Teacher educators engage preservice teachers with The 57 Bus

The 57 Bus is an intriguing nonfiction story in which Dashka Slater uses her journalistic style to chronicle the explosive encounter of two high-school teenagers on the 57 bus. One teenager, Sasha, is White and from a middle-class neighborhood. Sasha, wearing a skirt, identifies as agender, rather than as either male or female. Richard is an African-American teen from a low socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhood. The book details the harrowing accounts of each student’s life prior to and after an eight-second timeframe that changed their lives forever—when Richard lights Sasha’s skirt on fire.

This book explores the points of view of two students who have been traditionally marginalized in today’s schools, namely LGBTQIA, African-Americans, and those from low SES neighborhoods. By doing so, this book portrays the multidimensional lived experiences of actual students related to controversial topics like sexual and gender identity, equal housing, equitable education, and justice under the law. The book thus has the potential to counter the dominant narratives of mainstream culture by highlighting the nuanced complexity between individual “choices” and consequences that ripple across a lifetime.