Teaching Students How to Challenge Injustice

Social injustice is all around us and schools are places where K–12 students can learn how to probe and confront systemic inequalities — both for their own well-being and to help make the world a better place — according to the authors of the new book: Educating for Justice: Schoolwide Strategies to Prepare Students to Recognize, Analyze, and Challenge Inequity. Aaliyah El-Amin, a lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and co-authors Scott Seider and Julia Bott, embrace a schoolwide approach to educating for positive social change and lay out research-backed strategies and practices across grade levels and subject areas for school leaders and teachers.

To begin incorporating social action lessons into their schools and classrooms, educators should:

1) Prepare themselves for the work.

Make time for self-reflection

People can be marginalized both inside and outside of schools, the authors note, and they stress the importance of thoroughly examining one’s school culture and practices. Educators should also reflect on their own identity, perspectives, and experiences, and how these shape their knowledge of inequity.  

“In order to responsibly engage with a diverse group of students, we have to ask ourselves: what has been my relationship to various types of injustice, either in the form of having been marginalized or harmed by structural injustice or potentially benefited from it,” explains El-Amin.

Make room to be learners

Teachers may need professional development before they feel comfortable leading discussions about injustice and inequity in their classrooms. As a first step to building teachers’ confidence and understanding, school leaders should ask teachers what topics related to injustice they wish to learn more about in professional learning, says El-Amin.

2) Foster students’ critical consciousness.

“Critical consciousness” was coined by the late Brazilian philosopher and educator, Paulo Freire, and involves the capacity to: 

• Recognize injustice and inequality in the world. Noticing that some people in your community are housed while others are not, for example. 
• Analyze injustice. Students learn to question why something unfair is happening and then explore its root causes and how and why the injustice was created and is sustained.
• Take action to challenge injustice and to transform or resist it. Through participating in social action, students can gain a “sense of possibility and that the things around them don't have to be the same as they are now but can be changed and adjusted,” explains El-Amin.

3) Develop critical consciousness in students. 

• Give learners the opportunity to observe the world around them and articulate what they have seen

Even four- or five-year-old children notice ways in which the world is unjust, but need space to express their thoughts and observations, according to El-Amin, Seider, and Bott.

• Build content knowledge about systems of injustice

Educators can provide books and other materials to help students understand the broader context for injustices that they have experienced or observed.

Children who experience the consequences of structural injustices, such as poverty, may blame their experiences on other factors, including themselves, says El-Amin, who previously taught fourth and fifth grade in a low-income school district in Atlanta, Georgia. With deep content knowledge about how systems and structures create unjust conditions for some and not others, students can shift from self-blame to a more systemic understanding.

• Address why injustice and inequality exist in the first place 

With lessons appropriate for their age, young people can learn about the history behind injustice and examine the consequences of various choices and decisions that have been made by leaders over many years.  

• Show examples of how injustice has been challenged in the past

Through storybooks, movies, and guest speakers, students can see examples of people who have challenged unfair practices and learn about the strategies they deployed and the impact they had.  

• Provide students with meaningful opportunities to practice social action 

“Change doesn’t happen just by thinking about it,” explains El-Amin. It is not enough for students to just recognize and discuss inequity because “if we raise a generation of young people who can identify and analyze injustice without providing them with the skills to act on their insights, we ultimately preserve the status quo,” she says.

Teachers can show students that there are many ways to challenge and disrupt injustice.  Some examples shared by El-Amin include a high school senior who organized a community discussion about gentrification in a humanities project, a third grader who wrote letters to their state representative about hair discrimination, and students who testified before state legislative committees to stop utility companies from shutting off the heat during winter.

4) Align critical consciousness work with state standards.

Nurturing students’ critical consciousness can support other goals for student learning. Justice content can be brought into many different subjects including English, history, science, art curriculum, and even math, and be connected to state standards.  Students in a math class who are learning how to calculate the area of a surface or space might calculate the amount of green space in neighborhoods with different demographics and analyze why wealthier areas tend to have more green areas than poorer ones, El-Amin, says. Writing skills can be honed by drafting letters to state legislators in opposition to unfair policies, for example, and young people can learn about the U.S. political system by studying voting rights laws across states, she adds. Ultimately, “blending existing learning objectives with real-world analysis enhances students' academic skill development rather than hindering it,” El-Amin insists.

5) Use existing curricular justice frameworks to guide planning.   

Educating for Justice also includes a companion study guide which includes tips on choosing a curricular justice framework that can help teachers with developing lessons plans, curriculum units, and projects to develop students’ critical consciousness, “even in states with mandated curricula,” says El-Amin. For instance, Gholdy Muhammad's culturally and historically responsive literacy framework and Gloria Ladson-Billings’ culturally relevant pedagogy framework.

6) Partner with community leaders and families. 

Educators should think about those they can turn to within their own communities for support. Developing partnerships with community leaders, families, and caregivers, who have their own expertise, wisdom, and historical local knowledge, can be fruitful. Teachers can also share tools with families to extend learning at home. 

Additionally, the book has advice on anticipating and responding to concerns from some families who may oppose justice-related topics being taught to their students.