Changing the World One Community at a Time: Social Justice Education and Teachers as Healing Agents

As a social justice educator and a doctoral student in college of education, in the past 3 years I have developed a pedagogy for a course that discuss cultural foundation in education. The course\u27s foundations are feminist critical pedagogy and social justice education. The pedagogy that I\u27ve developed is rooted in understanding and realizing the importance of connection, community strengthening, and social responsibility - all are components I identify as related to community healing. My pedagogy is concerned with how these three main issues relate to each other, and how do one’s and others’ identity markers/categories play a main role in the classroom and outside of it when realizing and understanding connection, community, and responsibility. Only after the students and I conceptualize the course\u27s framework for the rest of the semester, we start digging in social injustice and inequities in the American society, in the context of the education system. In my proposed presentation I will discuss the relationship between social justice education as a practice of community healing in the context of teachers preparation program. I will explore the possibility that the broader context of social justice education is healing, Educators can be community healers, and as such, they should be equipped with not only tools to identify inequities in the education system and within other public systems in general, but also tools to address the brokenness of the society, the systemic violence that produce those inequities