Social Justice within a Secondary Education Setting

Because this is an education course, the question that I had concerned how I could make my future students more aware of social justice within a secondary school environment. Through my reading more about how I could do this, I found a curriculum that employs political comic strips as a tool to encourage discussion about various social justice situations. For example, there are lessons that include strips about the prejudicial views that some may have towards minorities and homosexual individuals, and there are also lessons about the sexism that takes place within our society. In my opinion, employing these strips as tools for instruction about social justice is a very unique and valuable way to help students learn about how to be more inclusive of those who are different from themselves. This is because the humor and art that is included within the comic strips allow the students to enjoy the lessons more than if they were simply being lectured, and the strips also encourage discussion among themselves and with their teachers about social and societal issues.

One weakness that I could see about including social justice within secondary lessons is that it could provoke arguments and conflicts within the classroom setting due to the sensitive nature of the issues that social justice is involved with. Also, these situations could happen due to the diverse nature of the students in a classroom, which may result in their having differing views about certain issues. However, I feel that these potential consequences are unimportant, as each student that I have will become an adult who has to live in a diverse world. For this reason, these students need to learn how to discuss societal issues with different groups of people without engaging in negative interactions, which I feel the comic strip curriculum for lessons about social justice encourages greatly (McNergney & McNergney, 134).



Works Cited:

Image From: Student Journalism - The Value Of School Newspapers - By Holly Epstein Ojalvo

McNergney, Joanne M. & Robert F. McNergney. Education: The Practice and Profession of Teaching. 6th Ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc., 2009. Print.

Using Editorial Cartoons to Teach Social Justice - Teaching Tolerance