Reading Groups as a Strategy for Teaching Justice
Overview
This paper examines reading groups as a pedagogical strategy for teaching justice and critical thinking in educational settings. The author argues that reading groups facilitate constructive engagement with challenging course materials on social justice, feminism, and critical pedagogy by allowing learners to process difficult information collectively and develop skills necessary for understanding complex societal issues.
What this essay covers
- Introduction addressing critical courses and student resistance to challenging content about social justice and inequality
- Definition and explanation of reading groups as collaborative learning structures involving guided discussion of curricular materials
- Importance of reading groups in developing critical thinking, literacy skills, emotional learning, and community engagement
- Example resource materials such as the Global Oneness Project for teaching social justice in pre-K-6 classrooms
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Reading Groups as a Strategy for Teaching Justice
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Reading Groups as a Strategy for Teaching Justice
Introduction
Courses that take a critical stance are those that address issues like social justice, feminism, post-colonialism, racism, multicultural education, and critical pedagogy, among others (Ozlem & DiAngelo, 2012). Such courses view that knowledge is a social construct and that education is a political project marred with inequality within a network of social institutions. These courses often provide unsettling information that prompts learners into resistance and a tendency to protect their familiar and comforting worldviews. Learners may become silent, immobilized, withdrawn, angered, hopeless, or even overly hopeful. These reactions may affect the educational outcomes and objectives of the courses. As a result, there is a need for constructive engagements in the courses to allow learners to reconcile with the information and react effectively to the required changes within the self and within the larger society. One method of constructive engagement is through reading groups.
Reading Groups
Reading groups involve two or more learners engaging in a reading and discussion of a curricular material under a tutor's guidance. Within the classroom, such groups are critical in developing literacy skills, sharing information, and encouraging teamwork. On a larger scale, however, reading groups may consist of children and adults. Such groups may be through meetings where children and adults within a community read, talk, and learn together. Such groups' objective is to help children develop the skills required to thrive in a diverse society.