Reflecting on learning

As teachers and advocates we need to be more than just nice. We need to be able to recognize issues that are already affecting the lives of the children and families we will work with. We need to adapt and change when necessary to teach our young learners. Classroom practices that move rhetoric and substance should be:

1. Grounded in the lives of our students. Instruction should start with the needs of the child and connections between students and their lives and can be a starting point for the understanding of social justice.
2. Critical. Children should be taught it is alright to critique information, and literature and these critiques must move beyond the classroom and be linked to real-world challenges. We need to teach them how to think.
3. Multicultural, antiracist, and pro-justice. Our curriculum should be changing, presenting ongoing that addresses multiple perspectives.
4. Participatory and experimental. Use a variety of mental and physical, engaging activities. We need to help children to learn how to make real decisions and how to solve problems.
5. Hopeful, joyful, kind and visionary. Classrooms need to be designed in ways that teach children to trust and care for each other and provide ways to show the good in people and empower them to overcome their inequities.
6. Activist. We should teach children to be human and humane and show examples of people struggling for justice.
7. Academically rigorous. A social justice curriculum should be academically rigorous and should prepare students for the real world.
8. Culturally sensitive. Critical teaching requires teachers to admit they don’t know everything and we need to listen, and learn from our students (Boutte, 2008).

This will not be an easy task, however it is necessary if we want to help our children grow up and become productive members of our society.

Erich Fromm: Why should society feel responsible only for the education of children, and not for the education of all adults of every age?

To My Colleagues

Don't ever be afraid to seek help when you truly need it. We don't enter college as geniuses, and we don't leave college as geniuses. We leave as learners, who are determined to succeed. “Keep on teaching”.

Reference

Boutte, G. (2008). Beyond the illusion of diversity: How early childhood teachers can       promote social justice. Social Studies, 99(4), 165--173.
   Retrieved from the Walden Library using the Academic Search Complete database.