Describe your action plan.
One action that all of the students took was the creation of public service announcements related to their topics. This was connected to an in-depth examination of graphic design principles in their art class. Their designs emerged out of an iterative process that drew on their work from the feel and imagine stages. Students refined their designs based on peer and teacher feedback and a final critique session with renowned designer Mirko Ilić. Finished PSAs were displayed in the school and shared with fieldwork partners. You can view the PSAs here.
Information about the Social Justice Teach-In that was a collective “Do” action undertaken by the students is explained in more detail on the “Share” section.
Additionally, many groups undertook specific “Do” actions as part of their learning process. A selection of responses is provided below.
How was the implementation of your project? What was the impact?
As the title of our project implies, the choice to participate orients our students to action. This action is part of a larger process and includes novel solutions to problems and collaborations with existing groups and organization that are further along on the change process. Whatever the context, these moments provide powerful opportunities for students to understand that they have a voice and the agency to make a difference.
“My group did a lot of hands on work where we helped clean up our community. We all share this one world and there’s no such thing as “Planet B.” Whether it was small or big, when it came to social justice and taking care of our home, we made sure to do our part. We helped spawn oysters with The Billion Oyster Project, we held several clean ups with the Gowanus Canal Conservancy and NYC Parks and we even helped reuse and reduce waste by creating art and reusable items like wallets and baskets. I think our actions made pretty good impacts and were also able to raise awareness amongst our community. Our group learned the importance of taking action and getting involved with the world.”
“We interviewed the head of the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP), Robert Gangi. What started as four boys interviewing an activist and his intern became way more than that. He introduced us to court monitoring and then trained us in how to do it. In court, we recorded on sheets the name, race, gender, charge and verdict of all of the defendants during the session. This data helps PROP with their advocacy work. Then, in a meeting with some of the activists from PROP, one of them informed us that she’s holding an art exhibition called Art Against Police Brutality on June 21. That gave us the idea to create a mural as part of our Teach-In project (see images here). Our students-created activist art mural will be presented at the show. There it will be displayed as a memoir to the victims of police brutality.”
“In addition to our Teach-In Workshop, we had an impact on one organization we visited for fieldwork. Marina Maher Communications work in marketing to women. After visiting them several times and having multiple discussions and interviews with different people within the company, they said that we impacted them because we educated them about the work we were doing on the topic. While the reason we visited them was to be educated more thoroughly on our topic and to hear from their experience, it turns out that they took away as much information as we did. Since the company focuses on marketing to women, they know a lot about what sells things best, but they might not know exactly how people outside of the company see their advertisements. That’s where we helped them out.”
“As a group, we worked with about 10 different organizations that were each taking approaches to solving education inequality. Our fieldwork included watching relevant documentary movies, making phone calls, lobbying and hands-on tutoring with kids. This stage taught us so much. We started by not even knowing all the different types of schools and what differentiates them. We then learned about the pros and cons of charter schools and public schools and ended up spending a lot of time with a organization lobbying for New York public schools to get the funding they need. In a fieldwork with the Go Project with worked 4th graders and tutored tutoring them in ELA, and math. One moment in particular resonated the most with me. While working with a girl named Angeline in English class, she got upset because I wouldn’t give her the answer; so she tried looking at someone else’s sheet. She told herself she was a bad reader and refused to try but when I encouraged her to try again she slowly read the sentences easily. Before even trying she just gave up. I think this says a lot about her confidence level and how she is encouraged on a daily basis. I believe that the school she regularly goes to is not giving her enough support. She needed a kind of support that her school wasn’t giving her. This shows how kids are shutting themselves down at a young age. We learned about how this makes them doubt their every move because they are not taught the confidence they need to succeed. Working with these kids have taught us how lucky we are. We hope that we also gave them something that will them to believe that they can succeed; we hope that they saw us as allies in the struggle to make sure that educational funding is equitable.”
“We worked with Amnesty International on a letter writing campaign with our seventh and eighth grade peers to support individuals who have been imprisoned for expressing their views. This experience was so successful that we did a similar activity with fifth-seventh graders for our Teach-In workshop. In the workshop, participants created illustrated letters of support for individuals who have been imprisoned for creating political cartoons to express their opinions and dissent.”
“As part of the Do stage, our group volunteered at many different food pantries and soup kitchens. One of the most interesting things we did was volunteer with Food Bank for NYC. Food Bank is a New York City based anti-hunger organization that runs many different food banks and pantries. We got to work in one of their Food Pantries. At their pantry, clients get to choose their own food as if they are in a grocery store. As there are certain constraints on what food they are allowed to choose, our job was to help clients through the pantry and follow the point system that dictated the different food choices. This was a very meaningful experience because we got to engage with every person that visited the food pantry. Even though some of the clients didn’t even speak English, we were able to use what we have been learning in World Language class to communicate with them. This action opportunity was important because we got talk not just with the people running anti-hunger organizations, but also those who face hunger in their day-to-day lives. As part of the Do stage, we also visited City Harvest’s food repack facility. While there, we helped to repack fruit that farms and grocery stores otherwise would have thrown out, but were actually perfectly good. We sorted the fruit from large crates into smaller bags that could then be delivered to food pantries and soup kitchens. These were two of many things were did as part of the Do stage which helped us to better understand our topic, care even more about the work that we were doing and have an impact on others.”
“In late January 2016, our social justice group, Stop the Shots, organized an assembly in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision for a peaceful and equal America. The focus of the assembly was gun violence prevention. We showed a portion of President Obama’s speech on his Executive Order to increase background checks. Obama believes that this will make it harder for someone to obtain a gun, especially if they should not have one. We also led a discussion about gun violence in America and how it affects everyone. We brought in a guest speaker named Donna Dees. Ms. Dees was the Director and Creator the Million Mom March in 2000. She talked about why she got invested in gun violence prevention in her life and the steps she took to increase gun violence awareness. The goal of our assembly was to show why gun violence prevention is social justice and how it relates to Martin Luther King’s dream.”
“In the “Do” stage, my group scheduled a fieldwork with a non-profit organization called Dress For Success. This organization helps women to get jobs by giving them interview clothes and prepping them for the interview. If the client gets the job, Dress For Success gives them a week’s worth of work clothes, accessories, make-up, etc. so that they wouldn’t have to use their first week’s pay to buy clothing. We volunteered at their offices over our Winter Break. While we did not work directly with their clients, our actions helped in a subtle way. At Dress For Success, we helped organize everything from blouses to skirts to pants to shirts to shoes. When the volunteers at Dress For Success give the women interview clothes, they pick things out that the women feel confident and comfortable in and we made it easier to find clothes for them. After the fieldwork, we reflected on what we had just done and we felt elated about how we had helped out and we felt good about what we had done. We also realized how fortunate we were to have access to clothing and people around us who will help us with whatever we will face.”
“In the Do stage, we learned what it felt like to take action. We worked with the Beyond Coal Campaign, the Sierra club, El Nevado and many more. We engaged in protests and educations. We went as far as Albany, New York and as close as an LREI classroom. No matter had far away the work was we learned a lot and realized our youth gives us authority. We interviewed many people who helped us get involved and they were very interested in how we can make a difference. We learned that using the media to spread the word is very important for changing climate change because many people do not believe it is real so spreading the word makes a difference. We made an Instagram account to update our work and progress; this was a good tool to use in spreading the word. Even though our project has ended we will continue to make a difference in the world of climate change.”
“Our group wanted to teach others how to be more critical when we see ads on the street, in a magazine or on the TV and Internet. We learned how to notice the hidden messages in ads and wanted to share this with others. In our workshop, we explored how women are portrayed in the media and had participants make stop motion movies expressing their views. We are going to send our movies to a contact we made at the Paley Center for Media who was interested in our work. We hope that they will share some of them with a larger audience.”
“This project has enlightened me on how our education system is not working well for so many students. We will continue to fight for this funding until our schools get what they need and are entitled to. We will do this by sending the letters that students wrote in our workshop to leaders in Albany asking for funding.”
“After we conducted interviews and went on many field works, my group was ready to share what we learned and found out about the discrimination of women in the workplace and the glass ceiling. We learned about what kinds of discrimination there are, like men with less experience getting a job over a woman with more experience, or men with less experience being payed twice as much. We interviewed and heard stories of female doctors, directors, bankers, foundation leaders, CEO’s and heard about the obstacles they faced to get where they are and how to overcome them. We shared this information with the 5th – 7th graders in our workshop by creating a board game. In this board game ,there were male and female characters and different obstacles for the different characters. The boys and girls that attended our workshop saw how hard it was for women to break the glass ceiling and pass these barriers. We brought awareness to our community by sharing with them all that we learned.”
Did you encounter any challenges? If so, how did you overcome them?
Social justice work is by its very nature iterative and students as learners and activists need practice in working through disappointment and failure. That this work is most effective when engaged in with others adds an additional layer of complexity and challenge. The design thinking framework helps to define a path that build strenth, capacity and character and affirms Martin Luther Kink Jr.’s assertion that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Below are a selection of challenges and responses to challenges undertaken by our students:
“One challenge for my group was sharing all that we learned with the kids at our school. We had learned such a wide variety of information some of which was only loosely related; this made it hard to compact it all into an hour workshop. In the end, we decided to focus on underfunding in traditional public schools with only a brief mention of charter, private, independent and parochial schools. We worked with so many different organizations that all had different views on what was most important; this made it harder for us to decide what we thought was most important.”
“We encountered issues with communication in the group about going on fieldworks. Some of us didn’t know what was going on and one of us missed a fieldwork that the others completed. This caused a huge upset in our group and we couldn’t focus on our topic anymore. We had to have a meeting and hear everyone’s thoughts. We brought the teachers in. We said sorry and looked at the contract we made when we started. We created goals and guidelines for communication and began having lunch meetings to clarify things. Meeting in person was much better than texting. Getting our group to work well together again and not have hurt feelings allowed us to be more effective in helping achieve our goal of helping children in poverty.”
“A challenge was after a main rush of a lot of fieldwork, we had trouble finding new opportunities. We overcame it by being persistent and talking to all of our past fieldwork connections to get suggestions about organizations to work with next.”
“We had trouble getting to do as much environmental work outside as we wanted to because it was winter. We overcame this by not giving up and contacting more and more organizations. We also got teachers to help and we worked outside of Social Justice Time in school. Also, it was hard to learn about how bad things are for the Earth. One person was really upset about the state of the ocean; I was upset about NYC’s condition; and one of us was upset about the effect on animals. We didn’t really overcome this, but we did learn how to make an impact and keep doing the work. I still pick up trash and talk to my classmates when they don’t recycle.”
“We had organizational issues. We went to a fieldwork and the organization was closed. We then put in double checks on our fieldwork scheduling and met in person to confirm everything at school and not do it online. We had also all experienced the pressure girls were under to look a certain way and we didn’t like it. We knew this at the start. We were surprised, though, to find out just how sexualized women are in advertising. We didn’t have the knowledge to know that some of the positions they were placed in was to represent sex. Also we learned how men in the same photos and pictures would seem ridiculous and people would laugh. But they accept it as normal for women. This made us want to make all of our peers in the middle school aware of the issue, but it was a challenge to make sure that it didn’t get too inappropriate for their ages. Also we wanted to to them that these images and the pressure to look a certain way are not ok. It’s okay to be upset and it’s important to learn that you don’t have to conform. You don’t have to live up to these stereotypes and expectations and you can help your friends to not live up to them. This understanding informed our Teach-In workshop Finally, during the workshop, we had technical difficulties with the iPads. This was frustrating because we spent hours the day before making sure all our materials were working. When it happened, one of us worked on the tech, while the others of us we kept the discussion going. In the end, everything worked out okay.”
“A challenge occurred when my group members disagreed about possible solutions and this created conflict. This happened when we were trying to figure out how to design our workshop. It was a little bit funny because our topic was freedom of speech and we weren’t able to respect this value in our small group. But we had to speak to each other to get the work done. We realized that freedom of speech is really about listening. So we listened to each other, spoke to each other and resolved our differences. We decided it was better to listen to each other’s ideas and help each other people than to fight.”
“One challenge we encountered while doing our project, was that most of us didn’t want to speak to adults. We were all really nervous as to what was the right thing to say, or whether the adult was interested in us. After a bit, we realized we had to contact the adult sooner or later. After talking to an adult, we realized that they really cared about what youth thought about climate change, after this, we started talking more and more, and a while later, we were very confident in what we were saying.”
“One challenge I faced during the Social Justice Project was really grasping how far the different injustices extended. My group was focusing on the injustices women face in the workforce; I had heard about the gender pay gap and gender-based biases and the different ways women were treated at work. However, as we interviewed more and more people, I came to realize that these are real problems that real women face and that I might have to face one day. It is a real problem that one day it may be harder for me to support myself because I earn less than my male counterparts and that I may be sexualized and treated as less capable at work because I am a female. Another challenge I faced while participating in the Social Justice Project was figuring out how we could help make a change and educate more people about just how far these problems extend. In order to overcome these challenges, my group decided to interview different people in different positions in their companies or jobs to learn more about the different challenges women face and why. To educate others about this problem, my group decided to create a board game where there were male and female characters that were all trying to get past something called the ‘Glass Ceiling,’ which is an invisible and nearly unbreakable barrier that prevents most women from getting to higher positions in companies. We rigged the game so that it would be harder for the female characters to get past the ceiling such as having things like ‘Maternity leave isn’t offered at your job, lose two turns to have your baby and move back one space’ or ‘Your son is sick, lose a turn to take care of him.’ We also had very clear differences like a gender pay gap for the character where the woman was paid roughly 75% of what the man was paid. This way, we could educate people about these different problems in an engaging way. Overall, I really enjoyed the Social Justice Project and it taught me a lot, as well as opened my eyes to many things happening around the nation and around the world.”
