Practicing Social Justice Education in Higher Education: Through a Lesson of Understanding Privilege and Oppression

Abstract

As Japanese society gets more diverse, the reported cases of discrimination against social minority groups have been increasing. Educational lessons and programs which nourish skills and knowledge to fight against oppression and social injustice have not been developed enough. This study aims to examine possibilities of improvement of practicing social justice education in higher education in Japan. In this article, the author discusses the features of oppression and privilege, which are theoretical bases of social justice education, as well as conscientization as a process of understanding those ideologies, and then examines a lesson of privilege and oppression that was conducted at the “Multicultural Coexistence” class at the author’s university by analyzing the descriptive and interview data of the students.

The study showed that the students realized their privilege through the lesson and their own experiences by understanding the ideologies of privilege and oppression, and the feature of and the relationships with the dominant and subordinate groups. At the same time, it was found that some students understood those ideologies only at the surface level, not reflecting their own privilege; others felt hesitant about discussion with international students for overthinking to be a member of the privileged group. Further research for practicing social justice education is needed so that the students would be able to understand privilege and oppression more deeply and learn about how to react to social injustice, by introducing activities such as creating action plans.