2024 George Orwell Book Awardee for Honesty and Clarity in Public Language from the National Council of the Teachers of English for "writers who have made outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse."

Making americans

Setting out from her classroom, Jessica Lander takes the reader on a powerful and urgent journey—told through captivating stories of the past, the present, and the personal—to understand what it takes for immigrant students to become Americans.

She brings to life historic struggles to improve immigrant education—the Nebraska teacher arrested for teaching an eleven-year-old boy in German who took his case to the Supreme Court; the California families who overturned school segregation for Mexican-American children; and the Texas families who risked deportation to establish the right for undocumented children to attend public schools. 

She visits innovative classrooms across the country—a school for refugee girls in Georgia; five schools in Aurora, Colorado that created a community-wide network of organizations and people to support newcomer children; and a North Carolina district of more than 100 schools who rethought how they teach their immigrant-origin students.

She shares inspiring stories of her own students' immigrant journeys and how they created their own American identities—a boy who escaped Baghdad and found a home in his school’s ROTC program, the daughter of Cambodian genocide survivors who dreamed of becoming a computer scientist, and an orphan boy who escaped violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and created a new community here. 

Together, the stories and insights chart a course for educators and policy makers—and for everyone who cares about America’s future. Making Americans is a landmark book, providing a clear vision for how schools can help nurture a sense of belonging in newcomers, with benefits for all students.  It is a catalyst for communities across America to reimagine immigrant education.

Beacon Press, Fall 2022