Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards-- Diversity
The Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards represent an effort to support educators’ development of age-appropriate curricula for anti-bias education. Organized into four domains—Identity, Diversity, Justice and Action (IDJA), the Anchor Standards clearly articulate a vision for teaching students (and other stakeholders) about social justice.
In this blog series, we’ll look at each of these Anchor Standards individually to consider how the SpaceBox experience aligns with it and how educators might use Spacebox to support the intellectual development of their students. Today’s domain is Diversity.
Students will express comfort with people who are both similar to and different from them and engage respectfully with all people.
Students will develop language and knowledge to accurately and respectfully describe how people (including themselves) are both similar to and different from each other and others in their identity groups.
Students will respectfully express curiosity about the history and lived experiences of others and will exchange ideas and beliefs in an open-minded way.
Students will respond to diversity by building empathy, respect, understanding and connection.
Students will examine diversity in social, cultural, political and historical contexts rather than in ways that are superficial or oversimplified.
The Diversity domain is very helpfully vague. It does not proscribe diversity as being different from the “norm”, but rather different from others generally. This is in opposition to a common definition of diverse that means Black. Further, a person cannot be diverse, but a group of people can be diverse. In these ways the TTSJS Diversity domain gets it.
I do wish it was more descriptive about the different axes of diversity that exist, instead of leaving it vague at “identity groups.” This is a vagueness that leads to tolerance, sure, but tolerance, to me, is not a satisfactory end goal. I hope the Justice and Action Domains do more to help students understand their responsibilities to work toward freedom for all people, not just tolerance.
SpaceBox is a tool that supports the development of the Diversity domain by including a diverse array of characters that students learn about and interact with. SIS astronauts are from all over the African Diaspora, have mixed ethnicities, different educational backgrounds, a range of gender identities, and a gamut of hobbies and work experiences. An astute educator can invite discussion about the social, cultural, political and historical contexts that could have created or limited the diversity represented in SpaceBox. This, of course, can lead to discussions about diversity in their classrooms and schools
No matter the identity of the student participating in SpaceBox, there are opportunities to check implicit biases and consider that Black folks, that scientists, that fill-in-the-blank group, are not a monolith. This is a fundamental step in “building empathy, respect, understanding and connection,” necessary prerequisites in working toward liberation of all people.
-Parker Miles
Parker Miles is a Ph.D. candidate in Education Policy Analysis at the University of Michigan. His academic interests include youth's cyborg literacies and experiences interacting with the digital and its discourses.