Social Justice and the Classroom

Children internalize messages of power from a young age that can affect their perspective on ethnicity, culture, gender, and identity. Without active discourse to these messages, a status quo that perpetuates injustice and the unmet basic educational needs of students will continue. Teaching with a social justice perspective can be overwhelming as it is difficult to transform theories into practice. Today’s students are diversifying more linguistically, culturally, ethnically, and socially. Additionally, more students are growing up in non-dominant groups or non-traditional homes which include children of color, children with single parents, children with same-sex parents, and children from immigrant families. The purpose of this research is to find concrete methods that educators can implement in their classrooms. The research question this study addressed was: How can social justice be incorporated in the classroom? In order to answer the research question, data was collected through literature research in addition to classroom observations at an elementary school in the San Francisco Bay Area over the course of two semesters