Strengthening Justice in Education in Adverse Times
In this blogpost, María Balarin and Lizzi O. Milligan present key findings from the JustEd Project that explored responses to global educational justice and sustainability agendas by countries in the Global South. The authors expose key limitations in such responses and argue that we need to move beyond narrow conceptualisations of how education can contribute to broader social change and sustainable development, refocusing efforts on pedagogical practice and on the key role played by epistemic justice.
Justice in Education in a Time of Polycrisis
We live in a time of interconnected global crises of climate change, increasing violence and inequalities, misknowledge and political polarisation. What some describe as a polycrisis raises important challenges for global education policy agendas that call for justice, sustainability and transformation as essential ideas for education to contribute to the future of both humanity and life on earth. Such calls are becoming weaker in a context in which even the most fundamental ideas about truth and knowledge are coming into question. This is alongside increasing acceptance and tolerance for individual and collective behaviours that provide daily realignments of what the grossest injustices in the world could be.
Five years ago, we began the JustEd Project with the aim of investigating how countries in the Global South were responding to calls for education to contribute to justice and sustainability. This was a multi-country, mixed methods research project that ran from 2020-2024 exploring justice in and through secondary education in Nepal, Peru and Uganda. One of our starting points was the observation that many calls for justice and sustainability in education assumed linear policy to practice trajectories and had limited concerns for educational practice. Through our research we arrived at the conclusion that much thought had been put to the role of education for justice, without properly understanding the role of education as justice.
Education as and for Justice
JustEd examined how policies, curricula, textbooks and practice influence young people’s experiences of schooling and their intended actions. Many of our findings were consistent with existing critiques of educational justice agendas, which show how poorly specified justice aims are in global policy frameworks, how little they actually seek to change, and their degree of siloisation, which limits their transformative strength. We also found clear evidence of how dominant ‘learning’ and ‘outcomes’ agendas have confounded the purpose of education and the nature of educational practice.
JustEd showed that many current policy efforts by Global South countries to address justice and sustainability are limited by their weak justice framings. Problems are often simplified to an extent that empties them of anything that may seem to challenge the status quo, with policies and textbooks assuming often exclusively normative perspectives. Our research showed how those policies that sought to go beyond such normative intentions had less chances of enduring time and politics, and of translating into practice. We also found a notable absence of pedagogical guidance for teachers to implement justice-oriented policies. This, together with the poor justice framings at the policy level seriously limits the translation of justice aims into educational practice.
In all three countries, a common theme was the persistent and multiple injustices that young people faced in their daily lives. These included young people in rural Nepal facing the increasing threat of landslides, those in Northern Uganda being physically punished for speaking in languages other than English and those in urban marginalized areas of Peru with daily experiences of urban violence and authority abuses. Significantly, we found very few examples of connections being made between such daily injustices and the normative presentation of issues of diversity, environmental degradation and peace in the school curriculum. Such disconnections left young people often unable to articulate these contradictions or make sense of how what they learn in school has relevance for their lives and actions beyond the classroom.
A transversal problem that we found through the JustEd project was the weak epistemic grounding of school and classroom practices. Young people, as well as their teachers, were not accustomed to learning in ways that encouraged them to go deeper in their understanding of different problems. School practices did not enable them to grasp the complexity of many current issues, to consider different perspectives, to make connections and to support their claims with reasons, evidence, openness and humility. School experiences, despite the different curricular and pedagogical models in each country, seemed characterised by what we came to describe as shallow pedagogies, which, we argue, constitute a major form of epistemic injustice that seriously limits the contribution that education can make towards necessary societal transformations.
While Peru, Uganda and Nepal represent clear examples of the intersecting injustices that young people in the Global South face on a daily basis, the need for justice in education and the limitations that justice agendas face is certainly not limited to these countries. This is particularly so in the case of what education is charged with enabling – i.e. justice beyond classrooms through young people’s positive actions for the environment and society.
Contributions from JustEd
JustEd offers some important conclusions through its thorough critique of justice agendas and through reimagining what education as justice could look like. These ideas are in conversation with those now being developed by The Alternatives Project, and in our special collection for the Global Social Challenges Journal, they are complemented by those emerging from the Transforming Education for Sustainable Futures Project. Our articulation of education as justice brings concepts related to environmental, epistemic and transitional justice into the three dimensions of social justice as redistribution, recognition and representation. Through the development of teacher training materials, currently being piloted for teaching environmental education in Nepal and Uganda, we have articulated how these concepts can underpin a justice approach to secondary education.
We have also argued for the centrality of knowledge-making for young people facing the complexity and urgency of intersecting injustices both now and in their futures. Here, we argue for the grounding of educational transformations around an epistemic core, highlighting how knowledge is ‘the essence’ of education. Borrowing from Elmore’s instructional core, the epistemic core rests on the interrelated pillars of rich pedagogies, making connections to learners’ lived experiences and a diverse range of epistemic resources. Through these, young people can learn to handle knowledges, make evidence-informed arguments, make sense of themselves and the world around them and develop an understanding of the complexity of systemic issues we now confront. This is just one way of moving beyond narrow conceptualisations of how education can contribute to broader social change and sustainable development and of articulating the secondary education that the polycrisis demands and young people across the Global South deserve.
The Authors
María Balarin is Senior Researcher at GRADE, Perú. She has published numerous pieces on education reform, privatisation, segregation and marginalized youth. She recently co-edited Limitations and Possibilities of Justice in Education (Global Social Challenges Journal 2024 V3:1) and is co-author of the forthcoming book Education as and for Justice in the Global South (2025 Bristol: Policy Press).
Lizzi O. Milligan is Professor of Education and Global Social Justice in the Department of Education at the University of Bath (UK). She was the Principal Investigator of the JustEd project. Her research particularly focuses on different forms of (in)justice in language-in-education. She holds a PhD from the University of Bristol.