Social Justice as Strategy: Connecting School Libraries, Collaboration, and IT

Abstract

This article examines perceptions of social justice among a set of students undertaking a group research task in a New Jersey high school library. The purpose was for students to produce a coconstructed product that represented the negotiated understanding of their curriculum topic. The study involved 42 grade nine students in a language arts class focused on independent reading tasks emphasizing critical/reflective thinking, speaking, and independent learning skills as well as the effective use of research/knowledge construction strategies. The study used open-ended reflections and an asynchronous Google Docs–based environment to capture perceptions of the students’ collaborative processes and to examine collaborative knowledge-building dynamics and outcomes. This article proposes an action-level typology that maps the collective strategies used by students to negotiate socially just conditions during the collaborative process. The study also provides suggestions for and a methodological example of how social justice principles can be examined in information-intensive organizations.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.