Welcome!

Hello! My name’s Nate. I’m a middle school social studies teacher from Chicago with over fifteen years in the classroom. With The World, With Each Other focuses on my experiences teaching, learning, and traveling. Often the three intersect in ways that surprise even me.

I recently realized that I have been in schools most of my life. Except for a brief period in my 20s when I thought I was going to be a lawyer (I wasn’t), I’ve been a student or a teacher for longer than I’ve done anything else. I thought I’d use this space to talk about what I’ve learned - and what I’m still trying to learn.

The name With The World, With Each Other comes from Chapter 2 of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. “For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” For Freire, to gain knowledge, to be whole, we cannot learn in a vacuum. We must do so within the context of the world around us and alongside the people we live with.

Beyond any long-term goals, With The World, With Each Other has an immediate practical application. I will spend part of July at the International center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust (ICEAH) as part of their summer academy. The academy “aims to deepen participants' understanding of the history of the German Nazi camp Auschwitz within a broader historical context.” Although my primary reason for attending the academy is to enhance my own curriculum, I want to share at least some of what I learn with a broader audience in the hope that it will help other teachers and their students.

In the short term, you can expect posts on my experiences in Poland this summer. Longer term, I hope to continue to post things I’ve learned in my time as a teacher in the hopes that it is helpful to others.

A bit more about me: I am a National Board Certified teacher with a Masters in Education from DePaul University. Although I started my career in high school, I’ve spent the last six years teaching middle school social studies and civics. Middle school is a vibrant, challenging, wonderful place to be, and civic learning is my passion. If you’re looking to witness Freire’s “restless, impatient, continuing, hopefull inquiry,” middle school is the place to be!

I’m always looking to grow my practice as an educator. I spent 2018 completing a Fulbright Fellowship in Aotearoa New Zealand. While there I studied how community organizations can support student learning through place-based and culturally sustaining practices. Much of my personal inquiry focuses on finding interdisciplinary connections between social studies, science, and English. I’ve pursued these connections utilizing grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pulitzer Center, and the Chicago Foundation for Education. My 2024 lesson, Our Water, Our Ways is available on the Pulitzer Center website. It focuses on helping students understand the scope of the growing global freshwater crisis.

Thanks for visiting! Hope you find something useful here.

Peace,

Nate