We often forget injustice affects everyone. Teacher Dr. David Nurenberg shares how his upper-class students do not merely benefit, but are also hurt, by societal inequality and their ignorance of it.

Dr. David Nurenberg is a high school English teacher, writer, educational consultant and core faculty professor at the Graduate School of Education at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the recipient of the 1998-1999 Diane A. Rottenberg Davis Memorial Endowment Prize in Education, and the 2014 Harry S. Levitan Prize for Excellence and Leadership in Education, both from Brandeis University

Over his 20 years as an educator David has developed and taught a wide variety of interdisciplinary humanities courses with strong project-based learning and social justice education components. Whether teaching high schoolers, undergraduates, graduate students or in-service teachers, David tries to practice the principles of student-centered, inquiry-based and service learning. He knows that people learn best when they have choice, when they can connect material to their own lives and their lived experience, and when they have a chance to create authentic products that let them take part in solving real-world problems. David’s published work has appeared in several prominent peer-reviewed journals including The Harvard Educational Review, NCTE’s English Education, American Secondary Education and High School Journal.

David is Vice President of the Massachusetts-Hokkaido Association, and has coordinated ongoing sister-school exchanges with schools in Hokkaido, Japan since the early 2000s. He has also received several grants from the U.S. State Department to build and conduct educational exchanges between the USA and the former Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan, and in 2010 led the first American delegation to meet with Turkmenistan’s National Institute of Education (NIE).

More recently David founded and coordinates the G.L.O.B.E. (Global Learning Opportunities in Boston Area Education) Consortium, which brings Boston public school students together with their suburban counterparts, in association with MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, for interdisciplinary after-school courses in STEM/Green Technologies. The project is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Both through Lesley University and independently, David consults with middle and secondary schools seeking to develop, improve and expand their work with student-centered pedagogy, inquiry and project-based learning, cooperative learning and more. You can visit his website at www.strugglingwriter.com. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx