Pursuing Social Justice in ELA

A Framework for Negotiating the Challenges of Teaching

Danielle Lillge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780367681432
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000586503
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Challenges arise when teachers seek to enact socially just instruction while navigating social, classroom, and school dynamics. This research-based, field-tested text offers an accessible process for successfully negotiating these dynamics to identify consequential inroads for making positive educational change. With a focus on ELA instruction, but applicable to other content areas, Lillge's clear framework offers a language for naming, and practical tools for navigating, those spaces where different frameworks for teaching and learning challenge teachers' ability to act on their commitments to teach for justice.

Throughout the book, readers meet teachers who show how they reframed challenges and identified opportunities to work with others within inequitable systems to enact more just and equitable teaching. These case studies in teachers' own words allow readers to analyze how context and classroom culture influence teachers' negotiation processes. Serving as more than thought-provoking exemplars of what to do, the case studies and spotlighted "application moments" also invite readers to reflect on their own negotiations in the fieldwork, classrooms, and professional learning communities where they teach and learn. Comprehensive and illuminating, this book is a vital resource for pre-service teachers, teacher educators, and novice teachers.

Part IOrientations

DOI: 10.4324/9781003134442-1

That you are here reading this book suggests that you believe in the potential of your own ability to teach for justice. That's so important, it's worth repeating in slightly different terms. You are the change. You are the possibility. What an exhilarating prospect!

Making the incredibly powerful choice to become a teacher who is committed to socially just instruction requires a willingness to grapple with a perplexing conundrum. Schools thrive because of brilliant possibilities: students and teachers who see and believe in their potential to nurture the future and contribute to more just and democratic communities. You likely already bring important ideas about how you will or already are teaching in ways that are socially just. You've read, begun learning, and contemplated how to go about teaching for justice.

At the same time, you are likely reading this book with the understanding that as you work to enact socially just instruction you, and other teachers like you who share similar commitments, will encounter challenges. After all, educational change and progress can feel incredibly slow and messy. Schools can perpetuate systems of inequity that preclude students from reaching their potential and prevent, at times, teachers from affecting the change they desire.

How, then, you may wonder, do I find consequential inroads to affect change and teach for justice?

This book offers a set of possibilities for negotiating the inevitable challenges we face as we work to affect change in the everyday places of possibility where we teach and learn: English language arts (ELA) classrooms and professional learning communities. The beauty of our work as ELA teachers hinges on relational work with others: students, colleagues, mentor teachers, field instructors, families, administrators, support staff, community leaders, and the larger institutions to which we belong. Together, we'll explore an interactional process for learning to negotiate and reframe the challenges we face so that we can improve the educational opportunities for learners for whom conditions are unfair, inequitable, and unjust. Moreover, we'll learn how to work with colleagues to enact more just and equitable ELA instruction that benefits all learners.

Be forewarned. There are no magic beans here, no simple, sure proof solutions. Taking up the work of socially just teaching and learning can require extra, complicated work. Yet, that's likely why you're here, too. You know that already. You may (secretly or not so secretly) like a challenge. What we'll explore then is how we engage in the critical work of enacting socially just ELA instruction by negotiating challenges, or more specifically what we'll define as sticking points, so that we find energy and renewal in the opportunities our actions and interactions make possible. Engaging in the process of negotiation, you'll learn about as you read on, offers a way of remaining committed to teaching for justice in the face of perplexing conundrums. This book offers a skillset for working with and in relation to others, including systems of inequity, to create possibility in your everyday teaching and learning, schools and communities, students' lives, and the heartbeat of your professional life.

1Embracing Sticking Points: Resources for Enacting Socially Just Instruction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003134442-2

Like many pre-service teachers, Alex is committed to instruction that opens opportunities for all students' learning. She is eager to jump into her fieldwork, so that she can apply her understandings about what socially just English language arts (ELA) instruction looks like. In the field, things feel “real.” Identifying as a white, cisgender female who grew up in a major metropolitan area, Alex spends a lot of time talking about and reflecting on the value of including diverse lived experiences, histories, and texts in her classroom instruction.

Alex's fieldwork occurs in a suburban high school not unlike the one she attended. Of the nearly 2000 students who attend the school, half identify as white, 40% Hispanic, and the remaining 10% of the population as multiracial, Asian, or Black. Approximately a quarter of the student population is eligible for free or reduced lunch, and just under 10% of students are English language learners. The school dedicates time to, as Alex describes, “professional learning about equity and identifying ways in which [teachers] can create inclusive spaces in classrooms.” English teachers “consistently talk about culturally responsive teaching and socially just instruction specifically in terms of text selection and assignments to reach a broader range of students.”

Aligned with the English department's commitment to infuse at least 15 minutes of daily independent, choice reading into each class, Alex's mentor teacher encourages her to book talk in their ninth grade courses. In her book selections, Alex seeks to promote “voices from historically marginalized writers,” especially “authors of color.” She designs a series of assessment tasks, or “pathways,” from which students can choose to evidence thinking about their choice reading. Among the pathway opportunities, students may “write an alternate ending” to the text, “create a book trailer, write about the characters, or write an online book review.” In her mind, the most substantial opportunity she offers is an invitation for students to become “an advocate” by “selecting a social justice issue” that their text explores, and then in consultation with Alex, developing a way of raising awareness about that issue with “an authentic audience.”

After students have completed the choice reading assignment, Alex reflects on the pathways that students chose to pursue:

1.1 Alex, in her own words

The students in our classes come from a number of different middle schools. I gave students an introductory survey at the beginning of the semester to get to know them better. The different kinds of choices I designed came from what I knew about students. Most were really busy with extracurriculars. Some of them really liked writing. A lot of them liked being artistic. They spend a lot of time on social media. I knew some even entered a film contest every single summer. From this knowledge, I designed specific choices to include things that would be of interest to students and help them connect to the content of their reading. I think the assessment choices say a lot about the connections I was building with students.

I also want students to have choice in what they read. They ultimately got to pick a book they wanted to read. In my book talks, I wanted to model talk about systemic inequities. A few times a week, I would have conversations and ask students to fill the class in on what they were reading to model how to put texts into conversation with one another.

In the end, only one student chose the advocacy project option. I thought it was extremely powerful. After reading Angie Thomas's (2017) The Hate U Give, the student chose to raise awareness about police brutality. It's not frequently discussed in this predominately white, wealthier area of the suburbs. He had two poster boards, and on one he just had the names of victims of police brutality who have unfortunately lost their lives. And he just held that up there and stood in silence after asking his fellow students to read it. And then he had another board that had more information and statistics to define police brutality and who is typically targeted, which invited students to discuss further the issue. It was the biggest example I saw of students discussing systemic inequities. Even just one was exciting to see.

I wish, though, I had seen more students select the advocacy project to take up an issue related to social justice of some kind. I knew that it wasn't going to be too widespread, since students had free choice to self-select their reading. I had a lot of students choose romance YA [Young Adult Literature], for example, versus other suggestions I [offered in book talks] that might have dug deeper into issues of equity and injustice, although some romances do, too.

Sticking Points

Generative Resources for Professional Learning

In this excerpt, Alex shares what bubbled up during her fieldwork with students. Her description offers an example of a sticking point, a moment when differing frameworks challenge a teacher's ability to act. In the day-to-day of teaching and learning, sticking points are commonplace. As teachers—beginning and veteran—work to enact socially just instruction, sticking points emerge naturally. They emerge not just in interactions with students but also in other professional places too: the curriculum we teach, interactions with colleagues or others in our schools and professional learning spaces, the school districts and policies to which we are beholden, and so on. To understand why sticking points matter and what to do about them, teachers need to understand what they are and how they emerge.

Sticking points are byproducts of dissonance between two or more frameworks that differently define the purpose of learning, and by extension, teaching. A framework is a big picture orientation to how individuals and groups of people define the work at hand. Frameworks act as umbrellas that house a number of understandings, which inform decisions. They help people—not just teachers—make decisions all the time. In people's everyday lives, frameworks inform decisions about what to wear, which way to get to school or work most efficiently, with whom to (and not to) engage in lengthier conversations, and how much time to devote to particular tasks. In our teaching lives, frameworks inform decisions about, among other things, what to teach, when to teach what, how to teach that, how to teach these students, and why we teach what we teach.

No matter where you are in your journey as a teacher, you employ and draw upon frameworks for ELA instruction. Even as we sit in other instructors' classrooms, we are thinking about and employing frameworks to make meaning of what we're seeing and experiencing. To surface these frameworks, explore one of the following invitations:

• Think about a single instructional choice you have made in your recent teaching or rehearsal of teaching. It may have been something quite simple like choosing to chat with a student about that student's weekend plans before class begins. Or it might have been a choice that required advanced planning such as deciding to open the discussion of a text by asking students to share their confusion. Once you've identified a single choice, reflect on why that choice mattered to you. What were you attempting to accomplish with that choice? Why did you select that instructional choice rather than others that might have been available to you? What did you hope that choice messaged to students about your role, their learning, and their role in the classroom community you were seeking to foster?
• Think about someone else's teaching you have recently observed or experienced. Identify one instructional move that the teacher made during the lesson. Reflect on what that choice seemed to message to you about the teacher's rationale for action. What did that instructional choice seem to accomplish? In other words, what in your mind, was the goal of that instructional choice? What did that choice message to you about the kind of instruction and, in turn, learning that matters to that teacher?

Your answers to these questions begin to name framework commitments that motivate and inform your own ELA teaching. In this book I, a fellow teacher, focus on our daily lives as teachers who develop or adopt frameworks for socially just instruction that inform our everyday instructional decisions. However, as your reflections and experiences likely affirm, there are different and overlapping frameworks for teaching and ELA instruction that also circulate.

Surfacing frameworks can, at least at first, be challenging. Most often, we draw on framework understandings to make decisions automatically, and we don't need to think about them much when things go smoothly in our teaching and everyone seems to be working toward a similar goal.

When things don't go as planned or as we anticipate they should, however, we experience a clash between frameworks. Clashes, or sticking points, bring ou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Biography
• Foreword by Laura Roop
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Orientations
• Part II Negotiating Sticking Points, An Interactive Process
• Part III Moving Forward
• Index