Cultivating Social Justice Teachers: How Teacher Educators Have Helped Students Overcome Cognitive Bottlenecks and Learn Critical Social Justice Concepts ed. by Paul C. Gorski et al. (review)

Abstract

169 multicultural) audience. Another strength is her inclusion of nonliterary/nonhumanities disciplines such as biology and ecology. Her development and diction is very clear. We are called to “legitimize” our discipline, and we become preventative through this behavior. With humanities funding on the chopping block as frighteningly outlined by the New York Times over the past few years, this allows a way for our side of the campus to become real agents of progress. My primary concern with a text such as this is the very practical side: how do we, as twenty-first century feminist educators, get administrators and school districts/ universities to bite? How can student achievement be tied to the marginalized American voice? Our students’ assessments must be an extension of these texts, so if Ammons is to see real social change and environmental responsibility, we need testing centers to recognize their significance as well. There might be hope in this respect, as the College Board’s list of texts to use for the free-response section of the AP Literature exam now includes up to 40 percent multicultural texts compared to the very few that were present in the early 1990s. Perhaps this agenda can extend to administration and school boards as well. In the text addressed by Ammons, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee asks, “Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?” New humanism is the movement away from the Protagorean idea that man is the measure of all things to the idea that social change and environmental freedom are the measure of all things. Can we write to prevent social injustice? Would that impact form? Does that even matter? Though it is absent of an actual method by which we may practically implement these changes, Ammons’s text demands that we actually step up and live as agents of change as opposed to merely embodying the vocabulary while in the classrooms. If we are willing to accept this personal responsibility, the humanities may be saved after all. Perhaps we need to learn from O’Connor a bit—engage pathos, shock our audience, look to our feminist foremothers in the early years of the twentieth century. We can’t continue to be quiet, Ammons says, if we are to save our discipline and our world.