Classroom communities for everyone

Abstract

As people with power in schools, teachers and administrators make instructional decisions that shape opportunities in classrooms for students to learn. Educators’ words and actions, especially related to the treatment of students and their ideas, are foundational for creating equitable learning communities in our classrooms and schools. David Stroupe, Lindsay Berk, and Anna Kramer examine the creation and growth of learning communities through a particular lens of inequity: epistemic injustice. Briefly, epistemic injustice is a philosophical perspective that deals with inequities associated with knowledge and knowledge production practices. The authors provide concrete examples from two classrooms in which the teachers actively disrupt epistemic injustice.