Social Justice in the English Classroom

NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) held a conference in December 2009 addressing this issue of social justice in the English classroom. They start out by stating that the Declaration of Independence states that we are all equals. We all know that this is completely false because of power, racialism, social class, and gender fairness. Their goal is to have the English classroom differ from the Declaration’s failure and gives tips on how to accomplish this within every English classroom. 

They define social justice into 7 categories:

1. A goal that evades easy definition 
2. A grounded theory
3. A stance/position 
4. A pedagogy   
5. A process 
6. A framework for research  
7. A promise

This website goes into these beliefs more deeply and activities that could benefit us (English teachers) into incorporating into our own classrooms. 

The belief that social justice as a pedagogy is an interesting topic that should be addressed. The first sentence instantly caught my attention. The document states that “Social justice pedagogy presupposes that all students are worthy of human dignity, that all are worthy of the same opportunities in education, that the contract they enter into in schools must honor their sociocultural advantages and disadvantages,that it must seek to offer the same educational, sociocultural , and psycho-emotional opportunities to each student in order to help them meet and obtain a basic threshold that is mutually beneficial to each party who enter in the school space.” Let’s unfold this lengthy sentence. What the NCTE is saying is that we need to treat all o our students equally no matter their background or socio-economic standing. Too many teachers give up on their troubled, or “poor” students because they don’t know how to handle them. I think if we just handles them like HUMAN BEINGS, teachers wouldn’t have such a big problem. We shouldn’t be giving up on the bad students, we should be focusing more of our attention on these students so that they can be equal to the achieving students. 

For example: In my second period classroom at Mead High School, there is a student who comes from a different cultural background and has a hard time grasping the fundamentals on English. Instead of disregarding him as hopeless and giving up on him, I have allowed myself to be there to help him and tutor him to better his English work. We are reading paragraphs allowed to the class, and after I saw how many errors were in his paper I took his out of the pile and returned it to him telling him I would come in early to help him fix his paper. If I would have just left it be, he would have been torn apart by his fellow classmates and he would have probably given up on even trying. We have to put in more effort for those less fortunate and help them catch up with the rest of the class otherwise we are letting our students and ourselves down. 

http://www.ncte.org/cee/positions/socialjustice