Essential Questions: 

• Who are social justice leaders and how am I similar?
• How can people create change in American society when injustice is present?

Reflective Practice

I continued my anti-bias journey last summer by spending a week at the Institute for Teaching Diversity and Social Justice. Before that training, I was aware of some of my own biases and privileges, as well as social justice movements in our history/past. At the institute, I learned more deeply about privilege in dominant social groups, that each of us has some areas of privilege, and the daily presence of oppression. As a white, American born woman, it was especially meaningful to gain a systemic lens through learn the history, laws, and ingrained values in US society that maintain the dominant culture and intentionally marginalize those who are not members of it. Knowing more about my own biases and identities, as well as a deeper knowledge of American history, makes me a more authentic anti-bias educator and more empathic person. The conference inspired me to deepen awareness of my biases and the lived experiences of people, and to continue learning.  

I returned to LREI with plans to enhance the second grade Social Justice curriculum. While the brains of second graders are immature and their knowledge base is limited, they are already aware of differences and have biases about those differences. The challenge of creating lessons about social justice activism for seven-year-olds at the level of their cognitive understanding is both daunting and exciting to me. Chap (Dr. Sandra  Chapman) and Tasha Hernandez, second grade teacher, began the Social Activism classes for second grade over 10 years ago, using some of the Teaching Tolerance standards. The curriculum flows from past history to ways children can take action to awareness of injustice in the lived world of their class. After the summer training, I added lessons on the students’ identities and their connections with the identities of social justice leaders we were already studying, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Juertas are two of the key leaders we study. This work leads to appreciation and understanding of people with different identities from some of the identities of the children in the class. I added a systemic view of oppression at a developmentally appropriate level and developed essential questions to frame the curriculum, explicitly sharing them with the students. Chap added the Teaching Tolerance framework (domains and standards) and adapted these to maintain a developmental arch for young children. The essential questions and framework anchor the students (and teachers) in their learning. 

It continues to be a joy for me to teach social justice activist classes in second grade. The students are deeply engaged in the lessons. They stop me in the hall to ask when the next class will be!  Children have little power in their lives: adults make the rules and many decisions for them (e.g., where to live, what to eat, where to go to school, when to sleep). I think the relevance of the lesson content to their lives and the sense of agency the classes provide underly the second graders’ enthusiasm for our social justice activist curriculum.