Reflection On Social Justice

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In my second semester of seminar, we discussed several texts that dealt with the different types of injustice that our society was facing in the past. Specifically, we discussed Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr., which depicts the oppression that African American individuals were being faced with in the South. King Jr. depicts the feelings of going through oppression as being: “completely drained of self-respect and a sense of "somebodyness" that they have adjusted to segregation…” In this same semester, I was taking my Senior Capstone class for my major in Justice, Community and Leadership and we happened to be reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. I remember specifically a point that Freire made in his book …show more content…

Throughout the course of my major, we focused on environmental responsibility and justice in the global community, and essentially, focusing on studying the relationships between oppression, power, society, education and social change. With that being said, throughout Seminar 102, I found several of our readings to be very comprehensible and applicable to what I was learning in my major classes. For example, Theme for English B by Langston Hughes, The Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson, Maus by Spiegelman and of course, Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr. Since my disciplinary lens for my major focuses on the injustices from our past, current and future society, I always unintentionally take a social justice approach to every text that I …show more content…

I now feel that I have the courage, the means and the readiness to step out into the real world and share this knowledge that I was so fortunate enough to have gained. I have found my worldview to grow and help me change some ideas I had about my future, into whom I know I actually want to be now. Now I really empathize with individuals who are feeling different in our society and find myself standing up for these individuals in social settings, so that it is no longer considered an individual matter. I want to be a teacher and work in areas where children actually need me, in spite of what I will be paid, because I realized it isn’t ever about me, its about the children, the people who generate our future. I want to be able to teach my students about these social inequalities that we face through things like recycling, planting a school garden, educating them on the importance of interdependence and the oppression from our past, and current situations. Ultimately, I want to establish an environment for them that is essentially nothing like the one we are living in, in today’s

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