**Note: The moderator of this site is taking a break until she graduates from her PhD program. We are sorry about such a long pause and plan to be back Spring 2020 with more updates!***

About Teaching Social Justice

Teaching Social Justice (TSJ) is a website and blog that seeks to critically examine race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, and other social justice issues. TSJ is moderated by one person, but features guest posts by advocates of social justice around the world.

Background

As a teacher, I am always looking for ways to make education relevant to and powerful for my students. It is my mission to teach students like the individuals they are; to me, that means bringing diverse and multimodal texts into the classroom, and responding to texts in multiple ways. I believe it is important for students to read and think about issues related to social justice. It is equally important to read about these issues from different perspectives as well as contexts. Sometimes critical issues make us uncomfortable; however, we can learn a lot from our past. According to Paulo Freire (1970), “Looking at the past must only be a means of understanding more clearly what and who [we] are so that [we] can more wisely build the future.” It is my belief that current events and recent history evoke critical thinking when analyzed from diverse perspectives. Teaching, to me, means teaching about and for social justice; at least, it should be, and that is where the title of this website comes from.

About the Moderator

Jennifer Jackson Whitley taught high school English/Language Arts for six years and grades 6-8 English/Language Arts for one year. Currently, she is a full-time doctoral student at the University of Georgia in the Language and Literacy Education department, where she taught writing methods to pre-service teachers in the English Education department during the 2014-2015 academic year. She now teaches Introduction to Women’s Studies as part of a graduate assistantship. Her research interests include social justice pedagogy, dialogical pedagogy, rural education, and participatory action research.

Contribute to Teaching Social Justice

Teaching Social Justice accepts guest posts on a variety of topics. If you are interested in writing for TSJ, please email your idea(s) to Jenn at teachsocialjustice@gmail.com.

Contact Information

Email: teachsocialjustice@gmail.com

Twitter: @socialjusticeED