Connections to Social Justice Standards: Identity, Diversity, Justice, Action
Strategies:
1. Community Research and Outreach
2. Student-Designed Community Projects
3. Supporting Student Action
When students witness activist resistance to injustices in their own communities, it helps them better understand a core component of social justice education: learning to take action against exclusion, prejudice and discrimination. This level of engagement supports students in their ability to both name social injustices in their community and organize to confront them.
Community Research and Outreach
Conducting community-based research can deepen students’ understanding of social justice issues. This research might include opinion surveys, needs assessments, interviews with local activists, visits to historic sites or museums, or online research about the community’s history. This type of research allows students to reflect on and analyze their community’s strengths and challenges and raises awareness of larger structural inequalities.
Community-based outreach can be a unit, semester or yearlong partnership that offers students the chance to establish deeper connections with particular topics, community groups or projects. A partnership spanning multiple years gives each class a chance to build on work done by previous classes, multiplying its effect.
Student-Designed Community Projects
Any social justice issue could inspire an individual or group project designed to support the local community. When students identify a salient local issue and explore strategies for possible solutions, they learn to identify the roots of social problems and how to take action to address them. During this process, they will develop skills in community development, problem-solving and social justice organizing. Possible projects include designing a public service announcement; solving a community issue, such as responding to a natural disaster; providing direct service through a community agency; or hosting a justice-themed art show or event.
Read more about incorporating local history into your classroom in articles like LFJ’s “Recovering and Teaching Local History.”
Supporting Student Action
As previously described in the Youth in Front subsection, educators and schools can support student-led action by encouraging young people to learn about and engage with social justice issues that are important to them. Educators can also support students’ activism by working with community organizations that can help students understand various topics more deeply and suggest ways to maximize their time and talents.
Supporting student action could look like:
- Drawing on students’ knowledge of and personal connections to the issues involved—the more specific the project, the better.
- Including a strong research component that ensures students connect specific local problems to wider societal contexts, causes and challenges. For example, students who volunteer at a food bank should also learn about social and economic factors that drive food insecurity.
- Incorporating opportunities for reflection about student attitudes to ensure the project doesn’t reinforce assumptions or stereotypes about specific people or communities.
- Providing writing prompts to help students consider personal changes they can make to challenge bias, exclusion and injustice.
- Using texts to spark student reflection about community strengths and challenges.
- Working with people or groups the class wants to support, not for them.
After facilitating learning about social justice topics, support students by asking them to create their own personal action plans. This assignment allows students to focus on ways they can enact change within the context of a larger social movement. Give students an opportunity to share their plans with classmates to build accountability for implementing their plans.
