Teach Lives Like They Depend On It
This educator argues that schools often reproduce dominant cultural values, silence marginalized voices, and fail to prepare students to challenge injustice — a message echoed in rapper Stic.Man’s quote, “But if education ain’t elevatin’ me … then f*** education.”
Who is Kevin Camangian?
This type of awareness helps youth understand how power and inequality shape their everyday lives.
What is critical consciousness?
This term describes the idea that education should help all students, regardless of background, have equitable opportunities to learn and succeed.
What is educational equity?
This is the first element of Bree Picower’s framework, where students explore who they are, where they come from, and build pride in their identities.
What is Self-Love and Knowledge?
This teaching approach connects reading and writing to issues of power, identity, and social justice.
What is Critical Literacy?
The quote “Everything has a meaning now… I can put it together myself” shows that critical consciousness helps students do with their lives.
What is understanding the deeper meaning behind their experiences?
According to Sleeter, teachers must recognize this in themselves to better support diverse students and address systemic inequities.
What is personal bias or positionality?
In this element, students move from simply “celebrating diversity” to examining how racism, sexism, and other “isms” create unequal experiences for different groups.
What is Issues of Social Injustice?
This three-part framework is designed to move students from awareness of injustice to critical questioning and, ultimately, to action for social change.
What is Agitate-Arouse-Inspire Framework?
A metaphor Leon used to describe how internalized oppression puts communities to sleep and distract them from unity.
What is the “poppy field” metaphor?
Sleeter emphasizes that social justice education involves examining these two interconnected factors in schools that affect student outcomes.
What are curriculum and institutional structures?
This element encourages students to teach others about social issues they’ve studied through newsletters, blogs, or public service announcements.
What is Awareness Raising?
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Critical Pedagogy, and Critical Literacy share this overall goal in education.
What is to humanize education by making learning relevant, liberating, and socially conscious?
This student used poetry to expose how colonization and dispossession shaped her community’s struggles.
Who is Imani?
This strategy involves actively including students’ cultural backgrounds and experiences in lessons to make learning more relevant and equitable.
What is culturally responsive teaching?
According to Picower, students must go beyond charity projects like coat drives and instead take action to address root causes of inequality in this element.
What is Social Action?
According to critical educators like Camangian, education should not only teach students what to think, but help them see themselves as capable of changing their world.
What is liberatory or humanizing education?
This is what teachers must do to ensure students’ culture and lived experiences become central to rigorous academic language.
What is creating culturally relevant and humanizing institution?
Sleeter emphasizes that achieving social justice in schools often requires teachers to challenge this, which includes deeply ingrained societal assumptions about race, class, and ability.
What is the dominant narrative or systemic inequities?
This element teaches students that ordinary people, like César Chávez or participants in the Civil Rights Movement, have united to fight injustice and create change.
What is Social Movements and Social Change?