Teaching on Days After

How can teachers support students on the days after major events, tragedies, and injustices?

In a time of escalating polarization, classrooms are deeply impacted by the news cycle. In this urgent and fully updated second edition, Alyssa Hadley Dunn provides a practical, humanizing framework for how K–12 educators can teach in the hours, days, and months after social and political crises.

Moving beyond “business as usual,” Dunn shows why teachers must center equity, reject claims of pedagogical neutrality, and create spaces for dialogue, community, and healing. This timely, expanded edition addresses today’s sociopolitical climate—including guidance for navigating political pressure, misinformation, and the nationwide attacks on DEI and public education—when everyday feels like a day after.

New to the Second Edition:

• Updated Narratives: New teacher and student reflections on international, national, state, and local events between 2021 and 2025, thus encapsulating teachers’ narratives about the two decades of days after.
• Expanded Guidance and Current Resources: Additional strategies and tools for school leaders, preservice teachers, and teacher educators in the form of online resource banks and sample lesson plans.
• Creative Inquiry Tools: Includes an ethnodrama designed to spark classroom dialogue and critical reflection, particularly useful for classes or professional development with pre- and inservice teachers.

Through powerful teacher stories and youth-authored spotlights, Teaching on Days After illustrates how difficult moments can become opportunities for sociopolitical awareness, justice-oriented pedagogy, and sustaining hope during collective trauma. This second edition is an up-to-the-moment essential resource for educators committed to supporting students when the unthinkable happens—again.

Alyssa Hadley Dunn is the director of teacher education and a professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Connecticut.