Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom
A Radical Guide partnered with PM Press to document several panels at the Howard Zinn Book Fair.
Punk rock and education can both be liberation movements! Teaching Resistance features an active discussion with radical punk icons and professional educators including Alice Bag, Yvette Felarca, Miriam Klein Stahl, Michelle Cruz Gonzales, Jessica Mills, Frankie Mastrangelo, Kadijah Means, Lindsay McLeary, Sarah Orton, Ruth Crossman, and more. John Mink (editor of the Teaching Resistance anthology on PM Press) will moderate the conversation as they explore themes on radicalism in teaching practice and educational intersections with anti-authoritarian/anti-oppression currents in punk/DIY subculture. Join this discussion with these legendary punk activists on how to harness our lives, music, organizing, and classrooms to fight for human liberation, social justice, systemic change, and true equality.
Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom is available at PM Press and A Radical Guide’s Shop.
- Alice Bag is a singer/songwriter, musician, author, artist, educator, and feminist. Alice was the lead singer and co-founder of the Bags, one of the first bands to form during the initial wave of punk in Los Angeles, and wrote the acclaimed books “Violence Girl” and “Pipe Bomb for the Soul” about her decades of life as a punk and classroom teacher.
- Yvette Felarca is a teacher and civil rights activist, a national organizer with the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN).
- Michelle Cruz Gonzales played drums and wrote lyrics for three bands during the 1980s and 1990s: Bitch Fight, Spitboy, and Instant Girl. Her writing has been published in anthologies, literary journals, and “Hip Mama” magazine. Michelle teaches English and creative writing at Las Positas College and lives with her husband, son, and their three Mexican dogs in Oakland, California.
- Jessica Mills is a punk lifer who has played sax and bass for quite a few very well-known bands from the early nineties into the present. She is a former Maximumrocknroll columnist and author of the punk parenting memoir/guide “My Mother Wears Combat Boots”, a current MRR book reviewer, intrepid copy editor for this volume, and English instructor at Central New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque.
- Miriam Klein Stahl is a Bay Area artist, educator, and activist, and the New York Times bestselling illustrator of Rad American Women A–Z and Rad Women Worldwide. In addition to her work in printmaking, drawing, sculpture, paper-cut, and public art, she is also the co-founder of the Arts and Humanities Academy at Berkeley High School, where she has taught since 1995.
- John Mink is a social studies teacher who has worked at the high school and adult school levels and refuses to hide his political radicalism from his students. Editor of the Maximum Rocknroll monthly column and PM Press book “Teaching Resistance” and a vocalist/bassist for several internationally recognized punk bands, John lives in Berkeley, California, with his partner Megan March, who is also his bandmate in the truewave/punk group Street Eaters.
- Sarah Orton, born in Oakland, is thirty years old and has been an educator, advocate, and activist in interpersonal violence and social justice movements for over seven years. She has a background in sexual health and human sexuality studies and believes that sexual violence is a public health and human rights issue.
- Lindsay McLeary spent his formative years knee-deep in SoCal’s survivor-heavy punk/hardcore scene and had the peculiar distinction of being the most heavily tattooed person in the University of California Berkeley’s Department of Equity and Inclusion. He worked in education and educational outreach for well over a decade, including stints as a lecturer at the University of Southern California and Stanford and as a classroom teacher in Oakland and Richmond, California, public schools.
- Frankie Mastrangelo is an educator living in Richmond, Virginia. She’s working on a Ph.D. dissertation that looks at how neoliberal buzzwords, like innovation, circulate through and influence various cultures and communities.
- Ruth Crossman is a writer and educator who currently lives in Oakland. Her political writings have appeared on the website “Poets Reading the News” and in the anthology “11/9: The Downfall of American Democracy”.
Filmed by A Radical Guide at the Sixth Annual Howard Zinn Book Fair in San Francisco, CA on December 8, 2019.
