Research Methods for Social Justice and Equity in Education

Liz Atkins, Vicky Duckworth

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350015470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

Research Methods for Social Justice and Equity in Education offers researchers a full understanding of very important concepts, showing how they can be used a means to develop practical strategies for undertaking research that makes a difference to the lives of marginalised and disadvantaged learners. It explores different conceptualisations of social justice and equity, and leads the reader through a discussion of what their implications are for undertaking educational research that is both moral and ethical and how it can be enacted in the context of their chosen research method and a variety of others, both well-known and more innovative. The authors draw on real, practical examples from a range of educational contexts, including early childhood, special and inclusive education and adult education, and cultures located in both western and developing nations in order to exemplify how researchers can use methods which contribute to the creation of more equitable education systems. In this way, the authors provide a global perspective of the contrasting and creative ways in which researchers reflect on and integrate principles of social justice in their methods and their methodological decision making.
It encourages the reader to think critically about their own research by asking key questions, such as: what contribution can research for equity and social justice make to new and emerging methods and methodologies? And how can researchers implement socially just research methods from a position of power? This book concludes by proposing a range of methods and methodologies which researchers can use to challenge inequality and work towards social justice, offering a springboard from which they can further their own studies.

PART ONE

Theorizing social justice and equity in educational research

CHAPTER ONE

Theoretical conceptions of social justice and equity

This chapter will explore the theoretical conceptions of social justice and equity and their relationship with research methodology. A pertinent place to start is with the conception of philosophy; all philosophical positions and their associated methodologies, whether implicit or indeed explicit, offer a lens to notions of ‘reality’ which then determines what can be regarded as legitimate knowledge. A question we may ask is, whose interest does the ‘legitimate knowledge’ serve, and why? hooks (2009) argues that when the tenets of knowledge which include notions of authority and progress are embraced and implemented in specific ways that support only the interests of the dominant group, they lead to either social inertia or regression. So, what does that mean for us as socially just researchers? Importantly, we need to address the framing and posing of our questions. This is essential in ensuring that we are listening to perspectives from hidden, marginalized and silenced voices that enable new and different critiques of the educational settings and other institutions that support and perpetuate the interests of the dominant group(s). With this in mind, a central role and methodological driver of socially just research is how research questions are posed and to whom. For example, when researching educational inequalities there needs to be an awareness through the questions posed – that education systems are punctuated with social inequalities and the questions we ask, the context and the participant group cannot be positioned in isolation from this. Critical questions may explore aspects of how and why the educational system is unjust, and to what extent does an unjust society influence and perpetuate this. Philosophical positioning will shape the generation of the questions and methodology. In the absence of clear understandings of these issues that facilitate a single coherent theory, this chapter considers these issues in the context of the historical, philosophical and political meanings attributed to the terms equity and social justice. In particular, it explores the ancient concept of justice from which they are derived and considers them in the light of education, and more particularly educational research.

The history and philosophy of social justice

The debated notion of Justice is evident from the earliest times and draws heavily on the works of the ancient Greek philosophers and, later, Judaeo-Christian traditions and scholarship. Plato’s Republic (1955) is, essentially, an extended work which debates the nature of justice. However, in exploring the work of the early Greek philosophers, it is worth noting that the word ‘justice’ has a different – and wider – range of meanings and subtleties than its English translation. In Greek, it implies, among other things, morality and ‘right conduct’ (Lee in Plato, 1955). In addition to these constructs, Plato also debates whether Justice is a virtue or knowledge, and whether the act of being Just would make a man happy or unhappy. Similarly, Aristotle in his treatise Nicomachean Ethics begins by defining Justice as ‘a moral state’ (1998: 76) but develops this argument in the context of his debate around the notion of reciprocity, noting that the Pythagoreans defined Just as simply ‘that which reciprocates with another’ but arguing that this is not consistent with conceptions of ‘Distributive or Corrective Just[ice]’ (84). He comes to the conclusion that:

Justice is the moral state in virtue of which the just man is said to have the aptitude for practicing the Just in the way of moral choice, and for making division between himself and another, or between two other men, not so as to give himself the greater and to his neighbour the less share of what is choice-worthy, and contrary-wise of what is hurtful, but what is proportionably equal, and in like manner when adjudging the rights of two other men. (86/87)

Aristotle also differentiates between conceptions of Justice as an abstract and the ‘Social Just’, which is concerned with social relations, arguing that ‘by proportionate reciprocity of action the social community is held together’ (84).

Similar philosophies underpin teachings from all the Abrahamic religions: for example, Social Justice is central to Judaism, where the Torah commands both charitable giving and advocacy on the part of the poor (e.g. Proverbs, 31:9, ‘speak up, judge righteously, champion the poor and needy’). Similarly, in Islam the tenets of social justice are set down in the Quran, and then in Hadith and Sunna (sayings and behaviour of the Prophet Mohammed), with later interpretations by Islamic scholars. The Quran includes specific exhortations in relation to social justice. For example, ‘so as for the orphan, do not oppress him, and as for the petitioner, do not repel him’ (Quran.com/93), while the Prophet said, ‘he is not a Muslim who sleeps with his stomach full while his neighbour stays hungry’ (Sunan al-Kubra 19049). In a Christian context, the works of Aristotle informed those of St Augustine of Hippo, which are considered fundamental to modern understandings of social justice.

Augustine (354–430) was the bishop of Hippo Regius in modern-day Annaba, Algeria. His concerns were broad, including addressing the needs of the poorest and most marginalized members of his community. Augustine remains one of the most prolific writers in history, and many of his works are still extant. Similarly to the ancient Greeks, whom he referenced in his work (e.g. City of God, 2:14) he understood justice as meaning not only right relationships but also a fairer distribution of goods, a concept which is given prominence in much contemporary Catholic teaching (e.g. see John Paul II’s Catechism of the Catholic Church undated: 421) and which might also be understood to relate to concepts of equity. Augustine regarded a just person as one who sought to use things only for the end for which God appointed them, arguing that ‘when the miser prefers his gold to justice, it is through no fault of the gold, but of the man; and so with every created thing’ (City of God 15.22). Augustine’s notion of justice is, in a sense, reciprocal, in terms of his emphasis on fairer distribution of goods (Letters, CCXI, AD 423). However, his emphasis on responsibility for others, particularly where they are less advantaged, also has resonance with broader contemporary understandings of social justice, both within and beyond the field of education, as well as with notions of the ‘common good’. The notion of the ‘common good’, or responsibility for others, appears in both religious teachings and Aristotelian philosophy as a key aspect of justice, but, as with the concept of justice itself, it is a term which is open to interpretation. MacIntyre discussed at length the relationship of philosophic morality to that of Christianity (1981: 154/168), and the notion of common good is an example which may be observed in a range of examples from each tradition. These include the writings of Aristotle, who argues that ‘the greatest good . . . is justice, in other words, the common interest’ (Aristotle Politics III, II. 1282b15), the letters of St Paul (1 Cor. 12:7) and the work of the philosopher David Hume (1740: 318), who argued that ‘[I]‌t’was therefore a concern for our own, and the public interest, which made us establish the laws of justice’. More recently, Morwenna Griffiths (2003: 54) has argued that social justice is ‘a dynamic state of affairs that is good for the common interest, where that is taken to include both the good of each and the good of all’.

In relation to this, MacIntyre (1981: 227/232) also rehearses a number of arguments about why people are affluent or needy relative to the rest of society. In doing so, he considers notions of desert and reciprocity in terms of the distribution of material wealth and the extent to which a person can ‘earn’ or ‘deserve’ such goods, as well as the extent to which that material wealth could or should be redistributed among the ‘needy’. Such arguments have been debated by many writers across time and include works such as St Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, Hume (1740: III ii 2: 318), and Minogue (1998: 258). While not addressing reciprocity directly, Rawls (1999: 301/308) debates the concept of ‘fairness’, which has some parallels with MacIntyre’s discussion, as well as with concepts of reciprocity. Reflecting the ‘slippery’ nature of these notions, alternative conceptions of reciprocity and social justice – those from a political/ideological perspective – can be found in education policy internationally, particularly where these are concerned with the education of young people and adults (e.g. see OECD, 2018; DfES, 2003a, 2003b, 2006) and those from marginalized communities. In the context of such policy, educational opportunities such as skills-based training are made available to young people in return for the increased economic contribution it is assumed they will make as a result of having particular skills or credentials. In the UK, this was first given prominence in the rights and responsibilities agenda of New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ and can be traced through the more recent policies of the Coalition and Conservative administrations (e.g. DfES, 2005: 10; 2006: 1; DfE, 2011: 1). Similar policy initiatives and ideologies can be seen internationally, with Machin (2006) noting that in 2005, OECD social policy ministers made a move from ‘remedial approaches’ to ‘making work pay’, leading to greater concern with learning experiences which might result in integration in the labour market, something also regarded as supporting the ‘traditional goal of social justice’.

However, these ideologies, despite the discourses they use, derive not from conceptions of social justice or equity but rather from neo-liberal conceptions of human capital, in which individuals are positioned either as a problem or as a resource (e.g. see Ade-Ojo and Duckworth, 2015; Atkins, 2016a; Billet et al. 2010) and where, if they are unable to engage with the opportunities presented to them, they are placed within a deficit model, characterized by state discourses as failing to meet their civic responsibility of engaging with lifelong learning. Such discourses effectively transfer responsibility from the state to the individual for this perceived failure (Ainley and Corney, 1990: 94/95). In doing so, they divert attention from any critical consideration of economic and education systems, since they obscure ‘the existence of systemic and structural failures which confine people to an allotted place in life, constrain individual agency and replicate social class and other social inequities’ (Atkins, 2009: 144), an action which in and of itself is contrary to social justice. This implies that the role of socially just educational research is to illuminate and work to address some of the inequities and inequalities which are evident in the education system. Further, because education is so bound up with social justice, not only as a means to promote a more equitable and socially just society but also as a structure which reproduces marginalization, it is all the more essential that research and its methods which claim social justice as part of its purpose can be seen to be doing social justice in the context of its process. For example, critical educational research is a form of principle research that unites purpose and process. It is designed in its methodology not just to explain or understand social/educational reality but importantly to unsettle the status quo and change it. Duckworth and Smith (2018c) identify that the moral driver of critical research is underpinned by human emancipation and social justice. Their critical research (highlighted in Chapter 6) aims to firmly establish and maintain conditions which empower the often silenced and disadvantaged communities. A way to address this was in the development and implementation of the methodology whereby a strong emphasis was placed and driven on the democratizing of the relations between researchers and researched. This shifted from a privileging of the researcher’s view of reality to a method that supports shared understandings or ‘dialogic conversations’.

Such forms of critical methodology have become increasingly prominent over the past generation, by increasing numbers of scholars taking a more critical standpoint in their research and theory-making, which positions them as influencers of policy, with the aim being to redress historical inequities and ‘make’ social justice (Denzin and Lincoln, 2013: 580). This move towards social justice as a form of critical inquiry implies activism as well as philosophy – to quote Denzin and Lincoln (2013: 194) ‘getting mad is no longer enough’, and also suggests that social justice can be constructed as a form of politics, encompassing both action and value. Therefore, in the context of critical educational inquiry, both these aspects of social justice are critical in guiding the design and methodological and theoretical frameworks.

Social justice as a value

Educational Research has been conceptualized as a value-led form of inquiry and this is reflected across a broad range of scholarship, including, for example, works by Griffiths (1998, 2003), Christians (2013) and also Stenhouse (1975). Indeed, Carr (1995) considered that the educational research would not be possible unless it was value laden:

1.Values are so vital an ingredient in educational research that their elimination is impossible save by eliminating the research enterprise itself. Those educational researchers who claim that they are adopting a ‘disinterested’ stance are, therefore, simply failing to recognize certain features of their work.

2.The reason why educational research is always so value laden is because educational research methods ...