subject: Social Problems and Social Justice [print this page] Noddings (1991) wrote widely about the need for our schools to teach caring. She wrote that "caring" should be the foundation of our curriculums, including caring for ideas, friends, family, the earth and its ecosystems, human-made objects, and "strangers and distant others" (p. 110). The very heart of teaching for social responsibility is teaching for caring.
Living a socially responsible life means understanding and acting to improve the many problems confronting the United States, especially involving culture, gender, economic class, and sexual orientation. In a study on teaching civics, only 11% of students reported spending time in their classes on "problems facing the country today" (Lopez & Kirby, 2007). Teaching for social responsibility means being honest about our problems and injustices, and literature can help us to confront these truths.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Alexie, 2007) is an autobiographical novel of 15-year-old junior trying to cope with the modern plight on his Spokane Indian Reservation. In Buried Onions, Soto (1997) tells the story of 19-year-old Eddie, a Mexican American struggling to find a way out of the hopelessness of his barrio in California. In Make Lemonade (Wolff, 1993), the lives of two urban teenagers, Jolly and LaVaughn, become entangled when LaVaughn becomes the babysitter for Jolly's young children.
Social responsibility requires knowledge and understanding of U.S. constitution and government systems (as well as those in other countries). Young adult literature can bring constitutional issuesand the lack of constitutional rightsto life. The autobiographical novel Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party (Compestine, 2007) tells the story of Ling, a young girl growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution. Satrapi's (2003) graphic memoir Persepolis is her story of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.
Spite Fences (Krisher, 1997)a book that explores when the United States ignored its own constitution and had systemic racismis the story of a 13-year-old Caucasian girl in Georgia in 1960 who must confront both the brutality of racism and her own abusive mother.
