Social Justice: Choice or Necessity?

Journal #6
Social Justice: Choice or Necessity?
By Colleen Swain and David Edyburn.


This article investigates what social implications are associated with teachers’ decisions to use, or not use, technology to enhance teaching and learning. Little attention is focused on the critical issue associated with the use of instructional technology as a social justice tool.

How is social justice related to technology? David Miller states “Very crudely, I think, we are discussing how the good and bad things in life should be distributed among the members of a human society.” Students today must be technologically fluent and able to use technology to solve problems with various sources of information. Students who are lacking the skills to do these things are at a disadvantage for the rest of their lives. Future education and employment opportunities will be difficult because we live in a technological and information-based society. “In 1992, the U.S. Department of Labor’s SCANS report noted that at least 80% of all jobs in the next two decades would require workers to be technologically fluent. This means if workers are not well prepared in using technology to succeed in the workplace, they will be forced to take low-paying jobs with limited potential for advancement.

What can schools do with limited technology to prepare their students?

There is a resource called the Digital Toolkit Equity Portal and toolkit that has more than 150 strategies and resources for addressing key aspects of the digital divide. Problems like access to hardware, software, digital content and even internet access can be addressed and even solved with this resource. There are computer refurbishment Web sites where schools can obtain computers and also ways to get deeply discounted computers.
There is also a growing collection of free or open source software available.
Educators must search for ways to make instructional technologies accessible in the class and a normal part of the learning process.