Social Justice, Democratic Education and the Silencing of Words that Wound

2003 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Applebaum
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Democratic Education

scholarly journals Educational Institutions Negotiating Democracy and Social Justice: The (Im)balance of Power and Accountability

2007 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Carr ◽  
Gina Thésée
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Democratic Education ◽  
State Level ◽  
Institutional Culture ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
Balanced Approach ◽  
Justice Sociale ◽  
Democracy And Education ◽  
High Level

Democracy and education are considered to be mutually reinforcing, yet it is unclear how democracy is achieved in/through education. At a time when educational systems and governments rhetorically advocate for greater accountability for academic achievement, there seems to be less emphasis placed on the area of social justice for students. The capacity of the institutional culture of an entire educational system of a jurisdiction (the provincial/state level, school boards and schools) to support and achieve a high level of critical democracy has not been the focus of extensive research. For the purposes of this paper, democratic education is considered to be an amalgam of concepts, including how decisions are made, what those decisions are, and the effect of those decisions, covering both student outcomes and the institutional culture, with a particular emphasis on social justice. The paper argues for a more rigorous and balanced approach to conceptualizing democracy in education, thus the need to interrogate conceptions of power relations and accountability, and proposes a framework for democratic education. On considère que la démocratie et l'éducation se renforcent mutuellement, mais ce n'est pas souvent clair, comment atteindre la démocratie à l'aide de, ou par l'éducation. Au temps où les systèmes d'éducation et les gouvernements prônent avec éloquence une responsabilité plus grande pour l'accomplissement académique, l'emphase se fait beaucoup moindre sur le domaine de la justice sociale pour les élèves. La capacité de la culture institutionnelle de tout système d'éducation qui relève d'une juridiction quelconque (au niveau provincial, ou d'un conseil scolaire, ou d'une école) pour soutenir et achever un niveau élevé de la démocratie critique ne fait pas encore le point d'extensives recherches. Pour le but de cet article, les auteurs considèrent l'éducation démocratique comme une amalgame de concepts qui incluent: comment les décisions se prennent, quelles sont ces décisions, et les effets de ces décisions à la fois sur l'accomplissement des élèves et sur la culture des institutions, en accordant une importance particulière à la justice sociale. L'article soutient une approche plus rigoureuse et mieux balancée pour conceptualiser la démocratie en éducation. De là s'ensuit le besoin d'interroger les conceptions sur l'interrelation des pouvoirs et les responsabilités. Il propose aussi une structure pour l'éducation de la démocratie.

scholarly journals Student experiences of democratic education and the implications for social justice

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-64
Author(s):  
Freya Aquarone
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Inclusive Education ◽  
Democratic Education ◽  
Student Experiences ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Democratic Schools ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Depth Interviews

Using data from a case-study school as a springboard, this article explores how enactments of democratic education might both problematise and illuminate new possibilities for the way we conceptualise social justice in education. Nancy Fraser’s tripartite framework of social justice is used to analyse in-depth interviews with students aged 14–16 from a democratic school in the United Kingdom. The article makes two key arguments: first, it highlights the interdependence of ‘recognition’ and ‘representation’ and, consequently, calls on mainstream policy and practice to make a substantive commitment to participatory democracy as part of the ‘inclusive education’ agenda. Second, it points to the tensions between ‘redistributive’ justice and other social justice aims which may be particularly stark in democratic education (and other progressive education) spaces. The article suggests that a strengthened relationship between democratic schools and research communities would offer a crucial contribution to collective critical reflection on social justice in education.

On the Role of Teacher Unions in Social Justice: An Essay Review of Michael Charney, Jesse Hagopian, and Bob Peterson (Eds.) Teacher Unions and Social Justice: Organizing for the Schools and Communities Our Students Deserve. Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 2021.446 pp. ISBN: 978-0-942961-09-6

2021 ◽  
pp. 089590482110494
Author(s):  
Michael W. Apple
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Essay Review ◽  
Democratic Education ◽  
Professional Autonomy ◽  
Teacher Unions ◽  
The Common ◽  
Teacher Unionism

In an earlier essay in the Reviewing Policy section of this journal, I examined many of the major arguments for social justice teacher unionism. This combines both more traditional union concerns over wages, working conditions, professional autonomy, and respect with a much more concerted focus by unions on social justice issues in schools, communities, and the larger society. The importance of such a commitment and what it actually looks like is evident in the book under discussion here. Teacher Unions and Social Justice is one of a deservedly well-respected and growing series of volumes published by Rethinking Schools. The entire series constitutes substantive contributions to some of the most significant and contentious issues facing deeply committed educators. Through books such as Teacher Unions and Social Justice and other important publications, Rethinking Schools provides us with ways of combining the professional, political, and personal aspects of our lives and of coming together to build thicker forms of critically democratic education to defend a more robust vision of the common good.

scholarly journals Policy and Research on Citizenship Education in the United Kingdom (1998–2018)

2019 ◽  
pp. 302-327
Author(s):  
Edda Sant ◽  
David Menendez Alvarez-Hevia
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Citizenship Education ◽  
Democratic Education ◽  
Research Trends ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
School Based ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Uk

This chapter explores citizenship education in the United Kingdom with a particular focus on the major policy and research trends of the last 20 years (1998-2018), particularly in relation to school and non-school based citizenship education. This discussion is articulated in relation to dimensions (i.e., global and national), approaches (i.e., character, social justice, and democratic education), and spaces. The last section of this chapter illuminates some key issues for citizenship education in the UK and how these can help us to understand what might happen everywhere else.

scholarly journals Knowledge, the curriculum, and democratic education: The curious case of school English

2019 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Belas
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Democratic Education ◽  
National Curriculum ◽  
The Other ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Powerful Knowledge ◽  
The One

Debate over subject curricula is apt to descend into internecine squabbles over which (whose?) curriculum is best. Especially so with school English, because its domain(s) of knowledge have commonly been misunderstood, or, perhaps, misrepresented in the government’s programmes of study. After brief consideration of democratic education (problems of its form and meaning), I turn to issues of knowledge and disciplinarity, outlining two conceptions of knowledge – the one constitutive and phenomenological, the other stipulative and social-realist. Drawing on Michael Young and Johan Muller, I argue that, by social-realist standards of objectivity, school English in England -- as currently framed in national curriculum documents -- falls short of the standards of ‘powerful knowledge’ and of a democratic education conceived as social justice. Having considered knowledge and disciplinarity in broad terms, I consider the curricular case of school English, for it seems to me that the curious position of English in our national curriculum has resulted in a model that is either weakly, perhaps even un-, rooted in the network of academic disciplines that make up English studies.

School Reform, Educational Governance, and Discourses on Social Justice and Democratic Education in Germany

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mechtild Gomolla
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Young People ◽  
School Reform ◽  
School Effectiveness ◽  
Democratic Education ◽  
School Development ◽  
Educational Governance ◽  
Children And Young People ◽  
International Student Assessment

In Germany, at the beginning of the 2000s, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) not only served as a catalyst for the development and implementation of an overall strategy for quality assurance and development of the state school systems. The school effectiveness movement has also brought the issue of educational inequality, which had been lost out of sight in the 1980s, back on the agenda. In ongoing reforms, the improvement of the educational success of children and young people with a migration history and/or a socioeconomically deprived family background has been declared a priority. However similar to the situation in Anglo-American countries, where output-oriented and data-driven school reforms have been implemented since the 1980s, considerable tensions and contradictions became visible between the New Educational Governance and a human rights- and democracy-oriented school development. A Foucauldian discourse analysis of central education and integration policy documents at the federal political level from 1964 to 2019 examined how, and with what consequences, demands of inclusion, social justice, and democracy were incorporated, (re)conceptualized, distorted, or excluded in the New Educational Governance, which was a new type of school reform in Germany. The results of the study indicate that the new regulations of school development are far from shaping school conditions in a human rights–based understanding of inclusion and democratic education. The plethora of measures taken to improve the school success of children and young people with a history of migration (in interaction with other dimensions of inequality such as poverty, gender, or special educational needs) is undermined by a far-reaching depoliticization of discourse and normative revaluations. In the interplay of epistemology, methodology, and categories of school effectiveness research with managerialist steering instruments, spaces for democratic school development and educational processes, in which aspects of plurality, difference, and discrimination can be thematized and addressed in concerted professional action, appear to be systematically narrowed or closed. But the case of Germany also discloses some opposed tendencies, associated with the strengthened human rights discourse and new legislation to combat discrimination.

scholarly journals Policy and Research on Citizenship Education in the United Kingdom (1998–2018)

2021 ◽  
pp. 507-532
Author(s):  
Edda Sant ◽  
David Menendez Alvarez-Hevia
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Citizenship Education ◽  
Democratic Education ◽  
Research Trends ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
School Based ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Uk

This chapter explores citizenship education in the United Kingdom with a particular focus on the major policy and research trends of the last 20 years (1998-2018), particularly in relation to school and non-school based citizenship education. This discussion is articulated in relation to dimensions (i.e., global and national), approaches (i.e., character, social justice, and democratic education), and spaces. The last section of this chapter illuminates some key issues for citizenship education in the UK and how these can help us to understand what might happen everywhere else.

scholarly journals Citizenship education and human capabilities: lynchpin for sustainable learning environment and social justice

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tendayi Marovah
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Learning Environments ◽  
Citizenship Education ◽  
Democratic Education ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Politics Of Difference ◽  
Education Theory ◽  
Physical Spaces

The paper builds on and contributes to literature in citizenship education studies in higher education. Many studies in this field have explored the history, development and implementation of various forms of citizenship formation as an advancement of social justice. However, little has been written on how the formation of critical democratic citizens 2 links with the notion of sustainable learning environments and how it relates to social justice. Studies by McKinney (2007); Waghid (2007; 2009), Lange (2012); and Leibowitz, Swartz, Bozalek, Carolissen, Nicholls &Rohleder(2012) are among those on citizen formation in the South African higher education context. Thisconceptual paper argues that the formation of critical democratic citizens through higher education relates not only to social justice, but also to the advancement of sustainable learning environments (SLEs) beyond physical spaces. The paper explores the normative value of a democratic education theory, Marion Young’s (1990) theory of justice and the politics of difference, and human development principles in advancing citizenship education. These foster both sustainable learning environments and social justice. A democratic education theory lays the foundation for an inclusive and deliberative form of education, while a theory of justice and politics of difference advances better justice and an environment that is non-oppressive. Human development principles set the tone for a sustainable human development, which becomes a framework through which asustainable learning environment is built in pursuit of social justice. Drawing on a Capabilities Approach framework and the philosophy of Ubuntu, with emphasis on substantive freedoms, opportunities, and the thriving of the common good, the paper illustrates how citizenship education advances a conception of sustainable learning environments and social justices not necessarily limited to physical spaces, distributive justice or economic motives, but inclusive of institutional arrangements, policy issues and relational justice.

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