Living the Work: Promoting Social Justice and Equity Work in Schools around the World: Volume 23

This book provides a deeper understanding of what it means to promote social justice and equity work in schools and communities around the world. Throughout this book, narratives describe how authors continue to reshape the agenda for educational reform. They remind us of the significance meaningful relationships play in promoting and sustaining reform efforts that address the injustices vulnerable populations face in school communities. Their voices represent the need for engaging with obstacles and barriers and a resistant world through a web of relationships, an intersubjective reality (see Ayers, 1996). As authors engaged in thinking about addressing injustices, they describe how their thoughts transformed into actions moving beyond, breaking through institutional structures, attempting to rebuild and make sense of their own situations (see Dewey, 1938).

This narrative describes the author’s belief that life has meaning and purpose, even if it is for a short time. The author shares his understanding of what it means to be the “other” and how he can work to make the world a better place.

This chapter provides discursive space for story-telling to provide narrative reflection on the experiences associated with struggles and advantages attributed to advancing non-traditional perspectives into practice. I utilize an auto-ethnography (L. Anderson (2006). Analytical autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35(4), 373–395; C. Ellis & A. P. Bochner (2000). Auto-ethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 733–768). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; L. Richardson (2000). Writing. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 923–948). London: Sage) to detail my lived experiences as a scholar who has encountered the outsider-within status in academe (Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge.). I detail my dual role as a social agent and as an African-American female scholar and the complexities of teaching social justice while promoting the need for activism of social justice and equity in our U.S. schools. Therefore, this study amplifies silenced voices regarding challenges for African-American female scholars engaged in transformative pedagogy in academe. I will utilize a Critical Race Theory lens to examine the racialized experiences that persist for African-American faculty seeking to advance transformational perspectives in academe, and thus through teaching, helping students to realize inequities in K-12 classroom settings (Grant, C. (2012). Advancing our legacy: A Black feminist perspective on the significance of mentoring for African-American women in educational leadership. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25(1), 101–117.).

Colleges of education must do more than expose prospective educators to “best” practices for teaching and leading linguistically, culturally, and ethnically diverse students. Educators need to develop attitudes, knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to become competent in catering to diverse student populations in schools. In this chapter, we seek to extend this conversation using a critical pedagogical lens. We draw specifically on Paulo Freire’s concept of radical love to interrogate our ways of teaching, leading, and opening up spaces for dialogue toward educating pre-service teachers and leaders who are critically conscious. Additionally, we use Paulo Freire’s concept of radical love to explore the similarities and disjunctures in our pedagogy and positionalities as international scholars of color.

A problem in many public schools is the implementation of improper inclusion. This creates an environment where the number of students with different abilities is almost equal to the number of general education students. As an aspiring school leader learning about social justice issues in public schools, I wanted to create an art piece that stood for an area of inequality that I often see in schools. Inclusion is a controversial issue because there is research to show that both inclusion and pull out models for students on an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) can be effective. I took the issue of inclusion in the classroom as my social justice issue for an artmaking project I was completing for a social justice course. We were encouraged to pick a social justice issue that we felt strongly about and incorporate it into our artmaking project. My artist mentor and I decided weaving would be a great way to show the issues of inclusion in schools.

A teacher shares her journey of learning to lead for social justice in a U.S. public school. Look forward to learning about the successes and struggles through her transformation. She shares an enthusiasm and passion to persevere even when met with resistance. These stories will help inspire others to try to begin their daunting task to create changes in their classrooms, schools, districts, and communities.

The Indiana Writers Center (IWC) believes that everyone has a unique story to tell. The mission of IWC is to nurture a diverse writing community, to support established and emerging writers, to improve written and verbal communication, and to cultivate an audience for literature in Indiana (About the Indiana Writers Center, 2012, para. 1).

For more than 30 years, the IWC, a nonprofit organization, has worked to foster a vibrant literary writing community in Indiana, providing education and enrichment opportunities for both beginning and accomplished writers. (About the Indiana Writers Center, 2012, para. 1).

Teacher, writer, and community activist Darolyn “Lyn” Jones was asked to join the staff at the IWC in 2005 to meet the new initiative: take writing out of the center and to marginalized writers. Her charge was to help writers both find and share their voice.

The origin of this initiative began with a group of girls, ages 12–22 in a maximum state prison. The girls became the Center’s muse and because of their words, the Center was compelled to build, create, and nurture even more youth writers. The backstory of the IWC work with the girls will be featured in this chapter.

The product of that early work has now evolved into Building a Rainbow, an eight-week long summer writing program designed to teach creative narrative nonfiction writing program to youth using a curriculum that helps them identify meaningful moments, see them in their mind’s eyes, and bring them alive on the page in vivid, compelling scenes.

Currently funded by the Summer Youth Program Fund (SYPF) in Indianapolis, the Building a Rainbow writing program is free to youth participants and held in various locations that serve a diverse student population. This chapter will highlight our work with four different community partners: our first group of youth, girls at a maximum state prison, and our current work with an all African-American youth development summer camp for students ages 6–18 run by the Indianapolis Fire Department, a Latino leadership institute that works with Latino students ages 11–16, and a south side, historic community center that works primarily with Caucasian students living in poverty.

By forging new collaborative relationships with arts organizations, schools and universities, community organizations and social service providers, IWC has worked successfully to

• Create community with our writers and with partnering sites

• Identify, sort, and prioritize program objectives (Caffarella, 2002, p. 21) in designing and delivering curriculum that meets the diverse needs of each site’s student group and meets our mission

• Solicit and train instructors, university student interns, and community volunteers (Caffarella, 2002, p. 21)

• Present, publish, and perform our work for the greater writing community.

Create community with our writers and with partnering sites

Identify, sort, and prioritize program objectives (Caffarella, 2002, p. 21) in designing and delivering curriculum that meets the diverse needs of each site’s student group and meets our mission

Solicit and train instructors, university student interns, and community volunteers (Caffarella, 2002, p. 21)

Present, publish, and perform our work for the greater writing community.

Besides learning about the programming above, readers can also read and hear the words and voices of students at the sites as they share their memoirs of people, places, and events that have shaped them.

This narrative describes the author’s experience as an artist, author, and a humanitarian. She uses pictures, art, and collage to make connections between her past, present, and future.

The author uses poetry to describe feelings regarding racial identity, spirituality, and sexuality. The author uses expressive narrative to convey this emotional message.

As a team of eight scholars at the University of Texas, we collaborate to research issues that directly focus on the development, training, and experiences of anti-racist and social justice leaders in urban secondary schools. Each of us considered a personal event, or series of events, that significantly influenced our thinking about social justice. We share experiences of personal and institutional racism, and reflect on how these experiences continue to shape our awareness of race. Our perspectives capture how issues of race and racial discrimination persist in a status quo educational system and how past experiences directly influence our work.

This chapter applies a qualitative theoretical approach, drawing on critical literacy frames including socio-cultural theory and auto-ethnography to examine the journey of a language arts teacher in her struggle to respond to her students’ resistance and create a classroom context of mean-making and empowerment. Asserting the process as the decolonization of pedagogy, the chapter asserts the language arts classroom as a borderland, a site for both critical analysis and a source for creativity and possibility (Giroux, 2001) to teach students who are traditionally underserved in the educational community. The chapter points to ways students’ rich cultural heritage and the teacher’s autobiographical narrative can become part of the classroom pedagogy and result in a rich learning experience that is transformative.

Students living in urban environments tend to have lower academic achievement and college- and career-readiness skills than students living in suburban environments, as well as tend to be more at-risk for social-emotional learning problems. Research indicates that several school and community variables are related to this education discrepancy, and aligning these variables to best meet the needs of students is the best way to improve educational outcomes. This chapter will describe a collective impact initiative designed to align school, community, and nonprofit resources in an urban environment to best address the needs of students and increase academic success.

This progressive organizer discusses her passions and interests as an activist, which are largely linked to her desire to end the powerful inequities that limit access for oppressed and underserved people. More specifically, her narrative focuses on inequities that impact the LGBTQ community.

A social studies teacher shared the unique experience of leading one of the most profound changes in the culture of a junior high school. This manuscript includes the context of the work that had a significant impact at a Western New York junior high school. Moreover, pragmatic strategies and approaches to enhance school climate in any school are expanded upon.

Focus group discussions were utilized to explore factors that facilitated the academic success of Kenyan high school students in spite of their adversities. These identified factors were instrumental in creating personal development modules that Kenyan school counselors implemented as a pilot intervention for enhancing academic resilience. While more research is needed on the most effective delivery styles for the modules, the intervention resulted in improved skills that support academic resilience. There is a need to continue to explore resiliency with respect to academic performance in Kenya. Educators, students, parents and policy makers will benefit from uncovering models of resiliency based on the contextual realities that the youth face on a daily basis.

Literature in the study of leadership for Social Justice has widely discussed the roles and responsibilities of school administrators and teachers to enact and manage systems change using an educational equity agenda. Frequently missing from these discussions is how to create an urgency about impetus for change which will have lasting personal relevance to those enacting the change. The main purpose of this chapter is to share one effective approach for bringing about change through the power of story. The leader’s personal narrative of marginalization creates a space for dialog about the universality of disconnection and invisibility. This chapter illustrates that when staff are able to see that their own experiences are not separate from the experiences of marginalized students in their classrooms, staff mobilize for change without being pushed and pulled by administration.

The purpose of this chapter is to present an overview of two school-based outreach initiatives geared toward the promotion of psychological well-being in borderland children. This chapter discusses first Cruzando Fronteras, an outreach initiative that provided support to children impacted by the violence in the US-Mexico border through the use of liberation psychology and narrative approaches. This chapter then presents an overview of the Kimochis program, a social skills program focusing on the promotion of social–emotional learning and resilience in children Pre-K through third grade. This chapter also includes a reflection of my experience as a social justice advocate and concludes with a discussion of rewards and challenges inherent to social justice work.

This chapter evolved out of the situation of a professor and his doctoral student having numerous discussions regarding her students’ concern for oppression and their desire for social activism. It became obvious that the cultural environment of the classroom was permitting these students to have a very real part in constructing their knowledge and taking ownership of this process, thus giving them the freedom and courage to act. The purpose of this chapter is to reveal, through the voice of the teacher and her students, how a class of marginalized third graders demonstrates their knowledge of social justice concepts and also perform superbly on their standardized reading and math assessments.

School and community gardens have long histories grounded in social justice. Currently there are advocacy movements calling for gardening programs that foster academics and equity movements through nutrition education, neighborhood green spaces and beautification, and ecological sustainability. While the authors contributed personal experiences and useful resources for those interested in school and community gardening, the authors primarily investigated multiple theories that embraced critical and ecological pedagogies in neighborhoods, schools, urban communities. The democratic movements of food security, removal of food deserts, and socioeconomic sustainability using applicable gardening programs were the driving forces behind this chapter.

The writer of this personal story discusses her process for becoming and staying an ally. She discusses her own privilege with regard to the concept of “gay” and advocates for ways to support the LGBTQ community. Most important, she addresses the issue of presence as a means for support.

The author of this story discusses how “living the work” is an extension of him. He recounts how his personal experiences have signified what it means for him to practice as well as promote social justice and equity.

This narrative describes the authors experience at school and journey into adulthood whilst dealing with a challenging school environment and disability. Poetry is used to express the emotions felt.

A Love Supreme was written and performed as John Coltrane’s truth and testament to the power, glory, love, and greatness of God. Music, jazz in particular, enhances my gifting in the realm of teaching and leading as well as grounded in my strong spiritual beliefs. This album defined the work in a whole new way for me; it touched my soul. It prompted and has continued to prompt the (re)consideration and the (re)visioning of what did/does it really mean for me to be an educator and a leader? This chapter will illumine my ideas of living, leading, and loving the soul work of education and leadership via my beliefs in the ethics of care, justice, and responsibility, all viewed and spoken through the prism of parrhesia.

Authors’ experiences encourage teachers and learners to consider the impact of integrating an intersensory transformative curriculum that explores how the senses interact with each other in different combinations and hierarchies (see Howes, 2003). Such efforts may require a deeper and more comprehensive analysis of the senses in understanding self with a focus on increasing consciousness, meaning-making, and embodied experiences (Boske, 2011b; Burns, 1978; Eisner, 1994; Noddings, 1984). All human experiences are essential to interpretation of the senses. Attending to the sensorium, which embeds the senses throughout learning, may encourage connectedness among self and others; and ultimately, provide spaces to promote equity in schools. Teachers and learners, in developing this socioecological perspective by designing curricula to include readings and activities centered on deepening personal knowings, can work to collectively engage in making connections among self, social justice and equity, and addressing larger societal issues (Furman, 2012; Jean-Marie et al., 2009).