Just Scholarship! Publishing Academic Research with a Social Justice Focus

This article provides support to academics who are committed to engaging in scholarly activities in ways that promote an explicit social justice focus. Moreover, this article provides a broad overview of how to pursue social justice purposes in the field of education throughout the process of scholarly production and dissemination.     

Pedagogy and Foreignness

Based on my reflections on “being a foreigner,” I explore the boundaries of citizenship education in this essay. I use my foreign identity to articulate how social justice education can perpetuate closed-mindedness in classrooms by moving too quickly to student activism. I situate my experiences and reflections on being a foreigner within previous conversations about notions of certainty and indoctrination in the field of education philosophy, and I make an argument to create a safe intellectual space for my students. Creating such space is not neglecting moral responsibility or perpetuating privilege but actually navigating through the binary between “us” and “them.”     

Preparing New Teachers for Urban Teaching: Creating a Community Dedicated to Social Justice

Focusing on community as a key element in teacher education, this paper highlights the importance of new teachers embarking on their careers with a vision for social justice. Paying specific attention to the need for effective teachers in America's urban schools, the author stresses purposeful development of this vision for social justice alongside practical skills for classroom instruction in teacher education. The Teacher Education for the Advancement of a Multicultural Society (TEAMS) Program at the University of San Francisco is described to show possibilities for offering new teachers this combination. Professional development, networking, and service-learning are highlighted as foundations of TEAMS designed to help new teachers begin their careers with vision and a sense of community.     

Advancing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in a Secondary Methods Course

Given changes in the U.S. school-age population, it is crucial that colleges of education prepare teacher candidates to work effectively with students from diverse backgrounds. Because diversity constitutes such a small portion of the curriculum in many teacher education programs, it is crucial that teacher educators find creative ways to incorporate diversity into the courses they teach. In this article a teacher educator at a predominantly White institution in the American Southeast describes how she introduces culturally relevant pedagogy and connects it to the content, activities, and assessments included in the remainder of a course.     

Racial Justice,Hegemony, and Bias Incidents in U.S. Higher Education

Formal administrative protocols for responding to bias incidents are now the norm in higher education. In considering these developments, the author of this article poses critical questions about racial justice work on campus, identifies key features of an under-acknowledged institutional racism, and contributes to discussions about ways that diversity and social justice efforts often reproduce rather than challenge systemic inequities.     

Teaching for Social Justice: Resources,Relationships, and Anti-Racist Practice

Fear and bigotry have spread through schools on the heels of a presidential campaign that promoted divisiveness grounded in racism and discrimination. This article describes the need for and a path toward explicit anti-racist teaching and anti-racist action to counteract this surge of hate speech. In addition, to create a more equitable and just education system and society, the article outlines actions needed to change key aspects of institutionalized racism and intolerance that are embedded in our schools: a) Correcting the unequal resources leading to inequitable opportunities, programs, teacher and leader distribution; b) providing equal opportunity for the kind of deeper learning demanded in the 21st century: A curriculum that supports critical thinking, problem solving, communication, collaboration, and applications of knowledge to real-world problems; c) developing social/emotional as well as academic skills; and d) supporting personalization and relationships so that students feel cared about and cared for and experience culturally responsive, engaging, and empowering learning opportunities in contexts that provide supportive relationships and community.     

Culturally Relevant Education: Extending the Conversation to Religious Diversity

Culturally relevant education represents a wide collection of pedagogies of opposition to social injustice and holds a commitment to collective empowerment and social justice. By using culturally relevant education as a framework, we make the case to include religious diversity as a part of culturally relevant education intentionally. We believe that by opening the dialogue to include religious diversity, we are working together as educators to promote social justice in schools that benefits all children regardless of their religious backgrounds. We synthesize successful examples of culturally relevant education in connection to religion. Further, we argue for teacher educators to incorporate discussion of religious diversity as part of multicultural and social justice teacher education.     

Evaluating Multicultural Education Courses: Promise and Possibilities for Portfolio Assessment

As multicultural education continues to evolve, better assessments are necessary to provide a holistic measure of the effectiveness of multicultural education in the academy. Unfortunately, as multicultural scholars champion the cause for social justice, equity, and access for school children they remain vulnerable to negative promotion and tenure determinations due to misaligned measures of teaching effectiveness in the academy. In this article, a Black female teacher educator at a Predominately White Institution describes how she utilized a Multicultural Education Teaching Portfolio (METP) as a means to inform the measurement of her instructional quality and effectiveness. This discussion provides an overview of current challenges to assessing quality within Multicultural Education courses and provides an outline of possible components of the METP for further consideration.     

The Intersectionality of Culturally Responsive Teaching and Performance Poetry: Validating Secondary Latino Youth and Their Community

In this article the authors draw from culturally responsive teaching and multicultural education to describe performance poetry as an effective strategy for validating secondary aged Latino youths’ lived experiences. Supported by teacher modeling and the incorporation of community poets, students created and shared their own powerful poems that provided authentic opportunities to engage in critical analysis of the poems and issues of equality, social justice, and equity. Performance poetry is successfully used as a tool for validation, honoring and learning from our community, and transformation. Students in this border community were validated in terms of the identities as members of multiple worlds, learned about their own neighborhood from community poets, and were transformed in their identities as community activists through performance poetry. However, in this era of standardized teaching and high-stakes testing, teaching through performance poetry is often not supported in schools.     

Fostering Positive Ethnic Relations Between African American and Latino Children: A Collaborative Urban Program Using Art and History

This account of a 1998 National Association for Multicultural Education workshop suggests how making and discussing art can broaden and deepen multicultural education beyond a tourist survey of food, clothing, and customs. A partnership of artmaking and multicultural education that develops creative behaviors necessary for realizing social justice, through critically reflective art activities, is described. The complexity of creating an equitable, tolerant, and just learning environment with diverse learners is compared to the complexities of making and discussing art. The discussion presents the arts as a metaphoric way of thinking about, a model for developing, and an actual modality for developing multicultural education.     

Exposing Privilege and Racism in The Great White North: Tackling Whiteness and Identity Issues in Canadian Education

As social justice–oriented teachers and teacher educators, it can seem as if we are fighting a losing battle against neoliberal education policies designed to disrupt and dismantle our field. In this article we draw upon traditions of critical race theory, counterstorying, and critical hope to examine the complex realities of contemporary teacher education and envision an alternate reality in which our profession develops and thrives. To do so, we first present a series of autoethnographic critical case studies that highlight dilemmas of practice. We then invite readers to examine each case through multiple lenses, as they grapple with the complexities of a visionary path forward. In so doing, we offer tools for critical professional development that articulate, deconstruct, and reimagine social justice–oriented teacher education and activism in this changing landscape. We close with recommendations to increase our collective capacity as social justice teacher educators, placing a central emphasis on the need for community, critical professional development, and hope.     

Linguistic Privilege: Why Educators Should be Concerned

Awareness of privilege and the unearned power that it brings those who have it is a crucial aspect of becoming a multicultural educator. For some time White and male privilege has been a topic of discussion among educators and people concerned about social justice. All aspects of privilege need to be understood and articulated in order to continue our work to provide equitable educational opportunities for all. This article focuses on Standard native English speaker's linguistic privilege and how educators can increases their awareness of it in order to more equitably educate students learning English.     

Measuring intercultural contact and its effects on intercultural competence: A structural equation modeling approach

This study utilizes a structural equation modeling approach to construct a scale to measure Chinese college students’ intercultural contact and to explore the pathways from intercultural contact to intercultural competence and their significance. Through exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, the study conducted a series of reliability and validity analyses. The results indicate that the intercultural contact scale for Chinese college students has good reliability and validity. Moreover, a path analysis with the structural equation model was performed and reveals that the pathways of intercultural contact are beneficial for improving Chinese college students’ intercultural competence. In terms of direct contact, domestic social media is the most important, whereas for indirect contact, cultural products are relatively more important than multimedia and courses. The implications for the theoretical development of intercultural contact could be significant for scholars engaged in intercultural communication as well as for planning international education training programs.     

A/R/T-Candidates Explore Intersectional Identities Through Art

Teaching diversity and social justice can be difficult when working with teacher candidates (TCs) from primarily homogenous areas, with little to no exposure to pluralistic realities. In multicultural classes, TCs often struggle to understand intersections of race, gender, orientation, socioeconomic levels, religion, ability, and citizenship. In this article, an educational studies professor and four undergraduate students discuss their methodological use of Artist/Researcher/Teacher (a/r/tography) to introduce intersectionality to young students in the classroom. The article discusses a/r/tography as a method in teacher education and provides arts-based examples of how intersectionality can be taught in the PK–12 school system.     

Naming a Personal “Unearned” Privilege: What Pre-service Teachers Identify After a Critical Multicultural Education Course

This qualitative study systematically documents pre-service teachers' responses to a writing prompt asking them to name a personal “unearned” privilege on an end-of-term final assessment. Findings suggest that typical White/European heritage pre-service teachers can name privileges that have advantaged their own lives, even after one 14-week critical multicultural education course. Categories reveal patterns in participants' responses about their own privilege that are traditionally attended to in critical multicultural education curriculum, such as White privilege. However, student responses show that students are most comfortable talking about inherited privileges related to social class and race is named at a lower rate. Other responses show a range of privileges that students can draw on when they reflect on the structured nature of privilege in society. Overall, our findings suggest that when opportunities are created for students to grapple with complex, personal, emotional concepts, the vast majority of students are willing and able to perform this type of reflection and analysis. This work begins a discussion of what kinds of social privilege are more easily discussed in a high stakes assessment after experiences in critical multicultural education. Our findings provide nuanced understandings of how typical pre-service teachers name their own personal unearned privileges and deconstruct their experiences of privilege. Our findings suggest that attention to privileges associated with social class could provide powerful entry into examinations of other personal privileges in critical multicultural education.     

Developing Multicultural Awareness,Knowledge, and Skills: Diversity Training Makes a Difference?

As the population becomes more diverse, social work educators will bear a larger responsibility for educating culturally competent practitioners. To enhance student learning, research should consider those factors that influence students' multicultural awareness, knowledge, and skills. This information potentially can help students better prepare for cultural competency courses and improve student outcomes. The focus of this study was to evaluate BSW and MSW students' (N = 191) multicultural awareness, knowledge, and skills at the beginning and end of a required cultural diversity course. The results indicate that more previous diversity trainings at different sites consistently predict higher pre-test scores while previous diversity training sites and pre-test scores predict post-test scores. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of research, practice, and teaching implications.     

Social support perceptions,network characteristics,and international student adjustment

Two hundred seventy-six international students reported their perceptions of social support from multiple sources (i.e., friends, family, institution, and significant other) as predictors of three facets of cross-cultural adjustment (i.e., general, interaction, and school-related adjustment). In addition, this study explored the incremental effects of cultural diversity and social network size on adjustment by asking international students to report members of their social network that they rely on for instrumental (i.e., task-oriented) and socio-emotional (i.e., relationship-oriented) support. Findings showed that certain sources of social support (i.e., friends and institution) were more strongly related to adjustment than others. Moreover, cultural diversity and the presence of host-nationals in student’s socio-emotional support network were significant predictors of cross-cultural adjustment. This demonstrates the importance of promoting initiatives that encourage host-national and sojourner interactions and diverse relationships within higher education to benefit cross-cultural adjustment.     

Constructions of Race Among Religiously Conservative College Students

The “Whites as victims” motif in conversations about race has been well documented in recent decades. When discussing affirmative action hiring policies, a common belief expressed by Whites is that people of color have been permitted to progress unfairly at the expense of harder working Whites. Whites using this discourse see themselves as victims of a political process that ignores individual responsibility and caters to people of color who are not willing to work toward their own success. Using students’ Blackboard discussion forum postings, the author analyzes ideas about race expressed by students in education classes at a small denominational Christian college in the northeastern United States, and compares these students’ constructions of race to those analyzed in previous research using Whites as subjects in both religious and non-religious settings. The author argues that these students do not differ in their constructions of race and racism from other Whites in non-religious settings. Further, with more complete education and intentional conversation about the history of racism in the United States, these students are able to incorporate understandings of deeper structural causes of racial inequality.     

Tharp's Funnel: A Conceptual Framework for Teaching about Religious Pluralism in Potok's My Name is Asher Lev and Zakiyyah's If I Should Speak

If teachers are to transcend mono-cultural borders and advocate for social justice in liberatory, critical pedagogical practice, then they must understand the relational and causative ethnogenetic layers of experience for students in the global community. Specifically, accommodating religious pluralism is a challenge facing educators today. Immersing themselves and their students in the lives of others through literary narratives provides one immediate and accessible strategy for exploring ethnogenetic experiences and crossing monocultural borders.