Possibilities towards a socially just pedagogy: New tasks and challenges

Abstract

This paper contributes to an emerging debate on what it means to transform teaching and learning in higher education and to renew the social justice mission of universities. By focusing on the teaching and learning environment, we set the stage for the special issue, exploring the idea of socially just pedagogy, where it comes from and what it means in the present day. The social justice-pedagogy nexus as taken up in this paper aims at using pedagogy as a change process to transform higher education. We offer new considerations arguing that to adopt socially just pedagogies it is important that teachers consider the personal dimensions of pedagogy, the politics of difference, and the relationship between pedagogy and agency. In doing this, the chance that universities remain places of possibility, rather than turning into divisive spaces, becomes more plausible.

Beyond Colour-Blind Intercultural Education: Operationalising the Concept of Culture for Future Preschool Teachers

“…Swedish educational institutions, including my home university, need to do more to respond to decades of social unrest and calls for change, including the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Calls to decolonise the curriculum and offer social justice education (Morreira 2017;Osman and Hornsby 2018) are not adequately addressed by promoting intercultural education, which as I have shown can inadvertently undermine the fight against Afrophobia and other forms of racism and discrimination. Based on my students' research, it appears that all too often intercultural education in teacher education programs facilitates 'insidious aggressive intercultural interactions' in preschools (Valencia 2010).…”

Actioning social justice into the engineering curriculum

“…The curriculum would need to move away from the status quo of engineering culture, where individuals solve problems with engineering knowledge, toward a socially just culture of engineering, where engineering knowledge facilitates just outcomes with and for those experiencing injustice. To transform the curriculum, and by extension engineering culture, ESJ scholars have strongly recommended: (1) faculty will need higher quality facilitation and multicultural training (Davishahl & Grubb, 2021;Dimitrov & Haque, 2016), (2) the classroom environment will need to be reimagined (Turner et al, 2022;Arif, 2020;Osman & Hornsby, 2018) and (3) students' interests will need to be supported (Godbole et al, 2018;Leydens et al, 2017b;Rainey et al, 2021Rainey et al, , 2018.…”

Emergency University Teaching in the COVID-19 Health Crisis

“…This debate emerges from (re)thinking the methodologies used, resources and power relations within academia; authors such as Narodowski & Botta (2017), argue that the exercise of power has been so meticulously disseminated in the academic canon that it is now commonplace, hence, figures of power such as curricula and evaluation methodologies have ceased to operate with the same effectiveness as in the past. Along these lines, Osman & Hornsby (2018) recognize a crisis in higher education institutions that resist change and transformation; noting that they have become a hostile and divided environment, which, in the case of learning approaches, would be alien and even opposed to the worlds of students and their families.…”