Connections to Social Justice Standards: Identity, Diversity, Justice, Action
Strategies:
1. Honoring Students’ Experience and Wisdom
2. Connecting to Current Events and Real-World Issues
3. Project-Based Learning
4. Positioning Students as Agents of Change
Students have a long history of leading social movements in our country, from the Birmingham Children’s March in 1963, one of the most celebrated and effective marches in U.S. civil rights history, to fighting for environmental justice and ridding their schools of Confederate icons.
Educators play a valuable role as adult allies to youth organizing for social justice. Teaching with the Learning for Justice Social Justice Standards, for example, helps students develop as leaders and change agents.
Honoring Students’ Experience and Wisdom
When teachers use students’ lived experiences as the starting point for curriculum and instruction, they affirm students’ identities. In turn, when students have a strong sense of self, they are more likely to respect diversity of experience and to care about injustice in their communities and beyond. The Social Justice Standards can help educators identify grade-level appropriate outcomes for supporting students in their learning about identity.
Recognizing—and helping students to understand—how intersecting identities can function to compound injustice or to add pressure to separate aspects of one’s experiences is also essential in honoring students’ multiple identities. For example, in the LFJ article “Confronting Ableism on the Way to Justice,” disability rights activist Keith Jones explains: “But the fact that I have race and disability at play is often overlooked, as though parts of my identity should be siloed when focusing on other parts. And the times all my identities are recognized, they compound one another in society’s biased view of both my race and disability.”
Connecting to Current Events and Real-World Issues
Asking students to connect what they are learning to what’s happening in the news and in their communities encourages them to draw comparisons, predict outcomes and identify differences. For example, analyzing statistics or other data can help students assign greater meaning to contemporary social trends. Reading primary source news clips or articles can help them connect contemporary or historical texts to current events.
Understanding the historical context of a current event requires students to trace the long-term effects of policies, attitudes, challenges and movements. Using content as a lens for understanding the world, past and present, helps students explore issues of injustice and embrace opportunities for justice and equity—information that can be found in LFJ’s “Digging Deep Into the Social Justice Standards: Justice.” Regardless of content area, making classroom connections to real-world issues promotes deeper engagement and more authentic learning outcomes.
Project-Based Learning
Educators can implement the Social Justice Standards through project-based learning. Because of its focus on open-ended inquiry, as detailed in “Exploring Social Justice Issues Through PBL,” published by Edutopia, project-based learning intersects with social justice education by helping students explore themes of identity, diversity, justice and action through a classroom unit of study or a curricular learning plan, for example.
Edutopia and PBL Works are two websites that can help educators implement project-based learning.
Positioning Students as Agents of Change
Educators can work in solidarity with students against injustice, equipping them with knowledge, skills and networks and supporting them in achieving their demands, as described in the LFJ article “Existence Is Resistance: Supporting Student-Led Social Change.” By positioning students as leaders, educators can promote civic and community education and help students develop social emotional skills like empathy, collaboration, communication, planning, problem-solving and working across lines of difference.
