About
My name is Clayton Edwards, and I am a public-school teacher in Chicago. I teach mathematics and science, with much of my recent classroom work centered on physics and chemistry. I have spent much of my career thinking about what rigorous education should actually mean, not as greater compliance, more testing, or more data collection, but as serious intellectual work carried out by students and teachers together.
The Material Classroom grew from that concern. The site is a place for classroom inquiry, criticism of educational policy and technology, research on the privatization of public education, and reflection on the work of teaching. I am especially interested in the ways corporations, philanthropies, vendors, and reform organizations gain influence over institutions that are supposed to remain publicly governed.
My interests outside the immediate classroom often overlap with my teaching. I am involved in astronomy and space-science research, amateur radio, scientific instrumentation, and hands-on technical projects. These interests have reinforced my belief that students should encounter science as investigation of the material world and not simply as content delivered through textbooks or screens.
My professional goals include continuing to develop inquiry-centered physics, chemistry, and mathematics curricula; contributing to research on public education and private influence in schools; and defending the autonomy of teachers as intellectual workers, curriculum designers, and researchers.
Our Story
materialclassroom.org is the archive and evolution of that struggle.
It gathers essays, action research, surveys, reflections, and provocations produced across the course, tying them back to lived reality in the classroom. It is part portfolio, part research notebook, part political intervention.
This site is for teachers who feel their agency shrinking beneath the weight of pacing guides, data dashboards, and algorithmic personalization;
for scholars who understand that curriculum is always ideological;
for students who deserve learning that nourishes them rather than disciplines them;
and for anyone fighting to keep public education public.
In North Lawndale, and across CPS, education has too often meant something done to students and teachers, not for them. But learning in its truest sense is vitality: intellectual struggle with purpose, creativity, community, and freedom.