Thinking more about social justice and education

Much of the material and discussion I encounter in my education classes is focused on social justice and those ideas have an interesting interaction with the dilemmas faced by classroom teachers everywhere. I wrote earlier that I am critical of approaches which seem to focus a curriculum on examining specific issues of social justice without recognizing that education has another form of justice to which it ought to aspire; namely, students need to acquire the skills and knowledge to be able to succeed and empower themselves. Without accomplishing the latter goal, what good is teaching students to be critical? My readings for class recently have helped illuminate why this makes sense and I'm going to share some of that here.

Barbara Comber argues that there are issues of economic justice which should motivate teachers to teach "critical literacies" so as to help prepare their students to compete in a world of ever increasing inequality. She pulls from Piketty's comment that people who own only their own labor are at risk for being left out of income growth and other opportunities. The moral imperative is for teachers to push students toward more knowledge production skills, chiefly critical literacy. To accomplish this, she thinks students should be "researchers of language" - that they should not just learn the content but also learn how a particular field approaches and solves problems. That is, in short, teaching literacy instead of teaching content. Being critical, in Comber's case, applies to that role of students as language researchers. Once they take on that role, they can challenge flaws and argue for improvements. 

I think Comber threads the needle on this issue very well. She repeats again and again that critical literacies do entail a focus on the forces that create inequality and injustice but she doesn't think that is the measure of good critical literacy. I struggle, sometimes, to articulate this concept in discussions so it's nice to see someone do it better than I can. Overall, I don't know if I agree with the economic framing if only because so many education reformers reduce the role of education to job preparedness. Her use of Thomas Piketty is crucial, as he argues for significant social reforms and redistribution which I think education reformers would be uncomfortable with. 

Second, I have another article about the role of critical literacy in education. Hilary Janks provides a more conventional justification for teaching critical literacies: combating social injustice through education. 

In the actual world—where a 17-year-old boy sells one of his kidneys for an iPad; where adult men rape babies; where rebel fighters video themselves mutilating and cannibalizing the body of an enemy soldier to post on YouTube; where imprisonment without trial and tor- ture are condoned; where children are molested by adults they trust; where millions of people lack access to drinking water or sanitation; the list is endless—it is even more important that education enables young people to read both the word and the world critically 

Again, I worry about these kinds of approaches because I want tone sure students are not just getting a crash course in how fucked up the world is. They need to tools and the ability to fix it, too. She walks us through a lesson she's taught about access to clean drinking water and includes examples of data, photos, and other texts she brings to the students as they analyze the issue. The students are challenged to think about who gets access to a valuable resource, water, and how it is unevenly distributed. In a social studies context, I think this less works well and can fit both a pedagogy of social justice and a socially just pedagogy. The students don't stop at learning about a problem, they are assessing how the language creates and distributes power. I see this as a task very much inside the domain of a social scientist and the students are, therefore, going to be acting and thinking like a social scientist would. Lastly, the presence of solutions to externalities (plastic pollution) means there's a solution mindset which urges the students to be an active part of making things better. The connection to student empowerment is there. 

For me, these both helped me understand what a socially just pedagogy looks like that also engages specifically in teaching about a specific issue of social justice. I am, maybe, just a little, possibly, biased in favor of more traditional classroom approaches if only because I see so much emphasis on social justice curriculums and so little on making sure the kids can be successful. As I move into the fall and begin more specific coursework related to teaching literacy, I will have to be more open to how social justice can be woven into a socially just kind of teaching. 

Power and Justice in Education

Two weeks ago I wrote a little about some paradoxes in education and how those made it hard to determine what America considers the role of its educational institutions to be. A brief part of that post was me noting that education is always an exercise in the use of power. I thought more about it this week and how that relates to ideas of justice, in part, because of a discussion I had with a classmate about a socially just pedagogy.

Education is always a exercise of power for a few reasons. For one, it's compulsory in the United States. Even though some parents opt out of the public school system through private or home schooling, the children still have to meet some definition of being educated. Choosing no education is not an option and the government will forcibly remove children from families who do not school their kids in some form. That is, in short, a use of power. The reasoning behind the government's use of power betrays another use of power: knowledge. At its core, the reason education is compulsory is to provide instruction in various kinds of knowledge. These might be specific academic fields. These might be social skills and knowledge needed to work and function in society. There are other. As my previous post points out, I don't think we have a good grip on what exactly we want education to be so it's stuck in a variety of competing modes. We, as a society, empower the government to force children into education so that they may acquire knowledge broadly deemed necessary. Power.

So far so good. An exercise of power by the state in the form of compulsory education is mostly non-controversial. The controversy comes in when the public has differences with the second aspect, the knowledge part. Maybe they don't like evolution being taught in schools because they feel schools should represent christian morals and doctrine. Maybe the public wants schools to be more responsive to the needs of minorities or to provide broader social services. The picture of what good schooling looks like quickly becomes muddled. I'd like to suggest that all these issues ultimately come down to a single idea, justice. When power is exercised in a way which a society broadly agrees with, we consider it just. When power is exercised in a way which a society broadly disagrees with, we consider it unjust. Obviously it's more complex than that binary as societies are capable of holding varied and contradictory views about how power is used by the state. Let's skip the whole discussion of political philosophy, though, because I have other things I'm interested in talking about right now. We can assume that compulsory education is just. Pretty much only extreme libertarians would argue the state has no role in educating children or maintaining an educated populace. Even then, I find most libertarians still accept public schooling but would prefer a more choice oriented model of it.

When is education unjust? Well, we think of it as unjust when schools somehow harm children. Few, if any schools, actively hurt kids anymore. Policy broadly reflects the desire to act justly toward children and attempt to provide them with a good education so that society is broadly capable of sustaining itself. Instead, children are harmed when we perceive their schooling to be inadequate. Maybe they never learn anything. Maybe they are over-disciplined and end up in suspension and, eventually, prison. Maybe they're getting good grades but lack any useful skills. When schools fail to use their power to accomplish their overarching goals, they are not just.

Which brings me to my discussion with a classmate. As I've mentioned before, my current class is about disciplinary literacy. The short version of the thesis for the class is that teachers across various disciplines should envision their classes as opportunities for the students to become members of a discipline (math, science, whatever). Rather than simple knowledge of the facts and procedures required of a discipline, students learn better and have greater opportunities when they are able to walk and talk like a member of that field. Don't just learn about history, learn how to think and speak like a historian. It's also more just. The idea here is that becoming a member of a discipline allows you more opportunities to pursue your own interests. In other words, you are granted the freedom to choose your own path because you have every option available to you.

My classmate disagreed with this approach on a practical footing. She suggested that you can't be certain every student really feels like a member of a discourse and adopts the language and practices of that field. Moreover, just because you teach the students how to think like a mathematician doesn't mean they will have access to those institutions as they age and pursue their interests in college or the workforce. Larger societal forces are at play than just the school environment. She suggested explicitly teaching about those forces as a better and more just alternative. The context of this discussion was an analysis of a math lesson about the Census. We were discussing whether the lesson really did make kids members of math discourse and whether that was a just pedagogy.

My option here is nuanced because I see these as two very separate arguments. On one hand, my classmate is suggesting that the curriculum is only just if it teaches kids about the ways power is used and abused. By helping them see how math and statistics on the US Census can include or exclude various people and, therefore, change how they are represented politically, she is directly teaching students about issues of social justice through her math curriculum. They're still going to do math. They're still going to learn about statistics and how to analyse data but they're going to do so with a lense critical of those methods. The term for this is a pedagogy of social justice. The kids gain knowledge and skills primarily as a means to engage with and critique a field of knowledge. On the other hand, we have something a little bit different although not totally different (remember, I said nuanced). Instead of being concerned only with criticism and the misuse of power, teachers should be concerned with making sure their students acquire power. The way in which students acquire power is by actually learning and actually developing skills which they can use to elevate themselves.

If you've read my blog before, you probably recognize this dilemma because I keep returning to it time and time again.

...I don't see how it could exist outside of very selective areas of the country. How great is your social justice education if it's only happening in New York and San Francisco?

and 

I haven't even brought out the larger critique of ignoring student's language needs to focus on their cultural needs.

There's a paradox here with regards to a pedagogy of social justice. A pedagogy of social justice is not just. Indeed, to the extent where it sometimes leads to ignoring the needed skills and knowledge in favor of a critical approach to learning a field, a pedagogy of social justice could actually be an injustice. If the kids learn all about how the census hurts the poor and minorities but don't learn how the statistics work or how they can be the mathematicians to improve the system, how much social justice is your curriculum really producing? Now, I don't think that's why my classmate was suggesting. I also don't think the two are mutually exclusive of one another but that doesn't mean they go hand in hand either. What a truly just pedagogy allows for is the student to freely engage with the curriculum as an equal - as a member of that field or discipline. This means than in addition to teaching about the US Census and the math behind it, we also teach about the norms, conventions, and practices of math. Can they take this knowledge and use it in real life? Can they take this knowledge and create a career, a cause, or a critique of their own? Ultimately, that is far more empowering than being walked through a series of critiques the teacher determined needed to be discussed.

So let's return to thinking about justice through this lense of power. The pedagogy of social justice my classmate envisions power flowing in one direction. The power to compulsory educate leads to the power of the educator to drive the curriculum in a way she sees fit. Therefore, she decides the best thing for the students to learn is that other institutions in the US abuse power - like how the US Census is a flawed instrument which uses statistics to systematically disenfranchise people. Justice, for a pedagogy of social justice, comes from students learning all about other injustices. The goal of schooling is to help students learn about injustices so they might fight to make it better. Power flows from the government to the schools to the teacher to the students. It's decidedly old fashioned and centered on the teacher and the institution as the center of knowledge and the arbiters of what is and is not worth learning about. Kids are in place to receive this knowledge and act upon it.

Meanwhile, an approach which creates a socially just pedagogy envisions power flowing differently. While school is clearly still compulsory in this model, the teacher is deemphasized as the source of power for the class. Instead, the discipline (mathematics, in the case of the Census lesson) contains the power and the goal of the teacher is to help kids feel like they're part of the discipline. With disciplinary knowledge, the students are the ones with power. They can choose to pursue criticisms and reform, they can choose to pick a different discipline which they find more interesting, they can do whatever they want, reall. Beyond being a more effective way for the students to learn the specific skills and knowledge we expect them to have, a pedagogy which seeks to bring all students into a discipline is one which seeks to give students power.

Between these two, which is ultimately going to prove more just? Which is going to exercise power in a way which society will broadly embrace?

Much of the discussion here pulls from Elizabeth Moje's Review of the Literature on Disciplinary Literacy Teaching published in Review of Research in Education Vol. 31 from March 2007.