Critical consciousness (CC) is the ability to understand, critique, and act against oppressive social structures and systemic forces. To assist educators in understanding and enacting strategies that foster CC, the authors identified examples of CC in third through fifth grade virtual classes of a 2020 "Children's Defense Fund's" Freedom…

Early adolescence is a dynamic stage for the development of critical consciousness, yet there are few resources focused on social justice education (SJE) in the middle grades. This article shares the findings from a study that investigated the experiences of three social justice educators as they engaged in SJE with young adolescents (YAs). We…

In this article, the author discusses the work of a public-school teacher in New York City whose commitment to social justice has led to the design and teaching of a lesson that directly addresses the meanings and manifestations of social class with her fourth- and fifth-grade students.

The purpose of this dissertation study was to identify the nature of 23, 4th grade children's talk in social justice awareness circles about topics representative of DEI issues. Omitted in prior research on student talk is the "situatedness" of the classroom discussion and how local context, school climate, media coverage of sensitive…

Racism impacts various facets of the lives of people of color (POC) in the United States, spanning across historical and contemporary contexts. Chinese Americans, as an ethnic group historically excluded from entering the United States and denied naturalized citizenship, have endured distinctive and enduring forms of racism that are…

Students in grades 3-5 are undergoing significant cognitive growth and beginning to understand what fairness and equity mean in a diverse and interconnected world. "Modern Math Tasks to Provoke Transformational Thinking" presents carefully crafted tasks that nurture multi-disciplinary literacies, including ecological and cultural…

As historically construed, both engineering culture and school science culture marginalize girls. With the focus on engineering in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), engineering education researchers have called for a more targeted investigation of how girls at the K-12 level engage in engineering. This study investigates, through…

The Critical Literacy (CritLit) project promotes using critical texts to engage readers in examining their lived experiences and understanding of social justice issues. This study used a qualitative participatory approach with a narrative design to research the students' engagement in a book club using critical texts. Participants were fourth- and…

A powerful way to build students' mathematical power and agency is through Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice (TMfSJ), where students read and write the world with mathematics (Gutstein, 2005). Reading the world with mathematics uses mathematics to understand relations of power, resource inequities, and disparate opportunities between…

The purpose of this study is to determine the strategies teachers use in teaching social tolerance to elementary school students. Social tolerance is an attitude where a person accepts a difference in terms of religion, race, culture, ethnicity, nation, and others. In the context of social tolerance, students can understand others who are from…

This article models the integration of social studies and language arts commonly used in elementary classrooms by using a text that incorporates straightforward social studies content in the context of the daily experiences of a Chinese family in the U.S. The authors illustrate how to use the award-winning novel, Front Desk by Kelly Yang, with…

Children are often denied science education that engages their emotions and multiple identities. This study focused on ways in which embodied arts-based experiences offer opportunities for such engagement in pedagogical efforts associated with justice-centered science. The conceptual framework that informed the study considers the body as a site…

This article details how a team of fourth-grade teachers in Rockingham County, Virginia used the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) to deepen student understanding of Barbara Johns and the Moton Student Strike's fight for racial justice in Virginia and to reframe their overall approach to Black history in general. Although Rockingham County Schools are…

This article examines and critiques gap-based education policies that are based on statistical and reductive conceptualisations of success for First Nations students in Australia. The policy desire to achieve social justice underpinned by parity of outcomes across a range of life indicators (including standardised English literacy) between First…

In this study, the researcher uses quantitative methods to examine the extent to which Title I funding helps public schools with large populations of economically-disadvantaged students increase student academic achievement in reading and math in grades 3-5, and whether the leaders of these schools utilize specific social justice actions…