My name is Asha Jones, and I am a global affairs
major and a social justice minor. For my research project, I am investigating
the effectiveness of social justice curriculums from the perspective of
educators, and ways in which we can improve them. I am working under the
mentorship of Dr. Paul Gorski, from New Century College, as well as Alex
Cromwell, an instructor in Peace Education at American University. I became
interested in the field after taking a class here at Mason, NCLC 101,
Narratives of Identity. In this course, we learned about different social
justice issues, and how our perspectives impacted our understanding of these
topics. After seeing how seemingly ignorant many of my classmates were, I
became interested in social justice curriculum in high schools, and how we can
first make them available for all, and secondly make them better. Ultimately, I
aspire to do human rights/advocacy type work, and education is key in both of
these tasks, so this research is fitting. At this point, majority of my
research is reading. My research question has shifted a bit since my initial
proposal, so now my time is consumed by doing additional reading to further
pinpoint my question. This week, I finally had a breakthrough in terms of the
focus I’d like to hone in on for my research, and as a result I was able to
start to developing the interview questions I’d like to use. My study will be
qualitative, and for a while I was having difficulty finding a niche within the
realm of social justice education, but I believe I have figured it out.
