RESPONSE #8 SOCIAL JUSTICE

Social justice is anything that affects human welfare, advocating for fairness and equality for every person. Many topics fall under the social justice umbrella: gay rights, human trafficking, pollution, homelessness, genocide, access to education or clean water, just to name a few.

It is important for secondary students to become aware of social injustices on a small and large scale, and various points in between. Students may be outraged over a closed campus during the lunch break or a double standard for teachers checking their cell phones during class. Students may know about gay marriage getting approved in some states and not others. Students may not know the disturbing statistics about child slavery on a global scale. Before a student enters the world as a young adult, they should know what’s really out there, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

However, I do not think students should be frightened or fanatical by the time they graduate high school. Great care should be taken to expose students to the exciting new possibilities in discovery, invention, technology, and extraordinary volunteer and human relief efforts happening locally and abroad. Sheltering students from blatant and subtle injustices is not protecting them, it’s disarming them. Very cliché, but knowledge is power. Teachers should be careful to support concepts of social injustices with strategies for battling them. Students should be informed about how the world works, which includes both the injustices and avenues for thwarting them; balance the heartbreaking realities with some hope.

Students make excellent activists because they still feel invincible, do not have children or careers demanding the majority of their energy, and are anxious to be taken seriously. Using social injustice in a classroom widens the student’s scopes to the world, and challenges them think bigger than who they are trying to avoid in the hallway. I can see doing either an informative or persuasive essay unit for my future classroom themed around social injustices. I could let the students pick social injustice topics that they feel passionate about and maybe their conclusion or reflection could be something specific they plan to do towards alleviating their particular social injustice topic.