Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education

Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education is a book for anyone with an interest in teaching and learning in higher education from a social justice perspective and with a commitment to teaching all students. This text offers a breadth of disciplinary perspectives on how to center difference, power, and systemic oppression in pedagogical practice, arguing that these elements are essential to knowledge formation and to teaching. Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education is structured as an ongoing conversation among educators who believe that teaching from a social justice perspective is about much more than the type of readings and assignments found on course syllabi. Drawing on the broadest possible definition of curriculum transformation, the volume demonstrates that social justice education is about both educators’ social locations and about course content. It is also about knowing students and teaching beyond the traditional classroom to meaningfully include local communities, social movements, archives, and colleagues in student and academic affairs. Premised on the notion that continuous learning and growth is critical to educators with deep commitments to fostering critical consciousness through their teaching, Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education offers interdisciplinary and innovative collaborative approaches to curriculum transformation that build on and extend existing scholarship on social justice education. Newly committed and established social justice pedagogues share their experiences taking up the many difficult questions pertaining to what it means for all of us to participate in shaping a more just, shared future.

In this critical moment that calls educators to employ social justice frameworks, cathartic creativity, and center questions of difference, power, and discrimination, Transformative Approaches to Social Justice Education amplifies and addresses critical consciousness, resistance, and resilience. This book calls for the transformation of undergraduate curricula and radical institutional change in the service of a just and equitable future. The candid classroom testimonies in this book emphasize experience as evidence and make clear and compelling connections between theory and praxis, across disciplinary boundaries. The chapters within are offered as an exigent, timely, and generous gift to all educators seeking to strengthen their pedagogical practice and commitments to institutional transformation. - Dr. Mel Michelle Lewis, Associate Professor, Sexuality Studies & Black Studies, Chair, Studio and Humanistic Studies, Co-Director, The Space for Creative Black Imagination, Maryland Institute College of Art The institution of higher education is mired in white supremacy, colonialism, and hetero-patriarchal logics, so that any instructor aspiring to advance social justice must continually commit to learning. This book, which is based on close to 30 years of lessons taken from the Difference, Power, and Discrimination (DPD) Program at Oregon State University, can assist educators in such crucial learning. Each of the book’s authors leverages the rich body of existing social justice education and illustrates how they have reimagined, in the context of DPD in concrete and practical terms, teaching and learning to not only be more inclusive, but liberatory. This book is a must-have tool for educators who are ready to do their part in the struggle for social justice. - Dr. Leslie D. Gonzales, Associate Professor and Faculty Advocate, College of Education at Michigan State University "Students are demanding universities place higher emphasis on racial justice, limitations on perceived hate-speech, and decolonising Euro-centric curricula. The book seizes on this moment and provides a plethora of thoroughly described activities and instructions for assisting educators with reframing the conception of educational norms and defaults."-John Essington, Educational Review

Nana Osei-Kofi is Director of the Difference, Power, and Discrimination Program, and Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University. Bradley Boovy is Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and World Languages and Cultures and co-facilitator with Nana Osei-Kofi of the Difference, Power, and Discrimination Academy at Oregon State University.Kali Furman is a PhD Candidate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University writing her dissertation about the Difference, Power, and Discrimination Program.