Social justice education

Activism and Community Connections

Last year I had a kid who was a really reluctant writer. He never wanted to write more than two sentences altought he’s a very bright kid; he just hated writing. When we were doing our child lobor unit and the kids decided to write to the newspaper ang different companies, he was so motivated to get those letter out. I think it was because it was writing for a purpose that he thought was important. It made a big difference for him in his attitude and also in his accomplishments in writing. I think that kids feel that it’s real work, it’s not just fake work.

Kara, Grade 2-3 Teacher

Social justice education places special emphasis on bridging the gap between the classroom and the community. When students are enganged in meaningful activities with others outside of the classroom, they develop enthusiasm for learning and the community also benefits. Rather than practicing reading and writing or other “fake work,” students become immersed in real world problem solving and applying skills and knowledge learned in the classroom to civic action. “Education work best when it is grounded, when it merges the skills and knowledge of the community with the skilss and knowledge of educators” (Kohl, 1994a, p. 62). Teaching for social justice simply cannot stop at the classroom door. Out efforts to create significant improvements in teaching ang learning within schools are strengthened by forming strong, interactive connection with communities beyond them.

Connecting students with the world beyond the walls of the classroom is essential if students are to experience firsthand opportunities to work for social change. It is throught firsthand experience that students can best again an understanding of social justice issues and the possibilities for addressing them. “I thing bringing the world ino the classroom is just really critical, “states Kris, a Philadelphia-based second grade teacher.” You know, you can’t see school as a separate entity. You really have to look around you and see what’s happening.” Preparation for community experience begins in teh classroom with skill development and planning for venturing out into the community. Learning continues outside of the classroom as students seek out valuable sources of information, collect data, and describe what they have learned. Thus social justice education is as much about learning from the community as it is engaging in social action for the community. William Ayers (2004), noted social justice teacher educator, agrees: “Eduction at its best, then, is linked to freedom, to teh ability to see but also to alter, to uderstand but also toreinvent, to know and also to transform the world” (p.21) Teachers use many strategies for connecting students with the world outside the classroom walls. Sometimes studets don’t have to go farther than the playground or the other classrooms in the school to find injustices they want to change. Teachers bring the local community into the classroom via guest speakers and indirect service activities. Students also venture out into yhe community to participate in hands-on service-learning projects, take a field trip, or attend a community rally.

All of these strategies contribute to opportunities for students to engage in concrete learning and real-world problem solving. Classroom community connections teach students that social change is more succesfull when we work together, drawing on the strengths of the entire community. And when students engage in accomplishing a real task taht is respected in the world beyond school, they are more likely to understand why they need to acquire basic skills and then work harder to learn them (Fried, 2001). Community connections and activism provide rich opportunities for social justice work.

Community Connections

We can build meaningful connection between our students and the community by bringing community members into the classroom and taking our students out into the community. The two primary strategies discussed here, guest speakers and field trips, illustrate the power of these experiences for social justice teaching.

Guest Speakers

Bringing the community into the classroom through guest speakers is an effective means for promoting multiple perspectives or different cultural views on an issue. Guest speakers can include local community activists, artists, people from different culture, people with disabilities, experts on community issues, local politicians, and elderly individuals who can shed light on past events that the class is studying.

Jeffrey, a fifth- and sixth-grade teacher in a rural Colorado town, assist students in being successful community advocates with input from a variety of guest speakers. When a local recreation center was about to be bumped out of the way by a golf course project, Jeffrey brought in city councillors and people from the recreation field to talk about recreation centers and golf courses. After the students learned about the different perspectives, they wrote letters to the local paper advocating fot the recreation center. Jeffrey noted, “I think we were helpful in getting the rec center built first. The golf course came along afterwards.” Jeffrey’s class’efforts provide an example of how teachers can link guest speakers with writing advocacy letters.

A guest speaker can share about events from a personal standpoint that is powerful and fosters students’ empathy. The elementary years are an important time period for developing empathy. The elementary years are an important time period for developing empathy, the ability to understand another’s sadness, joy, or anger. Empathy skils developed early on lay the foundation for a concern for social justice in later years. Hopefully, children who can empathize with others will become adults who have compassion for people who are poor, marginalized, discriminated against, or oppressed. Thus introduction elementary-age students to various perspective and life experiences through guest speakers can be a key step in the process of creating social justice advocates.

Guest speakers can give students a window into another time and place or help them quetion their views when they might not otherwise. Kara shared, “We had a guest speaker who was a veteran of the war in Vietnam and he came during a war unit and talked about what iw was like to be a young idealistic soldier and to go in and really experience what war was like-that was very powerful.” When students talk to an older African American activist who was jailed during the Civil Right Movement or an Iowa farmer who tried to make ends meet during the Great Depression, student develop a very different understanding of history than they would by reading the few sentences devoted to these historical events in their social studies textbooks.

Parents are readily available to be effective guest speakers in the classroom. Pearl, an African American first-grade teacher, brings in parents to counter cultural stereotypes. “I have them come in so the students are also leraning about different parents and the jobs that they do, and they’re not just stereotyping.” She is especially concerned with the image of African American males. She asks blackmale police officers to come in dressed in plain clothes rather than their uniforms. “And then they ask the childrenn, “who do you think I am and what do you think I do” One of the best ways to countes stereotypes is to have students directly interact with people who do not fit the typecast.

Guiding students to ask good questions is an important aspect of maximizing their oppotunity to learn from community speakers. A good strategy is to have students generate question beforehand that are relevant to them and then sen the question ahead of time to the guest speaker. Prepared speakers can more effectively address students’ concerns and thus engage greater interest from their audience. And since questions are an important aspect of social justice education, teaching several lesson on how to ask respectful and interesting question will aide students in other aspects of their social justice education as well.

Field Trips

Another type of experience to connect students and teh local community is a field trip that highlights social justice issues and engages stidents in critical analysis. June, an early career teacher in Oakland, California, takes her third graders to Angel Island, an immigration station for Chinese people comint to the West Coast. She noted both the difficulty and the power of her experience. June finds it hard “to present this stuff without it being a downer or scary or hard for them to kind of digest. Because you can’t give the whole history of it, it’s too complex.” However, she also notes that for some students at least, the field trip is a very moving experience:

They see that sometomes people were stuck on that Island for up to 2 years, waiting to get allowed into the United States. In the men’s barracks, people were etching poems in the walls being so frustrated and sad that they were there. In a bokk, thay have the Chinese character of the poems that were scratched into the walls. Some of the kids in my class read Chinese so it can really resonate with them

Powerful experiences such as this enable students to gain a deeper empathy for those in the past as well as consider the present-day connections and opportunities for action. In the case of Angel Island, students could look at how prejudice and discrimination toward the Chinese ang other cultures still exist today and then develop a plan for creating greater equal opportunity or stronger cross-cultural interactions and appreciation.

Field trip must be accompanied by reflection and discussion if they are to fulfill their potential as social justice learning experience. We need to encourage our students to examine the perspectives on social justice issues promoted by the agency, historical site, or other location visited. We must also think carefully about where to take our students in field trips and make sure that they will encounter artifacts and information that will teach them about the legacy of justuce and injustice in our society.

Activism

There are manu opportunities for students to engage in social action on issues of interst to them. Some of the options-such as letter writing, indirect service project, and school-based activism-can be carried out without leaving the school grounds. Other strategies involve taking students out into the local community to engage in direct service or participate in community rallies and marches.

Writing Letters

Letter writing can be a powerful advocay strategy. Students might write on the principal about a school-based problem or to the mayor about a concern they have in their community. They can write to their city councillors, the governor, or even the president of the United States. Students could also write pen pal letters to children in South Africa, Iraq, or Israel. These are just a few af the possibilities for how letter writing can help students learn about their world, express their views, and work for social change. Because of the power of purposeful writing, ideally every major writing assignment should have a real audience outside the school.

Sometimes letter writing leads to other types of social action as well. When Sue’s graders wrote to California Governor Davis about the unfair distribution of resources in their state’s schools and communities, one of her students had the opportunity to read her letter aloud at a press conference.

Letter writing on controversial issues must be structured carefully to be effective. Pam’s third and fourth graders became concerned about vivisection at the local university and wrote letters to the university professors protesting their use of live animals for scientific learning. Pam didn’t read all the letters before mailing them and some of the children had written inflammatory and disrespectful statements. The researchers were upset and let Pam know. But because Pam welcomed diverse perspectives in her classroom and was open to her students’ learning fron community, they had an engaging dialogue with the scientists and also visited and observed the animals at a nearby medical research lab.

Pam’s experience highlights several important aspects of letter writing experiences. First, we must teach students how to write respectful letters, even when they are voicing concern or dissent. Second, as teachers, we are responsible for the content of students’ letters and should read them before mailing them. Finally, if we are open to dialogue and interactions beyond the initial letter writing, we can model honoring multiple perspective on an issue and maximize our students’ opportunities to learn.

Indirect Service

Community service learning-the integration of community service with the academic curriculum and structured reflection on the service experience-is another strategy for connecting students with opportunities to improve their community. Service learning for social justice does not adhere to a typical charity model, in which students just engage in service for those in need. Service-learning aimed at social change must also involve students in questioning the status quo, examining the root causes of injustice, and working with, rather than just for, those who experience injustice (Boyle-Baise, 2002; Kahne & Wesrheimer, 1996; Wade, 2000, 2001). “ True service learning helps students make the connections between what they are studying in class and real-world issues. It engages students in action and reflection on important community, social, political, and environmental issues” (Berman, 1998, p.31) In-class service-learning projects often focus on indirect service experiences such as fund-raisers (e.g., bake sales, school stores, concession stands at sports events, plays, movies) and collection activities (e.g., books, money, canned goods, clothing, toys). These activities are relatively easy to coordinate, as students do not need to leave the school to complete them. Often school-based service-learning experiences grow out of problems in the school that students notice and decide to change. Upper elementary students might set up a schoowide recycling program to eliminate the large volume of paper trash, create cross-age tutoring for struggling readers, or initiate a peer mediation prigram to address playground conflicts.

Other in-class service-learning activities focus on cross-cultural exchanges. For example, Rebecca’s students adopted an orphanage in Tijuana, Mexico. “Because they do learn Spanish, they wrote a couple of letters to the students in the orphanage and then also sent them some bilingual books,” explained Rebecca. Service-learning project can also educate other students in the school about worthwhile social justice issues. For example, students studying the rain forest could put on a play to raise funds to donate to this cause.

While elemntary school across the nation typically include one or more indirect service activities as special events or enrichment activities, in the social justice classroom such experiences are central to the curriculum. We need to see project that make a difference to others as “the main event, as jobs that replace, not just supplement, those tired old lesson plans” (Fried, 2001, p.207).

School-Based Activism

Many opportunities to address meaningful problems and make significant change happen right withi the school or on the playground. Students often find opportunities for social justice work in the daily life of school policies and practices as they encounter school rules or student behaviours they find unjust. For example, 9 year old girl at one school successfully petitioned the principal to change a rule that allowed boys