Social Justice: Diversity in Science

TEP believes that educators must be open to and respectful of diversity and difference.  Educators require the ability to see beyond their own ways of defining the world and to be advocates of social justice and the inclusive classroom. A high value is placed on the ethical responsibilities of educators.

Anti-Bullying hashtags with my grade 7 class.

At the beginning of my practicum, I did not know how I was going to meet the Social Justice value because I was placed in a grade 7 math and science classroom.  We took a Social Justice class in the Teacher Education Program and I was not only excited, but also prepared to cover this in subjects such as language arts and social studies, but that was before we received our practicum placements.  I met with my teacher mentor before the start of my long practicum and we went over what units I would be teaching.  For science, he asked me to teach an Earth Science unit, and this included teaching the theory of Pangaea to my students.  I was thrilled to teach this because it was one of my favourite topics to learn back when I was a student.  The first day of introducing Pangaea finally came and after I explained to my students what it was about, a boy in the class put up his hand and said, “Miss. Smith that is not how God made the Earth.  This theory is wrong.”  I stood there in front of my students in shock; I realized that I never thought about this controversy before I had introduced my lesson.  As we all quickly learned in our practicums, it is important to think on the spot.  Even though I was teaching about our continents and not about how planet Earth was created, I took on this teachable moment.  I told the class that everyone in the world has a different belief on how our planet was created.  I asked this student if he would be comfortable in explaining his theory and he gladly did.  I then went on to ask other students in the class if they have different beliefs and we ended up having a class discussion on different beliefs that people have about the planet we live on.  I ended the conversation explaining to my class that what I am teaching is one theory and that is the theory of Alfred Wegener; but as we have seen, each person has a different theory.  I received more respect from my students after this teachable moment because I respected them and their beliefs.  I did not realize that I could cover social justice in the topics that I was teaching but I quickly understood that social justice can be covered in all subjects and that it is important for teachers to respect the diversity and differences in their classrooms.