The transformative power of Chicana/o Studies: social justice and education

This essay responds to Professor Aguirre’s article in this issue that explores through personal narrative the trials and tribulations of being a faculty member with an expertise in Chicana/o Studies. The author joins his exploration by introducing the structural disadvantages that Chicana/o Studies suffers as a field. She then expounds on what we have gained by developing a new field with an explicitly political focus that includes putting student interests at the center of its development while fighting for economic and social justice as an integral part of its intellectual agenda. Her conclusion explores the challenges that the field of Chicana/o Studies faces as we confront changing demographic and societal conditions.     

The Power of the Pen: Writing Mentorship and Chicana/o M.A. Students

This article draws on my experience as an adjunct professor in the Master's program of the Department of Mexican-American Studies at a large public university in California. Seeing my students’ struggles with writing, I conceived of a set of practices of writing mentorship anchored by a series of writing workshops held in Summer 2012. In this article, I document the pedagogy and content of these writing workshops in order to think about the unique struggles and opportunities Chicana/o Master's students face in the writing process and to provide an outline for other instructors interested in developing a practice of writing mentorship.     

Our stories matter: storytelling and social justice in the Hollaback! movement

ABSTRACT

As feminist and anti-racist scholars and activists have long known, which stories predominate and which are marginalised is always a question of power and authority – about who is entitled to speak, and who has the authority to decide the meanings of words and actions. Storytelling can be used as a tool for social justice, as exemplified by the international feminist movement Hollaback! and its regional and worldwide struggle to end street harassment and make public spaces accessible for everyone. This article examines the practice of sharing stories within one specific Hollaback! group, highlighting the timeliness of the online storytelling technologies promoted by the movement and considering this work as an example of extra-academic feminist education. The article concludes by questioning to what extent feminists manage to formulate their own localised struggles through storytelling within the feminist movement as a whole.     

Wait! It takes time to develop rich and relevant social justice curriculum

Educators of every stripe are too often guilty of adopting the latest cool idea heard at a conference in the belief that they have found what works best for student learning. Implementing the latest idea, without thoughtful consideration, can do more harm than good.     

The reliability and validity of the cultural congruity and university environment scales with Chicana/o community college students

Following the calls for increased research on the educational experiences of Chicana/o community college students, and the development of culturally applicable measures for communities of color, this study examined the utility and the applicability of the Cultural Congruity Scale (CCS) and University Environment Scale (UES) for use with Chicana/o community college students. Applying a psychosociocultural framework, the reliability, construct, and criterion-related validity of the scales for use with a sample of 110 Chicana/o community college students was examined. Results demonstrated adequate reliability and construct validity, with indication of applicability of these scales for the study’s sample. Overall, the study challenges normative practices in educational research that students—despite their race/ethnicity, backgrounds, and histories—face similar educational experiences. Implications are discussed.     

Leading for social justice in challenging school contexts

This article is part of the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP) and aims to analyse the success factors of two Spanish secondary school principals working in the line of social justice in challenging contexts. The factors are arranged in traits and beliefs of principals and in the strategies they used to bring successful leadership. The article concludes by showing a model of leadership that emphasizes both personal and professional characteristics of principals and their central role as agents of social change.     

Educational inequality and social justice: Challenges for career guidance

The article provides a multiperspective approach to educational careers. It first discusses social justice issues in the distribution of the crucial individual and social good of education. It then summarizes core findings of recent international research on processes and factors generating social disparities in the acquisition of education. Based on both it finally provides suggestions how especially professional guidance can contribute to reducing inequalities and increasing social justice.     

Inclusive education: a prerequisite for equity and social justice

Asia Pacific Education Review - Whether education fosters equity and social justice, as it is said to do, is a matter of debate. Whatever the outcome of the debate, education has a better chance of...     

Equity and social justice in teaching and teacher education

This essay presents a review on the theme of equity and social justice in teaching and teacher education based on articles published in TATE since its inception. It is a part of an initiative started by the current editors of TATE to “encourage us all to look backward to deepen our understandings of how earlier research has shaped our current research and the ways we can see the reverberations across the temporal span” (Clandinin & Hamilton, 2011, P. 2).     

Activist dispositions for social justice in advantaged and disadvantaged contexts of schooling

This article advances current conceptions of teacher activism through an exploration of the social justice dispositions of teachers in advantaged and disadvantaged contexts of schooling. We interrogate the practices of teachers in a government school, with a high proportion of refugee students and students from low socio-economic backgrounds, in a high-fees, multi-campus independent school, and in a disadvantaged Systemic Catholic school to illustrate how Bourdieu’s notion of dispositions (which are constitutive of the habitus) and Fraser’s distinction between affirmative and transformative justice are together productive of four types of teacher activism. Specifically, we show that activist dispositions can be characterised as either affirmative or transformative in stance and as either internally or externally focused in relation to the education field. We argue that the social, cultural and material conditions of schools are linked to teachers’ activist dispositions and conclude with the challenge for redressing educational inequalities by fostering a transformative activism in teachers’ practices.     

Towards social justice in education: contradictions and dilemmas

The article builds on prior arguments that research on issues of social justice in education has often lacked constructive engagement with education policy-making, and that this can be partly attributed to a lack of clarity about what a socially just education system might look like. Extending this analysis, this article argues that this lack of clarity is perpetuated by a series of contradictions and dilemmas underpinning ‘progressive’ debate in education, which have not been adequately confronted. At the heart are dilemmas about what constitutes a socially just negotiation of the binarised hierarchy of knowledge that characterises education in the UK, Australia and elsewhere. Three exemplar cases presented from contemporary education curriculum policy in England and Australia are used to illustrate these dilemmas. We then extend this argument to a series of other philosophical dilemmas which haunt education and create tensions or contradictions for those concerned with social justice. It is maintained that we need to confront these dilemmas in efforts to extend conceptual clarity in what it is we are seeking to achieve, which in turn can better equip us to provide the empirical and conceptual information necessary to effectively engage policy-making to remediate inequalities in education.     

Additional support needs reforms and social justice in Scotland

New additional support‐needs legislation in Scotland sought to recognise the way in which poverty, as well as individual impairment, contribute to the creation of children's difficulties in learning. As well as identifying a wider range of needs, the legislation sought to provide parents, irrespective of social background, with more powerful means of challenging local authority decisions on resource allocation, with the aim of delivering a fairer system. This paper uses Scottish Government statistics and family case studies drawn from an ESRC‐funded project (RES‐062‐23‐0803) to examine the links between social deprivation, the identification of additional support needs and parents' ability to use the new dispute resolution mechanisms. There is a strong association between the identification of additional support needs and social deprivation and this is particularly marked in relation to non‐normative difficulties, such as social, emotional and behavioural difficulties, compared with normative difficulties such as blindness and deafness. Statutory educational plans, which provide greater rights to additional resources and formal dispute resolution mechanisms, are disproportionately distributed to parents in more advantaged neighbourhoods. Parents from middle‐class backgrounds appear to be able to use their social and cultural capital more effectively to challenge local authority decisions. The paper concludes that some funding for additional support needs should be allocated on the basis of social deprivation, but there continues to be a need for the assessment and resourcing of individual needs, since poverty has material consequences for individual children, whose difficulties may be overlooked if an entirely systemic approach is adopted. There is a need for greater investment in advocacy service to enable parents from poorer backgrounds to exercise their rights.