At this week's Round Table, Inica, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Jeanette Castellanos,Vice President of the Social Impact Collective at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU). Jeanette’s career has been at the intersection of social justice, education, and innovation. We talked about what social justice means today; what it looks like in a professional context, formally and informally; and how it does and doesn’t play out in education today. Jeanette underscored that as long as there’s not equity in education, there’s unlikely to be equity elsewhere. Having access to high quality education for everyone, regardless of your zip code or economic status, is a linchpin for everything else. We talked about how social justice should be more fully woven into the K-12 curriculum, especially at the middle school level, which is a critical crossroads for civic identity. We talked about the need to disrupt the traditional notion of school THEN employment to instead explore how learning and earning can be more integrated. We all agreed that we have to broaden our conception of education to extend well beyond the classroom--and to include things like this podcast. Thank you for joining us!
