This school year has been a challenging one for educators. Many teachers are navigating new curricular restrictions—topics, historical periods, people, and identities that have suddenly been deemed off-limits for discussion and inclusion in instructional materials. Educators, rightly, feel the weight of these restrictions and fear the potential consequences of challenging them.
In fact, a recent Rand Corporation survey found that even in states without formal curricular bans, two-thirds of K-12 teachers have chosen to limit classroom instruction on social issues. In essence, the presence of state-specific restrictions has silenced even teachers who are not subject to them, limiting students’ access to learning about race, gender, historical events, and social movements nationwide.
In our own work, we have spoken with many educators who are feeling overwhelmed, uncertain, or discouraged in this moment. Yet, as James Baldwin argued in 1963—a year marked by both profound struggle and collective resilience—moments of social crisis are precisely when educational justice work becomes most essential. In a speech to teachers in New York City, Baldwin challenged educators to remember that the obligation of anyone who considers themselves responsible is to examine society and to work to advance justice.
If we take Baldwin seriously and understand the present moment as one in which examining society and advancing justice are especially urgent, the question becomes how educators and students can engage in this work amid intensifying social, political, and legal constraints.
We have spent years researching and writing about how educators across grade levels, from elementary school through college, can nurture students’ capacities to examine society and work toward its transformation. Through this sustained study, we have learned that even in moments when schools and educators are prohibited from explicitly drawing on justice-oriented curricula, pathways still exist to cultivate students’ motivation and foundational skills to recognize, analyze, and challenge injustice and to create spaces that value all human beings.
As teachers, we retain meaningful agency and power in our classrooms. Beyond teaching content, educators are responsible for shaping interactions, relationships, and critical skills—domains through which we can continue to prepare young people to analyze and engage the world around them with clarity and purpose. Here are suggestions for cultivating critical thinking in a challenging time.
1. Use your classroom to model community and practice connected living.
In dozens of ways, through the news, social media, their own communities, and perhaps even in their own lives, young people right now are witnessing people treat other humans with callousness and cruelty.
The ability to truly see one another as human beings and recognize each other’s humanity is the foundation of a just world. Equally important is the ability—and the will—to treat one another as human beings. We likely wish this came as second nature to everyone, yet the world around us, both historically and today, shows us that it does not. Or if it does, we submerge that nature in favor of other things.
Educators have the power and space every day to offer young people relational tools and help them practice the basic skills of communal human living. Even as specific content in curriculum is being sidelined, we can insist that students learn and speak each other’s names, create space for students to meaningfully hear pieces of each other’s histories and stories, and set expectations/norms for how students listen to each other, disagree, and engage with each other.
These small practices strengthen students’ ability to build just relationships and communities outside of school—and each models what connected human engagement can look and feel like. We should not underestimate the power of this skill and desire; relationships are the foundation of a transformed future.
2. Teach analysis skills and frameworks that students can apply to exploring and understanding justice issues.
Most teachers are guided by state standards that call on them to support students’ development of strong analytical skills, whether they are examining literary texts, historical events, scientific hypotheses, or mathematical approaches.
Within these expectations, teachers often have flexibility in choosing the analytic tools and lenses they introduce to students. Educators can make use of that flexibility to introduce students to analytic tools relevant to academic tasks that students can also apply to making sense of the wider world and the social and political forces shaping our lives and communities.
For example, political scientist Iris Marion Young offers a framework in her 1990 book, Justice and the Politics of Difference, with several key questions (see streamlined version below) that can be applied to any number of ideas, histories, or academic concepts:
- Who benefits?
- Who is excluded?
- Who has less power?
- Whose experiences are being discounted or attacked, or who is harmed?
History teachers might introduce this framework to their students to support their rigorous analyses of historical events not currently omitted from the curriculum, ranging from the Industrial Revolution to westward expansion to women’s suffrage.
Science teachers might draw on Young’s framework to ask students to analyze environmental issues (e.g., air or water pollution) by examining who benefits from industrial practices, which communities bear the most significant health risks, whose voices are excluded from decision-making, and whose lives are the most harmed.
Educators can also remind students that these frameworks can be used to analyze any event, including events happening in the present day. As educators, we need to remember that critical questions about power, voice, fairness, and justice are not bound to particular content; they are intellectual habits that can be practiced across texts, disciplines, and genres.
3. Leverage schools themselves as sites for practicing critical social analysis skills.
Our own classrooms and schools can also serve as sites for this kind of analysis, offering students meaningful opportunities to explore fundamental concepts and levers in creating and sustaining injustice, such as power.
For example, teachers can invite students to explore who sets classroom rules, who enforces them, and whose voices shaped the rules in the first place. Students can be invited to analyze a school dress code, asking whose forms of expression are policed or excluded. This practice of noticing and observing power in the everyday spaces they inhabit helps students see power at work in tangible ways and supports their understanding of a fundamental principle of justice.
Some teachers may have the opportunity to engage students in applying these same questions to events shaping their local or neighborhood communities, but even teachers who cannot have access to ecosystems within schools themselves that provide ample opportunities for critical questioning and reflection. These opportunities build students’ muscles to do this critical questioning in other domains.
4. Teach something you can teach and make it matter.
Almost anything we are charged with teaching can be grounded in concepts related to civic engagement, social change, or justice, even without using commonly associated justice language. No text, theory, or equation exists outside of time, place, and power. Literary canons, scientific paradigms, and mathematical methods reflect decisions about whose knowledge is preserved, valued, and taught.
In conversations about chemistry, we can discuss quantification and precision as epistemic power, or explore how foundational concepts such as yield, waste minimization, and optimization may harbor hidden values. We can teach a Shakespeare play or a Robert Frost poem and invite students to consider: whose interior life is being explored, and whose is not? In history, humanities, or anything that involves text, we can employ resistant reading strategies, documented practices that develop students’ critical thinking. Resistant reading consists of asking students to interpret a text from a different perspective or to scrutinize a text for pre-existing beliefs. This can be done in any text across a wide range of content and perspectives.
Any canon or content can be taught in a way that offers students an entry to deep criticality and consideration of the fundamental questions of civic and just life. This may require some creativity on our end or collaboration with other educators to think outside the box, but we can use anything we teach to build students’ habit of asking questions as they encounter information in the world around them.
5. Leverage schools and classrooms as sites for practicing social action.
To truly advance justice, students also need chances to use the relationship-building and critical thinking skills they are developing, not just talk about them. Shifting from thinking to doing helps students see that their voices matter and that they have infinitely more power when collaborating.
For some of us, the opportunity for students to practice doing already exists in the curriculum. For example, in Massachusetts, all eighth graders complete a student-led civics project focused on real-world topics. The goal is simple: students learn how change happens by actually trying to create it. And for many other educators, current restrictions limit or prohibit this kind of student-led civic work.
Yet, we don’t actually need state-sanctioned curricular projects to provide opportunities for students to practice acting on something they care about or to give students places and spaces to exercise their power.
Fortunately, we have learned from our two decades of research in schools that civic action within the school community or even in the classroom can be as real and meaningful to students as civic action out in the “real world” (because school communities are students’ real worlds). Importantly, civic action within the school or classroom can help students develop the real-life skills they need to engage in social action more broadly.
In a high school in Rhode Island, for example, a history teacher provided her students the opportunity to go through the school handbook to identify a policy they believed was unjust or unfair, and then come up with a plan to change that policy. The students collectively decided to try to change their school’s technology policy governing when they were allowed to use phones, iPads, and laptops, and then set about researching the topic, developing a presentation proposing a new policy, and lobbying their school’s administration to consider these changes. When the school leadership team ultimately agreed to enact the students’ proposed technology policy on a trial basis for the remainder of the school year, the students described surges in their confidence in their ability to effect change.
They also learned essential skills for social change: how to use research to make a compelling argument, how to make a pitch to various stakeholders, and how to write a policy that meets the needs of a wide range of community members. Importantly, they will bring these skills into other communities they are part of, now and in the future.
In times of consistent constraints and change, it can be easy to focus on the power we feel we are losing and to lose sight of the power we continue to have. Alongside the real reasons for concern that educators have, there are also enduring reasons for hope.
As classroom teachers and school leaders, it may be that some of the familiar ways we have supported students in critically analyzing society or preparing for civic and social engagement are no longer available to us.
But educators have always been masters of creativity and adaptation. History reminds us, again and again, that when the outside world closes in and places deep constraints on our work, educators remember the creative power that they have; they innovate, reimagine, and persist. In remembering and reclaiming our power, we help our students recognize the power they inherently hold and can harness to shape the world around them.
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