Social Justice in the Classroom

What is our job as teachers? This is a question I have been asking myself a lot lately, and to be honest I am not sure if I have found an answer, I am not sure if I ever will, it is a very complicated question that has a lot of room for twists and turns. So far what I have come to decide is that my job as a teacher is going to be rewarding my student’s freedom. Freedom to have their own opinion, freedom to share that opinion, freedom to question, and be questioned, freedom to have their own story and share it, freedom to disagree, freedom to not always know the answer. I believe that to give freedom is to give the students the power. Education is power, but educational freedom is powerful. When talking about social justice I think that freedom should be at the root of the conversation we have with our students, and that they have with each other. When I was reading this article that I have identified so strongly with she mentioned that “the issue [social justice] is not mine to let go. It is either mine to acknowledge or ignore.” Social justice means allowing students to take agency in their own learning. When students are personally invested in what they are learning they are going to be more passionate in their responses and more engaged in their peers. Taking students personal experience and applying it to what is going to happen in the real world outside of your classroom is recognizing your privilege as a teacher and then learning from your students. Torres mentions in her article that when talking about social justice with your students it is important to remember that these conversations while they may seem difficult to have in your class are vital, because your students will be facing these difficult things in life outside of your classroom. Giving students the opportunity to express their opinions in a constructive and meaningful way while also learning from their peers is what will equip them to have fully developed opinions about social justice topics in their adult life. I am firm believer that providing a classroom culture that allows difficult conversations to happen should be a main focus for us as educators. Giving students more freedom to control their own education and beliefs will only help them later in life, and will fulfill our job as educators, to provide purposeful avenues of education and exploration. 

Link to the article I responded to-
https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/why-teaching-about-social-justice-matters 

Literature Creates Free Thinkers

This essay takes a standpoint on education that while to me seems empowering and progressive, can seem dangerous and unteachable to others. In one of my other classes I was actually just having a conversation with my professor about the purpose of higher education as it applies to critical thinking and development. We talked a lot about how textbooks that are used in public education all stem from the same publishers, and a lot of them are produced from the same states. So, when thinking about the availability for students to learn and create their own ideas and opinions, there options to do so will be limited based on the condensed amount of information that we provide them with. Students today are not getting the expose needed to other works of literature that will allow them to become critical thinkers. This is what my professor and I mostly focused on, was the idea that college, any post-secondary education is now being used as a tool to formulate critical thinking skills, or rather that until students are coming to college we are not teaching them to be free thinkers. There are a lot of problems with this design and rational for thinking, the biggest flaw being… not every student is going to college.

The fact of the matter is we don’t want every student to go to a university, because we need students going into the workforce, going to trade schools, the military, community college, all of these options are great ones for students, but then why is it that we are not teaching our students in in their formative years to be “critically empowered and critically literate citizens” because those are the skills they will need for all avenues post-secondary. Education needs to shift from knowing the text, to thinking critically about that text, and applying it to your everyday life, and experiences. We need to make students “critical consumers of all information that they encounter in their daily lives, and to give them the skills to become more capable producers of counter-information.” Teaching students how to agree or disagree is fine, but the real power comes when we can teach students how to agree or disagree with reason and authority, to question things, to formulate their own opinions without other people telling them what to think or how to think it. This essay while talking about critical pedagogy mentions how to incorporate literature beyond the average textbook, and use it to look at concepts such as social change, multiculturalism, comprehension, and critical thinking, while keeping individual teacher’s practices “equally unique and equally meaningful.”