Critical Social Awareness Research Articles

Higher-Order Thinking Skills HOTS-based literacy media: An innovative learning strategy to promote the secondary students' social awareness

In this high-technology era, students are increasingly inclined to use digital services such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Unsurprisingly, most of them are becoming more addicted to using their digital devices. Unfortunately, the accessed contents are not always suitable and reliable for their needs and ages. Therefore, they absorb all information directly without filtering the messages. This study scrutinizes the implementation of Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS)-based media literacy to promote the critical social awareness of junior high school students in an EFL classroom. A case study was employed as a research design involving one eighth-grader class and one EFL teacher as participants. The data were gathered via classroom observations, interviews with the teacher and the students, and document analysis. The data were then analyzed qualitatively by referring to the principles of teaching media literacy, Higher-Order Thinking Skills, and social awareness. The findings of this study revealed that the teacher applied some principles in teaching media literacy, namely introducing general concepts, making generalizations, analyzing information, evaluating the content of information, and drawing a conclusion from the students' actions. These principles consequently promoted the students' critical social awareness, including emotional awareness, self-regulation, empathy, active listening, cooperation, and respect. Considering such benefits, HOTS-based media literacy can be used as an alternative learning strategy to promote the students' critical social awareness in EFL classrooms.

Crafting Work Happiness: Balancing Client Agency & Empowerment With Critical Social Awareness

Job crafting is a method taught by career developers and coaches to workers to help them achieve greater happiness in their jobs. Given its agentic, bottom-up approach, job crafting has become closely aligned with positive psychology. While offering empowerment benefits, job crafting has limitations. Given its almost exclusive focus on individual freedom and control, there is little attention paid to the social context, including structural operations of power within an advanced capitalist economy. Three social science critiques of positive psychology and job crafting are examined, with reference to contemporary career development theory. Practical suggestions are made for how career developers might address these social science critiques to best meet diverse client needs. This involves upholding a commitment to client agency and empowerment, whilst developing and maintaining a critical social awareness. Implications for research on job crafting are also discussed.

La formación de profesionales de la educación y el cambio en las comunidades rurales a partir de la IAP

Las comunidades rurales viven problemáticas derivadas de una política económica antidemocrática que pone en desventaja a los grupos sociales más desfavorecidos, por ello, las instituciones de educación superior deben desarrollar en sus estudiantes herramientas que se dirijan al logro de cambios sociales orientados a la búsqueda de calidad de vida y bienestar de la población a partir de la Investigación Acción Participativa (IAP). El propósito de la investigación es analizar las problemáticas de las comunidades rurales y buscar soluciones a partir del desarrollo de la IAP en la práctica diaria de formación de los interventores educativos. Participaron 24 estudiantes, 15 líderes de la comunidad y 50 familias. Se fundamentó en la teoría del desarrollo comunitario. Se utilizó la encuesta, el taller investigativo y la entrevista, se identificaron necesidades y problemas organizados en grupos etáreos, se propuso un plan de acción que se implementará con el apoyo de instancias gubernamentales y se reflexionó sobre la influencia de la IAP en la formación como interventores educativos. Se encontró que la formación teórico metodológica de los universitarios para intervenir en comunidades rurales favorece el desarrollo de la conciencia social crítica de los estudiantes y la praxis de la investigación a partir de la reflexión pedagógica de los profesores, situación que impacta en la transformación e innovación curricular. Se concluye que la formación de profesionales de la educación orientada al cambio social demanda un proceso reflexivo pedagógico desde la praxis y la transformación social e individual así como el cambio en el currículo formal.

Testimonial Injustice and a Case for Mindful Epistemology

AbstractIn her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice Miranda Fricker identifies testimonial injustice as a case where a hearer assigns lower credibility to a speaker due to “identity prejudice.” Fricker considers testimonial injustice as a form of epistemic injustice since it wrongs the speaker “in her capacity as a knower.” Fricker recommends developing the virtue of “testimonial justice” to address testimonial injustice. She takes this virtue to involve training in a “distinctly reflexive critical social awareness.” The main goal of this article is to argue that Fricker's proposed training falls short of the target and that a cultivation of the capacity of being present—the ability to be mindful—would be necessary to develop the critical social awareness that Fricker requires. I want to explore the impact of compassion and open‐mindedness—virtues cultivated in mindfulness training—on testimonial justice specifically and virtue epistemology generally. In attempting to develop an epistemic account informed by mindfulness—a mindful epistemology—my primary goal is to bring Buddhist insights on how to anchor the mind by training it to be fully present and attentive into the focus of mainstream Western philosophy. More specifically, I argue that doing so allows us to appreciate the crucial role that a prediscursive level of cultivation plays in the development of testimonial justice.

Youth as Interviewers: Methods and Findings of Participatory Peer Interviews in a Youth Garden Project

The process of conducting peer interviews has not been widely reported on as a participatory method. Youth gardens are known to support individual and community health and well-being. Producing for the Future utilized the principles of community-based participatory research within a gardening and microenterprise program for low-income youth. In addition to several mixed-methods data collection techniques, a process was implemented in which youth participants designed, conducted, and debriefed peer interviews in order to address their own questions about program impacts. Participants in the peer interview process observed four emergent themes, which were not identified elsewhere in the data, focusing on individual outcomes and the successes and challenges of implementation within unique community settings. A methodological discussion of the process of peer interviewing within a participatory research project is presented. Researchers found that the benefits of the peer interview process included high levels of youth engagement in research, shared learning and new ideas generated by youth, and building youth capacity for critical social awareness. Researchers present lessons learned from the peer interviewing process, as well as implications for using peer interviewing in future participatory research and evaluation projects.

Outcome Evaluation of the Intergroup Project

Using both quantitative data based on pre-post test questionnaires and qualitative data based on personal interviews with program participants, the authors examine the outcomes of students' experiences in a school-based intervention for improving intergroup relations between adolescents at two high schools. Specifically, the authors investigate whether students increase their awareness of social identities and intergroup conflict, their level of competence with dialogue and intergoup understanding, and their capacity for social action around intergroup conflict. The findings demonstrate that the intervention was successful in increasing students' critical social awareness and developing skills for conflict reduction and promoting intergroup relations. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice.

Developing Critical Social Awareness Through Digital Literacy Practices Within the Context of Higher Education in Brazil

This paper discusses a teaching experience developed in the context of Brazilian higher education, which had as its central goal developing critical social awareness through digital literacy teaching. The discussion begins with an explanation of a Neo-Gramscian approach to critical literacy education, contextualising this perspective within different conceptions of schooling. This broad philosophical debate is then related to key perspectives that have informed the social turn in literacy studies. The discussion emphasises that a positive teaching intervention should link language instruction to social awareness and ideological critique. Finally, these theoretical assumptions are illustrated by a report of a classroom experience in which university students learning basic digital literacy concepts (hypertext and hypermodality) were assigned the task of designing sites to suit the interests of a local peripheral community. The findings illuminate some contradictions and possibilities for teachers who try to combine literacy teaching with more complex social analysis.