ABSTRACT
In this chapter we examine student outcomes from a critical multicultural education (MCE) curriculum that pushed students to think individually and collectively about the relationships between personal, communal, and global justice concerns. Our research question was: Using a critical MCE curriculum to explore issues of social justice for the individual, community, and world, how did students express their personal identities, group affiliations, and privilege and oppression? The researchers employed a textual analysis of high school students’ writings from multiple three-week writing seminars to explore the rich ways that students experience and conceive issues of race, class, and gender. Students’ assignments were the result of a social justice framework with multiple writing tasks that highlighted particular aspects of their identities, issues that mattered to them and their communities, and issues of world concern which may only indirectly affect the quality of their lives.
