social justice what do you think of to
me social justice is a simple concept
it’s the notion that all people in a
society deserve fair and equitable
rights opportunities and access to
resources but it’s become controversial
and nebulous because we’ve stopped
talking about what working for social
justice actually looks like working for
social justice can look like this or
this it can look like this or it can
look like this or my favorite it can
look like that those are my students and
whenever I’m asked to articulate my work
or my priorities as a teacher I explain
that I believe education can be a tool
for social justice but a few months ago
I logged onto Twitter as I do and I saw
that a fellow teacher had taken issue
with that belief teachers he said should
not be social justice warriors because
the purpose of education is to educate
and he ended his argument by saying I
teach my subject but I reject that
simplification because teachers don’t
just teach subjects we teach people when
our students walk into our classrooms
they bring their identities with them
everything they experience in our rooms
is bound up in historical context and so
if we insist that education happens in a
vacuum we do our students a disservice
we teach them that education doesn’t
really matter because it’s not relevant
to what’s happening all around them and
what’s happening all around them well
racism for one in 2016 the University of
Chicago released a report that revealed
that according to results of the
implicit association test fully eighty
percent of white people harbored
subconscious biases against black people
believing them to be less intelligent
lazier and more dangerous than whites
and that’s just one concrete example of
the insidious effects of historic and
systemic racism on our country for more
evidence we could look at incarceration
rates we could look at statistics on
police violence against black people we
could look at the opportunity gap in
education so yeah
social justice belongs in our schools
social justice should be a part of the
mission of every school and every
teacher in America if we want liberty
and justice for all
to be more than a slogan because schools
are crucial places for children to
become active citizens and to learn the
skills and the tools that they need to
change the world so what are those
skills okay here’s a secret many of the
skills that people need to orchestrate
the kinds of change that will lead to
justice are already built into the work
of schools things like problem solving
critical thinking collaboration
perseverance none of that should be
revolutionary on its own combine that
with the ability to understand history
not as one static and objective
narrative on which we all agree but as a
series of intertwined events about which
there can be countless interpretations
if we deliberately choose to explore
history with our students rather than
just teach it we help them understand
that history is ongoing and that it’s
connected to current movements for
justice and we help them see themselves
as potential players within a living
history so those are the skills I’m
talking about when I say that education
can be a place to help kids learn how to
work for justice but maybe the reason
that my Twitter critic wasn’t happy with
that idea is because he doesn’t agree
with my definition of justice
fair enough maybe he and I don’t see eye
to eye politically but here’s the thing
our aim is to encourage students to
articulate their own opinions not to
coerce them into agreeing with us so it
actually
doesn’t matter if he and I agree what
matters is that we’re helping students
have those conversations with each other
and that means that as adults we need to
learn how to become effective
facilitators of our students activism
we’ve got to help them learn how to have
really tricky conversations we have to
expose them to different opinions and we
have to have to help them see how what
they’re learning in school connects to
the world outside so here’s an example
of that every year my students study the
history of apartheid in South Africa as
a case study of injustice now for those
of you who don’t know apartheid was a
brutally racist system and the white
ruled government in South Africa imposed
racist laws to oppress people of color
and if you resisted those laws you
risked jail time violence or death and
around the country other around the
world of other countries governments
including ours in the United States
hesitated to sanction South Africa
because well we benefited from its
resources so in 1976 the South African
government passed a new law which
required that all students in South
Africa learn in the language Afrikaans
which was a white language and many
black South Africans referred to that
language as the language of the
oppressor so not surprisingly students
of color were outraged at this law they
already attended segregated schools with
overcrowded classrooms a lack of
resources and a frankly racist
curriculum and now they were being told
to learn in a language neither they nor
their teachers spoke so on the morning
of June 16th 1976 thousands of kids from
the township of Soweto walked out of
schools and they marched peacefully
through the streets to protest the law
at an intersection they met up with the
police and when the kids refused to turn
back the police officers set dogs on
them and then they opened fire and the
Salado uprising ended in tragedy
apartheid itself didn’t end until almost
20 years later but the activism of those
kids in Soweto profoundly changed the
way the world viewed what was happening
in
of Africa news outlets all around the
world published this photo of 13-year
old Hector Pieterson who was one of the
first people killed by police in Soweto
and it became nearly impossible to
ignore the brutality of the apartheid
regime in the months and the years that
followed the Salado uprising more and
more countries exerted political and
economic pressure on the South African
government to end apartheid and it was
largely due to the activism of those
kids in Soweto so every year my kids
learn about this and invariably they
start to draw connections between those
kids in Soweto and themselves and they
start to ask themselves what kind of
political power and agency they have
they ask themselves whether there would
ever be a reason they would risk their
lives so that a future generation could
live in a more just world and most
profoundly for me every single year they
ask themselves whether adults will ever
listen to their voices a few years ago
my principal got an anonymous email from
one of our students it informed him that
the following day the students planned
to walk out of school this was in the
wake of Michael Brown’s death in
Ferguson Missouri and the students were
planning to join a walkout and March in
support of the black lives matter
movement so at this point the staff at
the school had a decision to make would
we use our authority and our power to
try to control the students and prevent
them from leaving or would we support
them as they put into practice the
principles of social justice that we had
taught them about since their ninth
grade year so the next morning the kids
left school on mass and they gathered on
the lawn and one of the seniors jumped
up on a picnic table and went over
safety expectations and the younger kids
took it very seriously and as teachers
and as staff we told them okay be safe
and we watched as they marched off the
kids who chose to stay spent that
afternoon in class they debated the
merits of protest they talked about the
history of the black lives matter
movement and they went on with classes
as scheduled and those who chose to
leave pretty
Cepeda din a citywide student walk out
and raise their collective voice for
justice but no matter where they chose
to spend the afternoon our kids learned
valuable lessons that day they learn
that the adults in their lives would
support them even as we worried for
their safety and they learn that they
didn’t need us to tell them how or when
or even why to protest they learned that
they were members of a community of
young people with a shared vision of a
more equitable society and they learned
that they had power within that society
they learned that events like the Soweto
uprising are not ancient history and
they don’t have to end in tragedy and
that’s what education as a tool for
social justice can look like and here’s
the thing our kids are ready for this
kind of work so in 2015 incoming college
freshmen were surveyed and eight point
five percent of them said that they were
there was a very good chance they would
participate in a protest sometime during
their college career
and that might not seem very impressive
but consider the fact that it’s the
largest number of students to say that
since 1967 and seventy-five percent of
those kids said that helping other
people who are having difficulty was a
very important or essential goal for
them again the highest number of people
to say that since the late 1960s and
research shows us that working for
justice doesn’t just follow from
building all those skills I talked about
earlier it actually goes the other way
too
so working for justice engaging in
activism helps students build skills
like leadership and critical thinking
and it correlates positively with their
political participation and their civic
engagement and their commitment to their
communities later in life so in other
words students are telling us that
social justice matters to them and
researchers are telling us that it helps
students learn so now it’s up to us to
listen and that might not be easy
in 1976 one of those kids who
participated in Soweto in the uprising
he said that that event represented
divorce between black children and their
families because their families had
grown up under apartheid
and they knew how dangerous it was to
speak out they wanted their kids to lay
low and stay safe and when our kids
threatened to walk out a lot of the
adults in our community were really
conflicted too some of us worried that
they might encounter violence other
people worried that they would walk out
but they wouldn’t really know why they
were protesting and some including some
students families were really angry that
the school hadn’t done more to prevent
them from leaving and all of those fears
that adults have about getting this
stuff wrong all of those fears make
total sense but despite those fears
we’ve got to prove to our students that
we will listen to their voices and that
they do have the power to affect change
it’s our responsibility to equip our
students with the tools and the skills
that they need to insist on a more
equitable world and then sometimes to
get out of their way and let them apply
those skills to things that they care
about and living up to that vision is
going to require that we are flexible
and it’s going to require that we’re
creative it’s gonna require that we’re
brave enough to stand up in the face of
people who try to silence or D
legitimize dissenting voices and hardest
of all it’s going to require accepting
the fact that sometimes we will be the
ones our students will rebel against
sometimes they’re gonna point out ways
in which systems that we have created or
in which we are complicit contribute to
inequity it’s going to be uncomfortable
and it’s going to be painful as they
push us to question our own assumptions
and beliefs but what if we change the
way we think about rebellion in our kids
when our kids rebel when they
thoughtfully push back against our ideas
or the way that we do things what if we
chose to see that as a sign that we’re
doing something right and that they’re
becoming liberated I know it would be
easier if their critical thinking skills
manifested in more convenient ways on
their essays or their standardized tests
I get it convenience and justice do not
often go hand in hand and when our kids
learn to think critically about the
world around them they become the kinds
of engaged citizens who will recognize
and question injustice when they see it
and work to do something about it
welcoming rebellion into our schools is
going to require some rethinking about
what teaching and learning look like
because there’s this misconception that
if we give students any wiggle room
they’re gonna walk all over us and
classrooms and dinner tables will
devolve into total chaos and if we
expect kids to sit silently and
passively receive knowledge from us then
their voices will always feel
overwhelming but if we accept instead
that learning is sometimes messy that it
requires opportunities to brainstorm and
mess up and try again that our kids
dislike chaos and want to learn when
they come to school then we can set up
schools to facilitate that kind of
learning so do me a favor and close your
eyes for a second and imagine schools
where teachers are thought partners
letting students grapple with complex
hard issues and not necessarily giving
them the right answers and imagine
schools where we let students make
choices we trust them enough to do that
and we let them experience the
consequences of those choices
imagine schools where we let students be
humans with all of the messiness and the
uncertainty that is bound to come with
that and whatever you just imagined it’s
not mythical it’s not unrealistically
idealistic because teachers all over the
country are already pushing the
boundaries of what teaching and learning
can look like with amazing results for
kids they’re doing that in all kinds of
schools and there are countless models
for teachers who want to get better at
helping students learn in a way that’s
more authentic and engaging and
empowering I was reading a book recently
it’s called the students are watching
and is by Ted and Nancy sizer and in
that book they said that the work of
education is often described as a series
of nouns like respect honesty integrity
and they say those nouns sound really
impressive but often they fail to
actually mean anything in practice but
verbs they say are active no less
demanding but requiring constant
engagement verbs are not structures but
rather engines and so as I’ve read that
I wondered how do we make engine how do
we make justice into an engine driving
our work as teachers what’s the verb
form of Justice I think there might be
an answer to be found in the words of
Cornel West who famously said that
justice is what love looks like in
public and all of my nerdy English
teachers in the crowd know that love can
be a noun and a verb school has to be
bigger it has to mean more than I teach
my subject school has to be about
teaching people to change the world for
the better if we believe that then
teaching will always be a political act
we can’t be afraid of our students power
their power will help them make tomorrow
better but before they can do that we
have to give them chances to practice
today and that practice should start in
our schools thank you very much
[Applause]
you
me social justice is a simple concept
it’s the notion that all people in a
society deserve fair and equitable
rights opportunities and access to
resources but it’s become controversial
and nebulous because we’ve stopped
talking about what working for social
justice actually looks like working for
social justice can look like this or
this it can look like this or it can
look like this or my favorite it can
look like that those are my students and
whenever I’m asked to articulate my work
or my priorities as a teacher I explain
that I believe education can be a tool
for social justice but a few months ago
I logged onto Twitter as I do and I saw
that a fellow teacher had taken issue
with that belief teachers he said should
not be social justice warriors because
the purpose of education is to educate
and he ended his argument by saying I
teach my subject but I reject that
simplification because teachers don’t
just teach subjects we teach people when
our students walk into our classrooms
they bring their identities with them
everything they experience in our rooms
is bound up in historical context and so
if we insist that education happens in a
vacuum we do our students a disservice
we teach them that education doesn’t
really matter because it’s not relevant
to what’s happening all around them and
what’s happening all around them well
racism for one in 2016 the University of
Chicago released a report that revealed
that according to results of the
implicit association test fully eighty
percent of white people harbored
subconscious biases against black people
believing them to be less intelligent
lazier and more dangerous than whites
and that’s just one concrete example of
the insidious effects of historic and
systemic racism on our country for more
evidence we could look at incarceration
rates we could look at statistics on
police violence against black people we
could look at the opportunity gap in
education so yeah
social justice belongs in our schools
social justice should be a part of the
mission of every school and every
teacher in America if we want liberty
and justice for all
to be more than a slogan because schools
are crucial places for children to
become active citizens and to learn the
skills and the tools that they need to
change the world so what are those
skills okay here’s a secret many of the
skills that people need to orchestrate
the kinds of change that will lead to
justice are already built into the work
of schools things like problem solving
critical thinking collaboration
perseverance none of that should be
revolutionary on its own combine that
with the ability to understand history
not as one static and objective
narrative on which we all agree but as a
series of intertwined events about which
there can be countless interpretations
if we deliberately choose to explore
history with our students rather than
just teach it we help them understand
that history is ongoing and that it’s
connected to current movements for
justice and we help them see themselves
as potential players within a living
history so those are the skills I’m
talking about when I say that education
can be a place to help kids learn how to
work for justice but maybe the reason
that my Twitter critic wasn’t happy with
that idea is because he doesn’t agree
with my definition of justice
fair enough maybe he and I don’t see eye
to eye politically but here’s the thing
our aim is to encourage students to
articulate their own opinions not to
coerce them into agreeing with us so it
actually
doesn’t matter if he and I agree what
matters is that we’re helping students
have those conversations with each other
and that means that as adults we need to
learn how to become effective
facilitators of our students activism
we’ve got to help them learn how to have
really tricky conversations we have to
expose them to different opinions and we
have to have to help them see how what
they’re learning in school connects to
the world outside so here’s an example
of that every year my students study the
history of apartheid in South Africa as
a case study of injustice now for those
of you who don’t know apartheid was a
brutally racist system and the white
ruled government in South Africa imposed
racist laws to oppress people of color
and if you resisted those laws you
risked jail time violence or death and
around the country other around the
world of other countries governments
including ours in the United States
hesitated to sanction South Africa
because well we benefited from its
resources so in 1976 the South African
government passed a new law which
required that all students in South
Africa learn in the language Afrikaans
which was a white language and many
black South Africans referred to that
language as the language of the
oppressor so not surprisingly students
of color were outraged at this law they
already attended segregated schools with
overcrowded classrooms a lack of
resources and a frankly racist
curriculum and now they were being told
to learn in a language neither they nor
their teachers spoke so on the morning
of June 16th 1976 thousands of kids from
the township of Soweto walked out of
schools and they marched peacefully
through the streets to protest the law
at an intersection they met up with the
police and when the kids refused to turn
back the police officers set dogs on
them and then they opened fire and the
Salado uprising ended in tragedy
apartheid itself didn’t end until almost
20 years later but the activism of those
kids in Soweto profoundly changed the
way the world viewed what was happening
in
of Africa news outlets all around the
world published this photo of 13-year
old Hector Pieterson who was one of the
first people killed by police in Soweto
and it became nearly impossible to
ignore the brutality of the apartheid
regime in the months and the years that
followed the Salado uprising more and
more countries exerted political and
economic pressure on the South African
government to end apartheid and it was
largely due to the activism of those
kids in Soweto so every year my kids
learn about this and invariably they
start to draw connections between those
kids in Soweto and themselves and they
start to ask themselves what kind of
political power and agency they have
they ask themselves whether there would
ever be a reason they would risk their
lives so that a future generation could
live in a more just world and most
profoundly for me every single year they
ask themselves whether adults will ever
listen to their voices a few years ago
my principal got an anonymous email from
one of our students it informed him that
the following day the students planned
to walk out of school this was in the
wake of Michael Brown’s death in
Ferguson Missouri and the students were
planning to join a walkout and March in
support of the black lives matter
movement so at this point the staff at
the school had a decision to make would
we use our authority and our power to
try to control the students and prevent
them from leaving or would we support
them as they put into practice the
principles of social justice that we had
taught them about since their ninth
grade year so the next morning the kids
left school on mass and they gathered on
the lawn and one of the seniors jumped
up on a picnic table and went over
safety expectations and the younger kids
took it very seriously and as teachers
and as staff we told them okay be safe
and we watched as they marched off the
kids who chose to stay spent that
afternoon in class they debated the
merits of protest they talked about the
history of the black lives matter
movement and they went on with classes
as scheduled and those who chose to
leave pretty
Cepeda din a citywide student walk out
and raise their collective voice for
justice but no matter where they chose
to spend the afternoon our kids learned
valuable lessons that day they learn
that the adults in their lives would
support them even as we worried for
their safety and they learn that they
didn’t need us to tell them how or when
or even why to protest they learned that
they were members of a community of
young people with a shared vision of a
more equitable society and they learned
that they had power within that society
they learned that events like the Soweto
uprising are not ancient history and
they don’t have to end in tragedy and
that’s what education as a tool for
social justice can look like and here’s
the thing our kids are ready for this
kind of work so in 2015 incoming college
freshmen were surveyed and eight point
five percent of them said that they were
there was a very good chance they would
participate in a protest sometime during
their college career
and that might not seem very impressive
but consider the fact that it’s the
largest number of students to say that
since 1967 and seventy-five percent of
those kids said that helping other
people who are having difficulty was a
very important or essential goal for
them again the highest number of people
to say that since the late 1960s and
research shows us that working for
justice doesn’t just follow from
building all those skills I talked about
earlier it actually goes the other way
too
so working for justice engaging in
activism helps students build skills
like leadership and critical thinking
and it correlates positively with their
political participation and their civic
engagement and their commitment to their
communities later in life so in other
words students are telling us that
social justice matters to them and
researchers are telling us that it helps
students learn so now it’s up to us to
listen and that might not be easy
in 1976 one of those kids who
participated in Soweto in the uprising
he said that that event represented
divorce between black children and their
families because their families had
grown up under apartheid
and they knew how dangerous it was to
speak out they wanted their kids to lay
low and stay safe and when our kids
threatened to walk out a lot of the
adults in our community were really
conflicted too some of us worried that
they might encounter violence other
people worried that they would walk out
but they wouldn’t really know why they
were protesting and some including some
students families were really angry that
the school hadn’t done more to prevent
them from leaving and all of those fears
that adults have about getting this
stuff wrong all of those fears make
total sense but despite those fears
we’ve got to prove to our students that
we will listen to their voices and that
they do have the power to affect change
it’s our responsibility to equip our
students with the tools and the skills
that they need to insist on a more
equitable world and then sometimes to
get out of their way and let them apply
those skills to things that they care
about and living up to that vision is
going to require that we are flexible
and it’s going to require that we’re
creative it’s gonna require that we’re
brave enough to stand up in the face of
people who try to silence or D
legitimize dissenting voices and hardest
of all it’s going to require accepting
the fact that sometimes we will be the
ones our students will rebel against
sometimes they’re gonna point out ways
in which systems that we have created or
in which we are complicit contribute to
inequity it’s going to be uncomfortable
and it’s going to be painful as they
push us to question our own assumptions
and beliefs but what if we change the
way we think about rebellion in our kids
when our kids rebel when they
thoughtfully push back against our ideas
or the way that we do things what if we
chose to see that as a sign that we’re
doing something right and that they’re
becoming liberated I know it would be
easier if their critical thinking skills
manifested in more convenient ways on
their essays or their standardized tests
I get it convenience and justice do not
often go hand in hand and when our kids
learn to think critically about the
world around them they become the kinds
of engaged citizens who will recognize
and question injustice when they see it
and work to do something about it
welcoming rebellion into our schools is
going to require some rethinking about
what teaching and learning look like
because there’s this misconception that
if we give students any wiggle room
they’re gonna walk all over us and
classrooms and dinner tables will
devolve into total chaos and if we
expect kids to sit silently and
passively receive knowledge from us then
their voices will always feel
overwhelming but if we accept instead
that learning is sometimes messy that it
requires opportunities to brainstorm and
mess up and try again that our kids
dislike chaos and want to learn when
they come to school then we can set up
schools to facilitate that kind of
learning so do me a favor and close your
eyes for a second and imagine schools
where teachers are thought partners
letting students grapple with complex
hard issues and not necessarily giving
them the right answers and imagine
schools where we let students make
choices we trust them enough to do that
and we let them experience the
consequences of those choices
imagine schools where we let students be
humans with all of the messiness and the
uncertainty that is bound to come with
that and whatever you just imagined it’s
not mythical it’s not unrealistically
idealistic because teachers all over the
country are already pushing the
boundaries of what teaching and learning
can look like with amazing results for
kids they’re doing that in all kinds of
schools and there are countless models
for teachers who want to get better at
helping students learn in a way that’s
more authentic and engaging and
empowering I was reading a book recently
it’s called the students are watching
and is by Ted and Nancy sizer and in
that book they said that the work of
education is often described as a series
of nouns like respect honesty integrity
and they say those nouns sound really
impressive but often they fail to
actually mean anything in practice but
verbs they say are active no less
demanding but requiring constant
engagement verbs are not structures but
rather engines and so as I’ve read that
I wondered how do we make engine how do
we make justice into an engine driving
our work as teachers what’s the verb
form of Justice I think there might be
an answer to be found in the words of
Cornel West who famously said that
justice is what love looks like in
public and all of my nerdy English
teachers in the crowd know that love can
be a noun and a verb school has to be
bigger it has to mean more than I teach
my subject school has to be about
teaching people to change the world for
the better if we believe that then
teaching will always be a political act
we can’t be afraid of our students power
their power will help them make tomorrow
better but before they can do that we
have to give them chances to practice
today and that practice should start in
our schools thank you very much
[Applause]
you
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