Searching for “truth”: Using children’s nonfiction for social justice and Common Core goals

Enriquez, G., & Shulman-Kumin, A. (2014). Searching for “truth”: Using children’s nonfiction for social justice and Common Core goals. Journal of Children’s Literature, 40(2), 16-25.


Teachers often experience dissonance between what they idealistically want to see happening in their classrooms, and the realities of accountability and its associated standards and assessments. What if a teacher could find an intersection between those ideals and the need for accountability? Here, we see a piece of one primary grade teacher’s quest to reach that intersection.

Professional development can often increase teachers’ ideals/reality dissonance, as we see in the case presented here. In this case, the teacher was enrolled in a graduate level children’s literature course. She was learning about critical literacy and its subtopic, teaching for social justice. These are topics currently of strong interest to the literacy researchers who inhabit the more holistic end of the literacy theoretical continuum, and it is clear that the authors of this article (one of whom was the instructor of the graduate course the case study teacher was enrolled in) espouse the holistic orientation and believe that critical literacy and teaching for social justice should be part of literacy instruction, even in the primary grades. This emphasis clearly resonated with the case study teacher, but implementing these new ideas in her instruction was not easy for her.

Teaching for social justice involves looking in deep ways at texts and the messages within them (often referred to as “interrogating texts”), examining those texts to reveal multiple viewpoints (often called “lenses”) and to expose “social discrimination, privilege, and oppression” (p. 17). It is not just that, however. Teaching for social justice is also about taking action to rectify injustices that are revealed in texts. In elementary classrooms, teaching about multiple views, and examining the underlying messages and motives in texts, though a challenging task, is something teachers can wrap their minds around. The part about taking action is less clear-cut, especially when we are working with young children. What do you do when the examination of texts convinces children that injustice has occurred, and they want to do something about it? We present people who have worked for social justice as admirable models and even as heroes (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr.), but what do you do with a class of young children who want to fight injustices in their own worlds?

The teacher in the case described here decided to try teaching for social justice, but she soon found she was over her head when the children wanted to address an obvious injustice in their worlds. It was an injustice that would seem insignificant to adults, but it mattered to these children. Their attempts to responsibly respond to the injustice by writing a letter to the adults who made the decision that led to the injustice received no response at all, which compounded the injustice. The teacher was uncertain what to do next, and we are left with the story unfinished, at least for now.

Another conflict that was described here was this teacher’s attempt to justify incorporating teaching for social justice by claiming that such an approach aligns well with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Those of us who have worked with the CCSS know that like all standards documents, it is broad rather than deep, and written somewhat vaguely, which leads to a variety of interpretations. This teacher saw the emphasis on informational text in the CCSS as a justification for implementing critical literacy instruction, and she believed that the kind of close examination required would be easier with informational texts. She also cited the CCSS expectation that children be able to discern and examine multiple viewpoints in texts as support for the kinds of reading involved in teaching for social justice.

While one could certainly meet a number of CCSS outcomes by teaching for social justice, there certainly could be other ways of meeting those outcomes. The thing that is so striking to me here is this teacher’s need to justify everything she did in terms of standards. The CCSS, and the need to help students meet them and do well on the assessments that will determine our success as educators, are at the center of everything teachers do in classrooms. If we can use them to justify what we think is best for our children, then we have found an intersection that can resolve our dissonance between ideals and reality.

Taking students to higher learning levels seems like a good thing, and the CCSS do seem to support doing that. However, when we teach for social justice we have to be aware of where the children’s thinking may lead, and be prepared to take the instruction full circle. If the children’s examinations of text can only go so far, and cannot lead to action, then really we are just doing another form of close reading. If we are not prepared to go full circle and assist children in actions that fight injustice, what we call “teaching for social justice” is an empty concept.