Defining Social Justice Education
For us, social justice education requires a recognition that society is stratified in many significant ways, including along lines of race, language background and proficiency, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. This stratification is built into the sociohistorical and structural fabric of our schools and institutions and impacts people on both structural and individual levels (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017). As social justice educators, we must recognize these power relations and understand our role in systems that can lift up some members while marginalizing others (Carlisle, Jackson & George, 2006). Perhaps equally important, we seek opportunities to take action (Grant & Sleeter, 2010). That means aiding in the identification and examination of instances of injustice so our students – who will soon follow us into the classroom – can grapple with issues of injustice that they might otherwise overlook in their daily lives.
In acknowledgement that we fit the dominant demographic of teacher today: white, middle class women, we believe it is necessary to examine the role we play in the overall system. We understand that our voices have power, and it is necessary to not just how we think of how we fit, but how others may perceive us. As social justice educators, we constantly reflect and analyze our own thinking, actions, and ideologies and in turn we teach our students to think critically about our singular and collective knowledge bases, beliefs, and ideologies and how we have come to know and understand concepts, as well as whose knowledge(s) we are privileging in our curricula, pedagogies, and understandings. As we learn more and reflect on these concepts, we are also driven to action, to praxis, and we understand the importance of engaging constantly in this cycle of learning, reflecting, doing (Hackman, 2005). Because for us, the point of being a social justice educator is to create a more just society.
This is where our practices come in. We believe that in order to achieve a more just educational system, we must reframe issues of access and equity for students of color (Paris & Alim, 2014) on two fronts: we must foster linguistic and cultural flexibility for students of color as well as white students; and, we must re-center the aim of education to multilingualism and multiculturalism. Promoting these aspirations is increasingly important to meet the demographic imperative (Hodgkinson, 2002) of the educational landscape across our state and the nation: there are increasing numbers of culturally and linguistically diverse students represented in public school classrooms, students who deserve to be seen, supported, and cared for by the predominantly white teachers who work as educators today.