Teaching Social Justice Research to Undergraduate Students in Puerto Rico: Using Personal Experiences to Inform Research

This article explores the process of teaching undergraduate students to conduct social justice research. We were interested in understanding how to develop a social justice perspective among students while training them in conventional research methods. The following questions guided our research activities. How can the principles of social justice inform undergraduate research projects? What pedagogical strategies prepare students to conduct social justice-based research? What are the challenges and opportunities in teaching social justice research? We documented the lessons and activities during the field school and collected students’ comments in journals, extensive observations, focus groups, and interviews to understand the influence of social justice on the students’ approach to research. We identify three lessons in teaching social justice. First, teaching social justice requires that students develop meaningful relationships with the community understudy. Second, gender dynamics can prohibit or promote meaningful student engagement and learning. Third, it is important to consider how to integrate, rather than “add on,” social justice activities and discussions into research lessons.     

Interrogating Positive Youth Development Through Sport Using Critical Race Theory

ABSTRACT

Sport has the potential to serve as a context in which youth can develop as players and people. Positive youth development (PYD) through sport is a prevalent strength-based approach that aims to promote life skills acquisition in youth participants. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the utility of critically interrogating PYD through sport using critical race theory (CRT). Select key tenets of CRT serve as analytical tools that can highlight potentially problematic assumptions that underline current approaches to PYD through sport. Interrogation of PYD through sport using CRT exposes its limitations in theory, research, and practice. This race-centered perspective can help to reimagine sport coaching for positive development from a more socially responsible, critical praxis.     

Ideological Repositioning: Race,Social Justice,and Promise

In this paper, I engage in discourse centrally located in the ideology of race in the United States of America juxtaposed to social justice with promise for tomorrow in higher education and beyond. I assert that social justice in kinesiology requires that once hired, retaining, securing tenured status, and promoting faculty of color means having realistic expectations, providing them with mentors, supporting their research agendas, and protecting their workloads. This calls for ideological repositioning: that is, changing our mindset, actions, and behaviors.     

Becoming Teachers for Social Justice: Raising Critical Consciousness

This article shares processes and practices which foster students’ critical consciousness. Critical consciousness, the core of social justice teaching, is a heightened awareness of the world and the power structures that shape it. Teachers can become forces for equity and change by: challenging students to reflect critically on their beliefs and the sources of these beliefs; using text to guide students to look outwards and discover the perspectives and challenges of others; selecting texts purposefully to heighten student awareness of issues of power and equity; teaching students to read texts critically, listening carefully for the points of view of others often ignored or silenced; creating space for dialogue beyond text; and finally, making the world their classroom, blurring the boundary between schools and communities as students research the world and take steps toward change in ways that recognize and re-value our common humanity. Becoming teachers for social justice entails moving students through intentional processes and practices to foster critical consciousness in the hope of effecting change.     

Participatory Action Research and Critical Race Theory: Fueling Spaces for Nos-otras to Research

Drawing on the intersections of a justice oriented participatory action research and critical race theory, this essay explores the possibilities for research embedded in the theoretical, ethical and methodological overlaps between the two. Using the Echoes project as a case study, a participatory collective of intentionally diverse youth from New York and New Jersey brought together in the long shadow of Brown, to document and perform educational injustice in their schools, the essay asks social scientists what it means to engage research that takes seriously the idea of mutual implication, or what Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera, The New Mestiza, 1999) calls nos-otras—whereby research is designed to seek knowledge at the nexus of everyday lived experience and intricate social systems; to ask questions that allow individuals to hold multiple, even opposing, identities; to provoke analyses that requires historical re-memory; to destabilize naturalized power hierarchies. Research that calls for socially engaged questions that demand to be answered collectively through research and action.

Critical Race Theory and Counselor Education Pedagogy: Creating Equitable Training

Infusing critical race theory, the authors discuss specific pedagogical strategies to enhance educational experiences of counselor trainees. The authors then provide an evaluative checklist to facilitate and evaluate curricular integration of critical race theory.     

The Mapping of a Framework: Critical Race Theory and TESOL

In this article, I attempt to elucidate some key intersections between critical race theory (CRT) in synthesis with English language learning as a way to examine linguistic and racial identity in English language teaching. I ask: How does critical race theory apply to English language learners when language rather than race is fore-grounded? What aspects of CRT would assist in theorizing the relationship between language and race for teachers of English to speakers of other languages? In looking to CRT to inform and expand critical approaches to English language teaching, I hope to more closely tie English language learning to issues of race as a way to better understand the intersectionality of these identity factors in the educational context of language teaching and learning. Such inquiry could work to broaden teachers’ knowledge of the ways that linguistic and racial membership inform student learning, and raise awareness about the range of perspectives and cultural interpretations that linguistic minorities may hold.     

公正:人的全面发展的社会指向

公正是社会发展的价值追求,其更深层的蕴涵乃是保证和促进人的全面发展.公正是人的全面发展的社会条件,只有在合乎人性的社会关系中,人才能作为真正的人存在,人才能获得稳定的提升和发展.作为社会关系发展状态的社会公正、作为个体完满德性的个人公正以及人们出于自愿在公正的社会联合中自由地发展并实现自身的价值,都表明了在本质的意义上公正本身就是人的全面发展的内容.     

Urban Poetics: Poetry, Social Justice and Critical Pedagogy in Education

Posing an alternate view to high stakes educational models, the thoughts, opinions and practices of four poetry educators are used to provide critical insights as how to infuse creative outlets in the educational process. In gathering the motivations of these poetry educators, a goal of this project is to encapsulate their philosophies through researcher observation and participation. Engaging such work with social justice at the center creates a particular disposition. It can be subjective in the sense that an understanding of improvement requires an explicit commitment to the improvement of the lives of young people in education through a participatory process.David Stovall is an Assistant Professor of Policy Studies.     

Growth and Resistance: How Deweyan Pragmatism Reconstructs Social Justice Education

While Democracy and Education is often cited within the scholarship on and teaching of social justice education, it and Dewey's work generally remain underutilized. Peter Nelsen argues in this essay that Deweyan pragmatism offers rich resources for social justice education by exploring how Dewey's three‐part conception of growth has both analytical and normative force. Nelsen makes this case by examining student resistance to engagement with social justice issues, and concludes from this analysis that resistance is an opportunity for growth. Furthermore, rather than being a precursor to critical engagement with ideas, Nelsen contends that creating collaborative environments that foster interdependence across group memberships might be as important as the critical engagement itself.     

Critical Race Theory and the Transfer Function: Introducing a Transfer Receptive Culture

In California, the majority of students of color who enter postsecondary education do so in the community colleges. However large numbers of them leave and do not transfer to four-year institutions; in particular to highly selective public four-year colleges and universities. By using the theoretical perspective of critical race theory, transfer can be seen as a dual commitment between both the sending and receiving institution as we put forth the conceptual framework of a “transfer receptive culture.” We define a transfer receptive culture as an institutional commitment by a four-year college or university to provide the support needed for students to transfer successfully—that is, to navigate the community college, take the appropriate coursework, apply, enroll, and successfully earn a baccalaureate degree in a timely manner. We outline five elements, informed by critical race theory, that are necessary to establish a transfer receptive culture and outline specific strategies within each element that practioners can employ on their home campuses.     

The Race for Class: Reflections on a Critical Raceclass Theory of Education

This article is intended to appraise the insights gained from Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Education. It is particularly interested in CRT's relationship with Marxist discourse, which falls under two questions. One, how does CRT understand Marxist concepts, such as capital, which show up in the way CRT appropriates them? The article argues that Marxist concepts, such as historical classes, class-for-itself, are useful for race analysis as it sets parameters around the conceptual use of historical races and a race-for-itself. Two, how does CRT understand the role of capitalism, therefore shedding light on its position regarding the class problem? It is no doubt attentive to class power, but this is not the same as performing an immanent critique of capitalism. As a result, within CRT class achieves a color whereby class becomes a variant of race, better known as classism. Race becomes the theory with class vocabulary superimposed on it. Last, I suggest areas where CRT could combine with Marxism in order to forge a Critical Raceclass Theory of Education.     

Social media: How the next generation can practice argumentation

In this article the authors share how social media, paired with gaming and in-class supports, can facilitate the practice of scientific argumentation and report data that show how students can learn and practice argumentation through these highly interactive and engaging mediums. Social media will continue to evolve and fluctuate in popularity, but no matter the service or software, there will continue to be online spaces for communication, collaboration, learning, and future career growth. Since the role of education is to prepare students to be college and career ready, the use of social media as a component of schooling should be explored. This work has parsed out specific strategies and methods to support higher order thinking through gaming and social media.     

How Exemplar Counselor Advocates Develop Social Justice Interest: A Qualitative Investigation

The authors examined the experiences of 10 peer‐nominated exemplar counselor advocates using grounded theory methodology (Strauss & Corbin, 1998 ). Analysis by the authors yielded a model of how exemplar counselor advocates develop a social justice interest and provided key insights on how counselor educators can enhance social justice interest in their students. Implications for supervisors and scholars are presented.     

Participatory Action Research: Practical Theology for Social Justice

This article looks at participatory action research (PAR) as a means for a religious educator to unite scholarship and teaching with the purpose of building up community and moving toward social justice. A definition of this term is offered as well as short examples of how different religious educators have engaged in doing PAR in their respective communities. The place of the researcher is analyzed and the different methods of research that are a part of PAR are briefly described. As a practical theology for social justice, theological reflection is integrated with the theory and practice of PAR.     

Critical Race Theory and Education: Racism and anti-racism in educational theory and praxis

What is Critical Race Theory (CRT) and what does it offer educational researchers and practitioners outside the US? This paper addresses these questions by examining the recent history of anti-racist research and policy in the UK. In particular, the paper argues that conventional forms of anti-racism have proven unable to keep pace with the development of increasingly racist and exclusionary education polices that operate beneath a veneer of professed tolerance and diversity. In particular, contemporary anti-racism lacks clear statements of principle and theory that risk reinventing the wheel with each new study; it is increasingly reduced to a meaningless slogan; and it risks appropriation within a reformist “can do” perspective dominated by the de-politicized and managerialist language of school effectiveness and improvement. In contrast, CRT offers a genuinely radical and coherent set of approaches that could revitalize critical research in education across a range of inquiries, not only in self-consciously “multicultural” studies. The paper reviews the developing terrain of CRT in education, identifying its key defining elements and the conceptual tools that characterize the work. CRT in education is a fast-changing and incomplete project but it can no longer be ignored by the academy beyond North America.