2015 Admissions Application Writing Prompt/Scholarly Exercise
GRU Ed.D. Program in Educational Innovation:
Matters of justice have perennially been foundational to the project of education,
especially in and for a democratic society; and yet have also been as perpetually
contested—perhaps even never more so than in present times. Such is attested to, for
example, in the articulated theme—“Toward Justice: Culture, Language and Heritage in
Educational Research and Praxis”—of the upcoming 2015 annual meeting of the
American Educational Research Association (AERA), arguably among the most
prominent educational organizations, meetings and gatherings of educational scholars,
nationally and internationally, in the world. In addition, GRU’s doctoral program in
Educational Innovation, in affiliation with the Carnegie Project on the Education
Doctorate (CPED) and its defining principles, “is framed around questions of equity,
ethics, and social justice to bring about solutions to complex problems of practice.”1
In a short essay, please address and analyze the question of (social) justice in
education—e.g., from the context of your own work, vision or path ahead; respecting
educational innovation, teacher education, school leadership, and/or curriculum reform;
etc. For example, you may stake a position, make a claim, examine an argument, pose a
question or problem, illuminate a context, examine a case or describe a practice. Review
the following selections provided, drawing upon them to support your work as needed. A
total of 1½ hour(s) will be afforded you for this exercise.
1
Drawn from the website of the American Education Research Association (AERA),
http://www.aera.net/EventsMeetings/AnnualMeeting/AnnualMeetingTheme/tabid/15492/Default.aspx
Selections for Review 1: On Education & The Question of Justice
Inquiry, On Inequity and Education
There is a pressing need to consider how education praxis, research, theory, and
policy can change the world—toward more justice. The challenge is especially urgent at
this time when the democratizing possibilities of education remain forestalled. That the
“arc of the moral universe… bends toward justice” is an oft-heard affirmation. To what
extent does this conviction apply to persistent inequities in education if justice is our
objective—given the meanings, unrealized potential, and continuing conundrum of
culture, language, and heritage in education and related research, theorizing, and policymaking? …. “Is justice a compelling interest in education research, theorizing, and policy
making?” ….
-AERA Annual Meeting Theme statement, “Toward Justice:
Culture, language, and Heritage in Education Research and Praxis”2
2
Drawn from the website of the American Education Research Association (AERA),
http://www.aera.net/EventsMeetings/AnnualMeeting/AnnualMeetingTheme/tabid/15492/Default.aspx
Selections for Review 2: On Education & The Question of Justice
Advocacy, on Teaching, Teacher Education and Social Change
As far back as 1890, a New England teacher named Horace Willard cogently
argued that in contrast to members of other professions, teachers lived “lives of
mechanical routine, and were subjected to a machine of supervision, organization,
classification, grading, percentages, uniformity, promotions, tests, examination.”
Nowhere, Willard decried, was there room in the school culture for “individuality, ideas,
independence, originality, study, investigation.” Forty years later, Henry W. Holmes,
dean of Harvard University’s new Graduate School of Education, echoed these
sentiments in his criticism of the National Survey of the Education of Teachers in 1930.
According to Holmes, the survey failed to support teachers as independent critical
thinkers. Instead, it endorsed a view of the teacher that George Counts termed a “routine
worker under the expert direction of principals, supervisors, and superintendents.”
Holmes was convinced that if teachers’ work continued to be defined in such a narrow
fashion, schools of education would eventually respond by limiting themselves to forms
of training that virtually undermined the development of teachers as critically minded
intellectuals.
At different times both of these noteworthy critics of American education
recognized that any viable attempt at educational reform must address the issue of teacher
education. Most important was their conviction that teachers should function
professionally as intellectuals, and that teacher education should be inextricably linked to
critically transforming the school setting and, by extension the wider social setting.
-Henry Giroux, Teacher Education and Democratic Schooling3
3
Giroux, H. (2009). Teacher Education and Democratic Schooling. In A. Darder, M. Baltodano, & R.
Torres (Eds.), The Critical Pedagogy Reader (2nd Ed.) (p. 438). NY: Routledge.
Selections for Review 3: On Education & The Question of Justice
Advocacy, on Moral Leadership
Public Intellectuals as Social Justice Activists
Critical interrogation is a moral endeavor that is linked with social justice.
Through this process, current, as well as prospective, school leaders personally grapple
with issues of race, class, and gender; signifiers of difference; and the marginalizing
strategies of institutions perpetuating elitist notions of the dominant culture. As
education leaders, public intellectuals recognize the demanding labor of examining the
ways in which schools and other systems help to maintain the social, political, and
economic status quo. The public intellectual scrutinizes social and cultural realities using
the tenets of democracy as guiding principles. A public intellectual also questions
cultural realities, motivated by a need to understand the underlying presuppositions and
values that provide an explanation as to why these cultural realities exist.
Public intellectuals are those who are steeped in the politics of education (Giroux,
1997). This perspective broadens the dimensions of the educational discourse, because
such a perspective includes the social and cultural dynamics that intersect and so deeply
influence what takes place in America’s schoolhouses. School leaders who also are
public intellectuals view school leadership/administration as more than management and
work to change the shape and contour of future democratically grounded societies.
Public intellectuals believe that pedagogy in schools must be focused on morally
impacting ends. According to Giroux (1997),
Whether in schools or in other spheres, public intellectuals must struggle to create
the conditions that enable students and others to become cultural producers who
can rewrite their own experiences and perceptions by engaging various texts,
ideological positions and theories. (p. 263)
Schools, according to Giroux’s perspective, are sites where the intellectual
activity taking place in them is inextricably linked to broader social and cultural
concerns. For example, curriculum content, special education, and other class placement
based on race, class, gender, and disability may reflect society’s discriminatory
perceptions and practices. The moral nature of transformative leadership, unlike
traditional notions of school administration, not only locates the work of schools in a
broader social context but also argues that students should become accountable as well as
responsible for their own education. Rather than subscribing to the ideals of banking
education (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994), where students are perceived to be empty
containers passively awaiting intellectual deposits from the omniscient teacher,
educational leaders who base their work in moral transformative leadership facilitate an
environment where students learn from one another and express their own ideas.
Students, according to the ideals of public intellectuals, function in schools where they
are
…given the opportunity to challenge disciplinary borders, create pluralized spaces
from which hybridized identities emerge, take up critically the relationship
between language and experience and appropriate knowledge as part of a broader
effort at self-definition and ethical responsibility. (Giroux, 1997, p. 263)
Leaders who have adopted a moral position as public intellectuals recognize the
formidable task of education in freeing students to inquire and interrogate the
traditionally accepted purposes of schools and the curriculum that supports them.
-M. Dantley & L. Tillman, Social Justice and Moral Transformative Leadership4
4
Dantley, M. & Tillman, L. (2010). Social justice and Moral Transformative Leadership. In C. Marshall
& M. Oliva (Eds.), Leadership for Social Justice (2nd Ed.) (pp. 24-25). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Selections for Review 4: On Education & The Question of Justice
Criticism, the University and the Public
The problem of imposing mandatory political orthodoxies is a serious one, whether those
beliefs concern “social justice,” “individualism,” or “patriotism.”
-Greg Lukianoff, The Social Justice and Political Orthodoxy, Chronicle Review5
The university can protect the integrity of its enterprise only… if it says, in effect, we do
academic, not political, business here…. There are those who do not distinguish… and
allow the latter to inflect the former, often in the name of social justice…. it is precisely
when teachers offer themselves as moralists, therapists, political counselors, and agents
of global change rather than pedagogues that those who are on the lookout for ways to
discredit higher education (often as preliminary to taking it over) see their chance…. I
want an academy inflected by no one’s politics, but by the nitty-gritty obligations of
teaching and research…. Only bad teaching is a political act.
-Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time6
A university is not a political party, and an education is not an indoctrination…. Instead
of educating students, these professors are trying to indoctrinate them.
-David Horowitz, Battle for Academic Freedom7
Advocates of social justice have often blithely ignored the impositional character of their
recommendations, but the fact of the matter is that every social objective, from the most
rudimentary goals of crime prevention and defense to the most exotic promotion of the
arts, is subject to disagreement among citizens. 611
-David Johnson, Is the idea of social justice meaningful?8
5
Lukianoff, G. (2007, March 30). The Social Justice and Political Orthodoxy, Chronicle Review, 53(30),
B8.
6 Fish, S. (2008). Save the world on your own time. Oxford England: Oxford University Press, pp. 85,
152, 14, 16, 70.
7 Horowitz, D. (2003). Battle for academic freedom. Retrieved May 27, 2006,
studentsforacademicfreedom.org. Los Angeles, CA:
Selections for Review 5: On Education & The Question of Justice
Criticism and Curriculum Scholarship
It [the curriculum field], however, remains plagued by an ameliorative orientation….
The educational left’s obsession with “social justice” reiterates the right wing’s claim that
schools—not government—are responsible for redressing the inequities of the
present….[:] the excess of contemporary identity politics: self-indulgent indignation
substituting for scholarship and dialogic encounter.
-William Pinar, The Next Moment9
However, it [social justice education] runs the risk of setting up camps of minority us
versus majority them, although the categories of minority and majority are slippery
concepts and are context dependent…. Such debates address particular manifestations of
violence rather than uncovering and further treating the root of social violence…. When a
separate sense of the individual, or by extension a group or a nation, is elevated above the
human and cosmic shared relationality, transcending one’s own boundary for the bigger
collective good remains difficult. If the notion of justice in today’s conflict-ridden
society does not unsettle the dualism between the self/us and the other/them, social
justice education can hardly lead us out of the cycle of blame, guilt, and defense to a less
violent world.
-Hongyu Wang, A Nonviolent Approach to Social Justice Education10
8
Johnston, D. (1997). Is the idea of social justice meaningful? Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and
Society, (11)4, 601-614.
9 Pinar, W. (2010). The Next Moment. In E. Malewski (Ed.), Curriculum studies handbook: The next
moment (pp. 528-533). NY: Routledge, pp. 528-529.
10 Wang, H. (2013). A Nonviolent Approach to Social Justice Education. Education Studies: A Journal
of the American Educational Studies Association, (49)6, 485-503, pp. 487, 490.