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Alumni
Mentor Network
Educators for Social Justice: Advocates for Awareness, Understanding and Action
What are our goals and mission?
Educators for Social Justice is a student group at the University of Washington-Seattle that advocates awareness, understanding, and action around issues of social justice within the College of Education, the field of education, and beyond.
Our goals are to: promote & advocate for multiculturalism throughout the UW College of Education, increase the ethnic & racial diversity of educators who work in common schools, colleges, & universities, and build a supportive, fun, & dynamic College of Education community.
How do we conceptualize the terms of "diversity" and "social justice" in education?
Diversity is a value neutral concept. Diversity signifies quantity—it does not
highlight a normative impulse. And, when a normative impulse is highlighted, it is usually in a manner that is inattentive to the ideological and systemic structural conditions that marginalize and oppress. For instance, while the language of diversity is used by numerous educational institutions to claim engagement with social injustice (especially, but not limited to, racial inequality), the reality of most institutional policy is that engagement rarely extends beyond simply advocating increasing the number of under-represented populations. While we certainly advocate numerical diversity, our concerns are much deeper than numerical representation. We advocate engaging and eliminating systemic injustice.
So, what is social justice? There is little question that social justice is a contested concept; it has ideological fluidity. We embrace this. Yet, while the language of social justice is broad enough to allow our group to engage in wide-ranging philosophical and political debates about the ends and means of social change, it is also narrow enough to place ourselves within a concrete conversation about social change that has, for many years, been occurring inside and outside the field of education. The language of social justice is connected to intellectual traditions and social and political movements (both left and liberal) that struggle against racism, class inequality, gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and a host of other social ills. Social justice is not simply about increasing numbers so as to be diverse; social justice is about fighting oppressive ideas and institutions and creating substantive social change.
How can other students (current COE grads, undergrads, prospective students), faculty, staff get involved?
We encourage those who are interested in Educators for Social Justice to attend a meeting and get acquainted with the range of issues that ESJ is currently involved in. Membership with voting privileges and meetings are always open to COE graduate students, we’ve recently revised our constitution to extend the invitation to attend the meetings to other undergraduate groups associated with education field (like Zesbaugh Scholars, FEDS, & SWEA). COE faculty and staff are invited to attend meetings by invitation only – please contact an ESJ member if you are interested in attending a meeting.
Contact info
Please contact us at e4sj@u.washington.edu for more information.
