October 6, 2025
By Jenna Fournel, Chief Curiosity Officer
Listen to this week’s Hooray For Monday podcast to hear the second half of Jenna’s conversation with Cathy Flesicher, educator and leader at Everyday Advocacy. They discuss how to use the organization’s advocacy framework in the face of book bans and censorship.
Last week, we introduced Hooray for Monday readers to Everyday Advocacy, an approach to creating change in schools by shifting the way the public understands what we do as teachers. Our guest for these two weeks is Cathy Fleischer, the creator of this resource, and this week she’s talking about the core principles that guide doing this work—so you can still keep your job!
This graphic illustrates these core principles: Smart, Safe, Savvy, and Sustainable.
Through a wide variety of web-based resources, teachers can use the Everyday Advocacy website to walk through a step-by-step process to create change. A core component of the toolkit is a focus on how the stories we tell and share shape public perception. If we can shape public perception, we can shape public support.
Listen to today’s podcast to learn more about organizer and educator Marshall Ganz’s work around public narrative: “the means by which an issue comes to be understood in a community.” And hear how one teacher used this framework at a curriculum night to get parents engaged with her approach to teaching writing.
Here are some of the resources she shares:
Everyday Advocacy Opposing Bans: This resource offers a path forward for being proactive before an issue arises, being strategic in the midst of an issue, and moving ahead after restrictions are enacted.
Author Stories: This series of videos by authors explores stories of when they learned their writing had made a difference in the life of a reader. These can be used to open up dialog about the importance of challenged books for students.
PEN America: “PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world.”
American Library Association: “ALA compiles data on book challenges from reports filed by library professionals in the field and from news stories published throughout the United States.”
National Council of Teachers of English Intellectual Freedom Center: “Guidance, tools, and other support to teachers faced with challenges in classrooms and schools pertaining to texts, student writing, and/or to teaching methods.”
Ban This! How One School Fought Two Book Bans and Won (and How You Can Too): “In September 2021, the school board in York, Pennsylvania, voted to remove a record-breaking number of books from school libraries in its community. The Panther Anti-Racist Union (PARU) at Central York High School, comprised of four students and two advisors, successfully fought the ban by organizing protests, speaking at school board meetings, and participating in media interviews to raise awareness.”
Cathy invites the Hooray for Monday community to reach out with any questions and encourages everyone to explore the plethora of free resources on the Everyday Advocacy website.
Having watched this work evolve with teachers over the past decade, I was inspired to learn about all the ways it’s leading to change. We don’t have to compromise our jobs and our school communities to move things forward. In the opening of the Everyday Advocacy Playbook, there’s a quote from the great civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs:
“Movements are not initiated by revolutionaries. They begin when large numbers of people, having reached the point where they can’t take the way things are anymore, see some hope of improving their daily lives and begin to move on their own.”
May we be so moved.
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Hooray For Monday is an award-winning weekly publication of Center for Inspired Teaching, a social change nonprofit organization that champions the power of curiosity and is dedicated to transforming the school experience from compliance-based to engagement-based. Inspired Teaching provides transformative, improvisation-based professional learning for teachers that is 100% engaging – intellectually, emotionally, and physically.
