SOCIALLY JUST PEDAGOGIES -

THE IMPERATIVE OF COGNITIVE JUSTICE

Gert van der Westhuizen Department of Educational Psychology University of Johannesburg SOUTH AFRICA

gertvdw@uj.ac.za

1. THE PROJECT OF PURSUING COGNITIVE JUSTICE IN EDUCATION

+ The current crisis of curriculum maintenance and mainstreaming - why change what works?

+ Absence of disruptions for curriculum change

+ Institutional visions of authenticity and responsiveness - what do they mean? How do they translate into curriculum practice?

1. THE PROJECT OF PURSUING COGNITIVE JUSTICE IN EDUCATION (2)

+ Clarifying agendas: developing socially just pedagogies to contribute to the DEMOCRATIC project

+ Problematising our sense of agency and personal/professional trajectories: practices are guided by beliefs and developed in community

UNDERSTANDING THE CONCEPT OF COGNITIVE JUSTICE

COGNITIVE Mind; thinking; analysis; knolwedge; perceptions; problem solving; critical thinking...

JUSTICE What is right; fair, just, equal; adequate...

2. NOTIONS OF COGNITIVE JUSTICE (1)

Shiv Visvanathan (2011): European remnants in Indian social life and class struggles... "The idea of cognitive justice is rooted in a search for survival realizing that a distributive justice that pays no attention to the survival of knowledges is incomplete. While there is an adversarial quality to aspects of it, there is agonal element, a sense of play, of dialogue that is not afraid of asymmetry. There is a sense of curiousity, of playfulness that also demands a hearing. The idea of cognitive justice is not about an abstract notion of rights. It seeks not an empty universalism for an abstract idea of humanity but it is a pluralistic search for an embedded idea of the social in which each form of the social is anchored in a particular way of knowing.

2. NOTIONS OF COGNITIVE JUSTICE (1)

Cognitive justice embodies an ethics of memory. To put it more specifically, it confronts an ethics of memory against an ethics of innovation which enables the dispensability or disposability of groups dubbed as waste or obsolescent. The defeated or the marginalized have a right not to be displaced. But cognitive justice goes beyond the idea of rights. What it challenges first is the linearity built into a development sequence which labels the tribe and peasant as backward, or as ancestors to the industrial. In their idea of the post industrial society, tribal and craft societies are synchronic as our contemporaries and not be museumized as ancestors" Visvanathan (2011).

2. NOTIONS OF COGNITIVE JUSTICE (2)

Catherine Odora Hoppers SARCHI Chair Development Education:

Transformation by enlargement, from colonial control, knowledge neglect, subjugation,

to

empowerment, emancipation, restorative action

2. NOTIONS OF COGNITIVE JUSTICE (2)

Odora Hoppers (2010; 2012) - with refercence to Rural communities who are "knowledge rich and economically poor": "Cognitive justice is based on the recognition of the plurality of knowledge and expresses the right of the different forms of knowledge to co-exist without duress." And the academy Odora Hoppers (2010) - knowledge from below; anchoring the institution in African Society; indigenously rooted futures...

2. NOTIONS OF COGNITIVE JUSTICE (3)

Neville Alexander: Language and knowing - importance of mother tongue and emancipation in education Crain Soudien: social dynamics of knowledge

Salim Vally: Knowledge in neoliberal era and problem of marketisation of higher education

Tsediso Makoelle: reinventing inclusion as cogntive justice

3. COGNITIVE JUSTICE AND SOCIALLY JUST PEDAGOGIES - QUESTIONS OF EDUCATION PRACTICE

+ Accepting the 'ethicality' of practice beyond approaches such as constructivism, acknowledging the range of cultural and linguistic realities experienced in terms of the self and the other, sameness and otherness... (Ippolito 2005) + Making learning more equitable: learning equity as i) equality of access to learning opportunities and materials, ii) fairness and balance in content and perspectives of materials and facilitation, iii) quality of the actual learning experiences and the extent to which those experiences enable meaningful and ‘deep’ learning, and iv) adequacy and success of learning, meeting individual needs (Van der Westhuizen 2012).

3. COGNITIVE JUSTICE AND SOCIALLY JUST PEDAGOGIES - QUESTIONS OF EDUCATION PRACTICE (2)

+ Reconsidering Dialogic learning; Conversations for Learning

+ Advancing cognitive/conceptual literacy (UCT research)

4. COGNITIVE JUSTICE AND SOCIALLY JUST PEDAGOGIES - QUESTIONS OF RESEARCH PRACTICE

Scholarships of practice - consider more authentic, relevant and responsive research methodologies and paradigms

Chilisa 2011 - INDIGENOUS RESEARCH PARADIGM AND METHODOLOGIES -

CONCLUSION

Need to stay with questions on the politics of knowledge, own practices and assumptions as intelelctuals, consequences of actions, and contributions to the democratic project