Grove City College, PA
Takeaway #1- Social Justice Education is something I’ve never really heard about . It means culturally responsive pedagogy that uses instructional strategies to support and allow for deep exploration of social justice issues. It also creates classroom environments that reflect diversity, equity, and justice and encourage students to speak out against bias and judgement. My elementary school was fairly diverse but we never embraced the diversity nor did we so activities to teach us about injustice and how to act when we see it happening. It engages families and communities in ways that are meaningful and culturally competent. It also teaches social justice curricula as a part of larger individual, school, and community action.
Takeaway #2- there are 4 goals for young students, which are now the social justice domains. They are as follows; identity, diversity, justice, and action. Identity means each child will demonstrate self-awareness, self confidence, family pride, and positive social identities. They define diversity in this context as each child expressing comfort and joy and accurate language for human differences. Justice is recognizing unfairness and have the language to describe it and the understanding that unfairness hurts. Action is each child being able to demonstrate empowerment and the skills to act with others or alone.
Takeaway #3- it more than just activities. We need students to be able to put these things they learn into practice. We need our students to understand empathy. That is something that is really big for elementary students. Empathy is the understanding of or the ability to identify with another person's feelings or experiences. When we put ourselves in another person’s shoes, we are often more sensitive to what that person is experiencing and are less likely to tease or bully them. By explicitly teaching students to be more conscious of other people’s feelings, we can create a more accepting and respectful school community. We can ask our students “What are some words we could use to describe our feelings?”