Jessica Lander

Jessica Lander is an award‑winning teacher, writer, and author who has taught middle school, high school, and university students for more than a decade in the United States and in countries including Thailand and Cambodia. Since 2015, she has taught history and civics to immigrant and refugee students at Lowell High School, a large urban public high school in Massachusetts, working with students from more than 30 countries. She has been recognized as a Top 50 Finalist for the Global Teacher Prize (2021) and as a Massachusetts Teacher of the Year Finalist (2022), and she frequently writes about education policy and teaching for outlets such as the Boston Globe and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Lander is the author of Making Americans: Stories of Historic Struggles, New Ideas, and Inspiration in Immigrant Education (Beacon Press, 2022), a comprehensive exploration of immigrant education in the United States through historical case studies, contemporary school initiatives, and profiles of immigrant youth. She co‑authored Powerful Partnerships: A Teacher’s Guide to Engaging Families for Student Success with Karen L. Mapp and Ilene Carver, a practical guide to strengthening family‑school partnerships, as well as the related Powerful Partnerships Family Engagement Action Guide. She is also the author of Driving Backwards, a nonfiction portrait of small‑town America.[