Research-Based Best Practice Article

The research article that I read was "The 'Building Tasks' of Critical History: Structuring Social Studies for Social Justice" by Wayne Au. It was published in Social Studies Research and Practice in July of this year. In the article, Au looks at two case study lesson plans by social studies teachers who actively seek to raise the consciousness of their students around social justice issues. The author utilizes discourse analysis where people "use language to operationalize certain 'building tasks' in order to express meaning, ideology, values, and other aspects of our identities in a given situation." Au concluded that these lesson plans were quality classroom pedagogical devices due to their service as vehicles for students to critically question social relations historically and in the present-day context. In doing so, he dismissed the claims of some that lesson plans stifle the true learning process by assuming that the planning and executing instruction occurs in some sort of linear fashion to a "predetermined endpoint."


I am interested in exploring social justice issues and concepts with my students for a number of reasons, some of which Au suggests research finds develops a sense of students' social awareness and prompts students to become more deeply involved in social action. In addition to my personal, ultimate educational goal of teaching Black American students Africana history in order to help erode deep, long-instilled notions of racial inferiority and boost Black students' individual and group self-perception, a major goal of mine is to inspire my students to become more active in the affairs of their community, government, and local institutions. By developing social studies lesson plans that include social justice issues and concepts on a regular basis, my hope is that students become increasingly interested in these issues to the extent that (a) they look forward to and eagerly anticipate more lessons on the topics or (b) they take personal initiative in addressing some of the social justice issues raised in class in their own communities of their own volition. Doing this as a math teacher may prove somewhat difficult but this challenge is something I look forward to undertaking throughout this school year.

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