Lara Searcy, Brogan Spears, and Kyle E. Foster Drafting a Social Justice Narrative to Explore and Interrogate Identity When educators understand who they are, specifically through the mode of narrative writing, they are able to remember that writing has the ability to change, to transform, and to move students toward justice, awareness, and empowerment (Fredericksen et al., 2012). In order to understand social justice as it exists in a classroom setting, it is important to define it by the key concepts of awareness and power. Social justice is the knowledge of students, community, and cultural diversity in order understand how to teach all students more fairly and equitably (National Council of Teachers of English, 2010). Educators in public schools support students when they acknowledge that schools’ growing diversity of backgrounds and perspectives help students “develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills” to become better “engaged in their own communities” (National Education Association, 2018, p. 1). This article details two recursive actions for educators to explore and interrogate their own identities so they may, in turn, help their students explore the identities they are developmentally just beginning to create. This article specifically focuses on how literacy (through the act of writing a social justice narrative) has the potential to impact how we come to understand and ultimately share our experiences with the world, through reading/speaking our own narrative and/or reading/listening to others’ narratives. As article authors on this topic, we affirm what Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides (2019) state in their text, Letting go of literary whiteness: Antiracist literature instruction for white students, by also acknowledging that as White English teachers, we “were not doing a good enough job addressing [topics of social justice]” (p. 1) with our own students. This understanding of ourselves (as article authors and educators) is important because educators must first engage in and model the process of “locating and implicating themselves in [this] work” (Cherry-Paul, 2020, p. 1). A resource we used in this work is Learning for Justice’s guide, Let’s Talk! Facilitating Critical Conversations with Students (2020), which asks educators to consider potential vulnerabilities, strengths, needs, and possible exposure (p. 11). There may be initial hesitation or discomfort in approaching these questions in general, but “students want to talk about these issues because they recognize the injustice inherent in racism, gender bias, ableism, anti-immigrant sentiment, religious and anti-LGBTQ bias and more—and they see these prejudices at work in the world every day” (Learning for Justice, 2020, p. 2). Therefore, to prepare students for these conversations, educators should: send a letter home to parents/guardians alerting them to the kinds of conversations that may occur. . . [B]ecause the United States has not provided in-depth teaching and learning opportunities on [topics such as] race and racism in K-12 schooling, family members may be learning alongside students and educators as they engage in these [conversations]. (Cherry-Paul, 2020, p. 1) Since “every critical conversation has its own context and content, but almost all touch on identity and injustice” (Learning for Justice, 2020, p. 5), these conversations may be uncomfortable; thus, educators should seek “brave spaces” grounded in mutual respect, with
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