Open Textbooks, Intuitive Pedagogy and Social Justice

International Conference on Education (ICE2) 2018: Education and Innovation in Science in the Digital Era, 2016

Given the complexities of education in the 21st century, how might transformative approaches to literacy, a critical literacy embedded in social justice, offer one way of responding to current issues? My interest in this question emerges from my work as a classroom teacher working with diverse students for ten years. In my work with elementary school students (Grades 3 to 8), my approaches to teaching aligned with critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970; Kincheloe, 2007; Andrade and Morell, 2008). That is, I sought to engage students in societal critique through dialogue, and to foster various forms of social action as responses to the issues we explored. I wanted my students to be literate, I believed they were capable of high levels of literacy, and believed that their literacy could be a tool to explore the underlying causes of injustice and take action to redress them. I often aimed at what Lesko and Bloom refer to as "happy-ever-after endings" (1998, p. 390): I hoped students felt good about our learning, their social action, the money and awareness we raised for particular justice initiatives, and about the people the social action aimed to help. In my teaching, I found that providing opportunities for critical talk in response to various texts and opportunities for drama improvisation activities to be powerful ways to engage students in the complexities of social justice issues, particularly those students who seemed to be disengaged during more traditional instructional approaches. Such in and out of role talk was my way of getting students passionate about an issue, and to foster embodied responses to texts that I (as teacher) introduced. I felt at the time that I experienced success in engaging students using dialogic and dramatic pedagogies associated with critical literacy. I taught in a school where most of the students identified as White and middle to upper-middle class. Students at this school responded with enthusiasm to my conceptions of social justice and my connected literacy practices. For example, I often invited analysis and critique of various media texts, organized community service learning projects, and accompanied students to demonstrations aimed at raising awareness of various issues that students and I associated with local and global injustice. We often discussed the plight of Others1. I began to wonder, however, why my students seemed to be buying in to my pedagogy. I wondered whether or not what we were doing was actually working toward social justice. When I began teaching at a large elementary school populated by students who had recently immigrated to Canada (many under refugee claims), were racially marginalized, and/or were of lower socioeconomic status, this challenged my prior conceptions of critical literacy work embedded in social justice. Many of these students did not seem to respond as positively to what I considered important issues (that I assumed were also important to them). My new context provoked questions about what I was doing, how I was doing it, for whom, and the role played by my gender, racial and class privilege in my attempts at transformative social justice teaching. I began to wonder whether my teaching reflected and valued these students' lived experiences. When I became an equity consultant for my school board, I continued to question the relationships between my (and other teachers') experiences, those of my (and their) students, and the realities of people directly harmed in the issues I addressed. I wondered: How did students with different social identities and life experiences interpret my pedagogy and content? Why did some students seem to care about issues of justice (as I presented them), and

Contemporary Justice Review

Higher Education, 2025

In On the Affective Threshold of Power and Privilege (2023), Julie Rattray reflects on the impact of decolonising the curriculum (DtC) on threshold concept (TC) theory. In this paper, I focus on student troublesomeness in the context of DtC-troublesomeness being a key dimension in TC. I argue that such difficulty requires a bespoke analysis as it involves complex entanglements of politics, existential experiences, and epistemic difficulties. The result is twofold. First, these difficulties cannot be overcome using standard epistemic and pedagogical methods precisely because they arise out of tensions between decolonial, material, and hegemonic culture and pedagogical practices. Indeed, even where conceptual material is involved, students' difficulty with that material cannot be properly characterised in terms of "acquisition"-the dominant model in educational theory, and TC specifically. Second, I argue that hegemonic student troublesomeness is necessary, desirable, and ongoing in these contexts. Again, this puts pressure on pedagogical commitments in TC. I mobilise my analysis through my teaching of Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí's decolonial gender theory. I then draw upon Wittgenstein and Gramsci to elaborate the existential and political vectors of the problematics of students' difficulty. I then draw specifically on Kristie Dotson's work to think through these dynamics in the context of epistemic injustice. The paper concludes with practical strategies for educators to manage and embrace student troublesomeness, advocating for an approach that prioritises cultural understanding and existential reflection over traditional epistemic methods.

2019

Third World Quarterly, 2022

Around the globe calls are being made to decolonise curricula and the university. Teachers in westernised universities, who are educated and socialised in the Global North, face challenges in recognising where and how western epistemologies and ways of being produce the coloniality of knowledge and the coloniality of being in the classroom. Teachers are also challenged to develop decolonial teaching practices. This paper provides an analysis of how western epistemologies and pedagogical practices structure and inflict wounds on historically marginalised students. Linkages are revealed between what happens in the classroom and resulting knowledge society has of itself. In order to transform the dehumanising effects of coloniality in the westernised university and classroom, an argument is made for the decolonisation of teaching and learning practices. The creation of decolonial atmospheres in the classroom is proposed as a prerequisite for creating the necessary conditions for students to experience a decolonised education.

Journal of Education, 2019

Educational Researcher, 2002

2006

This book offers a fresh perspective from which to read, discuss, and debate recent critical interpretations of schooling and our world at present. The authors build upon past accomplishments of critical pedagogy and critique those elements that contradict the radically democratic orientation ...

Perspectives in Education, 2015

It has become public knowledge that teachers have gradually been called to teach learners to world-class standards in order to enable them to participate actively in the global economy. This has fuelled a debate on how teachers should be prepared to fulfil this new role. In-service programmes on social justice and education have often been critiqued for failing to build teachers' subject knowledge and pedagogical skills which are essential for facilitating learners' access to the curriculum. This paper takes a position that teaching is an inescapably political act that often (if not always) involves ideas, power and access to learning and life opportunities. The study presented in this paper was designed to explore how teachers used social justice pedagogy as a conduit for making the curriculum accessible to all their learners. Data for this study were generated from self-reflexive action research reports from a sample of 20 teachers submitted as part of the assessment requi...

Futurum Careers, 2024

key aspect of colonialism involves taking the values and practices of the colonisers' culture and imposing them on those of the colonised. This inevitably leads to inequities. As well as introducing systems that can run counter to the needs and experiences of the colonised, it also establishes a power structure with the colonisers at the top. Colonialism continues to cast a shadow over many nations of the world, perpetuating injustices. At the University of Saskatchewan, Dr Geraldine Balzer is working to address these injustices through one particularly powerful tool: teaching. "Current and traditional pedagogies grow out of Eurocentric educational traditions," says Geraldine. "In the Canadian context, these evolved from the British and American educational systems." Such systems prioritised literature from their respective traditions, which were principally authored by white men from wealthier backgrounds. "This set of literature became known as the school canon," says Geraldine. "The school canon validates specific ways of existing in the world, centres on white middle-and upper-class values, and normalises a hierarchical, patriarchal structure."