One of the reasons I followed this line of inquiry and advocate for cyclical history to be taught is because I went through my entire public school education without a single teacher talking to me about modern social justice. Sure I heard about the Civil Rights Movement and the Suffrage Movement but I was ignorant to the battles people were fighting less than 10 miles from my home. Battles about race, education, safety, prejudice. At the beginning of this year, I told myself I would teach social justice and I tried. I made sure to build lessons about modern activism and social injustice today but I also was scared and played it safe. I stuck to topics where I knew I could control the conversation. As I began compiling my artifacts, I saw the hole I had built and the blunder that I was too obtuse to see in the moment-- I gave students stories of injustice but I never helped them figure out how to fight that injustice. My go-to response was, "Just being willing to have this conversation means we are changing the game." And while that is not untrue, it is also not everything my students needed.
In my future practice, I want to incorporate more social action into my classroom. Picower (2012) describes how teachers can bring social action into the classroom by saying,
Teachers share examples of movements of people standing together to address the issues of social injustice
students learned about in Element Three. Rather than leaving students feeling overwhelmed and defeated,
Element Four helps students understand that working together, ordinary people have united to create change.
While it is natural to highlight leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., it’s equally important to expose students to
the movements that provided the base upon which such leaders stood. By exposing students to people they can
relate to within social movements, teachers provide not only a sense of hope but also tangible models of what it
looks like to stand up on the side of justice ( p. 9).
I spent too much of my lessons looking at the ways leaders effect change but not how regular people effect change.
Taking Picower's idea of empowering students by showing them example movements and average people in those movements, I want to run with it and take it a step further. I want to give students the examples of average people in movements by pulling first hand accounts, reaching out to modern social justice movements to get people to speak to students, and having students go find the movements that ignite their passions and get involved.
I want to introduce students to different current movements as we discuss their historical roots by giving them primary sources, articles, blog, and interviews. Every movement is fighting the injustice they see in front of them and so my job will be to show students what that injustice is and explain the nuances of the movement and its history. Every unit needs to not only have a current events component, but also a component that takes that current events into social justice. I will do this by incorporating articles that explain ways people are combating the issue, lead discussions about how students can help fix this problem, and assign readings and homework that have students digging into the resources I provide around social justice.
It's not enough to tell students that there is a movement called Black Lives Matter and give them one article about it. I need to build lessons that show the history that lead up to that movement (see Juxtapose Historical and Current Events) and then teach students how to investigate the movement.
I can promote student's investigation of social movements by teaching them how to research, giving them the tool to find out more about a movement, assigning them projects that ask them to research different groups, and giving them assignments that ask them to go out address an issue they see around them. For example, to start small students can identify a problem they see in their school and figure out a plan to address that issue. They then implement the plan and record their attempt to fix the problem. This gives students a low stakes environment to test out their plans.
The marriage of constant discussion of social justice with projects that require students to act on injustices they see will help students better understand the importance of social justice in the big picture of cyclical history.
Teachers share examples of movements of people standing together to address the issues of social injustice
students learned about in Element Three. Rather than leaving students feeling overwhelmed and defeated,
Element Four helps students understand that working together, ordinary people have united to create change.
While it is natural to highlight leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., it’s equally important to expose students to
the movements that provided the base upon which such leaders stood. By exposing students to people they can
relate to within social movements, teachers provide not only a sense of hope but also tangible models of what it
looks like to stand up on the side of justice ( p. 9).
I spent too much of my lessons looking at the ways leaders effect change but not how regular people effect change.
Taking Picower's idea of empowering students by showing them example movements and average people in those movements, I want to run with it and take it a step further. I want to give students the examples of average people in movements by pulling first hand accounts, reaching out to modern social justice movements to get people to speak to students, and having students go find the movements that ignite their passions and get involved.
I want to introduce students to different current movements as we discuss their historical roots by giving them primary sources, articles, blog, and interviews. Every movement is fighting the injustice they see in front of them and so my job will be to show students what that injustice is and explain the nuances of the movement and its history. Every unit needs to not only have a current events component, but also a component that takes that current events into social justice. I will do this by incorporating articles that explain ways people are combating the issue, lead discussions about how students can help fix this problem, and assign readings and homework that have students digging into the resources I provide around social justice.
It's not enough to tell students that there is a movement called Black Lives Matter and give them one article about it. I need to build lessons that show the history that lead up to that movement (see Juxtapose Historical and Current Events) and then teach students how to investigate the movement.
I can promote student's investigation of social movements by teaching them how to research, giving them the tool to find out more about a movement, assigning them projects that ask them to research different groups, and giving them assignments that ask them to go out address an issue they see around them. For example, to start small students can identify a problem they see in their school and figure out a plan to address that issue. They then implement the plan and record their attempt to fix the problem. This gives students a low stakes environment to test out their plans.
The marriage of constant discussion of social justice with projects that require students to act on injustices they see will help students better understand the importance of social justice in the big picture of cyclical history.
Now that you have reached the end of my inquiry, I am sure you are curious about the process of how a lesson is created, changed, taught, and observed. Click the link to see an example lesson procedure.