Empowering Socioeconomic Minorities Through Sustainable Educational Practices 

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday V)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Making empowerment sustainable

Proposal

Socioeconomic status involves not just income but also other aspects of life, such as educational attainment, financial security, and perceptions of social status and social class. In this context, socioeconomic minorities are social groups that strive against all aspects of inequality within the social system. Education is often used as a tool to tackle the issues that such groups face. Extensive research has been conducted on education for sustainable development. However, there is a lack of research focused on minorities. Thus, can sustainable educational practices be an answer to the current challenges that socioeconomic minorities face? What is the role of sustainable educational practices, and how can this be used to empower minorities? These practices include but are not limited to individual and institutional efforts to reorient curriculum, programs, and policies to address sustainability. Thus, this topic is relevant for CIES because it brings a new holistic approach to sustainability. Furthermore, the development of socioeconomic minorities are relevant to all realms of behavioral and social science, including research, practice, education, and advocacy. In this discussion, I will be looking at the current literature and use a case study to explore the topic. I will take the example of Brazil, a country with a large socioeconomic minority population, and how the practices implemented there could be used in other countries. In this conceptual research, I argue that there is a strong need to empower minorities through sustainable educational practices, and that, as educators, we need to clearly apply those practices as a form of empowering minorities.

Author

• Junior Menezes, Soka University of America