Developing justice scholars: A social justice intervention to support educational equity for urban-residing students

Abstract

The historical legacies and current realities of social and economic subordination have left many communities of color in the United States navigating social and structural forces of segregation and redlining, economic exclusions, job discrimination, and racially biased criminal justice policies, all of which have implications for the inequitable educational opportunities we see across U.S. schools (Milner, 2020). In turn, these educational differentials are core components of intergenerational disparities in health, wealth, and well-being. Yet despite these challenges, teachers, school support staff, parents, and youths of color themselves continue to find ways to thrive in underresourced school contexts, in the process demonstrating highly effective practices that have potential for narrowing and eliminating racial and economic achievement disparities. A consistent ingredient in such processes is cultivating cultures of success and agency among students that shift them from being victims of an inequitable system to being in control of their own academic futures (Howard, 2017). In this vein, our interdisciplinary team has adopted a social work education framework that engages students and invites them into becoming change agents for social justice. Simultaneously, this initiative helps them forge strong academic identities through exposure to robust and rigorous educational experiences. Our work, to date, suggests that university units, including schools of social work in ur…