Chapter 7: “We’Re Gonna Run the World”: Empowering High School Readers

The quote above was taken from Kristie Mason’s (a pseudonym) cultural roots paper, an assignment for a multicultural literacy course in the Masters of Reading Program at Texas State University. The quote portrays Kristie’s mother’s influence on her own commitment to social justice. Kristie’s personal understanding of social justice had deepened throughout her life, and she viewed teaching as part of a larger struggle to reduce social inequities in our world (Darling Hammond, French, & Garcia Lopez, 2002). Her beliefs were aligned with those of Adams, Bell, and Griffin (1997), whose broad definition of a socially just society is one in which all members are psychologically and physically safe and secure. Adams et al. further noted in a just society, all people are able to develop to their highest potential and to interact democratically with others; all people are regarded as equal in worth and are afforded equal opportunity with no discrimination or prejudice based on race, class, age, gender, sexual orientation, or any other factor. Kristie realized the world is not socially just, and she considered Freire’s (1970) notion of reading the world to rewrite the world, with the most important aspect being that a person must participate in his or her own liberation.