Practice What You Teach

Social Justice Education in the Classroom and the Streets

Bree Picower

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415895385
• eBook ISBN: 9781136308659
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Many teachers enter the profession with a desire to "make a difference." But given who most teachers are, where they come from, and what pressure they feel to comply with existing school policies, how can they take up this charge? Practice What You Teach follows three different groups of educators to explore the challenges of developing and supporting teachers' sense of social justice and activism at various stages of their careers: White pre-service teachers typically enrolled in most teacher education programs, a group of new teachers attempting to integrate social justice into their teaching, and experienced educators who see their teaching and activism as inextricably linked. Teacher educator Bree Picower delves into each of these group's triumphs and challenges, providing strategies and suggestions for all teachers along with her in-depth analysis.

By understanding all these challenges, pre-service and in-service teachers, along with teacher educators, will be in a better position to develop the kind of political analysis that lays the foundation for teacher activism. This timely resource helps prepare and support all educators to stand up for equity and justice both inside and outside of the classroom and offers a more nuanced portrait of what the struggle to truly "make a difference" looks like.

1
TEACHER ACTIVISM

Social Justice Education as a Strategy for Change

If the United States hopes to maintain any semblance of a public education system, or a democracy for that matter, teacher activism is a critical necessity. The “public” nature of education is rapidly being stripped away by market-based reforms that are pushing an agenda of privatization. Slick marketing campaigns, round-the-clock news stories, and even full-fledged movies such as Waiting for Superman depict teachers as lazy and (with their greedy unions) as the cause of public school failure. By turning the hearts and minds of the general public against teachers (and their unions, their pensions, their seniority, etc.), politicians have succeeded in implementing mass teacher lay-offs, to the tune of 40,000 pink-slips nationally in 2010 (Epstein, 2010) and the deterioration of union benefits and bargaining rights in state after state across the country.

By conveniently glossing over the role that poverty, resource distribution, and institutional racism play in educational success, the current so-called “education reformers” are clearing the path for full-blown privatization of public education using the “bad teacher” as their rallying cry. With these fighting words surrounding the context of education, teachers must participate in the struggle to keep education public and to push for greater justice and democracy in the system. Just as we saw in the mobilization of the Occupy Wall Street movement, mass teacher mobilization is required to recalibrate the debate on what schools, students, and communities need.

Across the country, grassroots groups of teachers have emerged to create organizations such as the New York Collective of Radical Educators, Teachers for Social Justice in Chicago, and Teachers 4 Social Justice in San Francisco (Au et al., 2005/2006; Doster, 2008), Teacher Action Group in Philadelphia, Educators Network for Social Justice in Milwaukee, and more. These groups have created a national Teacher Activist Group network (TAG) that is actively working to organize teachers, in coalition with parent, student, and community groups “to work for educational justice both nationally and in our local communities” (Network of Teacher Activist Groups, 2009). Such groups are rallying around a wide array of issues, such as the rise of market-based school reforms and privatization, the school-to-prison pipeline, nationwide educational budget cuts and lay-offs, the need for culturally relevant curriculum, and more. Teachers uniting and forming mass movements played a significant role in the Wisconsin union uprising of 2011 and has precedents in global struggles such as Oaxaca, Mexico (Denham, 2008). A social movement driven by teachers and teacher-unions is one of the few forces standing up to the attacks that public education is facing in the current context of the United States.

While more and more educators are joining such activist groups to struggle for educational justice, they are still just a small fraction of the teaching force. It is not an understatement to acknowledge that most of the 83% White and predominately middle-class teaching force (US Department of Education, 2008) are not ready to pick up protest signs to start marching in the streets as many of them do not acknowledge the political nature of education. In fact, as a teacher educator, when I ask my pre-service teacher education students why they want to be teachers, the overwhelming response is because they “just love kids.” This lack of a broader analysis of the political nature of education points to a huge gap between who teachers currently are in the United States and the vision of teachers as activists fighting to intercede in social injustice.

As a scholar-activist and a teacher educator myself, I see my role as trying to narrow this gap. Working on multiple levels, my teaching and activism centers on preparing and supporting educators who will stand up for equity and justice both inside and outside of the classroom (New York Collective of Radical Educators, 2003). One of my main outlets for this work is as a core member of a grassroots teacher activist organization called the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE). NYCoRE is a group of public school educators “who believe that education is an integral part of social change and that we must work both inside and outside the classroom because the struggle for justice does not end when the school bell rings” (New York Collective of Radical Educators, 2003). NYCoRE works with politically active teachers to respond to local and national educational policies by organizing protests, conferences, and study groups, and creating curriculum and resources for use in classrooms.

In my other role as a teacher educator, my goal has been to prepare teachers to enact the role of teacher activist. Most of my students, however, do not come to the profession predisposed to think about the roles that equity, diversity, and justice have to do with elementary school teaching. Like all teachers who start by meeting their students where they are, I have to engage my students to think about their often unexamined beliefs about who they are and where they come from, and how that impacts the way they see students who are different from themselves. I want my students to begin to question taken-for-granted assumptions about power, privilege, and various forms of oppression and how these impact education and the educational outcomes of their future students. Through my courses, students examine the ways in which they themselves were taught and in what ways this reinforced or transformed the inequalities that they are uncovering.

My students react in a variety of ways to my courses that explore these topics. Some, as one might imagine, react quite defensively and oppose the idea that topics such as race and homophobia have a place in their teacher preparation program. These students wholeheartedly hang on to mainstream ideologies about students of Color and urban communities, using many discursive tools that block a critical analysis of inequality, particularly around racism. Without this political analysis, the gap between their desire to maintain the status quo and the goal of teaching from a social justice perspective is unlikely to close. Much of my teaching centers around helping these students recognize that inequality in fact does exist, and that mechanisms such as racism, patriarchy, and neoliberalism maintain it. Fortunately, other students say that the course content is inspiring and they become highly motivated to develop curriculum from their emerging understandings of social justice.

It was quickly apparent that one or two semesters of critically oriented coursework was insufficient to support my graduates to become social justice educators. To address this, I started a Social Justice Critical Inquiry Project (CIP) with former students of mine who wanted support from this perspective in their first years of teaching. My initial thinking was that CIP could serve to “incubate” these teachers while they got their first year or two of teaching under their belts, and that by then they would be ready to join groups such as NYCoRE. Unfortunately this was not the case. While the CIP teachers did develop powerful curricular units on social justice topics such as racism, child labor, and gender roles to name a few, the teachers did not seem to move their work outside of their classrooms as activists.

Treating each of these groups of educators that I work with, 1) oppositional pre-service teachers, 2) emerging social justice educators, and 3) developed teacher activists as separate groups, I have done research with and written several articles about each distinct group over the last several years. As I started to explore why the CIP teachers were not developing into teacher activists in the way I had anticipated, I started to think more about the connections between each of these groups of teachers and what shapes the development of increasingly critical and active educators over time. This book is an attempt to look closely at this continuum from opposition to action, examining the obstacles and the pathways toward teacher activism, and the role that teacher education and professional development can play in expanding social justice education from the classroom to the streets.

Social Justice Education: What Is It?

In the last decade, the term and concept of “social justice” in education has both come into vogue and come under fire (Labaree, 2004; Stern, 2006). Rather than allowing this term to be abandoned or co-opted, it is critical for those of us who see education as a vehicle for liberation to be clear about what we mean when we say social justice education (SJE). SJE necessitates the ability for educators to engage on three levels. The first is for teachers to have a recognition and political analysis of injustice and how it operates to create and maintain oppression on multiple levels. The second is teachers’ willingness and ability to integrate this analysis into academic teaching in the classrooms. The third is that teachers must have the mindsets and skillsets to expand their social justice work outside the classroom as activists, with students and on their own, to combat multiple forms of oppression.

While SJE is a distinct field, the term “social justice education” is often referred to as an “umbrella term” (Spalding, et al., 2010; Agarwal, et al., 2010; North, 2008) because there are many ways to center on issues of equity, access, power, and oppression. In fact, when scholars are invoking social justice education to redress these issues, they may just as often be adopting terminology, examples, or lessons from other fields such as critical pedagogy, culturally relevant, multicultural, anti-oppressive, anti-racist education as well as queer, woman, and disabilities studies, critical race theory, and critical pedagogy.

It is this inter-disciplinary nature of centering on issues of equity, access, power, and oppression that makes teaching itself, and teaching from a social justice perspective, a political act situated in cultural, racial, economic, political tensions (Freire, 1998; Montano, et al., 2002; McLaren, 2003; Cochran-Smith, et al., 2009; Schultz, 2008). As Cochran-Smith, et al. (2009) explain, “teaching for social justice [is] an activity with political dimensions in which all educators are responsible for challenging inequities in the social order and working with others to establish a more just society” (p. 352). In order to teach for social justice, educators must be able to recognize the highly political educational context that masquerades as neutral (Kumashiro, 2008; hooks, 1994; Zeichner, 1993), allowing reforms to act as gate-keepers for low-income students of Color in the name of meritocracy and common sense (Hursh, 2007; Kumashiro, 2008). In other words, educators themselves must have a political analysis of how inequality, oppression, and power operate as a starting place for social justice teaching.

The role of the teacher, therefore, is to contribute to the broader political project of identifying and eliminating oppression (Katsarou, et al., 2010) in order to work toward a more democratic society (Lipman, 2004; Freire, 1970; McDonald, 2007). Social justice educators are aware of social inequality and see themselves as responsible for playing a role in diminishing disparities within schools and the larger society (Cochran-Smith, et al., 2009; Giroux, 1988; Kincheloe, 2005; Schey & Uppstrom, 2009). Montano, et al. (2002) claim, “For critical educators, the concept of social justice is a foundation upon which to disrupt and change unjust, unequal, and undemocratic political institutions” (p. 266). They remind us that teachers must move beyond the surface interpretation of social justice in education as “community service days” or penny drives, and actively connect the concerns of students and their communities to the larger constructs of oppression in the form of racism, classism, gender subjugation, homophobia, ageism, and ableism (Katsarou, et al., 2010).

Struggling for Justice Both Inside and Outside of the Classroom (NYCoRE, 2003)

Because social justice educators are concerned with changing broader systems of oppression, they must be ready, willing, and able to work both inside and outside of their classrooms for social change. The work inside the classroom involves developing caring and respectful student relationships and culturally relevant curriculum and pedagogy that prepares students to create change. Outside of their classrooms, teachers must themselves take action to challenge oppressive systems that create educational and societal inequality (New York Collective of Radical Educators, 2003). Cochran-Smith, et al. (2009) provide a definition that addresses this dual nature of SJE: “Teaching for social justice is defined … by ensuring that all students have rich learning opportunities and challenging aspects of the system that reinforce inequities” (p. 374). To be fully realized social justice educators, teachers must be equally concerned with these dual goals if they hope to both educate their students and create actual change.

Inside the Classroom: Social Justice Pedagogy and Curriculum

Within the classroom domain, social justice educators challenge inequality through particular approaches that include 1) the relationships they develop with students, 2) the democratic classrooms they create, and 3) the specific ways in which they are then able to teach students to analyze and challenge oppression.

Social justice educators understand that developing caring relationships (Noddings, 1992; Valenzuela, 1999) with students based on a critical understanding of who students are and where they come from can lead to greater student academic success and leadership development (Cammarota & Romero, 2008). Therefore, social justice teachers take the time to get to know students’ life circumstances (Tan, 2008) and the “broader social and economic forces that make learning difficult” (Cammarota & Romero, 2008, p. 467). This allows teachers to understand the challenges students face based on oppressive conditions these students may be experiencing, rather than rely on deficit notions of students’ capacities. As North (2008) points out, social justice teachers “develop respect for individuals’ differences and recognize how those differences might be informed by individuals’ affiliations with particular social groups, such as those based on race, ethnicity, or class” (p. 422).

While these teachers understand the challenges students face in an unjust society, because they care about their students’ success, they maintain high standards and don’t allow these challenges to become excuses to teach less or to lower their expectations of students’ capacities (Cochran-Smith, 2004; Ayers, 2008). Rather than see these issues as something beyond their control, social justice educators feel a responsibility to address these issues in solidarity with their students (Mikel & Hiserman, 2000) and use this knowledge as a basis for co-constructing curriculum and social action (Camangian, 2010; Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Cochran-Smith, 2004). Social justice educators use students’ home cultures to support academic success and to develop socio-cultural consciousness (Lipman, 2004; Schultz, 2008; Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Camangian, 2010). Such teachers “draw on the talents and strengths that students bring to school (Nieto & Bode, 2008). This leads to greater trust, which ultimately allows for greater opportunities for students to take leadership for liberation (Cammarota & Romero, 2008).

Inside the classroom, these trusting relationships lay the foundation for democratic environments based on care, respect, and liberation that characterizes the classrooms of social justice educators. Such classrooms diminish traditional hierarchies between teacher and student, between those who have something to learn and those who have something to teach (Freire, 1970; Cammarota & Romero, 2008). Social justice educators reject the banking model of education, which posits students as empty vessels waiting to be filled (Freire, 1970). Instead, such educators co-create transformative classroom communities where everyone feels the responsibility to contribute (hooks, 1994) and students take an active role in their own education (Hackman, 2005).

These democratic classrooms provide the setting in which educators engage students in developing analyses of oppression in a manner that is culturally relevant and action oriented. To do this successfully, first and foremost, social justice educators must have deep content knowledge and competence (Montano, et al., 2002) in order to help young people develop the academic literacy skills they need to navigate professional and civic life. Duncan-Andrade and Morrell (2008) explain:

If these students are going to wear the mantle of the struggle for social and educational justice, if they are going to produce knowledge that forces us to look at our worlds differently, and if they are going to motivate people to act as collectives for social change, they will need to be able to read, write, and speak at high levels. (p. 129)

Duncan-Andrade and Morrell link academics to the struggle for justice and view academic skill development and content mastery as key components of social justice education and critical pedagogy. Hackman (2005) also describes three kinds of content mastery that social justice educators must possess: factual information, historical contextualization, and macro-to-micro content analysis. Without these areas of knowledge, Hackman (2005) suggests, educators will be unable to provide students with the necessary information and context to develop the skills described by Duncan-Andrade and Morrell (2008).

This content mastery across multiple disciplines is the foundation teachers use to teach the main theme of social justice education, which is to support students in developing political analyses of how oppression and inequality operate (Lipman, 2004). Moving away from a celebration of diversity and a focus on individuals, SJE concentrates on systems of oppression, power, and privilege, and the processes that perpetuate inequality (Hackman, 2005; Picower, 2011). SJE makes explicit parts of the curriculum that are often left hidden: “the inequities of society and institutional structures in which they are embedded” (Cochran-Smith, 2004, p. 78). By bringing to the surface the knowledge and history of people who have been marginalized and oppressed (McLaren, 2003; King, 2008), students are better able to understand how current conditions have been shaped by struggles for power. This provides them with a political analysis to better understand their own situations and how historical forces have shaped their lives. With these understandings, students are in a better position to act on injustice because they understand root causes of inequality and how they are perpetuated.

In addition to teaching the root causes of inequality and how they affect students’ material conditions, SJE emphasizes teaching about social movements and the processes by which liberating change has happened (Hackman, 2005; Leistyna, 2008). This knowledge is shared so that, rather than feeling disempowered upon learning about systems of oppression (Hackman, 2005), students instead have the opportunity to understand that change is possible, and that ordinary people working in coalition have had powerful results. This lays the foundation for teachers and students to move outside the classroom to take action for social change themselves because they have role models of others who have done so (Cochran-Smith, 2004; Tan, 2008).

All of the work in the classroom, the relationships, democratic practices, and focus on redressing inequality, ultimately serves one purpose: providing students with the tools they need to take action for justice. As Westheimer and Suurtamm (2008) argue, the purpose of SJE is “to equip students with the knowledge, behavior, and skills needed to transform society into a place where social justice can exist” (p. 590). However, some of the literature that describes SJE stops short before explicating the role of actual action, promoting instead student skills and dispositions such as critical thinking, reflecting on their communities, developing agency, and the ability to act (Nieto & Bode, 2008). The development of these skills is critical, but to what end? The ultimate goal of SJE within the domain of the classroom is to allow students to apply their academic knowledge and skills to work toward changing social inequality and oppressive institutions (Westheimer & Kahne, 2007; Dix...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Appendices: Further Resources
• 1 Teacher Activism: Social Justice Education as a Strategy for Change
• 2 “Why Do We Have to Talk about Race Again?”: Oppositional Stances and Tools of Whiteness
• 3 Teaching for Justice: Developing Strategies for Integrating SJE in the Classroom
• 4 Stuck at the Classroom Door: Falling Back on Tools of Inaction
• 5 Reconciling the Vision: Taking Action for Educational Justice
• 6 “Making a Difference”: Teaching in the Classroom and Organizing in the Streets
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index