Praxis for Social Justice combines learning and doing for the purpose of encouraging critical consciousness, ethical reasoning, and socially responsible behavior through civic engagement. This objective advances critical awareness of the social, economic, political, and environmental justice issues that demarcate the terrain of power, oppression, and resistance. Praxis for social justice includes developing the commitment, skills, and knowledge necessary to contribute to the on-going work for justice through activism and engagement that embraces local and global communities. Core competencies include: analysis of power and oppression, extension of knowledge, understanding of intersectionality, civic identity and commitment, social action and reflection.
Advanced-level indicators include:
- Demonstrates sophisticated understanding of power, oppression and resistance and the interconnections between social, economic, political and environmental justice.
- Connects and extends knowledge (facts, theories, etc.) from one’s own academic study to civic engagement and to one’s own participation in civic life, politics, and social justice work. Seeks out and attends to underrepresented voices.
- Demonstrates sophisticated understanding of the diversity of communities and cultures, frequently drawing connections between different forms of oppression (e.g., the locus of multiple identities such as race, gender, class, sexual orientation, etc.).
- Provides evidence of experience in civic-engagement activities and describes what she/he has learned about her or himself as it relates to a reinforced and clarified sense of civic identity and continued commitment to the social good.
- Demonstrates independent experience and shows initiative in team leadership of complex or multiple civic engagement activities, accompanied by reflective insights or analysis about the aims and accomplishments of one’s actions.