More than seven thousand workshop participants over five years used only "happy," "sad," and "angry" to describe their daily emotional experiences, while Brené Brown and her team have identified one hundred and fifty key human emotions. Exploring eighty-seven of the key emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human, Brown's new book, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience, holds riches for everyone in our school communities: parents/guardians, students, and faculty/staff. A social scientist, Brown grounds her writing in her research findings and fills many of her books with a combination of research and storytelling. Replete with photographs, comics, and pull quotes, Atlas follows something of a new model, presenting more like a textbook, art book, or travel book. You could use Atlas as a required, core text for a seminar class or advisory program. You could read it as a faculty or design a parent series around it. Brown's project is to help all of us have a richer, wider language to talk about our experiences and lives – and ultimately to help us connect more meaningfully with ourselves, the world, and one another. Using mapping as a metaphor, Brown believes that "a sense of place is central to meaning-making," and all of the "places we go" in this book – from anxiety, to reverence, to despair, to self-trust – are within us, our language for them a catalyst for connection.

In Alex Shevrin Venet's introduction to Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education, the author calls into question whether trauma-informed education can transcend its buzzword status. Venet seeks to redefine the framework of trauma-informed practices, making visible their connection to equity work by elucidating the three shifts in practice, pedagogy, and policy necessary for sustained systems change within schools. Venet argues for centering equity and social justice in trauma-informed practices by asking the salient question, "Why is trauma-informed education an appealing topic for professional development, but ending the things that cause trauma is not?" The content of the text is structured around the six essential principles that define equity-centered, trauma-informed education, namely that it is antiracist, asset based, system oriented, human-centered, universal and proactive, and focused on social justice. Venet's work is replete with relevant examples from her experience in classrooms as well as the work of other researchers in the fields of equity and trauma. If we readily admit that students and teachers have experienced the last 22 months of the Covid-19 pandemic as trauma, then Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education provides a pathway forward.

In her book Social Justice Parenting: How to Raise Compassionate, Anti-Racist, Justice-Minded Kids in an Unjust World, Dr. Traci Baxley urges that it is important to not only care about people but also to "care with action." Baxley, author and educator, emphasizes the need to go further than passively facilitating young people in becoming good people. Instead, she offers guidance for how to stimulate them in becoming proactive participants in social justice work. In addition to unpacking age-appropriate approaches to engaging in dialogue with children, Baxley also allows room for uncertainty. She underscores how important it is for adults to admit and examine their own knowledge gaps and biases. This reminder is important for educators; it is okay – vital even – to articulate that we do not have all the answers, particularly when it comes to complex and systemic issues like racism. While Baxley’s book is situated in parenting, the takeaways are relevant to the same kind of conversations and objective setting happening every day in our classrooms. Educators must model vulnerability and self-reflection as well as what it looks like to show up in alignment with the core social justice values that sit in so many of our school mission statements.

The discourse around teenage users of social media has been unfortunately swept up in the larger political conversation around social media, but in this article, scholar Cal Newport refocuses readers on a fundamental question: should kids be using these services at all? Newport consults four experts with a range of opinions, and in doing so, provides a comprehensive overview of the landscape of emerging understanding of the effects of social media on teens. For schools looking to better grasp how teens use social media, how social media affects teens, and how social media uses teens, there is a lot to learn from Newport's nuanced analysis about the state of the research. At the same time, the data itself is inconclusive, in part because "humans are complicated," an insight that school folks will undoubtedly affirm. Newport also cautions that the absence of conclusive data on the effects of social media does not mean that educators and parents shouldn't be concerned, noting the similarities between social media effects and tobacco use. The upshot here is that educators have a duty to help students and families better understand the potential effects of social media use; we can start by focusing on the right question.

On Being, a podcast hosted by journalist Krista Tippett, features interviews with people pursuing deep thinking, moral imagination, joy, and social courage. The podcast's archives date back to 2003 and feature an eclectic mix of interviewees engaging in contemplative conversations. One would be hard-pressed to find a human being more remarkable than the late Dr. Michael Rose, education research professor at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. Rose's 2010 appearance on On Being, "The Deepest Meanings of Intelligence and Vocation," was recently rebroadcasted following his death, and this conversation could not be more relevant to the present, ever-challenged moment. Rose speaks to the role of education in developing and dismantling deep-seated divisions in our country. Moreover, he draws on his personal experience to honor teachers' ability to spark curiosity in students through a care ethic. This episode is Rose at his best, a humble contrarian with a beautiful backstory and a "deep belief in the ability of the common person." Through Rose's words, we are reminded again and again of the true potential in all schools: the human beings that populate them.

After attending inspiring professional development workshops on issues of race and diversity and reading texts rooted in related theory, educators are often left with these wonders: how can we implement this work in the classroom? How do we help our students understand while simultaneously making every student feel validated? How do we help our students become future change makers? In Larry Ferlazzo’s article, "What Are You Doing to Help Students Understand Systemic Racism and Combat It?," Zach Podhorzer and Alison Rheingold's section on "Critical Engagement" underscores the importance of the how. Specifically, Podhorzer and Rheingold discuss the need to teach students how to dialogue instead of debate, as dialogue leads to understanding different perspectives while debate encourages a clear winner. Understanding the power of dialogue and practicing healthy ways to engage in that dialogue is crucial. These experiences, in addition to avoiding the "winner" mentality, will help equip students with the skills they need to recognize and confront systematic racism. There is no one view that we should take at face value. Instead, we need to teach students to discuss in dialogue and learn from one another.

"We tell ourselves stories to live," essayist Joan Didion famously said. At a moment in which it feels like the Omicron variant is aggressively rewriting what we thought we knew about living with Covid-19, Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land is a must-read story. Set in 15th century Constantinople, 20th century America, and onboard an interstellar ship called the Argos in the 22nd century, Doerr's masterwork of interconnected narratives at once discomforts readers as it soothes us. In the novel, we see our future world through the eyes of an adolescent girl, Konstance, as she educates herself using, and ultimately outwitting, a powerful computer named Sybil. Through the eyes of two boys living in Idaho during our own time, we see the perennial curiosity and propulsive loneliness of children in plain and often painful terms. But despite these difficult plot points, Doerr's novel is not only enjoyable for its narrative feats and lively storytelling, but also energizing, even hopeful. Perhaps that's because the thing that saves the book's children, regardless of where they live in space or time, is a ludicrous, Ancient Greek story about Aethon, the fool who wanted to leave Earth for a mythical city of plenty in the sky called Cloud Cuckoo Land. This story, discovered in a molding library by yet more courageous children just before the sack of the Byzantine Empire, only exists in fragments and suggestions, and in a language that few know how to read, even today. Its gestalt, however, is enough to delight readers through the ages and in doing so, to heal them. Ultimately, Cloud Cuckoo Land is about the infinite possibility that exists – not somewhere, out there, but right here, in all of us – if we just focus in and pay attention to our collective wisdom and shared humanity.