Holsinger, Kristi. 2012 Teaching Justice: Solving Social Justice Problems through University Education. Hampshire, United Kingdom: Ashgate.
Reviewed by: Rachel Jones, graduate student, Boise State University, Department of Criminal Justice
Kristi Holsinger’s Teaching Justice, is aimed at professors and professor-bound graduate students in the field of criminal justice. Her introduction explains how professors with doctorate degrees in their field go through much schooling with course content only relevant to the field. While education majors are taught how to teach, Holsinger argues that professors are thrown into a classroom with the assumption that they can teach based on the extensive amount of time they have spent in the classroom. She begins the book by explaining her own difficulty starting out as a professor and her development into a successful teacher who actually teaches her students lessons worthy of committing to memory.
Intertwined with explanations of Holsinger’s own curricula are findings from a survey of criminal justice professors exploring different approaches to the teaching of justice, social justice, and activism. The survey questions were all open ended in order to gather unfiltered data. Some responses to her survey included syllabi and assignments. One professor included a lesson plan using monopoly to demonstrate “social class, social mobility, social structure and agency, the limits of the American Dream, and justice and fairness” (as quoted in Holsinger, 2012, p. 43). The professor first has students play regular monopoly for a few minutes. Next she has them play again, but with different classes of society. Each social class has to play by different rules. The lowest class starts out with the lowest amount of money and has the least advantage. The upper class controls the bank and has the power to break the rules. She says that alliances are formed quickly and people’s emotions are triggered instinctually. This example was the most detailed and offered enough instruction to be able to adapt and make one’s own for their curriculum.
One substantial discussion revolved around the idea of students being apathetic. The ability of a professor to instill passion in their students and awareness of the world’s injustices was a measure of success, and professors were asked how they addressed their students’ apathy and whether they attempted to get them more involved. Dr. Holsinger compares the modern university to the way for-profit businesses are run saying that this model is creating students who come to college to get degrees, but not to learn. She argues that “teaching students how to most effectively learn is as important as teaching them the academic content of a course” (p. 15). In a college classroom, especially a capstone class, as she discusses most often, the curriculum is structured such that students do not need to be taught how to write a paper with proper headings and citations because they presumably already know how. As Dr. Holsinger mentions of her capstone class, she dedicates a considerable amount of time to teaching her students how to write and continues to build on this throughout the class so that the final papers are properly written. The business model creates students who simply go through the motions necessary to finish classes and graduate with a degree. Dr. Holsinger attempts to dissuade people from allowing this low level of participation and instead create a passion for learning and a desire to continue doing so outside of class and long after their academic careers have ceased.
Teaching Justice offers a plethora of ideas for professors to adapt into their own curricula. Student evaluations accompany many of the ideas put forth indicating that they enjoyed the class and planned to continue fighting for the injustices in the world or volunteering at a local non-profit organization. To be an inspiration like that to students should be a goal for which all professors strive.