Social justice
Many of my educational leadership colleagues across the country would say that they are working in the area of social justice. They write articles with titles like Expanding the landscape of social justice: A critical ecological analysis; Leadership for social justice and equity: Weaving a transformative framework and pedagogy; School leadership reforms: Filtering social justice through dominant discourses; and Educational leadership and social justice: Practice into theory.
From conferences and other interactions, I know these folks and can say
with complete certainty that they all are absolutely top-notch
scholars. I also know each and every one of these articles is
well-researched, well-reasoned, well-regarded, and well-meaning.
That said, I’m troubled by the fact that educational leadership
folks (faculty and K-12 leaders both) aren’t talking more about digital
technologies and future employability when they talk about social justice.
Indeed, I rarely hear mention of technology at all within these
contexts. I’d like to see more discussion in both K-12 and higher ed
about the future world that disadvantaged kids are going to live in and
what we need to do to boost their digital participation, citizenship,
and employability opportunities.
NCLB is framed as social justice legislation, but its basic premise
is that boosting disadvantaged students’ performance on industrial-era
skills is socially just practice. Similarly, we talk about the digital divide
mostly in terms of giving kids access to computers and the Internet and
not so much in terms of teaching them how to be effective participants
in a technologically-suffused, globally-interconnected future.
It’s not enough to give disadvantaged students access to digital
technologies. They also need opportunities to learn to use those
technologies in ways that will enhance their opportunities to be
fully-functioning members of our future society. Disadvantaged students
are the ones most in need of these pedagogical opportunities because
their families and communities are less likely to have the means to
provide such opportunities outside of school. I read a quote from
someone (and I dearly wish I could remember who said it) that said
something like “poor kids have things done to them by computers, while
affluent kids get to do things with computers.” The author’s premise
was that even when disadvantaged students get to use computers in
schools, too often it’s for drill-and-kill, repetitive, basic fact work
rather than them getting to use computers in creative, collaborative,
problem-solving ways. I think the author was deadly correct regarding
many, many schools.
Many of us education bloggers write a lot about transforming
classroom practice to reflect the needs of a new world: we often call
it ‘School 2.0.’ Is School 2.0 the ultimate
social justice issue for disadvantaged students? Is School 2.0 the most
critical social justice issue of our time if disadvantaged students
aren’t going to be left even further behind than they already are? If
so, why aren’t we framing more of our technology initiatives and
discussion in this way? Where’s our moral imperative?
This post also is available at the TechLearning blog.
