At the start of each year of the Addressing Injustices Project, we bring middle school students together with teacher candidates who haven’t met previously. We each have read a shared text—Maus or Beautiful Music for Ugly Children or Fahrenheit 451—but many of us are understandably reticent. Rather than regard students’ different levels of comfort with speaking in class or their preference for silence as a problem, we use Big Paper to level the playing field and invite everyone—adults and youth—to participate in a silent conversation through writing.

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