Social Justice Awareness Research Articles

Visual Arts as a Lever for Social Justice Education: Labor Studies in the High School Art Curriculum

This collaborative action research study of pedagogy examines an introductory high school visual arts curriculum that includes artworks pertinent to labor studies, and their impact on students’ understanding of the power of art for social commentary. Urban students with multicultural backgrounds study social realism as an historical artistic movement, consider the value of collective activism for social justice, and learn modes of artistic expression that meet state standards in visual arts. The powerful realistic and fantastical images the students produced express their consciousness of impending workforce participation; images communicate their inner voices and provide insights into their perceptions of working in today’s global environment. The art teacher’s reflections include recognition of the unique literacy demands of subject area textbooks, the necessity of schema-building to understand social studies content, the accommodation of the special academic needs of English language learners, and the importance of professional development for educators. Outcomes of the study find value in incorporating labor studies content into the visual art curriculum as an engaging and worthwhile avenue toward meeting visual arts standards and promoting social justice awareness among students.

Teaching a pedagogy of peace: a study of peace educators in United States schools in the aftermath of September 11

This qualitative study, based on in‐depth semi‐structured interviews, depicts practices of seven peace educators in public elementary and secondary classrooms in the United States during the time of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 through the US engagement in war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Focusing on individual perceptions of practice and classroom experiences, the participants described how, despite teaching at a time in which terrorism and war had become national preoccupations, they taught a pedagogy of peace that included recognition and rejection of violence, understanding of differences through dialogue, critical awareness of injustice and social justice, and imaginative understanding of peace. The study discloses a multitude of examples of both peacemaking and peacebuilding in their teaching and development of classroom cultures but a lack of emphasis on anti‐war curriculum. It also reveals the teachers’ motivations for teaching peace education, theoretical influences on their practice, their identities as activists and examples of their curriculum leadership.

The role of universities in achieving social justice

Social justice is not only a vital ethical principle of the human society but also the all-important value of the entire social system. As a public sphere, the university undertakes the purpose to achieve public interest. It plays a significant role in reflecting, defending, and fostering social justice. Nurturing people with social justice awareness is a key mission of the university; it communicates and advocates the ideas of social justice, which helps to foster social justice consciousness of the public; and, for its own part, it must strive to embody and defend procedural justice.

Power, Privilege, and Learning: Facilitating Encountered Situations to Promote Social Justice

As student affairs professionals increasingly move toward developing their students into active citizens that are committed to both social justice and systemic change, it is important for these students to have a keen awareness of the basic concepts that underlie social justice. The authors argue that fundamental knowledge about the concepts of power and privilege plays an important role in the learning process for students and that this knowledge can be gained through experiential learning activities (Kolb, 1984). The authors call attention to important characteristics that are essential for the design and implementation of encountered situations intended to promote social justice awareness and action and offer a clear methodology student affairs professionals can utilize to develop encountered situations that meet the needs of specific student populations.

Korean American evangelicals: new models for civic life

Scholarly and popular commentators lament the deterioration of civil society as a result of American individualism, a decline in some part based on eroding religious participation. In this context, it is important to ask how second-generation immigrants use religious resources to understand, participate in, and potentially change American religion. Scholars stress that religion was vital for the civic integration of earlier European immigrants. However, studies of religion among our nation's newest immigrants largely focus on how religion serves the immigrant community -- for example by creating job networks and helping retain ethnic identity in the second generation. In this book Ecklund widens the inquiry to look at how Korean Americans use religion to negotiate civic responsibility, as well as to create racial and ethnic identity. She compares the views and activities of second generation Korean Americans in two different congregational settings, one ethnically Korean and the other multi-ethnic. Surprisingly, she finds that the Korean churches de-emphasize ethnicity. They look like other evangelical congregations and are concerned about evangelizing in the context of providing social services. Multiethnic churches, in contrast, use evangelical Christianity to legitimate a political and social justice consciousness that values ethnic diversity and and individualized understanding of faith in the context of a conservative Christianity. Korean Americans in both kinds of churches are deeply concerned about helping those in their local community, including non-Koreans and non-Christians. In multiethnic churches, however, Korean Americans also develop an awareness of local politics and a concern with social justice for other ethnic and racial minorities. Ecklund's work is based on ethnographic data from two congregations in one impoverished, primarily non-white city on the east coast, which provided the opportunity to compare how members of each practiced community service in the same urban context. She also conducted more than 100 in-depth interviews with Korean American members of these and seven other churches around the country, and draws extensively on the secondary literature on immigrant religion, American civic life, and Korean American religion. Her book is a unique contribution to the literature on religion, race, and ethnicity and on immigration and civic life.

Book Review: Defending the Community College Equity Agenda

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Jen H. Dolan, coordinator of community service learning at Holyoke Community College, is interested in infusing a social justice consciousness lens into community-based learning. Bill Messner is president of Holyoke Community College with 30 years of experience as a community college administrator dealing with access issues.

Teaching Planning History as a Path to Social Justice

It is important to consider ways to help planning students develop a concern for social justice before they enter professional life. In previous decades, particularly the 1960s and 1970s, the task of instilling a sense of social commitment among planning students was not so difficult. Students were very likely to come into the classroom with a heightened awareness of social justice concerns, in great part because of the civil rights movement and because of an “urban crisis” that may have actually called them into the profession. In the current situation, in which such background and sense of urgency cannot be assumed, it is important to consider ways in which to create classroom learning experiences that foster a sense of social consciousness. Only a limited number of tools exist that can help with this process, however, and each has advantages and disadvantages. Planning history is one of these tools, but it has value only if used carefully and with purposeful preparation on the part of the instructor.

Teaching for diversity, social justice and global awareness

This paper explores the problems and challenges of teaching for diversity, social justice and global awareness in initial teacher education. It addresses the issues of student teacher identity, the attitudes of students, and their approach to classroom practice. The authors argue that general attitudes to issues of diversity, must be placed within the context of changes in society and changing social attitudes. Understanding students' approaches to their praxis is also essential if we are to understand the impact of initiatives in initial teacher education. Few studies have examined the links between pre‐service teachers' attitudes and their classroom practices. Only by conducting such an analysis can any real insights be gained into how student teachers actually respond to issues of diversity and of practice. This paper presents the findings of the quantitative dimension of a multilevel, qualitative and quantitative research study on student teachers' attitudes to diversity and their preferred teaching strategies in the classroom. Cet article étudie les problèmes et les défis de l'enseignement pour la diversité, la justice sociale et la conscience globale pendant l'enseignement initial des professeurs. L'article s'adresse aux questions de l'identité du professeur stagiaire, les attitudes des stagiaires et leurs façons d'aborder la pratique de la classe. Les auteurs indiquent que les attitudes générales envers les questions de diversité, doivent être placées dans le contexte des changements dans leur société et les attitudes sociales. Comprendre la façon dont les stagiaires abordent leurs cours est aussi indispensable si l'on veut comprendre l'impact des initiatives dans l'enseignement initial des professeurs. Peu d'études ont examiné les liens entre les attitudes des professeurs avant leur service et leurs pratiques dans la classe. C'est seulement en dirigeant une telle analyse qu'on peut comprendre comment les professeurs stagiaires répondent aux questions de diversité et de pratique. Cet article apporte les conclusions de la dimension quantitative d'une étude qualitative et quantitative à plusieurs niveaux, au sujet des attitudes des professeurs stagiaires envers la diversité et leurs stratégies préférées à enseigner dans la salle de classe. Este artículo explora los problemas y los desafíos en la enseñanza para la diversidad, la justicia social y la conciencia global durante la enseñanza inicial de los profesores. El artículo examina las cuestiones de la identidad de los profesores estudiantes, las actitudes de los estudiantes, y sus enfoques hacia la práctica en la clase. Los autores indican que las actitudes generales hacia las cuestiones de la diversidad deben ser colocadas en el contexto de los cambios en la sociedad y en las actitudes sociales. Es imprescindible comprender los enfoques de los estudiantes hacia la práctica para que podamos comprender el impacto de las iniciativas en la enseñanza inicial de los profesores. Pocos estudios han examinado los vínculos entre las actitudes de los profesores antes del servicio y sus prácticas en la clase. Es sólo por un tal análisis que se puede comprender cómo los profesores estudiantes responden a las cuestiones de la diversidad y de la práctica. Este artículo presenta los resultados de la dimensión cuantitativa de un estudio cualitativo y cuantitativo en varios niveles sobre las actitudes de los profesores estudiantes hacia la diversidad y sus estrategias preferidas de enseñar en la clase. Dieses Referat erforscht die Probleme und die Anforderungen des Vielfalts, sozialer Gerechtigkeit und Global Awareness bei der Studienreferendarausbildung. Es geht die Fragen der Identität der ReferendarInnen, ihre Denkweisen und ihre Einstellung zum Unterricht an. Die Autoren vertreten den Standpunkt, dass Einstellungen zu Problemen sozieles Vielfalts müssen in Rahmen der Verwandlungen in ihrer Gesellschaft und des sozialen Geisteshaltungwandels eingeordnet werden. Wesentlich sei es ebenfalls, die Einstellungen zum Unterricht der ReferendInnen zu verstehen, wenn wir die Auswirkung neuer Einsätzen bei der Referendarausbildung verstehen wollen. Bisher haben wenige Studien die Beziehungen zwischen den Einstellungen ReferendarInnen und ihren Verfahrungsweisen im Klassenzimmer durchsucht. Allein die Durchführung einer solchen Analyse kann echte Einblicke darin gewinnen, inwiefern StudienreferendarInnen auf diese Fragen des Vielfalts und ihr eigenes Unterrichtsverfahren ansprechen. Dieses Referat stellt folgendes vor: die Ergebnisse der quantitative Dimension einer mehrschichtigen qualitativen und quantitativen Studie über die Einstellungen zum Vielfalt von ReferendarInnen, sowie die Unterrichtsstrategien, die sie vorziehen.

Redefining the urban–rural divide: the significance of place in transformative learning

How do practising teachers and educators enrolled in a Master of Education program view the urban-rural divide in Australia and elsewhere? Using postings to a discussion board, this article looks at teachers’ awareness of social justice and equity issues as they affect educational provision in the rustbelt areas of the cities, and amongst communities in rural and remote areas of Australia. After situating themselves on the divide, participants then engage in memory work, and relate two stories of city or country life that are subsequently deconstructed by other members of the group. The research is part of a much wider project into knowledge construction and assessment online, which seeks to identify changes in beliefs and understandings, and looks at the ways in which tutors, instructors and e-moderators can promote transformative learning.

Understanding Emerson: "The American Scholar" and His Struggle for Self-Reliance

A seminal figure in American literature and philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson is considered the apostle of self-reliance, fully alive within his ideas and disarmingly confident about his innermost thoughts. Yet the circumstances around The American Scholar oration--his first great public address and the most celebrated talk in American academic history--suggest a different Emerson. In Understanding Emerson, Kenneth Sacks draws on a wealth of contemporary correspondence and diaries, much of it previously unexamined, to reveal a young intellectual struggling to define himself and his principles. Caught up in the fierce dispute between his Transcendentalist colleagues and Harvard, the secular bastion of Boston Unitarianism and the very institution he was invited to honor with the annual Phi Beta Kappa address, Emerson agonized over compromising his sense of self-reliance while simultaneously desiring to meet the expectations of his friends. Putting aside self-doubts and a resistance to controversy, in the end he produced an oration of extraordinary power and authentic vision that propelled him to greater awareness of social justice, set the standard for the role of the intellectual in America, and continues to point the way toward educational reform. In placing this singular event within its social and philosophical context, Sacks opens a window into America's nineteenth-century intellectual landscape as well as documenting the evolution of Emerson's idealism. Engagingly written, this book, which includes the complete text of The American Scholar, allows us to appreciate fully Emerson's brilliant rebuke of the academy and his insistence that the most important truths derive not from books and observation but from intuition within each of us. Rising defiantly before friend and foe, Emerson triumphed over his hesitations, redirecting American thought and pedagogy and creating a personal tale of quiet heroism.

Empowering Students for Social Justice (ES2J): A Structured Group Approach

This article presents a structured psychoeducational group intervention for increasing social justice awareness, knowledge, and advocacy skills with upper elementary, middle school, or junior high aged students. The empowering students for social justice model is presented. A general framework that includes goals and activities for an eight-session group is described. Issues processed in the group revolved around the social justice themes of oppression, prejudice, and racism. Implications for school counselors are also provided.

Social Justice Advocacy Readiness Questionnaire

Summary Social service providers of consultation, counseling, and education can benefit from determining their social justice awareness, knowledge, and skills to ensure culturally competent practice and to challenge the multiple oppressions facing clients and staff on individual, cultural, and institutional/systemic levels. The Social Justice Advocacy Readiness Questionnaire (SJARQ) provides a means to advocate for social justice with persons of multiple cultural identities, including all sexual orientations and gender identities. The SJARQ instrument contains three areas of self-assessment for social services staff: individual social justice advocacy awareness, comfort, and values; cultural social justice advocacy knowledge; and institutional/systemic social justice advocacy skills.

Doing Theory with Early Childhood Educators: Understanding Difference and Diversity in Personal and Professional Contexts

This paper will provide an overview of the pedagogical practices we have developed over several years of teaching early childhood educators at the University of Western Sydney, Macarthur, to increase their awareness and understanding of difference, inequality, and social justice. Students are introduced to a range of theoretical contributions to explain difference and social inequities over the three semesters that they undertake the compulsory diversity and social justice subjects. The focus of this approach includes incorporating critical personal reflection as a framework from which students can begin to analyse and theorise the construction of their own attitudes and values towards difference. It provides the opportunity to explore the origins, maintenance, and changes in one's attitudes over time, and how this process is linked to the construction and perpetuation of power and inequality within a broader social context.

Addressing Diversity in Leisure Studies: Three Case Studies

An awareness surrounding diversity issues is evolving in numerous ways within leisure studies, but many questions remain unanswered about using effective teaching strategies. The purpose of this paper is to describe elements of three courses taught at different universities that have sought to address diversity and culture. Using the three courses as case studies, we examined how these courses addressed diversity knowledge, social justice awareness, and cross-cultural skills as a three dimensional framework developed by Washington (1996). We concluded that approaching learning in only one of these dimensions may leave students with partial information. Instructors can best teach to students' heads and their hearts when all three dimensions of learning about diversity are activated.

Addressing Diversity in Leisure Studies: Three Case Studies

An awareness surrounding diversity issues is evolving in numerous ways within leisure studies, but many questions remain unanswered about using effective teaching strategies. The purpose of this paper is to describe elements of three courses taught at different universities that have sought to address diversity and culture. Using the three courses as case studies, we examined how these courses addressed diversity knowledge, social justice awareness, and cross-cultural skills as a three dimensional framework developed by Washington (1996). We concluded that approaching learning in only one of these dimensions may leave students with partial information. Instructors can best teach to students' heads and their hearts when all three dimensions of learning about diversity are activated.

Justice to Charity

Despite what one may be led to believe by breathless reports in the media, the acme of misery in America is not the woes, financial and otherwise, of Donald Trump and Michael Jackson. People lose their jobs, have their assets drained by reversals of fortune, suffer from illiteracy, malnutrition, lack of shelter, and other mishaps. The circumstances in which they find themselves are genuinely distressing. It would be an odd understanding indeed that failed to find these circumstances directly relevant to what morality asks of us. If morality is to count for anything, then surely it must take notice of exigent need. This is not merely the deliverance of a late twentieth-century Western moral consciousness massaged by the blessings of comparative affluence and graced with a newfound awareness of social justice. All traditional ethical codes of which I am aware, sacred and secular, demand that one take the distress of one's neighbor as bearing on one's own activities. “Am I my brother's keeper?” is the question; the well-nigh universal answer is “Yes.” The disposition to be moved by and respond to distress is the virtue ofcharity.

FEMINISING THE MAINSTREAM

Gender segregation remains a remarkably persistent feature of the workforce in all member states of the European Union (EU), regardless of variations in rates of female economic activity, the growth of equality legislation and changing values prompted by notions of social justice. However, the argument that such patterns of segregation, in particular the clustering of women in low skilled, low paid work, represents a waste of human resources has a more powerful resonance in the context of converging economic and social factors. The creation of a Single Market, chronic skill shortages and an ageing workforce have combined with a more acute awareness of social justice and climate of political correctness to put women's skill and training needs higher on the political agenda than ever before. As a consequence, the Commission of the European Communities (CEC), which arguably has a good track record in acting as a catalyst in the promotion of equal opportunities (EO) more generally, is now in a unique position to challenge the rigidities of segregation through its funding programmes for training.