Social Justice Education in the Classroom

The article I found concerning social justice and the classroom was "Teaching for Social Justice: From Conceptual Frameworks to Classroom Practices" by Alison Dover. Her study included 61 teachers from schools with differing multicultural backgrounds and classes and focused on what social justice education looks like within the context of varying classroom environments. An overwhelming number of the participants found that 88% of participants described the importance of civic engagement and social action when teaching for social justice. Within this construct, three themes emerged: "(a) teachers’ sense of themselves as social activists, (b) teachers’ intent to raise students’ awareness of inequity and injustice, and (c) teachers’ intent to promote civic participation and social action among students" (Dover 8). What I take away from this, is that social justice in education is less about simply treating students fairly and with equity, but instead remaining socially conscious as an instructor and granting students opportunities to practice civic participation and social action. These students need to be offered chances to be active within their schools and communities to really know how to effectively integrate into a society with vastly differing viewpoints. The value of teaching social justice in the classroom is found in its ability to mold students into individuals who are able to enter a world with an already high level of awareness of the people and communities around them while already having the capability of researching and raising their own awareness as they continue on in life.

 How should social justice be taught? It is really hard to say. The myriad of ways of teaching students on these topics is just as varied and diverse as the topics themselves. What it comes down to is the culture of the school and specifically the classroom. Teachers should manage this education in a way that appeals personally to the students, and this must be done by taking into consideration the environment these kids are coming from. Most importantly though, the teacher must possess integrity and firmly believe in what manner of responsible thinking they are attempting to pass on to their students.

Work Cited

 Dover, A. G. (2013). Teaching for social justice: From conceptual frameworks to classroom practices. Multicultural Perspectives, 15(1), 3-11.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Urban Accessibility

"Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom," places heavy emphasis on the fact that media and elements of popular culture are important education resources that can make a large impact on students from urban environments.The reality is that neary anything can be considered a "text", and it doesn't necessarily have to be created for education's sake to be considered educational. Lessons should be interesting and engaging for students. I've used popular (and unpopular) music in the classroom to a tremendous amount of positive feedback. Engaged classroom time is interactive, exciting, and mentally challenging. We, as teachers, are to avoid simply dispensing information to students and expecting them to salvage a valuable educational experience from such a stale platform.d I have heard various amounts of criticism regarding the common core, which mostly range from "I can't teach what I want to teach" to "There simply is...
Read more

Blog Post #5: Philosophy of Education

"Pedagogy of the Oppressed" was an interesting read that kept reminding of of the stale and intellectually stagnant planet of Camazots from A Wrinkle in Time.  In these classroom environments, it seems that students do not actually learn, but instead memorize and repeat back in words and writing exactly what information was presented to them. Students know exactly what to "cram" to pass classes, but short-term memory only gets them so far and nearly all will be forgotten if they don't apply what they've learned. Learning is less about bouncing back the same information and is more about negotiating meaning of concepts between instructor and student for everyone to come to a greater understanding.We should not have classrooms that are always top-down, instructor focused lessons. Instead, we should be focusing on the students and their individual needs. This is really all about them, so effective teaching needs to involve students in their own education. Ban...
Read more

Kelly Gallagher's "Readicide"

I do not feel that the "systematic killing of the love of reading" is at all intentional, but I think it is rather an exacerbation of an existing problem. That problem is the staleness of material and the lack of integration of different texts and unit ideas, and as Gallagher put it, teachers have already discussed a text to exhaustion by the time a class encounters it. If the instructor isn't excited about reading, why should the students be? We interrupt students during reading sessions to point out what are important details pertaining to the overall picture of the novel, but in doing so we take away the enjoyment that students would find in the 'reading zone'. I loved reading when I was younger due to how I could submerse myself in a different world on my own time, but it is ridiculous to assume students will foster the same love of reading if not given the chance to do the same either. The To Kill a Mockinbird unit plan was, in a word, exhaustive. If you'...
Read more