Addressing Social Injustice
The idea of social injustice was not news to my 12th graders; however, they did not have a strong knowledge of the source of those injustices. To provide my students with the knowledge required to form opinions about the injustices they face each day, as well as the injustices they would be facing as they entered college and the work force, I create a Social Justice unit, which resulted in the seniors’ final research papers and presentations.
Throughout the unit, students learned about four real-world issues: Food justice, the Black Lives Matter movement, gender inequality, and cultural appropriation. These issues were introduced to students via a social media hashtag. Many of my students were very active on Twitter and Snapchat, so using the hashtags as an access point allowed them to connect to the content and learn how to find and curate social opinions on an issue using social media. While the students had a surface-level understanding of some of these issues, the informational texts they studied pushed their understanding much deeper and propelled many of the students to advocate for themselves and identify solutions for these issues in their communities.
Planning
I planned this unit to encompass the last five weeks of the school year. To the left, you can see the weekly lesson plans for the unit, with highlights on the research paper-related standards, objectives, and essential questions.
I organized this unit to first introduce the idea of justice, then to introduce informational texts in various forms to the students over the course of several weeks — all the while, students were learning how to utilize different informational formats to form a well-rounded opinion and then how to incorporate these various source types into their research papers.
While all students read and learned about each social justice issue, each student chose one specific topic to research further independently and write about in their final papers. Students were required to incorporate at least three different source types, which allowed them to gain sufficient knowledge of the inequalities within their social justice topic.
The planning document above can be broken down into the following chunks:
Week 1, pages 1-4, focus on introducing and defining “social justice and injustice,” as well exploring current issues. This first week, the students also explored and answered the question, “Why should you have a seat at the table?” to prompt action-oriented thinking.
Week 2, pages 5-8, focus on the #BlackLivesMatter movement and include news articles and opinion editorials provided to the students to expand their understanding of the issue.
Week 3, pages 9-12, focus on #FoodJustice and include peer-reviewed journal articles that teach them about this issue and its impacts on impoverished communities.
Week 4, pages 13-17, focus on #NotYourMascot, where we began to study cultural appropriation in the form of professional sports’ teams mascots, and #HeForShe, which addresses gender inequality. Students analyzed news articles and videos to broaden their understanding of these issues.
Week 5, pages 18-21, outlines the students’ priorities to continue their own research and finalize their papers.
Students Engage
As stated above, I introduced students to four different social justice movements using their hashtags: #BlackLivesMatter, #FoodJustice, #HeForShe, and #NotYourMascot.
To begin the unit, I created four anchor charts, each with the appropriate hashtag and Tweets that advocates and followers had made about the issue online. Students then participated in a gallery walk, holding a silent discussion about each issue. Photos 1-4 to the right show students engaging with these topics during the gallery walk. They were reading the Tweets I had provided to gain a better understanding of the issue and how it affected different people, and then they were writing their own opinions about the topics. What I loved about this gallery walk was that some students were more informed or passionate about some of the issues than others, and they students really learned from each other.
This was the first point in our social justice unit in which students engaged with the inequalities we were about to study by writing and thinking about real-world problems.
The final gallery walk posters can be seen in pictures 5-8 above. Below are just a few of the insights students made during this activity.
“The notion that the color of one’s skin defines who they are is and always will be ludicrous. We should all be treated not equally just because of our skin tones but because we are all humans.”
“Everyone in America loves black culture but they do not love black people.”
“If both genders are empowered, changes are bound to improve. The younger generations are and will be more educated with equal opportunities.”
Students ResearcH
Once students had been introduced to these social justice issues and were invested in learning more, I expanded their knowledge on the real-world problems by providing informational texts in the form of news articles, opinion editorials, and scholarly journals. Students were required to use these articles in their research papers to supplement their own research.
The articles provided to students have been compiled in the document to the left and are organized as follows:
Pages 1-6 — “One Slogan, Many Methods: Black Lives Matter Enters Politics”
Pages 7-23 — “How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power”
Pages 24-41 — “Decolonizing Food Justice: Naming, Resisting, and Researching Colonizing Forces in the Movement”
Pages 42-51 — “The Radical Potential of the Food Justice Movement”
Pages 52-54 — “Emma Watson: Gender equality is your issue too”
Pages 55-59 — “Political leaders protest Redskins name at #NotYourMascot rally”
Throughout the unit, students engaged with these texts to speak, write, and think about real-world problems, specifically how those real-world problems surfaced in their own communities. With these texts, students developed opinions about social justice issues and formulated ideas on how to address these issues and advocate for themselves and others. After studying these texts, the students had a strong knowledge of injustices in the world, and as they wrote their research papers, the students’ voices were strong and showed passion toward addressing these issues.
Students WRite
After all of the in-class discussions and research, students finalized their research papers, in which they wrote about a real-world problem that they felt most impacted them. The students cited information from the informational texts I provided to them, above, as well as their own research.
Below are four student research papers, each addressing a different issue:
Sample A: #BlackLivesMatter
Sample B: Cultural Appropriation
Sample C: Gender Equality
Sample D: Food Justice
The student samples show some of the editing marks I made during the grading process in read, and I highlighted students’ thesis statements and body paragraphs topics as well. These work samples make it clear how knowledgable the students became about their social justice topic, as well as how they can independently or collectively advocate for themselves and others.
Student A clearly has a solid understanding of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, identifying the events that propelled the creation of this unit, as well as discussing the history of oppression facing African Americans (pp. 1-2). This student also discusses how social media can be used by civilians as a far-reaching advocacy tool (pp. 2-3).
Student C shows a strong understanding of what gender inequality does and does not look like and discusses how it affects both men and women (pp. 1-2). This student also illustrates how gender inequality impacts people in the workplace and education (p. 3), demonstrating a breadth of knowledge about the topic, and ends with a strong call to action (p. 4).
In discussing cultural appropriation, Student B tackles this issue by stating how it is defined and how it affects different groups, including African American, Hispanic, and Native American cultures. This student then identifies ways individuals can independently and collectively work to advocate for change when cultural appropriation takes place (p. 3).
Student D focuses on food justice, explaining the disparities that exist in access to healthy foods, as well as effects this lack of access has on low-income communities (pp. 2-3). This student ends by identifying and commending local farmers’ markets as strong advocates for food justice as they provide easier access to fresh foods in lower income areas (p. 4).
Impact & Reflection
This unit was not meant to stop at the research paper; it was meant to ignite a fire in my seniors as they were graduating high school and heading to college or into the workforce. I wanted my students to have a strong understanding of the world they were entering and how that world may view them. Many of my students went to college and joined their campus’ Black Student Union or other advocacy groups. One student went on to found a spoken word group that writes poetry about injustices at her university and was invited to compete in Washington, D.C. To the right is an audio recording of her performing an original poem she wrote at the Senior Day celebration inspired by the research she conducted for this research paper.
The artifacts provided in this section show the breadth of knowledge my 12th grade students developed about four real-world issues: Food justice, the Black Lives Matter movement, gender inequality, and cultural appropriation. The students read and cited evidence from resources that I provided and conducted their own research to write compelling research papers, which outlined their knowledge and conviction of the injustices they see in the world. Students also identified ways individuals can advocate for themselves and others, many citing social media as a platform wherein individuals become a collective.