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 Topic Selection and Justification

What are the best, most research-based practices for incorporating a social justice pedagogical approach to the language arts classroom?

For my professional learning project, I am diving into the inquiry process to explore research-based practices for incorporating a social justice pedagogical approach to the language arts for primary-aged students. I often find myself as a new teacher candidate trying to backwards design my lessons and approaches to the classroom in a way that has the end goal for the students in mind, and therefore the instructional approaches are developed through knowing what one wants to assess and require from the students. Through engaging in this process of design and planning, I find that I am often left wondering how to successfully incorporate the theme of social justice and become social warriors within the lesson planning. I focus on ensuring that students are still meeting curriculum expectations but with messages and understanding about real-world issues being connected within a larger global context. 

Within my teaching experiences thus far and being a reflective practitioner, it has become evident that I am missing a connection between wanting to incorporate this social justice theme and therefore touching on the topics in a surface-level manner, and now wanting to move towards a pedagogical approach that engages students in deep, critical connections and experiences that aid their understandings and needs for action and change regarding various topics. As an educator, I want to ensure that my students are not only acquiring the content as outlined in the curriculum, but also engaging with this content with overarching themes and understandings about the way the world works around them, issues and concepts that are prevalent, and creating change and action based on these realizations, all while acquiring language knowledge and developmental learning processes. 

To help aid my inquiry towards this professional learning topic, I began skimming through various resources to figure out where I could get information to support educators in incorporating and facilitating this social justice theme in a culturally appropriate way. I found YouTube videos, curriculum documents, and some online websites that aid educators in providing strategies and ideas for the implementation of a language arts curriculum with a social justice theme. I believe these resources help the inquiry process by allowing exploration of strategies already implemented, and therefore leading to discoveries of strategies we need to implement through questions, discoveries and testing these approaches we can develop a new understanding of the integration of social justice themes across the language arts. Follow along through this blog to look at all of the information I found along the way and my conclusion at the end.