Strategy

Social Justice Education

April 3, 2024

Achieving the Dream

A social justice approach to education involves two instructional strategies: antiracist and abolitionist teaching. Both approaches allow faculty to implement educational practices that provide meaningful, relevant, and liberating learning experiences for students.  

Purpose

  • Improve academic outcomes through the demonstration of higher order thinking, critical consciousness, problem analysis, problem solving, and cognitive development  
  • Encourage a better understanding of issues related to injustice and equity   
  • Better equip students to become social justice advocates  

Strategy Features

Creating Antiracist Spaces

To create antiracist spaces where BIPOC students can thrive, faculty should critically examine instructional practices and focus on advancing social justice education, uplifting communities of color, and acknowledging their contributions. 

Center and Amplify the Marginalized Voices and Experiences of BIPOC Students

Create a course framed in antiracism and abolitionism, where faculty intentionally embed readings, videos, and blogs that affirm historical experiences and contributions from communities of color. 

Develop Course Content and Curriculum Grounded in Antiracism

Intentionally design materials that inform discipline outcomes through an antiracist lens to ensure course content affirms BIPOC students and their communities, ideologies, values, and norms. 

Engage Students Through a Lens of Cultural Care, Upliftment, and Love

Build faculty-student relationships through an approach that values and embraces the whole student rather than only viewing them as a math major. Show care about students that goes beyond surface-level interactions. 

Implementation Tips

Introduction

Develop assignments that allow students to engage with accurate and affirming depictions of people of color, and have them read, analyze, and discuss course content through an antiracist lens, taking into account their lived experiences.  

Implement Social Justice Assignments

Create social justice assignments that allow students, specifically BIPOC students, to become agents of change by using their own voices and lived experiences. 

Support Students Engaging in Critical Consciousness

Antiracist teaching must be intentionally woven into the course content and curricula and should be embedded in teaching and learning across disciplines. 

Demonstrate Concern, Care, and Support for the Whole Student

Reach out to and engage with students outside of course content by having genuine conversations about their interests, lives, work experiences, and families. 

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