EDU150 Educational Justice Positionality Statement

Requirement: 5 pages double spaced with extra page of references. Please use the attached document “draft sample 150” as the base draft, revise and expand according to guideline and evaluation criteria.

Guideline:

Describe your own educational journey, K-12 or K-16, using the terms and concepts from this course. You must DEFINE terms and concepts from class, cite the readings, lectures, and materials where you found the definitions, and give concrete examples from your own experience (specific enough to create a movie in your reader’s mind). Your essay should contain the following sections (in whatever order makes sense to you):

(1) a section that discusses the communities to which you belong, and the cultural resources from family and community that have supported your educational success.

It is appropriate here to discuss communities into which you were born (ethnic, linguistic, religious) as well as those which you have chosen (athletics, student government, activist, etc.).

(2) a section that discusses the ways in which your intersectional social identities were positioned within the educational system to give you advantages or barriers and harm

This section should discuss institutional mechanisms of advantage and harm, such as ability tracking, representation of your communities among your teachers, presence of your communities’ contributions and histories in the curriculum, remedial programs, special education programs and supports, bilingual and ELD instruction and materials, standardized testing and its consequences, and more.

(3) a section that discusses how to reduce inequality in classrooms based on principles of culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies, humanizing pedagogies, anti-racism, and Universal Design for Learning.

(4) a concluding paragraph about how you will you carry forward what you’ve learned in this class to promote educational justice for yourself and others in your university classes and K-12/16 classrooms.