UBC EDST 401 2017: Education, School, and Social Institutions (original) (raw)
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RE/MEDIATING SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION
This paper, a self-study , explores our experiences designing and teaching a pre-service course that critically engages teacher candidates in discussions of equity, diversity and social justice. A persisting challenge in this work involves navigating teacher candidate resistance and inviting exploration of their own positionality in a context where existing racial ideologies, and their corollary white privilege, dominate.
Social justice education is the most explicitly activism-oriented discipline in higher education. However, critical media literacy is noticeably absent from the curricula at the leading universities offering graduate degrees in social justice in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This is a perplexing omission, given the corporate media's leading and comprehensive role in sustaining an oppressive status quo, spreading ruling-class ideologies, and maintaining the inherently unjust hegemony of capitalist economic and political elites. This chapter explains why the inclusion of critical media literacy is indispensable to social justice education. It provides educators with multifold ways to incorporate critical media literacy into their courses and curriculum to empower students to advance social justice causes and struggle more effectively for an equitable world.
"It's like Black and White!": Critical Media Literacy and Social Justice in the Elementary Classroom
The International Journal of Critical Media Literacy , 2019
In the current sociopolitical climate, children, often, bear witness to the levels of vitriol in this country. It has become more imperative that elementary classroom teachers disrupt normative discourses. Therefore, the author suggests critical media literacy as a significant pedagogical practice to utilize in order to do so. In this article, the author articulates the importance of employing critical media literacy in the elementary classroom to deconstruct the diversity of tense relations in the u.s. and provide a language for students to articulate their identities and experiences. Through her experiences in elementary classrooms, as a teacher and a teacher-educator, the author provides practical examples of how to disrupt normative discourses by utilizing critical media literacy.
International Conference on Education (ICE2) 2018: Education and Innovation in Science in the Digital Era, 2016
Given the complexities of education in the 21st century, how might transformative approaches to literacy, a critical literacy embedded in social justice, offer one way of responding to current issues? My interest in this question emerges from my work as a classroom teacher working with diverse students for ten years. In my work with elementary school students (Grades 3 to 8), my approaches to teaching aligned with critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; Kincheloe, 2007; Andrade and Morell, 2008). That is, I sought to engage students in societal critique through dialogue, and to foster various forms of social action as responses to the issues we explored. I wanted my students to be literate, I believed they were capable of high levels of literacy, and believed that their literacy could be a tool to explore the underlying causes of injustice and take action to redress them. I often aimed at what Lesko and Bloom refer to as "happy-ever-after endings" (1998, p. 390): I hoped students felt good about our learning, their social action, the money and awareness we raised for particular justice initiatives, and about the people the social action aimed to help. In my teaching, I found that providing opportunities for critical talk in response to various texts and opportunities for drama improvisation activities to be powerful ways to engage students in the complexities of social justice issues, particularly those students who seemed to be disengaged during more traditional instructional approaches. Such in and out of role talk was my way of getting students passionate about an issue, and to foster embodied responses to texts that I (as teacher) introduced. I felt at the time that I experienced success in engaging students using dialogic and dramatic pedagogies associated with critical literacy. I taught in a school where most of the students identified as White and middle to upper-middle class. Students at this school responded with enthusiasm to my conceptions of social justice and my connected literacy practices. For example, I often invited analysis and critique of various media texts, organized community service learning projects, and accompanied students to demonstrations aimed at raising awareness of various issues that students and I associated with local and global injustice. We often discussed the plight of Others1. I began to wonder, however, why my students seemed to be buying in to my pedagogy. I wondered whether or not what we were doing was actually working toward social justice. When I began teaching at a large elementary school populated by students who had recently immigrated to Canada (many under refugee claims), were racially marginalized, and/or were of lower socioeconomic status, this challenged my prior conceptions of critical literacy work embedded in social justice. Many of these students did not seem to respond as positively to what I considered important issues (that I assumed were also important to them). My new context provoked questions about what I was doing, how I was doing it, for whom, and the role played by my gender, racial and class privilege in my attempts at transformative social justice teaching. I began to wonder whether my teaching reflected and valued these students' lived experiences. When I became an equity consultant for my school board, I continued to question the relationships between my (and other teachers') experiences, those of my (and their) students, and the realities of people directly harmed in the issues I addressed. I wondered: How did students with different social identities and life experiences interpret my pedagogy and content? Why did some students seem to care about issues of justice (as I presented them), and
Review of the book Educators on Diversity, Social justice, and Schooling: A Reader
2021
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) recognizes aboriginal and treaty rights (section 25), official bilingualism (sections 16-20), and multiculturalism (section 27). The Charter also protects citizens from discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, or disability (Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1982). The spirit and values instilled by the Charter are significant to the field of education mission statements and policies endorsing diversity, inclusion and equity. Combined with different communities’ advocacy for social change, teachers are increasingly called to impart equal opportunities for all children in increasingly diverse classrooms with equitable curricular and pedagogical practices. In that context, Educators on Diversity, Social Justice and Schooling: A Reader provides insight for practitioners. This book is edited by Sonya E. Singer and Mary Jane Harkins, with each chapter’s authors representing various theor...
Educational policy and the social justice dilemma
2007
In this chapter Paul Carr reveals a controversy at the heart of Canadian educational policy making. The unacknowledged power and privilege of'whiteness' and the ways in which white people can define the agenda to support their own power, leads to marginalisation of minority groups and contributes to continuing racism in society. He critiques the complacency of public education in its attempts to inculcate social justice and democratic values in the absence of proper accountability and transparency.
Education for Social Justice: Provocations and Challenges
Educational Theory, 2006
Abstract In this essay review of three recent edited books (Greg Dimitriadis and Dennis Carlson’s Promises to Keep: Cultural Studies, Democratic Education, and Public Life; Nadine Dolby and Greg Dimitriadis’s Learning to Labor in New Times; and Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco and Erica Meiner’s Disruptive Readings on Making Curriculum Public), Kathy Hytten reflects on the relation among education, democracy, and social justice. She argues that in our current climate, progressive educators need a more powerful and compelling educational discourse that foregrounds issues of social justice. The three books under review in this essay provide a number of resources for this discourse. Hytten explores these contributions in relation to the theories that animate education for social justice, in particular, critical pedagogy, globalization theory, and cultural studies. In the end, she revisits the vision and promise of education for social justice, considering what these edited collections offer, reflecting on their gaps and weaknesses, and providing some direction for what kind of work we still need to make social justice a reality.