I like the idea of surveying parents and family members, and processing responses. It’s a step toward an ethnographic look at community, which is something I’ve thought about on and off for a long time. It would be doable, I think.

I thought it might be possible to develop a game through which students could explore the process of research or collaborative inquiry to make a result. Also including querying or surveying parents and processing responses.

In my head the idea of developing those processes in schools means that the class could be the engine room for making proposals about the form or outcome of their learning. eg. Develop a proposal for what to do with a specific patch of school grounds, or a local historic site, or a building renovation.

I thought that this kind of articulation could make it possible for schools to develop and practice techniques and dialogue which would make it possible for them to make authoritative proposals for their own regional or cultural focus in school. ie Its that kind of rigor which would make it attractive for edu departments to find the best way forward through listening to the schools and their communities and students rather than relying on mass testing as the source for authoritative outcomes?
This is possibly waffle but i feel like there is something in the relationship with community and students which makes the school the place where policy and pedagogy could be more tailored to local needs.

It is possible this happens already it just feels like there is a need for some bottom up thinking to cut through the testing to find something more authentic and individual for students to aim for.

I don’t agree that acknowledging the role of culture, class, history, or economics in how advantage is distributed in our society is necessarily antagonistic to the goals of an academic program, though.

Your point about what social justice means, is well-taken. I see the same difficulty in discussing whole language philosophy and constructivism. For a quick exploration of what we mean by the term ’social justice’, eduwonkette wrote on this topic last spring.

My problem with the concept of teaching for social justice is that the phrase can mean anything and can, and does, mean something different to different people. Simply the debate about the term and what it means can demonstrate that subjectivity.

But the problem that conservatives like me have is not that teaching for social justice is necessarily a bad thing. Rather, my concern is that in the rush to “make things better through social justice” we have forgotten to teach our children things like reading, writing, math, science (hard and soft), how to research and develop skils to really assess the world around them for themselves. My belief is that schools that educate children will develop citizens who can bring about change because THEY see the problem, not because some teacher believes a given cause to be important or a given issue is socially injust.

Social justice is a slippery term and it is one that should be defined by an individual person as to what the term means to them, as I am sure that my definition of social justice is far different than yours. What education should do, objectively, is teach children how to define that term for themselves, not be given the definition by someone else.