Tenure and educators you damn near can't fire fucking up our youth with their subversive ideas having absolutely nothing to do with the course they are paid to teach.

Well first of all, who's your audience going to be?

Perhaps you would do better in giving a seminar about why you aren't passionate about social issues in education

- Black/white achievement gap and lasting effects starting from kindergarten
- Influence of politics in education, specifically textbooks and cases from Texas
- Rich kids are far more likely to graduate from college, poor kids are more likely to drop out (see this week's NYT Magazine)
- Cost of college

Just to name a few.

The Greek System... Need I say more?

The way black kids are suspended more for the same infraction than white kids. Or just punished more harshly generally for the same infractions. It jumps to mind as one of the major ways racism is passed to the next generation in society.

Where are you located? The issues differ from place to place. Thucydides and 2WL have identified truly massively important issues. In much of the US, I'd vote for inadequate and disproportionate funding for poor (and minority) schools, especially once the contributions of foundations are taken into account

Social Justice is bullshit

@ kaner406: I have plenty to say about social justice and can probably offer you some advice. I work for a major municipal authority in the UK and getting social value out of our suppliers is part of my job. I have many examples of what can be achieved. But for me to respond, help me out - "social justice" is a very wide-ranging concept. Is that all you've been given? Or is there any more focus than that? What exactly is the wording of the question that you've been given?

You can go big, like slavery or genocide, or go medium, like demographic inequalities or whatever, or go even smaller like costs of college - is that big? - or something like that. Like Jamiet said, that's a really broad concept.

"Social Justice is bullshit"
- Faeces are you 12, if this is a subject you don't understand why spew your ignorance all over it.
This looks like a grown up thread so why not rest your pretty little head for the more age appropriate threads, "here boy, go fetch a stick"

ok, so a bit of background. I am doing this in Australia, and the seminar presentation is 30 minutes length. It's basically the final piece of grading the university will make before I go get employed full-time (hopefully) in the education system. It's given to my peers +1 lecturer who is an ex-principal of a school. At this point I have worked in secondary schools for 15 full-time weeks over a 1.5 year graduate course.

Now the the social justice issue needs to be something that I am passionate about, researchable, and has potential to 'plan' around fixing in the classroom as a first-year teacher. That's the criteria, intentionally left vague to encourage people to choose and adapt something that they are passionate about.

That said, I was wondering what people here would choose in my situation? I was thinking about "Authentic Learning in a Karaoke Culture - Teaching students to think for themselves in an era where media is king". But think that this is simply too large a topic for a 30 min seminar... let alone provide a plan for tackling this within teaching practice. So while I have a few ideas on the back-burner as potential social justice issues, I'm interested to hear from what you lot would consider something valid to present in this situation?

I like your idea, just focus it. Maybe focus on the immediate gratification of video games or focus on the issues surrounding kids and today's music "heroes". As you say, you have to be passionate about the subject which means you probably already have ideas. Look at how you want to reach the kids then look at the drive behind why you think it will worm. Work backwards from the methodology to find the reason.

Do it on the importance of not letting education policy be governed by passions.

You could look at gender gaps in classrooms and how men are given more opportunities to answer questions, more time to answer them once called on, more help working to get to the right answer rather than just being told they're wrong, and more praise than anyone else.

You could look at gender based discrimination and how coursework favours female over male students and the disproportionate number of women getting into university than men.

Coursework is SOOOOO in favor in female students. Out of the top ten highest ranked students in my grade, only one maybe two are males. And I'm pulling like straight D's...

yes Gender is an area that could be quite interesting to examine, particularly the statistics surrounding classroom talk-time/weighting - and I wonder does this differ across cultures to a significant degree. By the way the statistics still show that males tend to end up with a larger percentage of the higher paying jobs than females post-university - in Australia at least, but I think also the US, correct?.

I guess the my initial thoughts re: the media is more a master's level project, and it doesn't really lend itself to social (in)justice unless you take the view that access to quality media is slanted along socio-economic lines. But in this case perhaps I should just keep it simple stupid and look at the socio-economic disadvantages that students bring with them in their 'invisible backpack' to school, and what could be done to alleviate this situation within the classroom...

kaner, my final project for my Master's was very much related to social justice and I ended up with a great lesson plan and resources that I plan on using in my teaching job that I"ll be starting in the fall. My thesis incorporate student voice in the framework of critical constructivism in the classroom, essentially arguing that incorporating student voice is the best way to engage students because it creates a student-centered curriculum that builds upon values that are inherent to a local community. The teacher is there to merely provide guidance and scaffolding for discussion and group work; the students do the bulk of the critical thinking but at the same time discourse is conducted through the lens of student experience. Learning is meaningless unless students can relate to what is being taught. This ties it back in with your initial thoughts on socioeconomics and access to opportunities. When students build new knowledge on their preexisting worldviews, you as the teacher can direct discussion toward the power structures that create those worldviews and help students understand and overcome socioeconomic hindrances.

Of course, this works best when talking about poor schools. Rich schools are really the opposite.

" Learning is meaningless unless students can relate to what is being taught"

If I could plus one this a billion times, I would. You are going to be an excellent teacher, 2WL.

Translation: instead of teaching poor kids anything that might help them succeed or threaten to bring them into successful competition with rich kids, encourage them to focus on how bad they have it and to rant futilely against the society that has entrapped them there.

And that single sentence applies to all schools and all students. Poor, rich, public, private... Students learn and retain what they learn when they can relate to the subject in some manner.

@semck - You are reading a personal bias into 2WL's statement. There is nothing futile about wanting to change the world and striving to make it better.

I would argue that 2WL needs to consider the rich kids capable of wanting to do that as well. Occupy Wall street may have been misguided in most every way imaginable, but it wasn't all poor people. There were quite a few "rich kids" amongst that group.

No Draug, I'm just reading what he said.

"The teacher is there to merely provide guidance and scaffolding for discussion and group work; the students do the bulk of the critical thinking but at the same time discourse is conducted through the lens of student experience."

Try teaching a math or science course like that. The teacher -- if he's competent -- has actual knowledge that the students do not. If he chooses to encourage them in lengthy group discussion instead of imparting it to them, he is completely abdicating his duty to teach it to them.

Of course, teaching them to reason to some results themselves is a key part of any such course, and interaction is valuable in engaging them and aiding focus. But 2wl went quite a bit farther. If a teacher in one of these subjects (or history, or social studies) feels that he is there "merely to provide guidance and scaffolding for discussion and group work," you may rely that they're not going to get through the material of algebra I in a year. But that's OK. Denial of access to the many professions and industries that require mathematical competency is a small price to pay for understanding how power structures have helped create their worldview's vision of math (a pretty negative one, undoubtedly).

australia? guess you kinda have to do how fucked up the treatment of the aborigines is....

If students aren't motivated to learn math, they aren't going to learn math, no matter how many times to hit them over the head with a textbook.

They need to be motivated by being shown how math can be used every day in their life first. If that comes at the expense of learning a few less symbolic integrations, I'd say it was well worth it.

+1 SD, discussing Aborigines is probably the way to go here

if it ties into education :P

i'm no expert but i have read some articles on aborigines and education if you can find the stuff yourself