“Bad Things Could Happen”

Abstract

In this study, I compared the shifts in attitude of affluent high school seniors participating in a course on social justice issues to a control group of similar adolescents. In this course, participating adolescents learned about social justice issues such as homelessness, poverty, world hunger, and illegal immigration. An analysis of presurvey and postsurvey data revealed that the adolescents participating in the social justice course experienced a decline over the course of the semester in their support for educational equity between wealthy and poor communities. Interviews with these adolescents and analyses of their student work revealed that their shifts in attitude were influenced by fears about the possibility of one day becoming poor or homeless themselves.