Maurianne Adams

Review of the Year's Publications for 2002: Social Justice Education

In Volume 35, Issue 1, with a newly focused social justice direction for Equity & Excellence in Education (EEE), the incoming editorial staff initiated a service for readers that we hoped might help define the many points of intersection among social justice, equity, and education as a new emphasis in education and as a niche for this journal. We prepared a review of books and articles published during 2001 and titled it “Review of the Year’s Publications in Social Justice Education’’ (EEE, April 2002, pp. 79–85). We took as our model last year, the thematic review articles that characterize highly focused journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Review of Educational Research as examples of how a journal might help to shape an academic discipline such as women’s studies and educational research with emergent social justice agendas. This year and for the foreseeable future, we will offer a “Review of the Year’s Publications in Social Justice Education’’ as an annotated listing, rather than as a thematic review article. This annotated format enables us to review social justice books and articles identified in a broader, more comprehensive interdisciplinary search of the literature than we were able to conduct or review thematically for 2001. We believe that our readers will appreciate and accept the more extensive listing as an understandable tradeoff for our previous year’s effort to fairly and accurately synthesize a somewhat less extensive literature in a thematically more coherent manner. We note (as we did last year) our keen awareness that collecting a year’s review of writings that reflect a social justice orientation toward education presents a daunting interand cross-disciplinary challenge. Social justice education is a newly emerging field; it lacks clearly defined parameters, and it bridges distinctive disciplinary and academic areas, such as social psychology, sociology, dialogue work, teacher education, urban studies, legal studies, and multicultural education. Our intention is

Guest Editors’ Introduction to the Issue

More than a decade ago, the “Editor’s Note” (Adams, 2002) in Equity & Excellence in Education (EEE) made an editorial commitment to bringing “an explicit social justice perspective” (p. 3) to the issues of equity and equality that already were central to this journal. Now in August 2015 (vol. 48, issue 3), we offer a special themed issue that bookends our direct participation in this ongoing commitment to social justice education. During the past decade, faculty and graduate students, mainly in the Social Justice Education (SJE) concentration (College of Education, University of Massachusetts—Amherst), have edited and staffed this journal with special attention to the range of social justice issues related to education—across the social identities of groups marginalized or privileged in the larger society, as well as at the various levels of personal interactions in classrooms, schools, campuses, and other social settings. This social justice education approach built on the journal’s primary focus on desegregation and integration with important new work on gender and other equity issues. Now, in 2015, the journal is poised to continue its focus on social justice education, perhaps with new approaches that reflect ongoing changes in U.S. demographics, global diaspora, and immigration, and the enormous responsibility of formal and informal education to foster social justice, equity, and excellence in community and institutional settings. Each of the several phases in the long life of EEE, from its 1963 launching by Meyer Weinberg as Integrated Education to the social justice education journal it is today, has offered (in Weinberg’s words) “relevant, scholarly and dependable information . . . grappling with problems and issues . . . not yet completely decided” (Weinberg, cited in Adams, 2002, p. 3). Today more than ever we realize how little has been “completely decided” concerning our most pressing national and local efforts to achieve social justice. Although there are limits to what a scholarly, activist journal can do, there are no limits to how it can inform, question, interrogate, resist, interrupt, encourage, and recommend. We hope readers will find inspiration toward these actions in the articles published in this special themed issue, Engaging Praxis in Social Justice Education: Continuity and Change in Social Justice Education Theory/Pedagogy/Research, as we honor this transition to a new era for EEE. This seems the place and the time to acknowledge some explicit perspectives and criteria developed by the social justice educators who edited and staffed EEE between 2002 and 2014—and to whom we are bidding farewell in this special themed issue.

Review of the Year's Publication for 2007: Social Justice Education

For the last five years, Equity & Excellence in Education (EEE) has offered an annual annotated bibliographical review of the preceding year’s publications in the field of social justice education (SJE). This service to our readers provides an overview of books, articles, and dissertations of interest to the growing field of social justice education. In this Year in Review for 2007 (YIR ‘07) we present the work of four advanced Social Justice Education graduate students and the editors of EEE, who together have examined articles and annotated books from a range of academic disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, religious studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, and women’s studies, as well as from education sources. YIR ‘07 presents a review of social justice education books, chapters, dissertations, and articles from a broad, comprehensive interdisciplinary search of the literature. As we noted in previous years, collecting a year’s review of writings that reflects a social justice orientation toward education presents an increasingly daunting interand cross-disciplinary challenge. Even though Social Justice Education is a relatively new field within Education, it has been named increasingly in databases or print resources, sometimes to signal a systemic, multiple-identity approach to issues of discrimination and inequality but also sometimes as an attractive synonym for “diversity.” In preparing YIR ‘07, we were struck by how much more difficult the job had become of winnowing articles we considered useful to teachers, teacher preparation faculty, school personnel, community educators, and people in higher education who are interested in this emergent field. The variety and interdisciplinarity of the field has always presented a challenge to this YIR effort. However, the sheer number and variability of articles using Social Justice or Social Justice Education in the title or among keywords made the YIR project more time-consuming and difficult this year than ever before. Although we started with broad criteria for inclusion—social justice and social justice education, liberation, anti-racism education, immigration and language oppression, and other SJE “isms” (ableism, adultism1, antisemitism, classism, heterosexism, religious oppression, racism, sexism, and transgender oppression)—we decided this year to stretch the boundaries of what could be included in our article: Our graduate students were inclined to be attuned to nuances in describing social justice education, so as to

Editors' Introduction Special Issue: Partnering for Equity

In a brief and elegant statement that we use as an epigraph for our introduction to this special issue of Equity & Excellence in Education, Wendell Berry (2001) tells us that “A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life’’ (p. 13). The impetus behind Berry’s reflections is the current national environmental crisis, concerning many citizens who profess values associated with local economic strength and a healthy environment without a willingness to move from the comfort of holding such values to the difficulty of acting on those values in every day situations. Similarly, in the view of the editors of this special issue of Equity & Excellence in Education, commitments to the values of social justice and educational equity are often undermined by failures to translate those values into action. Our concern about social equity and social justice in our schools directly parallels the tendency identified by Berry with regard to the environment. And so, we turn to the concerns of social justice values and social justice practice in P–16 schooling taken up by this special issue. Many P–16 educators readily agree that equity and excellence should be a central focus of our nation’s schools and teacher preparation programs, whether that focus is located in a moral conviction of the equality of all human beings, the dramatic demographic growth of students in the nation’s schools from underserved communities of color, the civic argument that a nation based on democratic ideals requires an educated citizenry, the enrichment approach (recently affirmed in the Supreme Court’s decision in the University of Michigan Law School case) that the education of all university students is enhanced by socially and culturally diverse viewpoints, or the political conviction that students must learn how to communicate respectfully, knowledgeably, and peacefully across their social and cultural differences (Border & Chism, 1992). But, unless we each enact these values with daily practice to dismantle systems of inequity and injustice, our values hold little meaning; and unless interdependent systems work together in this dismantling, efforts in one system will likely undo those in another. P–12 schools and institutions of higher education that prepare teachers and other educators are two such interdependent systems. Educators from both systems commonly acknowledge the need for improved school and university collaboration and for increased equity of opportunity and teaching excellence within these collaborative endeavors (and, of course, beyond). Those of us who advocate school-university partnerships as a means toward effecting these goals must heed Berry’s (2001) ecological concern by continually asking ourselves if our daily practice enacts our values of collaboration, equity, equality, and critical inquiry. Or, do we profess a set of values while comfortably and passively accepting and carrying forward historical practices that strengthen existing imbalances of social and cultural power and privilege? Do our educator preparation programs value theoretical knowledge over experiential knowledge, or have we learned the benefits of multiple ways of knowing and perceiving the world? Does status reside primarily at the university or do university faculty members recognize practitioner expertise by coteaching courses, copresenting at conferences, or coauthoring reports of research, for example? Are decisions made collaboratively, or do university faculty members tell teachers and administrators in schools what their joint efforts should look and feel like? Similar questions can be asked of schools: Do experienced teachers work with the neediest students or do they prefer to work with those most like themselves? Does the seductive ease and logic of tracking continue to thread its destructive way through structures such as access, scheduling, and curriculum? Are preservice teachers encouraged to ask critical questions of their mentor teachers or are they socialized to do just what is being done? These and other issues of social justice are an inescapable part of the fabric of school-university partnerships, as the guest editor and contributors to this volume have observed and experienced over the years. These partnerships and their resulting unions of practice— professional development schools (PDSs) or partner schools—came about in large part because of concerns