‘Social justice’
Rhone and others on the WTIG team will work with six 5th-grade teachers from different elementary schools in the Wichita district for one full academic year. The group will use readings and other activities and resources to examine school structures, ideological beliefs and teaching practices that could perpetuate bullying. Rhone said she chose 5th graders for the project because evidence shows bullying is most extensive in middle school.
Teacher participants will receive graduate workshop credit, a stipend for their yearlong commitment, books, articles, and subscriptions to professional journals that will be used through the course of the project, as well as classroom coaching from Rhone and other Newman faculty. “Every person involved in this project will examine his or her teaching behaviors, including me,” Rhone said. “This work is not about the other as much as it is about us all.”
The WTIG team includes Rhone, Newman School of Education Director Steven E Dunn, Ed.D., Newman Professor of Education Don Hufford, Ph.D., Executive Director of the U.S.D. 259 Office of Equity Kim Johnson Burkhalter, and U.S.D. 259 Parent Coordinator Jackie Lugrand. Also on the team are Joseph Dunn, a social studies teacher at Marshall Middle School who will facilitate a session with teacher participants, and Administrative Assistants Karen Whitmore and Joyce Rhone Scott.
Beginning in April and running throughout the program, the WTIG team, participating Wichita teachers, and teachers and other interested parties across the nation can track the inquiry group’s progress and communicate with each other through a Web site and blog, at http://wtig.newmanu.edu.
The project is rooted in the work of the late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who developed teaching techniques during the 1970s designed to help illiterate adults acquire the critical thinking skills they needed to connect and cope with their social, historical, and political environment. Freire found that teachers who validated the cultural backgrounds and present realities of their students were able to have authentic relationships with them, leading to better learning outcomes. Freire also advocated what he termed transformative teaching and learning, which seeks to engage learners, provide meaningful experiences beyond textbooks and the classroom, and empower students to act on the injustices in their lives.
The WTIG group will use works written by Freire, as well as educators Antonia Darder, bell hooks, and Hufford, in the course. Freire’s work Pedagogy of the Oppressed will also be read by Newman faculty. Hufford will then lead a discussion on the book for faculty members and the Committee for Transforming Teaching and Learning at Newman.
Rhone said the project will use real-life examples of social justice to help students develop the skills to address bullying in their lives through nonviolent and productive measures. She added that combining the concepts of social justice, cultural competence and transformative teaching and learning can help teachers create classroom environments that model an appropriate use of power, inclusion, mutual respect and critical thinking – all of which lessen bullying behavior.
“Teachers must teach students an appropriate use of power, and be willing to examine the use of power in the larger school context and in their classrooms,” she said. “Schools are hierarchal in nature. That structure constitutes a kind of bullying of children and teachers through the ranking and sorting regimes, which are unfair and discriminatory against certain groups of students. But we as educators can create different classroom and whole-school climates.”
