Abstract
Middle level and secondary students' understanding of social justice can be cultivated through educators' inclusion of multimodal texts in the curriculum. By engaging in critical literacy through ongoing analyses of music lyrics, poetry, and prose related to social justice, students can develop a deeper understanding of the presence/lack of social justice in previous historical eras as well as its role today. Educators can ensure that formal explorations of issues surrounding social justice, such as race and socioeconomic status, become part of the curriculum through the inclusion of relevant multimodal texts. This chapter presents a variety of multimodal pop culture texts—including novels and song lyrics—that can be included in a middle school or high school curriculum focused on social justice education.
TopIntroduction
In the current educational climate, which is often focused on high-stakes testing, a renewed emphasis on social justice and student advocacy has moved to the forefront in response to national and international instances of injustice. Today’s students are keenly aware of local and global issues (Flanagan & Levine, 2010; Stufft, 2017), and educators are answering the call to incorporate and implement instruction related to social issues and advocacy as part of classroom learning and in district-wide curricula. In recent years, trauma-informed teaching has gained attention from educators and administrators due to its recognition of the impact of trauma on students. Trauma-informed teaching emphasizes the role of social and emotional learning (SEL) as part of the overall learning experience for each student (Taylor, Oberle, Durlak, & Weissberg, 2017). With a focus on not only recognizing trauma but also providing ways for educators and educational stakeholders to effectively support students in the classroom, trauma-informed teaching provides a foundation for the importance of connecting with students and considering the many facets of life - including childhood trauma and social issues - that impact learning. As middle level and secondary students and their teachers learn and grow together, attention to social issues such as those related to race, socioeconomic status (SES), religion, ability, gender, and sexual orientation often become part of the narrative. In some instances, this narrative may take place informally, such as through casual conversations between a teacher and a group of students, while in other cases the narrative may be more formally intertwined with classroom teaching and learning, such as through students’ critical analysis of text.
Today’s teachers also realize that text no longer refers only to written words but to symbols and multimodal representations of ideas (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996/2006). The use of multimodal texts involves multiple modes of communication, such as music and written language (Anstey & Bull, 2010). While discussions of social justice may look and sound different from one classroom to the next, best practices related to the presentation of social issues surrounding race, class, and power provide a framework for explorations of social justice in middle level and secondary classrooms. As middle level and secondary students gain awareness of social issues, they are poised to consider the role of social justice in their communities and globally; further, as they consume pop culture texts and participate in online communities (e.g., through social media), middle level and secondary students are in a position to question the status quo and to advocate for change. In this chapter, the author presents practitioner ideas for using multimodal pop culture texts in the classroom to foster middle level and secondary students’ explorations of issues related to social justice.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Digital Storytelling: The use of audio and visual components to create and share a narrative. Through the use of digital storytelling, students become active producers of knowledge. For an online guide for using digital storytelling in the classroom, visit digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu , and for examples of digital storytelling to promote social change, visit transformativestory.org.
Social Justice: A consideration of the equity, or lack of equity, in terms of the distribution of wealth and/or the distribution of opportunities among individuals from diverse backgrounds. Social justice issues are present when inequality is caused by policies or programs that favor one group over another, based on a characteristic such as gender or race. The concept of social justice is based on the belief system that all humans should have equal access to resources and should have the same rights.
Biopoem: A biopoem presents the life of a person through a specific 10-line format that includes the person’s name, where the person lives, adjectives that describe the person, important relationships in the life of the person, who or what the person loves, feelings and fears the person has felt, significant accomplishments in the person’s life, and goals or desires of the person. For an example, see: http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson _ images/lesson398/ biopoem.pdf.
Graphic Novels: A narrative presented with consistent visual support and formatted in a similar manner to a comic strip.
Active Learning: Pedagogical approaches focused on cultivating students’ higher-order thinking skills.
Youth Activism: The activities that youth, typically pre-teens and teenagers, participate in with the explicit goal of seeking social change by advocating for issues of relevance and concern.
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL): SEL involves the development of self-awareness, the ability to engage effectively in interpersonal interactions, and the ability to apply self-control. Students who experience childhood trauma may have difficulty managing emotions and difficulty engaging socially with other students and/or adults. Teachers who recognize the role of SEL as it relates to learning are better equipped to meet student needs through trauma-informed teaching practices.
Trauma-Informed Teaching: Pedagogical approaches that stem from a recognition of the occurrence of childhood trauma and the impact of such trauma on a student. Childhood trauma such as abuse, witnessing violence against another person, or surviving a natural disaster, can lead to students having difficulty concentrating in class, difficulty connecting with or trusting a teacher, or can include avoidance behaviors or behaviors that may traditionally be viewed as inappropriate. Teachers who are able to contextualize students’ trauma-influenced behavior and who can recognize the role of trauma in the ways their students react and interact are able to incorporate trauma-informed teaching strategies, such as providing supportive feedback and maintaining consistent routines in the classroom, to foster students’ feelings of safety and belonging.
Multimodal Text: A text that includes more than one modality of information, such as both visual and audio elements, and that requires the reader to interpret and synthesize information presented in the various modes in order to comprehend the text.
Middle Level Education: Pedagogy aimed at meeting the needs of pre-adolescent and adolescent students in grades 4 through 8, recognizing the unique aspects of physical development, cognitive development, psychological development, and social-emotional development that take place during these pre-teen and early teenage years.
Prosocial Video Games: Video games that include prosocial, positive thinking or behavior. The positive behavior can be related to social factors, morals, and/or ethical perspectives. For example, the prosocial video game EVOKE allows gamers to identify, through missions within the game, possible solutions to worldwide issues such as poverty and to also take real-life actions toward making a positive change.
Critical Literacy: A framework for literacy instruction within which teachers model and guide students in considering multiple perspectives of a text in order to determine which messages privilege certain groups. Critical literacy involves the ability to “read the world” through a critical perspective, considering potential sources of political or other influence.