Social Justice and Curriculum

One of the key resolutions from Howley and Hambrick’s research, ‘Getting There From Here: Schooling and Rural Abandonment’, concluded that “the relationship between place attachment and aspirations [of high school students] is negative: as attachment to place increases, educational aspirations decrease.”  The issue that Howley and Hambrick pinpoint is that although high SES individuals are attached to place they are driven elsewhere to seek post-secondary education, and low SES individuals who desire relocation stay in their hometowns unable to break free.  These results connect to some of the questions asked by Sleeter and Stillman’s article ‘Standardizing Knowledge in a Multicultural Society’.  Sleeter and Stillman ask and answer a series of questions surrounding whose interests curriculum documents are geared towards, their main concern being that curriculum excludes the interests of non-European descendants.  Such similar questions can be asked of Howley and Hambrick’s results: Are curriculum documents geared more towards the success of individuals from higher socio-economic status?  Do curriculum expectations exclude individuals from low SES?  One additional connection that Howley and Hambrick identified as influencing an individual's attachment to place is how adults in their community treated them, the more fair and equitable they felt they were treated, the more likely they were to “prefer to reside locally.”  Are curriculum documents treating all individuals fairly and equitably?  Are teachers pressures to cover the curriculum creating a school atmosphere which is exclusive to non-academically driven individuals?

Flinders, D. J., & Thornton, S. J. (2013). The Curriculum Studies Reader 4th Edition: Standardizing Knowledge in a Multicultural Society by Christine Sleeter and Jamy Stillman. Routledge. New York, New York.

Howley, C. W., & Hambrick, K. (2014). Getting there from here: Schooling and rural abandonment. In C. B. Howley (Ed.), Dynamics of Social Class, Race, and Place in Rural Education (pp. 193-216). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.