Justice in Schools began in 2012, and will likely be actively under development until at least 2017. It is organized around a set of intensively-researched, normative case studies of classroom-level, school-level, and district-level decisions about everyday choices regarding curriculum design, parent outreach, discipline, school culture, grading, teacher hiring and retention, assessment and evaluation, and teaching justice to students (among other potential topics). They will be chosen both for their representativeness (they will feature common dilemmas faced by many educators in many schools) and for the normative, especially justice-oriented, questions they raise.
These cases will provide the basis for:
- This website, which will eventually contain both standard text renderings of the cases and also multimedia versions including videos, exhibits, and other supplemental materials. Visitors to justiceinschools.org will be able to use the materials for their own teaching and learning, offer commentary on the normative case studies we post, and also submit their own dilemmas of justice in schools for edited inclusion on the site and/or further research as a full-blown normative case study. As we learn more about how to make these cases helpful to educators and policy makers for their own professional development and practice, we will likely post additional resources, as well.
- Scholarly and practitioner-oriented articles written for various audiences, including: educators, policy makers, philosophers of education, political theorists, and applied ethicists/public philosophers;
- An edited book or journal for use by educators, professors, and scholars that features three normative case studies, each followed by short commentaries/essays by philosophers, social scientists, and educators from a variety of fields;
- A book written for political theorists and philosophers of education that: (a) explains and justifies normative case research methods, especially in educational theory; (b) demonstrates the significance of such research for non-ideal theory development, especially with regard to “everyday justice” and microcontextual analysis as opposed to basic structures, high-level institutional design, or rights analysis; and (c) maps the contours of a revived and reoriented field of educational ethics, focusing on the development of a new theory of educational justice.
- A course at the Harvard Graduate School of Education about Justice in Schools.