Social justice

A major part of teaching for social justice is teaching students how to think about certain situations and not what to think about these situations.  Students need to be afforded the opportunity to approach a conflict from many angles, they have to understand the historical context of this conflict, prejudices of different information sources and ultimately they must be able to form their own position on this conflict that uses logic and critical rational reasoning to justify their position. 

Too often science and math teachers make the mistake of presenting everything as unquestionable truth when in reality scientific theories and paradigms are revised and argued constantly.    Scientists can get caught up in the argument of who is right and who is wrong when in fact their individual theories could, at some point in the future, be used to inspire a scientists that creates a once in a generation breakthrough in their field.  Scientific progress is not always linear, theories are always being thought of and discarded and then revised or expanded on.  Students of science must be able to identify the prejudices and contexts the authors of scientific papers may have.  A scientist that spends his life justifying some school of thought is going to be reluctant to scrap a whole career of work even if he is presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  Teaching for social justice to me means equipping students with enough skills to create their own informed opinions about a subject and not just accepting what one source says is the truth.  (GH)