Connections to Social Justice Standards: Identity, Diversity, Justice
Strategies:
1. Personal Reflection Activities
2. Open-Ended and Higher-Order Questions
3. Critical Reading
4. Teaching and Practicing Digital Literacy
5. Critically Surveying the Curriculum
Critical engagement emphasizes the value of students’ learning, increasing the likelihood that they will use the knowledge and skills they build in the service of their academic, personal, social and political lives. Educators who encourage critical engagement help prepare students to recognize and resist injustice.
Educators must also engage critically with materials. From auditing their curriculum through a lens of inclusivity to selecting materials that resist dominant narratives, educators can model critical engagement by continually interrogating their own work.
Personal Reflection Activities
Using art, individual conversation, group shares or class discussions, students can engage in personal reflection by connecting to the text, identifying and explaining their emotional reactions to a text, and answering questions such as:
- What events or ideas in the text connect to your personal experiences? (Note: Depending on the content being reflected upon, students may choose to disclose or not disclose personal information. Support them in this inquiry by providing them with space and listening attentively.)
- What inspires or upsets you about the text?
- What questions does the text raise?
- How do you see issues from the text playing out in your school, neighborhood, community or society?
- What do you want to change as a result of your reading?
Open-Ended and Higher-Order Questions
Higher-order thinking questions promote critical engagement and stimulate discussion. Because they have no single correct answer, open-ended and higher-order questions require students to form and defend an argument by hypothesizing, speculating and sharing ideas. As outlined in “How to Make Your Questions Essential,” available on the ASCD website, teachers can ask students open-ended and higher-order questions throughout a lesson or at the end of a lesson or unit.
The two questions below demonstrate the difference between a closed, lower-order question and an open-ended, higher-order question.
- Which rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights focus on economic issues?
- Which rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are most important? Why?
The first is a closed, lower-order question because there is one right answer and to reach it, students use basic thinking skills like memory or summary. The second is an open-ended, higher-order question that requires critical analysis of the text to defend a perspective. For more on higher-order thinking skills and for examples of open-ended questions, see “Generating Effective Questions” on the Edutopia website.
In addition, many educators use Bloom’s taxonomy to scaffold questions. However, Bloom’s taxonomy is a theory of assessment, not teaching. Applying Bloom’s incorrectly can have the unintended effect of lowering rigor for students. Instead, Roland Case, Ph.D., executive director and co-founder of The Critical Thinking Consortium and author of the article “Putting Bloom’s Taxonomy to Rest,” recommends that teachers:
- “Adjust the difficulty so that every student engages regularly in ‘higher order’ learning activities.”
- “Appreciate that understanding subject matter is not a ‘lower order’ task that can be transmitted; it requires that students think critically with and about the ideas.”
- “Understand that inviting students to offer reasoned judgments is a more fruitful way of framing learning tasks than using verbs clustered around levels of thinking that are removed from evaluative judgments.”
Critical Reading
Using strategies like Reading Against the Grain (6-12) or Resistant Reading (K-5), both available from Learning for Justice, can help students identify, question and analyze dominant narratives. Educators can also apply critical reading when selecting materials for their curriculum.
Asking questions like these can also help start the conversation:
On publishing trends and which texts are designated as literature:
- Whose stories are most often told? To whom?
- Whose stories are most often missing or left out? Why?
- What are some reasons different stories might receive different kinds of attention or exposure?
- How do you think this text supports or pushes back against these trends or traditions?
On the role of the reader:
- What do you think someone very similar to the main character might find most interesting about this text? What might they like or dislike about it?
- What do you think someone very different from the main character might find most interesting about this text? What might they like or dislike about it?
- What character do you most identify
- with? Why?
- What is something you wish this text included? Why?
On the role of culture:
- What critical topics (e.g., race, gender, religion, sexual orientation) does this text address? What can we infer that the author’s family, friends and community thought about these topics?
- What critical topics are not addressed in this text?
- Are there any critical topics you thought the text might address that it doesn’t?
- Why do you think that’s the case?
Teaching and Practicing Digital Literacy
Because students spend more time online than ever before, teaching digital literacy is increasingly urgent. In the LFJ article “Reimagining Digital Literacy Education to Save Ourselves,” we define digital literacy as “a holistic approach that cultivates skills that allow people to participate meaningfully in online communities, interpret the changing digital landscape, understand the relationships between systemic -isms and information, and unlock the power of digital tools for good.”
Digital literacy can help students recognize and combat hate speech, anti-democratic viewpoints, online disinformation and conspiracy theories. For multilingual students and families, digital literacy is especially important because—as outlined in the Washington Post article “Misinformation online is bad in English. But it’s far worse in Spanish.”—social media companies intervene less often when online misinformation is in languages other than English.
In addition to teaching students digital literacy, educators have a responsibility to use a critical lens when selecting and sharing online information and materials. Educators can analyze the author, the source, why the author created the material and how the author’s biases affect the content.
Critically Surveying the Curriculum
Being an effective social justice educator means learning the content—and the history of how it has been taught—from the perspective of historically underrepresented groups. Lorena Germán, author of Textured Teaching: A Framework for Culturally Sustaining Practices, explains in the LFJ article “What It Means to Be an Anti-Racist Teacher” that every discipline, including math and science, “has been implicated in the project of racism.”
By knowing the history of their discipline, teachers can learn to avoid inflicting violence, as detailed in the LFJ article “Ending Curriculum Violence” by Stephanie P. Jones, Ph.D., and facilitate more inclusive, affirming learning experiences for all students. As noted in the article, curriculum violence doesn’t have to be intentional. As Jones explains: “The notion that a curriculum writer’s or teacher’s intention matters misses the point. Intentionality is not a prerequisite for harmful teaching. Intentionality is also not a prerequisite for racism. … [Curriculum] violence occurs when educators and curriculum writers have constructed a set of lessons that damage or otherwise adversely affect students intellectually and emotionally.”
Educators who wish to critically survey their curriculum can investigate the Culturally Responsive STEAM Curriculum Scorecards—from New York University’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools—to analyze their yearlong curriculum, a learning plan or even their classroom library. Specific tools such as those found in two of LFJ’s publications, Reading Diversity and Supporting LGBTQ+ Young People, can also help educators assess their texts.
Teachers can also ask the following questions when selecting or curating curricular materials, as educators Lisa P. Stevens and Thomas Bean suggest in the article “Redefining Literacy”:
- Who is the author? Why did they create this material?
- Who is represented in the material?
- What groups are absent, not represented or underrepresented?
- Who stands to benefit or be hurt by these materials?
- How do other texts and authors represent the ideas reflected in these materials?
