Reading for justice: Twelfth grade girls\u27 talk around Young Adult Novels

Current trends in educational research about teaching for social justice focus on fostering critical literacy in populations thought to be most affected by inequity, with students of color or minoritized populations as the target of social justice curricula. However, systemic societal change involves challenging white privilege (Macintosh, 1989) and wider promulgation of critical literacy tenets. Students who are in the so-called mainstream of society need to take a critical stance on issues such as racism, sexism, poverty, and intolerance, and investigate their own locations. This study examines the ways Caucasian middle class girls take up a social justice curriculum at a private Catholic college prep high school. Using Young Adult Fiction as the starting point for verbal and written explorations of social justice themes, the study invites discovery about how a student population that considers itself outside of inequitable institutions and situations is located within those same unjust conditions. The study also investigates, as all students are female, how girls respond to Young Adult Fiction as gendered individuals. This study contrasts the way social justice themes are discussed in English class with the way they are taken up in a Theology class of Catholic Social Teaching