Beyond Cultural Appreciation: Implementing Social Justice Education through the Informal Curriculum in a Primary School in the United States

This study aimed at exploring the implementation of social justice education through the informal curriculum in a primary school in the United States. An ethnographic case study was conducted over eight months at a K-5 elementary public school with a high degree of ethnic diversity among its students. Multiple methods of data collection were employed, including participant observation, data analysis, and in-depth interviews. The findings of this study were as follows: (1) The informal curriculum provided wiggle room for curriculum liberation and transgression of minority groups on campus. (2) The curriculum of the case school emphasized functional literacy, critical literacy, relational literacy, democratic literacy, and visionary literacy, blending emotional, cognitive and practical dimensions of teaching to enrich practices in multicultural education. (3) The implementation of social justice education needs to be conducted through both top-down and bottom-up methods, in order to achieve its objectives. At t