Connections to Social Justice Standards: Identity, Diversity, Justice, Action
Strategies:
1. Self-Assessment
2. Ongoing Reflection and Learning
3. Professional Development
4. Critical Friend Relationships
Cultural competency—the ability to work effectively and sensitively across cultural contexts—involves learning, communicating and connecting respectfully with others regardless of differences. Culture can refer to an individual’s race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, immigration status, disability and age, among other things. All these factors strongly influence people’s lives and experiences.
Regardless of their background or identities, effective social justice educators bring both cultural understanding and self-awareness to their work. The process of building this understanding and awareness includes several key commitments:
- Seeing diversity as a strength and an opportunity rather than as an issue or problem.
- Asking how issues of similarity, difference and power affect relationships with colleagues, students and families.
- Understanding how identities, including experiences of privilege and marginalization, shape how we see one another and the world.
- Developing skills and attitudes that bridge cultural differences, such as empathy, flexibility, listening without judgment, appreciation for multiple cultural perspectives and cross-cultural communication.
- Committing to ongoing learning and engaging in relevant professional development, dialogue, study and personal reflection.
- Understanding how sharing life experiences can help build relationships with students and enhance the curriculum.
Many educators work in schools and communities with changing demographics. Commitment to cultural competency, therefore, requires ongoing effort, reflection and personal humility.
Self-Assessment
A number of cultural competency self-assessments exist, including one offered by the Georgetown University National Center for Cultural Competence (see Appendix C: Online Supplement). Most include either self-reflection questions or checklists of indicators related to culturally competent practices against which teachers or organizations can measure their work. These tools can be used for personal learning and group discussion.
Ongoing Reflection and Learning
Journaling regularly is an effective reflection and self-discovery practice. Journals help capture evolving thoughts on social justice content as well as classroom or school dynamics related to identity and diversity. They also offer an opportunity to record and reflect on personal experiences related to social justice teaching and relevant insights from discussion groups and training sessions.
Helpful reflection prompts include:
- Who am I? What are my identities? How do they relate to power and privilege? How do they show up in my classroom?
- How can I use my life experiences to build relationships with students and improve my curriculum and teaching?
- How do issues of similarity, difference and power affect my interactions with colleagues, students and families?
- How would I describe my own educational experience? How does that affect the way that I teach? What messages does that send to my students?
- What power dynamics are present in my classroom? Are there imbalances of social power? What can I do to address those?
- What did I learn from this professional development? How can I implement it in or adapt it for my classroom?
Professional Development
School communities benefit when teachers and other staff participate in professional development opportunities focused on working with LGBTQ+ youth, students with disabilities, multilingual learners, and specific racial, religious or ethnic groups. Reading and sharing professional journals, books or blogs related to social justice education can augment professional development.
Researchers from the Learning Policy Institute define effective professional development as “structured professional learning that results in changes to teacher knowledge and practices, and improvements in student learning outcomes.”
Effective professional development:
- Is content-focused.
- Involves active learning.
- Invites collaboration.
- Uses models and modeling.
- Involves coaching and extra support.
- Offers participants feedback and time for reflection.
- Results in sustainable, positive changes to practice.
Learning for Justice provides virtual and in-person professional learning opportunities.
Critical Friend Relationships
Collegial friendships can provide safe, constructive opportunities to work through curricular material, implementation issues or difficult interactions. Critical friends can observe one another’s classes, review assignment ideas, discuss the joys and complexities of social justice education, and point out biases or oversights. To be successful, all of this must be done within a context of mutual care, regard and trust. The National School Reform Faculty is one organization that offers protocols and activities for critical friends to use in helping each other work toward a specific goal.
