By Jingwoan Chang

The goal of social justice education is to enable individuals to develop the critical analytical tools necessary to understand the structural features of oppression and their own socialization within oppressive systems. Social justice education aims to help participants develop awareness, knowledge, and processes to examine issues of justice/injustice in their personal lives, communities, institutions, and the broader society. It also aims to connect analysis to action; to help participants develop a sense of urgency and commitment, as well as skills and tools, for working with others to interrupt and change oppressive patterns and behaviors in themselves and in the institutions and communities of which they are a part (Bell, 2023, p. 4).

Early in 2020, I enrolled in Leaders of Social Justice in Education: Theory to Practice, a course taught by Dr. Amber Makaiau, Dr. Patricia Halagao, and Dr. Ger Thao. This course was offered through the University of Hawaiʻi (UH) at Mānoa College of Education (COE) in collaboration with the Hanahauʻoli School Professional Development Center as part of an initiative to advance social justice education in Hawaiʻi. This initiative, the Social Justice in Education Project, aims to grow local educators’ capacity for educating children and youth to be active participants in a diverse democracy, and is made possible by the generosity and support of Jana and Howard Wolff.

When I signed up for this course I was in my second year of doctoral studies in the UH Mānoa COE Curriculum Studies department, with a vague idea that I might write a dissertation about world languages education or multilingualism. As we pivoted online in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, this course remained a bright spot during a time of isolation and uncertainty. In this course, we read and reflected on issues of identity, diversity, justice, and action, four components of the Learning for Justice Social Justice Standards. For our final projects, we each designed and implemented a social justice action project and shared it with an audience of educators, advocates, and funders. I found myself intrigued by the diverse ways in which my peers enacted social justice in education, and in awe of their deep commitment to equity. Being part of this cohort inspired me to focus on teacher experiences for my dissertation research project, a qualitative study on how K-12 educators in Hawaiʻi defined and implemented social justice education, and the experiences that shaped their orientations towards social justice. 

In the spring of 2024, I taught the second iteration of this course with Dr. David Ball, English teacher and coordinator of the Davis Democracy Initiative at Punahou School, who was my classmate in 2020. Drawing on my doctoral journey and dissertation research, I updated the course by blending synchronous and asynchronous meetings, streamlining the progression of topics, and adding texts from Oceanic and Kānaka Maoli perspectives. With a cohort of 15 educators from around Hawaiʻi, we read, reflected, and discussed issues of place, identity, justice, and action while sharing our experiences and building a social justice educator community. We also invited guest speakers to talk about their advocacy around equity issues in K-12 education in Hawaiʻi.

For the final project, I recommended these initial steps for proposing a social justice action project:

• Identify, define, and contextualize an issue of injustice in your community or context.

• Center the people most affected by this issue and learn about their needs, assets, and perspectives.

• Explore, interrogate, and reflect on who you are, your relationships to the community and contexts, what is at stake for you in this action plan, and what lenses or blind spots you might have.

• Identify, seek out, and build coalitions, allyship, or community around this issue.

• Continue to educate yourself, talk to people, build alliances, and invite collaboration to create a plan and timeline.

• Consider the impacts, consequences, and long-term sustainability of the plan with regard to individuals, communities, places, animals, and any other stakeholders.

After sharing and getting feedback on their proposals, participants could take the next steps of implementing, reflecting, and documenting their projects, while collecting feedback on the impacts and sustainability of the solution.

At the end of the Spring 2024 course, participants shared their social justice action projects. These projects covered a wide range of topics including:

• Using inclusive literature to build kind, respectful communities;

• Implementing a Filipino History & Culture course for the first time;

• Teaching children to speak up for the inclusiveness of peers with mental or physical differences in all school spaces and activities;

• Recognizing the important contributions of people with disabilities through a student research project and gallery walk;

• Advocating for a culturally responsive and inclusive curriculum instead of a packaged curriculum from outside Hawaiʻi;

• Creating a culturally responsive curriculum celebrating the gifts and assets of multilingual students while developing their English proficiency;

• Incorporating Nā Hopena Aʻo with a packaged social-emotional learning curriculum;

• Creating 5th-grade units based on principles of Nā Hopena Aʻo to promote belonging;

• Creating a Hawaiʻi-based social justice K-5 library & bibliography to promote ʻāina-based social justice;

• Sharing a resource zine on social justice, place, and ethics to help settler teachers learn about their kuleana and impacts in Hawaiʻi;

• Conducting an equity audit as part of a school-wide initiative on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging;

• Teaching about and writing a children’s book connecting ‘ōlelo Hawaiʻi and Black History Month.

We had funding to support inter-island travel for participants, which meant that many of us met in person on the last day of class when we heard the final project presentations. In attendance were our funders, participants’ ʻohana, previous course instructors and participants, along with other friends and supporters from the community, including Hawai’i State Representative and former teacher Amy Perruso. All audience members were invited to give feedback and suggestions about the project presentations. We gave hugs, shared food, and learned about each others’ social justice action projects in an atmosphere of aloha, hope, and mutual support. 

Teaching this course was a full-circle moment in a lot of ways. For one, it allowed me to reconnect mentally with the dissertation research I set aside after graduation in August 2023. In my review of the existing literature on social justice education, I found that  

1. “Social justice education” can be a vaguely defined catch-all term;

2. Definitions of social justice education are not necessarily rooted in a theory of justice;

3. Scholarly writing about social justice education lacks detail about actual teacher experiences or pedagogical practices.

To address these issues, I designed a study to explore how Hawaiʻi K-12 educators defined, implemented, and experienced social justice education. Drawing on surveys and interviews with seventeen K-12 educators from diverse backgrounds and with different relationships to Hawaiʻi, I identified several themes in how the research participants thought of social justice education:

• Equity: This was a central concern in how teachers defined social justice education. While teachers gave different examples of equity issues that concerned them, many participants described their understanding of inequity as something that existed not just on the individual level, but on the level of unjust histories, narratives, structures, and systems. 

• Empowerment through Engagement and Action: Many participants defined social justice education in terms of empowering students to become more engaged citizens. They talked about the importance of developing knowledge and skills so that students can think critically, have difficult conversations, recognize and identify injustices, address oppressive systems, and take action to bring about liberation for themselves and their communities.

• Identity Awareness and Affirmation: Almost all participants spoke about their identities and positionalities as part of the journey towards a social justice orientation in their teaching. Some teachers described painful experiences of devaluation, erasure, or disidentification around their own identities in their educational journeys, while others described positive, identity-affirming experiences. Some pointed to aha moments around their privilege and how they developed a sense of responsibility towards justice. These experiences around identity were profound motivators for educators to teach with a social justice orientation.

• Inextricability Between Identity and Place: For many participants, their identities and their sense of justice were inextricable from specific local issues like militarization in Hawaiʻi, environmental degradation of ʻaina, erasure of Hawaiian history in their received education, lack of Filipino representation in curriculum, or deficit narratives around multilingual students. In other words, when teachers described what social justice education meant to them, they spoke in deeply personal ways and in great detail about issues specific to our geographical, historical, and cultural contexts.

As both teacher and researcher, it was interesting to see many of the findings from my study echoed in the experiences of the participants in the Spring 2024 course. Making these connections helped to strengthen my ongoing understanding of what it means to be a social justice educator in Hawai‘i, and how I can use what I’m learning to hone the work I do in research, writing, and facilitation of professional learning. 

As I continue to reflect on my research, the experience of teaching the Spring 2024 Leaders of Social Justice in Education course, and participant feedback, I am updating the next iteration of the course. I plan to start the course with an in-person pilina building opportunity. I also want to develop strategies for eliciting greater involvement from the participants in leading the biweekly discussions that are central to the course experience. Additionally, I plan to streamline the reading list while focusing on Hawaiʻi as the place and context for our learning. Last but not least, I want to make more time for final presentations at the end of the course. 

I will wrap up this blog entry with one more finding from my dissertation, which is that educators developed their critical consciousness (or conscientização for fans of Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, 1970) in non-linear, complex ways that were not bounded by a particular time or experience. For example, none of the research participants said that they developed a social justice educator awareness within a teacher preparation program. Rather, they described layers of lived experiences from childhood through their professional lives, sometimes involving family, critical readings, memorable conversations, teachers, students, colleagues, and their own schooling. Over time, educators reflected on their experiences, sought out new learning, identified patterns, and made new connections that shaped their present-day social justice educator awareness. Similarly, this blog entry is a reflection on a series of experiences that continue to hone my thinking and practices around social justice education.

I invite Hawaiʻi educators to consider joining the third cohort of the Leaders of Social Justice in Education course in Spring 2025. Wherever you may be on your journey, this course might be a good opportunity to explore, reflect, build community, and take action in the realm of social justice education in Hawaii. Visit the course information page here to learn more, apply, or share with others.

Works Cited:

Bell, L. A. (2023). Theoretical foundations for social justice education. In M. Adams, L. A. Bell, D. J. Goodman, D. Shlasko, R. R. Briggs, & R. Pacheco (Eds.), Teaching for diversity and social justice (4th ed.). Routledge.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Jingwoan Chang

In addition to facilitating professional development and teaching social justice education, Jingwoan Chang is a World Languages Resource Teacher in the Hawaiʻi State Department of Education’s Office of Curriculum and Instructional Design. She taught K-12 Mandarin Chinese in public and private schools in Chicago and Honolulu for sixteen years. In 2023, she received her doctorate from the Curriculum Studies department at UH Mānoa, College of Education. Her dissertation project focused on how K-12 educators in Hawaiʻi defined and implemented social justice education. Her project also explored the experiences that shaped teachers’ orientations toward social justice education. In her free time, she is often in the ocean.