Social Justice Practices on Gender, Race, and Environment Within a School in Granada

Abstract

In this article we discuss the experience of the Institute Ilíberis, a public high school in a small town in Granada, Spain, that has been engaged in innovative ways of teaching. Located in Atarfe, one of the few rural Spanish municipalities with expanding, rather than shrinking demographics, in the last 2 decades the Institute Ilíberis has experienced the challenges of educating for democracy with an increasing diverse student body. This article focuses on the innovative and committed response of the entire school to address these challenges. By looking at the programs that the school prioritized in the articulation of this response, our article attempts to highlight an unorthodox Spanish school that has been successful in educating all of their students, respecting their ethnic and religious values while encouraging the students to do the same with their peers.

Notes

By this we mean the Institute has had high rates of graduation for its secondary school. The graduation rate at The Institute Ilíberis continues to improve each year, and this is recognized by other area schools that visit it for training purposes.

We appreciate an anonymous reviewer who indicated that beyond an overview of the school and the three major programs, readers of our article might not get a sense of how these programs play out in the school, how students or teachers/staff members view them, and/or what are the challenges involved in enacting the program. When we originally collected the data for this study, we did not collect data that would allow us to analyze the perceptions of the students and/or teachers/staff members.

As an anonymous reviewer of this article noted, racism is a global issue and has worldwide implications.