Understanding Social Justice: The Role of Education in Promoting Equity

social justice what do you think of to me social justice is a simple concept it's the notion that all people in a

society deserve fair and equitable rights opportunities and access to resources but it's become controversial

and nebulous because we've stopped talking about what working for social justice actually looks like working for

social justice can look like this or this it can look like this or it can look like this or my favorite it can

look like that those are my students and whenever I'm asked to articulate my work or my priorities as a teacher I explain

that I believe education can be a tool for social justice but a few months ago I logged onto Twitter as I do and I saw

that a fellow teacher had taken issue with that belief teachers he said should not be social justice warriors because

the purpose of education is to educate and he ended his argument by saying I teach my subject but I reject that

simplification because teachers don't just teach subjects we teach people when our students walk into our classrooms

they bring their identities with them everything they experience in our rooms is bound up in historical context and so

if we insist that education happens in a vacuum we do our students a disservice we teach them that education doesn't

really matter because it's not relevant to what's happening all around them and what's happening all around them well

racism for one in 2016 the University of Chicago released a report that revealed that according to results of the

implicit association test fully eighty percent of white people harbored subconscious biases against black people

believing them to be less intelligent lazier and more dangerous than whites and that's just one concrete example of

the insidious effects of historic and systemic racism on our country for more evidence we could look at incarceration

rates we could look at statistics on police violence against black people we could look at the opportunity gap in

education so yeah social justice belongs in our schools social justice should be a part of the

mission of every school and every teacher in America if we want liberty and justice for all

to be more than a slogan because schools are crucial places for children to become active citizens and to learn the

skills and the tools that they need to change the world so what are those skills okay here's a secret many of the

skills that people need to orchestrate the kinds of change that will lead to justice are already built into the work

of schools things like problem solving critical thinking collaboration perseverance none of that should be

revolutionary on its own combine that with the ability to understand history not as one static and objective

narrative on which we all agree but as a series of intertwined events about which there can be countless interpretations

if we deliberately choose to explore history with our students rather than just teach it we help them understand

that history is ongoing and that it's connected to current movements for justice and we help them see themselves

as potential players within a living history so those are the skills I'm talking about when I say that education

can be a place to help kids learn how to work for justice but maybe the reason that my Twitter critic wasn't happy with

that idea is because he doesn't agree with my definition of justice fair enough maybe he and I don't see eye

to eye politically but here's the thing our aim is to encourage students to articulate their own opinions not to

coerce them into agreeing with us so it actually doesn't matter if he and I agree what

matters is that we're helping students have those conversations with each other and that means that as adults we need to

learn how to become effective facilitators of our students activism we've got to help them learn how to have

really tricky conversations we have to expose them to different opinions and we have to have to help them see how what

they're learning in school connects to the world outside so here's an example of that every year my students study the

history of apartheid in South Africa as a case study of injustice now for those of you who don't know apartheid was a

brutally racist system and the white ruled government in South Africa imposed racist laws to oppress people of color

and if you resisted those laws you risked jail time violence or death and around the country other around the

world of other countries governments including ours in the United States hesitated to sanction South Africa

because well we benefited from its resources so in 1976 the South African government passed a new law which

required that all students in South Africa learn in the language Afrikaans which was a white language and many

black South Africans referred to that language as the language of the oppressor so not surprisingly students

of color were outraged at this law they already attended segregated schools with overcrowded classrooms a lack of

resources and a frankly racist curriculum and now they were being told to learn in a language neither they nor

their teachers spoke so on the morning of June 16th 1976 thousands of kids from the township of Soweto walked out of

schools and they marched peacefully through the streets to protest the law at an intersection they met up with the

police and when the kids refused to turn back the police officers set dogs on them and then they opened fire and the

Salado uprising ended in tragedy apartheid itself didn't end until almost 20 years later but the activism of those

kids in Soweto profoundly changed the way the world viewed what was happening in

of Africa news outlets all around the world published this photo of 13-year old Hector Pieterson who was one of the

first people killed by police in Soweto and it became nearly impossible to ignore the brutality of the apartheid

regime in the months and the years that followed the Salado uprising more and more countries exerted political and

economic pressure on the South African government to end apartheid and it was largely due to the activism of those

kids in Soweto so every year my kids learn about this and invariably they start to draw connections between those

kids in Soweto and themselves and they start to ask themselves what kind of political power and agency they have

they ask themselves whether there would ever be a reason they would risk their lives so that a future generation could

live in a more just world and most profoundly for me every single year they ask themselves whether adults will ever

listen to their voices a few years ago my principal got an anonymous email from one of our students it informed him that

the following day the students planned to walk out of school this was in the wake of Michael Brown's death in

Ferguson Missouri and the students were planning to join a walkout and March in support of the black lives matter

movement so at this point the staff at the school had a decision to make would we use our authority and our power to

try to control the students and prevent them from leaving or would we support them as they put into practice the

principles of social justice that we had taught them about since their ninth grade year so the next morning the kids

left school on mass and they gathered on the lawn and one of the seniors jumped up on a picnic table and went over

safety expectations and the younger kids took it very seriously and as teachers and as staff we told them okay be safe

and we watched as they marched off the kids who chose to stay spent that afternoon in class they debated the

merits of protest they talked about the history of the black lives matter movement and they went on with classes

as scheduled and those who chose to leave pretty Cepeda din a citywide student walk out

and raise their collective voice for justice but no matter where they chose to spend the afternoon our kids learned

valuable lessons that day they learn that the adults in their lives would support them even as we worried for

their safety and they learn that they didn't need us to tell them how or when or even why to protest they learned that

they were members of a community of young people with a shared vision of a more equitable society and they learned

that they had power within that society they learned that events like the Soweto uprising are not ancient history and

they don't have to end in tragedy and that's what education as a tool for social justice can look like and here's

the thing our kids are ready for this kind of work so in 2015 incoming college freshmen were surveyed and eight point

five percent of them said that they were there was a very good chance they would participate in a protest sometime during

their college career and that might not seem very impressive but consider the fact that it's the

largest number of students to say that since 1967 and seventy-five percent of those kids said that helping other

people who are having difficulty was a very important or essential goal for them again the highest number of people

to say that since the late 1960s and research shows us that working for justice doesn't just follow from

building all those skills I talked about earlier it actually goes the other way too

so working for justice engaging in activism helps students build skills like leadership and critical thinking

and it correlates positively with their political participation and their civic engagement and their commitment to their

communities later in life so in other words students are telling us that social justice matters to them and

researchers are telling us that it helps students learn so now it's up to us to listen and that might not be easy

in 1976 one of those kids who participated in Soweto in the uprising he said that that event represented

divorce between black children and their families because their families had grown up under apartheid

and they knew how dangerous it was to speak out they wanted their kids to lay low and stay safe and when our kids

threatened to walk out a lot of the adults in our community were really conflicted too some of us worried that

they might encounter violence other people worried that they would walk out but they wouldn't really know why they

were protesting and some including some students families were really angry that the school hadn't done more to prevent

them from leaving and all of those fears that adults have about getting this stuff wrong all of those fears make

total sense but despite those fears we've got to prove to our students that we will listen to their voices and that

they do have the power to affect change it's our responsibility to equip our students with the tools and the skills

that they need to insist on a more equitable world and then sometimes to get out of their way and let them apply

those skills to things that they care about and living up to that vision is going to require that we are flexible

and it's going to require that we're creative it's gonna require that we're brave enough to stand up in the face of

people who try to silence or D legitimize dissenting voices and hardest of all it's going to require accepting

the fact that sometimes we will be the ones our students will rebel against sometimes they're gonna point out ways

in which systems that we have created or in which we are complicit contribute to inequity it's going to be uncomfortable

and it's going to be painful as they push us to question our own assumptions and beliefs but what if we change the

way we think about rebellion in our kids when our kids rebel when they thoughtfully push back against our ideas

or the way that we do things what if we chose to see that as a sign that we're doing something right and that they're

becoming liberated I know it would be easier if their critical thinking skills manifested in more convenient ways on

their essays or their standardized tests I get it convenience and justice do not often go hand in hand and when our kids

learn to think critically about the world around them they become the kinds of engaged citizens who will recognize

and question injustice when they see it and work to do something about it welcoming rebellion into our schools is

going to require some rethinking about what teaching and learning look like because there's this misconception that

if we give students any wiggle room they're gonna walk all over us and classrooms and dinner tables will

devolve into total chaos and if we expect kids to sit silently and passively receive knowledge from us then

their voices will always feel overwhelming but if we accept instead that learning is sometimes messy that it

requires opportunities to brainstorm and mess up and try again that our kids dislike chaos and want to learn when

they come to school then we can set up schools to facilitate that kind of learning so do me a favor and close your

eyes for a second and imagine schools where teachers are thought partners letting students grapple with complex

hard issues and not necessarily giving them the right answers and imagine schools where we let students make

choices we trust them enough to do that and we let them experience the consequences of those choices

imagine schools where we let students be humans with all of the messiness and the uncertainty that is bound to come with

that and whatever you just imagined it's not mythical it's not unrealistically idealistic because teachers all over the

country are already pushing the boundaries of what teaching and learning can look like with amazing results for

kids they're doing that in all kinds of schools and there are countless models for teachers who want to get better at

helping students learn in a way that's more authentic and engaging and empowering I was reading a book recently

it's called the students are watching and is by Ted and Nancy sizer and in that book they said that the work of

education is often described as a series of nouns like respect honesty integrity and they say those nouns sound really

impressive but often they fail to actually mean anything in practice but verbs they say are active no less

demanding but requiring constant engagement verbs are not structures but rather engines and so as I've read that

I wondered how do we make engine how do we make justice into an engine driving our work as teachers what's the verb

form of Justice I think there might be an answer to be found in the words of Cornel West who famously said that

justice is what love looks like in public and all of my nerdy English teachers in the crowd know that love can

be a noun and a verb school has to be bigger it has to mean more than I teach my subject school has to be about

teaching people to change the world for the better if we believe that then teaching will always be a political act

we can't be afraid of our students power their power will help them make tomorrow better but before they can do that we

have to give them chances to practice today and that practice should start in our schools thank you very much

[Applause] you