Preview of Article:
Teaching for Joy and Justice
Illustrator: Aleks Sennwald
Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt of the introduction to Linda Christensen’s new Rethinking Schools book, Teaching for Joy and Justice: Re-imagining the Language Arts Classroom. For more information on the book or to order, go here.
I believe we need to create a pedagogy of joy and justice. When Michael writes a stunning essay about language policy in Native American boarding schools, there is joy because he finally nails this form of academic writing, but there is also justice in talking back to years of essays filled with red marks and scarred with low grades. There is joy because he’s learned a craft that he felt beyond his reach; there’s justice because Michael and his classmates learned to question policies that award or deny status based on race and class. When Bree writes a poem so sassy that we all laugh and applaud in admiration, we rejoice in her verbal dexterity, but we recognize the justice of affirming the beauty of black/brown women whose loveliness has too often gone unpraised in our society. When Jacoa speaks to a class of graduate students at a local college, she exudes joy in taking what she learned about Ebonics out of our high school classroom and into the university, but she speaks about justice when she tells the linguistic history of a language deemed inferior in the halls of power — including schools.
