Individual Exploration: "Creating Classrooms for Social Justice"

            When I read the question “What is social justice?” I could not think of what my response could possibly be to that.  And if I couldn’t even define social justice, how could I say why it is important for our classrooms?  After looking through many articles, I came across a post on a website called edutopia, that simplified what being an educator for social justice really means and gave me ideas on some practices I could use to teach my subject, while still advocating for social justice in my classroom.  This post made it clear to me that social justice is important in the classroom because it is about using the power we have as teachers to make a positive change, and it is also about giving students the opportunity to see that they can make positive changes as well.  There were a few suggestions in this post on how to create a classroom for social justice that I really thought was important.  The idea that you need to make sure what you teach is relevant to the real world is such an important one.  This post talks about how you could incorporate what’s happening in the news into your content and it also talks about how you could ask your students if they have any questions about something controversial in the news that they have been hearing about.  I thought this was an interesting point because I never would have thought of that.  I think I would be too afraid of bringing up anything too controversial.  The post also suggests that you should create as many opportunities for students’ voices to be heard as possible through discussion and collaboration and that you should go through all of your materials for your lessons and make sure they include examples from diverse aspects of society.  I think both of these are extremely important.  I agreed with everything this post said.  In my mind, social justice is now defined as promoting tolerance, freedom, and equality for all people regardless of race, sex, orientation, religion, handicap, etc.  And it is important for our classrooms because students need to feel like they are accepted before they can begin to learn.

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/creating-classrooms-for-social-justice-tabitha-dellangelo