Week 12 readings

Literacy:
Wood, J 2005,  'Moses’s story: Critical literacy and social justice in an urban kindergarten' in Beyond the Journal: Young Children on the Web, July, accessed 6th November 2013 <http://www.naeyc.org/files/naeyc/file/vop/VoicesWood.pdf>

Numeracy:
Murphy, M 2009, 'Mathematics and social justice in grade 1: How children understand inequality and represent it' in Beyond the Journal: Young Children on the Web, May, accessed 6th November 2013 <http://www.naeyc.org/files/yc/file/200905/BTJMurphy.pdf>

Why?
In line with the analyst theme for Week 12, I wanted to understand how as an educator, I could provide a socially just environment in my classroom, pedagogy and learning. As an educator, I believe it is an educator's key role to respect the rights of children to learn and explore, as well as create an environment that makes children feel respected, confident and safe.

Summary
Both the literacy and numeracy reading by Wood (2005) and Murphy (2009) specifically focus on how as educators, they could introduce social justice into classrooms through literacy and numeracy programs. Wood (2005) focused on introducing social justice by encouraging critical literacy in classrooms. Critical literacy involved discussion about the stories, asking questions about the stories (perspective, intended audience, characters, social issues etc.), and incorporating the children's own personal experiences into conversations surrounding the stories being discussed (Wood 2005, pp. 4 - 5).  Murphy (2009, pp. 3 - 5 ) on the other hand encouraged children to express their mathematical knowledge and its relations to social justice using Cuisenaire rods. Woods (2005) explains that it is important as educators to understand that social justice from a child's perspective is not limited to the social issues that we, as adults face (i.e. race, social status, politics etc.) but instead are the everyday experiences that affect children's lives such as the teardown of a playground (Woods 2005, p. 7) or the kind of friends they want to make (Woods 2005, p.8) or the language used. Woods (2005, p. 3) also notes that we introduce critical literacy to children as a form of social justice to create children who are 'biliterate' so that that may communicate effectively in their home discourse as well as other community discourses (schools, playgroups, neighbours etc.). It is important to note that critical literacy and social justice allows children to form connections between their homes and their other social realms in the community (Woods 2005, p. 4). Children's prior home experiences well-determine their perception, understanding and practices in social justice (Murphy 2009, p.5 & Woods 2005, p.3) Murphy (2009) encourages educators to allow children to fully express themselves. Murphy's (2009, pp. 1 - 5) project involved reading a book, The Rabbits by John Marsden and illustrated by Shaun Tan, and encouraging children to use Cuisenaire rods to illustrate the power relationships in the book. From this project, it could be seen that the children each expressed differently how they felt about the power inequality. They each demonstrated different understandings and illustrations of the power inequality shown in the book. Murphy (2009, p. 6) quotes 6 notes that educators should keep in mind when creating a socially just numeracy environment:

" - Challenge children to be complex in their use of manipulatives
- Ensure that conversations with the teacher or other children occur alongside manipulative use
- Establish ways of capturing manipulative representations by more abstract means sometimes
- Trust children to be clever
- Make conversation an integral part of your mathematics program
- Allow children to surprise you".

Implications

Both these readings have definitely taught me about the importance of analysing environments and lessons from the children's perspectives. Both readings stress on the importance of providing opportunities for critical conversations to take place, and opportunities for children to express their thoughts and make sense and meaning of these thoughts for themselves. In my own future classroom, I hope to be able to introduce a wide range of diverse resources that stimulate children to question how it affects their own lives. For example, a social issue could be presented each week and we can take turns discussing how we were to feel if placed in those different situations. I hope to be able to have meaningful conversations with children when reading stories, and I hope to be able to prompt children to challenge and question the dominant curriculum. I would definitely like to incorporate as much home experiences as possible into the classroom, to allow children to make connections between the different social contexts they are involved in each day. My biggest fear really is to provide an environment that only supports a specific dominant perspective, or not doing enough to allow children to develop critical thinking skills, especially when it involves social issues. Fingers crossed, that as an educator, I too will be observant to the social justice issues that affect children's lives and be sensitive to those issues, to be able to truly impart social justice to children.