Constructing Social Justice Concepts Through Reading

I have been reading student blog posts centered around the social justice theme questions from our Nonfiction Reading unit. Throughout the unit, students needed to answer the three thematic questions using their NF book for text evidence support. The three questions are:

image from goodreads.com

• To what extent does power or the lack of power affect individual?
• What creates prejudice and what can an individual do to overcome it?
• What allows some individuals to take a stand against prejudice/ oppression while others choose to participate in it?

It has been a journey for some students to construct answers for these questions. All of them have gotten better with identifying who has/lacks power and who takes a stand against/participates in prejudice. They can point to moments in their books where people were treated unfairly due to their race, age, or gender. They are even seeing how the characters' lives are affected by this treatment and times when they've made attempts to overcome prejudice.

The harder part is constructing the general answer behind the example, to come up with ideas such as "Lacking power pushes some people to action to gain the power they deserve", or "Prejudice is often created through the environment they've grown up in and their family's beliefs", or "The best way to overcome prejudice is to get lots of people on your side to protest against it". These abstractions are slowly built through book discussions, targeted questions during conferences or blog comments, by reading others' blog posts, and by mixing up book groups so connections can be made between books with similar themes.

Most students were able to finally construct generalized answers by the end of the unit. Some never quite got there. I think there is a bit of a developmental divide there. For all students, though, the time spent thinking about social justice issues is time well spent. It opens a little window into our imperfect world so they can look at modern-day situations with a more critical eye.

Or will they just compartmentalize all that thinking into "stuff I needed to know during the NF unit"? 

image from npr.org

I just finished reading Delirium by Lauren Oliver, a dystopian novel in which 18-year-olds are "cured" of the dangerous disease of love. Throughout the novel, Oliver constructs societal norms through propaganda, starting with revised nursery rhymes in childhood, through citizenship training in the schools, through reading Romeo and Juliet as a cautionary tale, through police raids and media messages. This propaganda blitz means that young people grow up eagerly anticipating the cure "procedure" so they can live future lives that are safe, predictable, and "happy". Of course the main character rebels against this, otherwise we wouldn't have a story.

But I was fascinated by the construction of the society, and how the social justice theme questions so neatly dovetailed into the events of the story. What creates prejudice (or thought control)? How can an individual take a stand against it? If all of society believes in the rightness of a wrong, what does it take to break out of that individually as well as systemically?

I hope that some of my students will begin to notice parallels between the books they are reading and the "big questions" we talk about in class. I hope that they notice parallels between the "big questions" and the events in our modern world. I hope they examine their own lives for bias or participation in oppression, and find ways to take a stand.