There is a resurgent interest in social justice education because of the racialized tensions in the United States (U.S.) stemming from police brutality and polarizing politics about school accountability, resource allocation, and achievement gaps.
Social justice education has a democratic equality aim. Historically, the aims of schooling have oscillated back and forth between democratic equality (developing citizens), social efficiency (developing workers), and social mobility (developing individuals’ success) (Labaree, 1997). The name of what constitutes social justice education changes over time based on the trends. Presently, the buzz word is “social justice” to represent multicultural education or culturally relevant education. Social justice education includes having a multicultural education perspective (Au, 2009; Banks; Lee) reframed as a praxis (Nieto, 2000; Shannon-Baker, 2018) with equity goals that transcend merely adding curriculum content (El Ashmawi et al., 2018).
Literacy education is a very important aspect of social justice education.