Through the Lens of Social Justice: Using The Change Agent in Adult Education
Through the Lens of Social Justice: Using The Change Agent in Adult Education celebrates The Change Agent’s first 10 years of providing social justice resources to adult educators. The book is both a gathering of its best and most timeless pieces and a guide for educators in how to use it in the classroom. It addresses the needs of both new and experienced ESOL, ABE and GED practitioners. Edited by Andy Nash. Published by the New England Literacy Resource Center/World Education, June 2006. 200 pp. $18. Copies can be ordered on the subscription page.
See sample pages from the book below (in PDF format).
Table of Contents
Catalyst Materials: Illustrations
Catalyst Materials: Environmental Print
Math: What Countries are in Your Closet?
Media Literacy: How to Detect Bias in News Media
Analyzing Issues: The Voucher Argument
Analyzing Issues: Does Putting People in Jail Cause More Crime?
Tax Unit: Are Taxes Fair?
Dealing with Difficult Issues: Homophobia in the Classroom: One Teacher’s Response
The book provides specific strategies for using the three types of articles and teaching tools that are most often published in The Change Agent:
- Connecting to Issues pieces are tools to draw students out and work with their interests, experiences, questions, and concerns about social issues.
- Analyzing Issues articles take an issue (prisons, school vouchers, health care, etc.), then examine how our current systems work and for whose benefit. These pieces pull together the economic, social, political, and historical factors that provide the big picture context for understanding an issue more fully.
- Supporting Student Action includes accounts of students who have used what they have learned to take some kind of individual or collective action outside the classroom. These pieces also describe what their teachers did to prepare and support them.
The book provides guidance in using The Change Agent to build thematic curriculum units. It also offers creative strategies for dealing with the challenges of bringing social justice issues into the classroom.
Are you looking for ways to explore social justice themes while building skills and addressing immediate student goals? Here’s a resource that will help you bring popular education and social analysis into the contemporary adult education classroom!