{"id":401,"date":"2013-12-01T22:24:15","date_gmt":"2013-12-01T22:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/reslife\/?p=401"},"modified":"2013-12-16T18:25:59","modified_gmt":"2013-12-16T18:25:59","slug":"an-interview-with-social-justice-leader-aja-laduke-ph-d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/reslife\/2013\/12\/01\/an-interview-with-social-justice-leader-aja-laduke-ph-d\/","title":{"rendered":"An Interview With Social Justice Leader: Aja LaDuke, Ph.D."},"content":{"rendered":"

In October, Resident Director Ayanna Bledsoe attended the National Association of Multicultural Education (NAME) conference in Oakland. This conference is a great opportunity to meet educations across the nation dedicated to making our campuses, both K-12 and higher ed, more socially just. What does that mean to leader\u00a0Aja E. LaDuke, Ph.D.,\u00a0Assistant Professor of Teacher Education \u00a0at\u00a0Thelma P. Lally School of Education at\u00a0The College of Saint Rose? Read here to find out!\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

What does social justice mean to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My first point of contact with social justice, or I would be more correct to say the first point in which I \u201cwoke up\u201d to it, was in a graduate level education course called \u201cLiteracy in the Secondary Schools.\u201d\u00a0 At this point I had been teaching for two years in a public elementary school, and had chosen the course as a step toward earning my certification as a reading specialist.\u00a0 Little did I know, but this course would be much more than that and put me on another path entirely \u2013 one that guides both my life and my work as a teacher educator.\u00a0 On our first day, our professor asked us to explore the question, \u201cHow are schools like prisons?\u201d which would be a guiding question for our study throughout the semester.\u00a0 The group conversations, academic reading, and individual writing responses that stemmed from that question served as my first exposure (or again, the first exposure that I was conscious of) and first engagement with examining schools from an institutional lens.\u00a0 We read works like \u201cLiteracy with an Attitude\u2019 by Patrick Finn \u2013 a book that introduced me to the works of others like Jean Anyon and Paulo Freire, and that I still have my underlined, dog-eared, post-it note covered copy of to this day to show to my students.\u00a0 I use it as an example of \u201ctransformational literacy,\u201d or in short, literacy that can change one\u2019s life \u2013 in ways that they will when they become teachers themselves.<\/p>\n

How did you get involved?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong>I had chosen teaching as a profession for many of the reasons that others would name, for example, wanting to make a positive difference for future generations.\u00a0 I had also been drawn to the idea of the evolving nature of teaching, how there would be no point at which I would reach a pinnacle and be able to say, \u201cI\u2019ve got this\u201d and not find ways to improve my practice.\u00a0 My logic was that society is always changing over time, so teaching changes with it and I have to keep up.\u00a0 Though I was entirely wrong (ex. technology), this course and a host of other courses and experiences that followed asked a question that I now use to guide my own courses: \u201cThough schools have the potential to be sites of powerful social change, how do they instead work to perpetuate the status quo?\u201d\u00a0 I had not thought about how schools contributed to societal \u201cnon-change.\u201d\u00a0 In exploring the ways in which schools are normed to dominant groups (i.e. White, middle class, native English speaking, etc.) through their policies, curricula, testing and other practices, I realized that my job as a teacher was not just to \u201chelp students learn\u201d but to help many of them to exercise their right to learn<\/span>, in other words, to gain access to educational opportunities in a system designed to only give them to some, not all.\u00a0 This also began me on a journey of examining my own life and school experiences from an institutional lens.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t ever thought of school as a prison before that moment because schools were set up for me to succeed.\u00a0\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t supposed to see them that way, and I didn\u2019t \u2013 until I was already in adult teaching in one.<\/p>\n

As a teacher educator, I see it as my responsibility to make sure that new generations of teachers do not enter the field without examining schools from an institutional lens and identifying unjust practices that are embedded within them (including, but not limited to the underrepresentation of students of color in honors and AP courses, overrepresentation of students of color and bilingual students in special education programming, inconsistent disciplinary practices, emphasis on order and procedure vs. authentic learning, White\/Eurocentric curricula, etc.).\u00a0 We unpack widely used phrases in the education community, such as \u201cthe achievement gap\u201d or \u201cdropout,\u201d through consideration of schools\u2019 roles in the underachievement or low graduation rates of students of color and\/or speakers of other languages, making \u201copportunity gap\u201d and \u201cpushout\u201d as Michelle Fine and other scholars have purported, more appropriate choices.\u00a0 Without this institutional lens, teacher candidates may enter schools to complete field experiences and see situations that reinforce deficit perspectives or stereotypes that focus on what students \u201cdon\u2019t have\u201d either academically, socially, financially, etc. and\/or reinforce myths of meritocracy (\u201cthese students just aren\u2019t trying hard enough).\u00a0 As a class, we examine counternarratives that challenge these deficit perspectives, and see examples of teachers using social justice pedagogy, multicultural education, and culturally relevant pedagogy that to engage ALL students, regardless of cultural background.\u00a0 These examples show that when an alternative is introduced \u2013 for example, a more inclusive curriculum in which students multiple perspectives of historical events or an environment in which students are not tracked by \u201cability\u201d as determined by a standardized test score \u2013 that traditionally underperforming students perform<\/em>.\u00a0 We realistic look at the challenges associated with creating these alternatives, as well as the potential societal consequences if we do not pursue social justice education on a broader scale.\u00a0 What would change if this was happening in more places and with students of all ages, instead of in small pockets and only with \u201colder\u201d students.\u00a0 What can be accomplished if we educate students to both curricular standards and social justice\u00a0 – – and avoid situations like mine in which I did not begin building my awareness until graduate school as an adult?<\/p>\n

How can students get involved?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My first recommendation seems clich\u00e9 coming from a professor and a professor of literacy education, but it is to read.\u00a0 As I have mentioned, the reading piece was key to my understandings of institutional forces how they influence individual interactions.\u00a0 Getting back to the idea of transformational literacy, Freire says to \u201cread the word is to read the world,\u201d which I have found to be true.\u00a0 I see and read situations very differently than I did before my social justice \u201cawakening,\u201d the difference lying mostly in that I can read them from more than one perspective \u2013 one that considers privilege and oppression and the overt and subversive ways in which they operate.\u00a0 I ask students to consider their own place within these systems and how their positions as oppressor and oppressed change according to context.\u00a0 We talk about the power they will inherit as teachers.\u00a0 Regardless of their various social identities, as a classroom teacher they will be positioned as an authority over their students.\u00a0 We discuss how being an effective teacher often includes stepping out their comfort zone \u2013 which may include admitting mistakes or ignorance, and confronting the fact that mistakes and ignorance may have a negative impact even if they had a positive intent.\u00a0 This also may mean leaving their comfort zone physically and spending time in communities very different from their own \u2013 particularly for educators, in the communities that your students call home.\u00a0 Students quickly identify teachers who teach in their school or district, yet live somewhere else, and never spend time in their community.\u00a0 Essentially, if you talk the talk, you need to also walk the walk.\u00a0 Walking the walk can begin with self-examination that is needed for social justice work.\u00a0 Asking yourself questions like, \u201cHow have I been socialized by family, friends, schools, or media to think about people who are different from me and how does that influence my interactions?\u201d\u00a0 Walking the walk also means building authentic cross-cultural relationships, which like any other relationship require time, active listening, and honesty.\u00a0 Part of my work is to encourage students to engage in field experiences in communities with students representing different social and cultural identities than their own, and for an extended amount of time.\u00a0 These experiences \u2013 on the individual level \u2013 combined with an \u201cinstitutional level awareness,\u201d set the groundwork for any social justice action.\u00a0 This awareness will empower you in knowing exactly what you are up against, and the individuals in your life with whom you have these relationships will provide the most inspiration to keep fighting until change is achieved.<\/p>\n

Learn more about the NAME conference here<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In October, Resident Director Ayanna Bledsoe attended the National Association of Multicultural Education (NAME) conference in Oakland. This conference is a great opportunity to meet educations across the nation dedicated to making our campuses, both K-12 and higher ed, more … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":254,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-5","category-staff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/reslife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/reslife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/reslife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/reslife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/reslife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/reslife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":403,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/reslife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions\/403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/reslife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/reslife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/reslife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}