Aside from the pain and suffering that abuse and poverty causes, this class brings to light another issue. If we consider the responses of everyone in our class, if we look at the posts on this blog, it becomes apparent that there is a common underlying desire for universal justice. This desire is not unique to our class. I am sure we can all think of twenty people outside of our ED460 class to whom we could describe the circumstances of poverty and abuse and all twenty of these people would respond in a similar fashion. These twenty people could then pose the situation to twenty more and so on and so forth. Eventually you would find someone who doesn't care or who thinks that the impoverished and abused some how deserve the life they are living. These people are not the majority.
There is a basic goodness to people and a basic sense of justice instilled in humanity and our class demonstrates this whenever these issues are discusses.
Now that we have been made aware of the situations and have been alerted to the signs of bulling, abuse, neglect, and poverty we can start to bring justice to students through the means we have. We have been presented with tactics -- providing a bag of socks, paying a bill, arranging for the child to bathe, referring the child to the proper authority, and so on. We need to make sure that we act justly and prudently for these students.
Ellen, you are so right about many people feeling the same way about (specifically) poverty as you do. We just don't really know what it is like! In responses to other blogs, I have found myself a broken record that keeps repeating the concept that if we get to know our students better, then everything will be all better and we'll understand where they are coming from and all will be fine and dandy and we can all eat bon bons everyday as we lay by the waterfront. Blah blah blah. Is that all we can do?? Really?!? I'd like to think that, as you said, we are all striving for a little more social justice than that! That brings up the question about how far we actually go for our students. I like how Sean put it- giving them the best human experience possible.
ReplyDeleteEllen, I do not feel that our class will be the problem when it comes to making sure there is justice for the social ;). What I find annoying and disheartening are those twenty others who do not understand what social justice really is. It is going to be very difficult for me, maybe others from this class, to sit in meetings and hear other teachers balk about different forms of band-aids. I am all for walking around the school to stay in shape, (actually I thought that was a pretty cool idea) but why do teachers need to walk their students? They are overweight because they only eat McDonalds. They only eat at McDonalds because its cheap food (which is actually terrible logic. If you ate at home you would save more money). They need cheap food because they are poor. They are poor because their parents have poor organization skills. We need to keep asking 'why?' and not just settle for socks.
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