twenty-three oral histories. These are voices of teenagers living ordinary lives at a time when being Muslim in America can provoke "extraordinary" reactions from classmates and teachers, from friends and strangers, or even from one's own family and kin. Whatever you think you know about Muslims in America, these stories rise above news-cycle stereotypes and open a personal window onto what it means to be young and Muslim.
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Print: $14.75 Killing the Sky grows out of a unique collaboration between The Student Press Initiative and Horizon Academy, the Department of Correction/Department of Education high school at Rikers Island in New York.
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Print: $11.92 Coring the Apple proffers the advice of 126 eighth grade “experts” at the New York City Lab School. Their expertise ranges from “The Best Place to be Watched by What You’re Eating” to “The Best Park Bench to Quietly Finish Your Homework.” The publication is part of a classroom study of editorial writing. After intensive analysis of review writing including the niche genre “Best-Of,” students apply their own powers of persuasion to chosen topics.
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Print: $13.68 9th Grade Sketches of scenes from Chelsea, NYC
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![Smoke Signals: Oral Histories from Long Creek [Hardcover]](http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_62/1916000/1916933/2/preview/detail_1916933.jpg) |
Download: FREE Hardcover Print: $18.54 Long Creek is a juvenile detention facility and the young writers published here, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty, began by telling their stories to a team of oral historians and teachers. Students and teachers then worked intensively and collaboratively to revise, edit, and transform transcripts into drafts.
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![For Every Voice, a Different Truth [Hardcover]](http://www.lulu.com/items/volume_62/1884000/1884300/1/preview/detail_1884300.jpg) |
Hardcover Print: $25.00 Advisories around the city—and most likely the country—are full of students and teachers who don’t necessarily have the resources to help them identify issues that are of true importance to young people today. There is a need for this and the students, themselves, are in the perfect position to provide this resource. They know what they, and their peers, need and want to talk about. Their voices ought to be heard.
This is the idea behind For Every Voice, A Different Truth. For an entire year, these 10th grade NYC public school students interviewed, researched and wrote a book for use in high school advisories. Call it a guide or call it a handbook, it is full of topics and issues that they determined to be relevant and, perhaps most importantly, ones that would generate much needed discussion. Their writing, as well as the questions they pose, is designed to provoke inquiry and empower individuals in classrooms to begin to talk about the issues that matter.
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Print: $15.59 Killing the Sky grows out of a unique collaboration
between The Student Press Initiative and Horizon
Academy, the Department of Correction/Department of Education high school at Rikers Island in New York.
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Hardcover Print: $21.95
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Hardcover Print: $21.95
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Print: $14.95
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Print: $15.95
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Print: $65.00
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Print: $27.10
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Print: $14.95 ...That is certainly the case for these 10th graders as they explored, through Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, the trials in their own lives and in the world around them.
Ultimately, the purpose of this yearlong project was for students to explore how writing about literature and our own experiences can help us to gain a deeper understanding of a text and of ourselves. Not only did these students accomplish this goal, they also learned that writing about literature can inform and instruct other students as well. The Truth Unfolded: Young Writers Explore the Crucible invited students to incorporate their thoughts and personally challenging experiences into academic yet reflective essays written in the hopes of helping other students in their study of The Crucible and other teachers in their teaching of it.
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Print: $13.95
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Print: $17.95 Speak Up, Brooklyn! is a collection of profiles written by ninth-graders at the Brooklyn Lab High School. In their interviews with the larger campus community, students explored the issues of family and dreams, learning a little about themselves in the process.
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Print: $16.95
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Print: $13.25
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Print: $12.95
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