Christopher Greenslate
At six years old I had decided that if I wasn’t a professional baseball player when I grew up that I would have no problem being a veterinarian. My love of animals is something that grew from that point forward. I remember my mom letting me stay home to watch our golden retriever give birth and naming all the puppies after baseball hall-of-famers like Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio and Hank Aaron. I remember later picking up animal rights literature at a punk rock concert and being appalled by conditions that animals faced on factory farms. Punk rock songs and ideology quickly planted seeds of concern for other human beings and compassion for those who had faced oppression based on race, ethnicity, political views, social class, gender and sexuality. The recognition of the power imbalance that allows humans to treat each other with such willful indifference quickly helped me see that the plight of animals in factory farms and laboratories was also morally reprehensible. These experiences helped shaped my path to becoming involved with activism and community programs, and eventually into becoming a public high school teacher. My sense of responsibility to serve others was strong and only grows as I move forward.
Since becoming a professional humane educator and founding the Social Justice program at La Costa Canyon High School I see the same passion and kindness in my students. This new program focuses specifically on three comprehensive units: Human Rights, Animal Protection and Environmental Ethics. Students learn information through an inquiry-based model wherein they research sub-topics within each unit and present their findings to the class. This allows students to discover information on their own, making the impact even more powerful. SJ students recently held a Social Justice fair at lunch, for which student and community groups tabled about different issues; they started the LCC Sweat-Free campaign to help our school transition to producing sweatshop-free apparel; and, they’re holding a school-wide showing of the film Invisible Children.
Through the M.Ed. program at IHE I have become more adequately prepared to serve my students and to explore issues that I had previously known little about.
I am always working on new projects and programs, writing, practicing Jiu-Jitsu, traveling abroad and someday will have an eco-helping home founded on the principles outlined in William McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle.
UPDATE AS OF 11/1/11
Christopher Greenslate is currently a doctoral student in education policy at Vanderbilt University and a research and policy analyst at the Tennessee Consortium on Research, Evaluation, and Development where he works to evaluate programs enacted under Race to the Top. Christopher recently taught at High Tech High School in San Diego, California, but before this, spent five years teaching English, Social Justice, and Journalism at La Costa Canyon High School. Over the past six years Greenslate has supported his students in doing award-winning work on both the national and international level. He has worked with children and educators on three continents, most recently in India in a program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. He holds a degree in literature from San Francisco State University, and a Masters of Education from the Institute for Humane Education.
Christopher also recently co-authored On a Dollar a Day: One Couple’s Unlikely Adventures in Eating in America (Hyperion Books 2010) about the economics of eating, which gained international attention and has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, and on Fox News, Inside Edition, National Public Radio and more. Publisher’s Weekly called it, “a sobering, personal consideration of hunger and poverty worldwide and in our own neighborhoods.” His writing has also been published by The New York Times, Green Teacher Magazine, and Teaching Tolerance, and is included in Teaching Green: The High School Years. As a result of his work in both education, and on other justice issues, he has lectured at several national conferences such as the Teachers for Social Justice Conference and at universities, including Harvard Law School.
Greenslate shares a lovely home with his partner, Jenny, and their rescued rottweiler companion, Viola, in Nashville, Tennessee.
Watch and share IHE President, Zoe Weil's TEDx talk -- an inspiring vision of how to create a just, compassionate, healthy world for all through solutionary education.
April 28, 2012 - 8:30 am to April 28, 2012 - 5:00 pm | Location: Nightingale-Bamford School
How can we best prepare our students for the important roles they must play in meeting the challenges of today's world? How can we help youth to become creative and critical thinkers who embody the qualities of wisdom, compassion, and integrity and who focus their grea...
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