Implications of a Learning Organisation for Social Justice in Poverty Stricken Communities: A Theoretical Perspective

Abstract

The term “social justice” cuts across disciplines and theoretical orientations. Critical theory underpinned the study reported on in this article. Many South African schools, particularly in poverty stricken communities, still experience insurmountable economic and social injustices despite progress since the apartheid regime. The injustices manifest in poverty, inequalities and unequal distribution of educational resources, impacting on the achievement gap. While social justice is a concern in the literature, South African literature has little on how to apply the concept of a learning organisation to reclaim a commitment to social justice. The article argues that schools perceived as learning organisations are sites of social and political struggle that can promote and encourage human rights to fundamental freedoms for all, without discrimination. This requires progressive teachers and critical thinking by students to transform dehumanising social milieus into communities of participation embodying the values of progress and human emancipation.     

Theorizing Social Justice Ambiguities in an Era of Neoliberalism: The Case of Postapartheid South Africa

In this essay, Sharon Subreenduth explores how social justice policies have both global–local and historical dynamics and maintains that, as a result, dominant Western models of social justice limit engagement with alternative modes of understanding social justice in non‐Western locations. She uses the South African experience as a case study for examining the complexities of social justice policy in the context of the decolonizing efforts that undergird national policy in South Africa as it simultaneously negotiates neoliberal globalizing dynamics. The essay specifically analyzes the neoliberal concept of choice and how it figures within the discourse and practice of race and education within society. Moving beyond binaries, Subreenduth highlights the murky areas of social justice and articulates what they tell us about meta‐analysis, narrative, resistance, complicities, infiltration, and the neoliberal il/logic of local–global histories.     

Tackling early school leaving and the governing of educational transitions in Italy

ABSTRACT

This article presents a critical policy historiography of how Early School Leaving has been understood as a social problem and what policy responses have been enacted to tackle it in the Italian context, devoting a specific attention to the analysis of the translation of EU policy ideas, tools and recipes to reduce ESL. It shows how the formulation of a global and integrated national strategy to tackle ESL in Italy in 2018 can be interpreted as the result of a troubled process of re-culturing. Such a reculturing is the effect of the complex interplay between the legacies of the Italian welfare regime in education and the co-option of the ESL issue within a EU political frame that struggles to combine economic rationalism and social justice. Such a struggle is interpreted as contributing to a profound rethinking of education and its mission.     

Cultivating sacred spaces: a racial affinity group approach to support critical educators of color

ABSTRACT

Despite repeated pleas for diversifying the U.S. teacher force, teachers of color who are committed to social justice are often unsupported and even pushed out via structural, interpersonal, and pedagogical obstacles within the profession. In response to neoliberal, colorblind, and apolitical approaches to teacher development and support, educators and organizers have reclaimed and reframed their pedagogies through critical professional development and grassroots activism to center healing from the impacts of oppression in its myriad forms . The ethnographic case study in this article examines how, over the course of three years, a grassroots racial affinity group became an important space for learning and healing for its members. I explain how the group explicitly centered twelve members’ voices, needs, and collective knowledge, and in so doing: (a) collectively cultivated a critical, humanizing, and healing space for their sustainability; and (b) navigated various positions within socially toxic education institutions and organizations. I conclude by discussing how and why critical racial affinity spaces for educators of color are necessary in order to support their personal, political, relational, and pedagogical growth, which has implications on their retention and leadership within the field.     

Narrative and Social Justice from the Perspective of Governmentality

The use of narrative research is often informed by a commitment to social justice on the part of the researcher. An example of this literature, Morwenna Griffiths' Action for Social Justice in Education: Fairly Different (2003), is taken here to illustrate the understanding of power and the way in which the relationship between theory and practice is conceived. The language and tone of such texts illustrate the role of a certain inheritance of psychology in the construction of subjectivity, which shapes our understanding and conduct of the personal and professional. This, and the way in which the 'reflective practitioner' forms part of broader contemporary understandings of the self within liberal political rationality, is discussed with reference to work informed by the thought of Michel Foucault in order to provide a critique of the stated objectives of narrative research and the accompanying agenda of social justice. It is argued that without further attention being given within such work both to what is meant by narrative and social justice, and to assumptions regarding the nature of the operation of power, its emancipatory objectives are undermined.     

A critical exploration of Colombian teacher education from Freire’s ‘directivity’ perspective

The paper presents an exploration of Colombian teacher education from Paulo Freire’s ‘directivity’ perspective, which involves the political notion of education and the struggle for social justice. It examines certain existing tensions in teacher education, and analyses critically their implications for the teaching profession regarding an alternative pedagogical framework and new approaches for the professional identity-formation toward teaching for social justice. The paper also discusses the challenges for education research in Colombia, a country that both dreams of education as the nation’s future and fights against its inherent sense of adversity.     

Negotiating multiple identities between school and the outside world: a critical discourse analysis

This article examines interview talk of three students in an Australian high school to show how they negotiate their young adult identities between school and the outside world. It draws on Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia to argue that identities are linguistically and corporeally constituted. A critical discourse analysis of segments of transcribed interviews and student-related public documents finds a mismatch between a social justice curriculum at school and its transfer into students' accounts of outside school lived realities. The article concludes that a productive social justice pedagogy must use its key principles of (con)textual interrogation to engage students in reflexive practice about their positioning within and against discourses of social justice in their student and civic lives. An impending national curriculum must decide whether or not it negotiates the discursive divide any better.     

Obama in Selma: Deixis,rhetorical vision,and the “true meaning of America”

I argue that Barack Obama’s immediate, imaginary, and discursive deictic references to the actions and character of ordinary citizens, specific geographical markers within the “landscape of American history,” and sacred moments in U.S. history extended and enlarged the relational, spatial, and temporal contours of the national narrative in his 2015 speech on the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. In so doing, the president offered a compelling (re)definition of patriotism, civic responsibility, and “the true meaning of America.” More broadly, I argue for an expanded notion of deixis within rhetorical scholarship. Beyond a linguistic “pointing” to bodies, places, and objects within the audience’s immediate vicinity, I detail how indexicals bring various images before the eyes of the audience, link individual texts to their political, historical, social, and cultural contexts, and direct our attention to the most important parts of the national narrative even as they deflect our attention from other parts of the story. Ultimately, I suggest that deixis illuminates theories of rhetorical vision in ways that have gone unnoticed, and it is only when we recognize the psychological and cognitive effects of deictic speech that we can fully appreciate the central role phantasia plays in persuasion, deliberation, and moral judgment.     

(White) women on the move: Suffrage memory and the 1977 International Women’s Year Conference

ABSTRACT

This essay examines how the 1977 International Women’s Year Conference (IWY), a historic gathering of women in Houston, Texas—tasked to put forward a series of policy recommendations, many informed by a feminist perspective—undercut its own intersectional impulse by leveraging collective memory of U.S. suffrage activism. I analyze the conference program, a document distributed to every conference attendee, that called up early woman’s movement history and suffrage memory in its language, ephemera, and image to constitute a certain narrative for the 1977 IWY audience. I argue that by linking the IWY conference to a specific narrative of women’s rights and suffrage activism, the planners made the conference more explicitly political and feminist, and imbued the event with historical significance and legitimacy. At the same time, the deployment of suffrage memory ultimately positioned white women as mobile and engaged in social movement while effacing Black women and women of color who had been involved in suffrage activism, thus rendering them immobile, invisible, silent, and locked in the past. I conclude by examining a concurrent counter-narrative, one not included in the program, as a productive, intersectional rupture in suffrage memory at IWY.     

Challenging the concept of ethical literacy within Education for Sustainable Development (ESD): storytelling as a method within sustainability didactics

Ethical literacy seems to be used, within Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), in various ways, some more general and others morally specific, emphasising individuals’ responsibility. The overarching aim of this paper is to present some prerequisites for the development of narrative methods that focus on the vision of a good society without compromising individual integrity. Is it possible to develop ESD in a ways that highlight global challenges with a focus on justice and equity without either, as within post-political romanticism, pretending that social sustainability is a non-controversial ethical goal, or, as within liberal individualistic approaches, claiming that no one may escape from the demands of action competence, which, it is claimed, paves the way for making social sustainability a reality? With reference to some threads in narrative theory and by an analysis of six children’s books, this paper critically and constructively examines storytelling as one method to inspire young people to reflect upon what a good society and a good world might be, to catch sight of visions of a sustainable world and of the differences between how things are and how things could be – a method that may also preserve respect for individuals’ integrity.     

Making social justice within educational psychology relevant to preservice teachers

We believe that teacher credential programs and, specifically, educational psychology courses should encourage future teachers to act in ways that promote social justice within their school communities as well as the community at large. In this article, we share how we respond to students' concerns, how we infuse a social justice orientation in our educational psychology courses, and how we struggle to attain a social constructivist perspective in a standards-driven context where we find our community of learners.     

Found Things: Genre,Narrative, and Identification in a Networked Activist Organization

This article examines the inter-relational role of genre and narrative in a social justice organization. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this test presents a process-centered approach using genre ecology modeling and narrative maps. This approach can help scholars understand how genre and narrative dialectically promote collaboration and coordination while simultaneously promoting the process of consubstantiality and rhetorical identification in networked organizations.     

Politics and higher education in Brazil: 1964–1986

Brazilian education, and higher education in particular, were transformed by the coup of 1964 and the two decades of military government that followed. In this article the political ideology of the military governments is described together with the concepts of national political security and national economic development. The implications of these concepts being translated into policy, especially in the context of the relationship between Brazil and the U.S.A., are considered with reference to the role education should have within modernisation. In conclusion, a counterargument is presented in respect of how higher education should now be conceptualized, organised and operated in post-military Brazil.     

Counter-Storytelling with African Proverbs: A Vehicle for Teaching Social Justice and Global Understanding in Urban,U.S. Schools

Although the current demographics of urban schools in the United States reflect a rapid growth of culturally and linguistically diverse students, curricula continue to emphasize mainstream culture; cultural and linguistic experiences of these diverse students are ignored. In this article, the author examines how the use of counter storytelling in the form of African proverbs can serve as a tool for teaching the concepts of social justice in the urban, U.S. school setting.     

二十世纪五六十年代乡村叙事结构的演变——以《三里湾》、《创业史》、《艳阳天》为例

叙述结构具有很强的主观性,是作家对叙述对象的主观安排。20世纪五六十年代的农村叙事结构由于作家不同的文学观念、审美意识、思维方式而出现不同范型:《三里湾》以家庭为纽带的平行交错结构;《创业史》以内部阶级斗争为主线的放射结构;《艳阳天》以敌我阶级斗争为主线的放射结构。从三部作品叙事结构的演变中人们不仅看到那个时期"左"倾社会思潮和政治文化规范对作家创作心态的日益严重的干预过程,而且看到在政治权利话语的挤压下,充满亲情、乡情的日常生活叙事一步一步地退场,作家的主体意识也逐渐失落了。     

国家考试立法的几点思考

考试制度是一种崇尚程序正义的程序制度,属于国家政治制度的范畴。成文法规性考试的创建与实施,都是国家意志的体现,既表现为一种社会行为,又是一种行政行为或者政治行为。考试的核心理念是公开、公平和公正。制定国家考试法的宗旨不仅应当体现在依法规范国家考试秩序,建立和完善科学的考试规范和程序上,同时也应当体现在维护应考人员参加考试权,并为其提供方便、快速、有效的法律保障和司法救济上。     

European Citizenship and Study Abroad: student teachers’ experiences and identities

Member states of the Council of Europe have acknowledged the importance of education for citizenship and have passed a number of resolutions concerning European citizenship and the need to promote democratic values, social justice and human rights. Yet there remains a degree of ambivalence over citizenship education and its relationship to the development of various identities, including personal and national identities. This paper examines the experiences of student teachers from a variety of European countries and the impact of a period of study abroad in another European country on their development of intercultural awareness, national identities and perceptions of how we might best educate young people for participation in democratic life. It considers the implications for teacher education.     

Social justice teacher educators: what kind of knowing is needed?

ABSTRACT

What do teacher educators need to know and do in order to move from espousing to enacting social justice in their own teacher educating practice? This article addresses this question by examining scholarship that focuses on the preparation of preservice teachers for social justice. Using five knowledge domains for teaching (personal, contextual, pedagogical, sociological, social) as an analytic lens, the authors examined teacher education literature published between 2010 and 2016 in three international journals from Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. The study reveals that teacher educators in different contexts seem to highlight personal and contextual knowledge in their preparation of equity-minded preservice teachers and provides insight into how they conceptualise educational equity and social justice. The study illuminates what is likely in place in initial teacher education programmes, and what may be needed or missing if teacher educators are to prepare teachers for today’s diverse classrooms.

Abbreviation ITE: Initial Teacher Education ITE