Introduction: Creating Classrooms for Equity and Social Justice

For this week's reading, I've chosen the introduction to Rethinking Our Classrooms Vol. 1, which I believe very well sums up the definition of social justice, its place in the class, and why it needs to be there. As the selection states, "too many schools fail to confront the racial, class, and gender inequities woven into our social fabric." Social justice is, then, the incorporation and acknowledgement of the diversities that exist within our cultures. In order to attain social justice within the classroom, we much have relationships with the students in which we are familiar with their backgrounds. We must be able to incorporate areas of each student's life and culture into the classroom. The classroom should also encourage students to critique their society and see areas of inequality and injustice. Students should be encouraged to ask "why." As I've mentioned before, classrooms must be accepting of all cultures. To do this, many different cultures and perspectives must be analyzed in order to help the students create connections. Finally, students need to be challenged and affirmed. They need to be challenged in the work that they encounter every day, giving them opportunities to participate in hands-on activities that help them to experience the content being studied. They need to be affirmed by teachers in a way that shows them that they are able to make a change, and thus makes them hopeful to do so. The students should learn to identify problems, ask why the problem is in place, experience (whether vicariously or truly) the problems, then know that they are capable of doing something about them. This classroom experience aims to develop pro-justice, worldly, hopeful individuals and prepare those individuals for a life outside of school that often encounters injustices. In an environment like this, a mutual respect exists between the teachers and the students in which the students recognize that the teacher does not really know everything and the teacher recognizes that the students are respectable, individual thinkers. 

My text selection can be found at the following link:

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/publication/roc1/roc1_intro.shtml