Placing epistemic justice at the core of educational transformations for just futures

• In Event: Education for Societal Transformation: Alternatives for a Just Future (Panel 1)

Proposal

This paper draws on findings from the JustEd Project, a large-scale comparative study conducted between 2020-23 in Nepal, Peru and Uganda. JustEd sought to explore how education systems in the Global South are responding to global demands for them to address justice and sustainability concerns. While education is often charged with such aims, conceptualizations of how this could be done are often vague and limited to the inclusion of curricular content. More importantly they fail to address the multiple injustices that many young people encounter in their daily lives and how they often contradict the normative ideas that they learn about in school.
JustEd examined selected policies, curricula, school textbooks and conducted qualitative fieldwork in selected public schools; it also included the application and design of an international survey that sought to understand how knowledge and experience influence young people’s attitudes towards justice and sustainability. A key finding from the study is that education in its current format is not enabling young people to face the societal and environmental challenges that define their lives. Throughout their formal education young people often encounter “shallow pedagogies” that prevent them from making sense of their own experiences, limit their understanding of the complex dynamics that lead to many of the world’s most pressing problems, and fail to provide them with the epistemic resources to consume, produce and critique knowledges. We argue that this is a major epistemic injustice that also limits the potential contributions that young people can make towards more just and sustainable futures. This paper will show this mainly through findings from the Peru case study.
The paper - which has been accepted for the 10th NORRAG Special Issue “Education for Societal Transformation: Alternatives for a Just Future” - proposes that a transformed secondary education needs to place epistemic justice at its core and outlines six pedagogical dimensions that provide an alternative to shallow pedagogies – critical pedagogy of place, reparative pedagogy, interdisciplinary learning, systems thinking, collective and individual action and critical thinking.

Author

• Maria Balarin, GRADE