For schools to become foundations of social justice, educators need to promote and practice what Ladson-Billings calls cultural relevant pedagogy. The three essential components of a cultural relevant pedagogy include academic achievement, cultural competence, and social-political consciousness. Educators become more aware of the processes of language and cultural acquisition and view schools as extensions of the child's life and not in opposition to it. As we learned in the second in-class session, constructing "environments of success" depends on the willingness and ability of educators to understand the interface between the norms that govern a child's identity outside of school and the norms that child is expected to uphold within the boundaries of the school. The school is a social institution with an incredible power to alter social realities and to create social justice in the world. It is not a collection of bricks, mortar, teachers, and kids. Teaching for social justice therefore requires a deep commitment from educators to critique common assumptions about language and about the distribution of cultural capital.
             Learning about language in particular empowers educators to review commonly-held assumptions about the role language serves in our society. Language is not just a series of signs and symbols, scratches on a paper that determine whether a child has mastered spelling or the art of grammar. When teachers splatter red marks over their student's written materials or correct oral phrasing, they may be doing more than helping a student prepare for their SATs. As Purcell-Gates (2002) points out in "...As Soon As She Opened Her Mouth," and as we reviewed in class, educators need also to comprehend the ways language can convey social status and can therefore be used as a means for social control.
             Changing our approach to language may therefore be one of our most important tasks as teachers. If we want our schools to breed s...