The concept of social justice is one of the central virtues and pillars of contemporary democracies. Nowhere are its consequences more keenly felt than in the education of each new generation of children and young people. The injustices and inequalities experienced by rural school participants, as this book will show, place the concept of social justice at the center of any discussion of education. The problem, however, is that social justice is a term that does not have the same meaning for everyone. It is usually understood as merit, need, fairness, equality, or equity, and it is in many instances used by philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, and educational researchers as self-evident and self-explanatory. One of the difficulties in conceptualizing social justice is that it is a contested term that carries often conflicting social, political, cultural, and economic meanings. Different political, economic, and social actors in society create a pluralistic agenda and each of these groups sustain their ideas and objectives through different rival conceptualizations of social justice, such as merit, need, or equality (MacIntyre 1985, 1988). These competing concepts of social justice and disparate positions do not arrive at a definitive concept of what social justice is. The same competing forces could be seen, for example, in the field of education, where different political and social groups have opposite visions of what “legitimate” knowledge or “good” teaching and learning consists of, rooted as they are in conflicting views of structural justice (e.g. gender, class, and race) in education and society (Apple 2001, p. 410). Yet paradoxically, there exists a rhetoric of consensus tied up with the implied universality of the concept—a sense that we all understand what we are referring to when we speak of social justice―which masks these very real differences. What this rhetoric of consensus does is foreclose an ongoing discussion about how best to attend to these differences in constructing a just society.
While social justice is a contested term but usually invoked as an explicit concept, there is very little research that examines what socially just education means and looks like for rural school participants themselves. 1 This seems surprising given the different well-documented inequalities endured over time by rural schools (e.g. lack of breadth of curriculum, staffing shortages, deficient infrastructure, prohibitive cost of services, and students’ educational performance) (Alloway et al. 2004; Boylan and Wallace 2007; Bradley 2008; Council for the Australian Federation 2007; Department of Education and Training [DET] 2007; Gonski 2011; Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission [HREOC] 2000a; Welch et al. 2007). This picture of rural education is occurring as many rural communities across Australia, and around the world, have been experiencing important structural change and, in many cases, decline, in the last 20 years (Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics [ABARE] 2008; Alston 2002; Brett 2011; Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics [BITRE] 2008; Carr and Kefalas 2009; Corbett 2007; Falk 2001; Kenway et al. 2006; Shucksmith 2012; Squires 2003; Woods 2011; Yang and Fetsch 2007). It is not my intention to present yet another deficit story about schooling in rural places, but given the opportunities and challenges occurring in rural education and communities, it is timely to ask people how socially just they feel teaching and learning is in rural places. In doing so, this book responds to the educational and political challenges of theorizing social justice education (Gewirtz 2002; North 2006), by bridging a gap between the theory and practice of normative social justice and social sciences (Brighouse 2004; Griffiths 1998b).
This book examines what social justice means to participants (students, teachers, principals, and parents) in two government (public) schools in rural Victoria, Australia. Including these voices in the discussion offers an important contribution to understanding what is going on in rural schools, which dimensions of social justice are being applied, and what the real needs are. This book contributes to an understanding of how an abstract concept, social justice, can work as an effective policy guide, in an operative way, by taking it from its theoretical isolation and putting it in the immediate context of rural schooling. Exploring the subjective element of social justice can make an important contribution to understanding how social injustices are experienced, tolerated, and perpetuated in disadvantaged settings and can assist in outlining an agenda for change. It is in this vein that the different chapters of the book aim to answer important questions: What does social justice mean to rural school participants? Which dimension of social justice is dominant in rural school practices? What are the possibilities for enacting a more plural social justice in rural schools? And, how can socially unjust discourses and practices be interrupted in rural schools? Answers to these questions open up a path to examining what is happening in rural schools, and how we can address the needs of rural school participants and analyze the different dimensions of social justice that redress or reinforce inequality in rural schools. Without this understanding, policymakers, educators, and researchers alike risk continuing to adopt an insufficient or limited model of social justice, a one-size-fits-all approach to issues of social inequality.
My analysis of social justice draws upon the theoretical work of Iris Marion Young, a political theorist, feminist, and radical egalitarian, to reclaim the discourse of social justice from the liberal dominance of the principle of distributive justice. Distributive justice, simply put, focuses on how major social institutions assign rights and duties, and distributes benefits and burdens through social cooperation (Rawls 1972). Like Young, I search for a position that offers a plural model of social justice—one that overcomes the shortfalls of the liberal-egalitarian model that equates social justice mostly with distributive justice at the expense of other forms of redress. This is a much needed critical exercise in a field like rural education which is dominated by analyses of disadvantage in terms of funding and material resources. The emphasis on distributive issues might seem unsurprising given the problems with staffing, facilities, and breadth of curriculum that have perennially affected the quality of rural education. In modern Australian education policy, significant documents like the Karmel Report and the Schools Disadvantage Commission in the seventies up until the current Gonski Review have focused on a politics of distribution to redress the poor educational outcomes evident in rural education. By pluralizing social justice I am not denying the relevance of appropriate funding and distribution of material goods—they are a critical component in the delivery of a good quality of education. This was also the case for Young, who in her seminal book, Justice and the Politics of Difference, already stated that distributive matters in society were critically important but not the end point of an analysis about justice. In rural schooling the adequate distribution of funding, facilities, and staffing is a perennial and major concern. But it is at this point where I believe analyses of rural schooling should be problematized by opening up the discussion of social justice to other dimensions that heterogeneize inequality and disadvantage. Here is where the work of Young (1990, 1997a, b, 2000, 2001, 2006a, b) becomes very useful to analyze discourses and practices of justice based on the elimination of oppression and domination through the recognition and participation of all actors in the process of education and schooling rather than merely on the distribution of benefits and burdens by major social institutions. Hence, in addition to distributive justice, I argue for another two dimensions of social justice: recognitional and associational. Recognitional justice, simply put, attends to the redressing of cultural domination and disrespect experienced by marginal social groups or individuals (Young 1990). Recognitional justice, for example, in rural schooling refers to the promotion and celebration of diversity through the inclusion and legitimation of all social groups’ culture and identity but also the respect and empowerment of teachers’ work as critical actors in interrupting injustices. Recognition, empowerment, and autonomy are crucial but they are not complete without participation. Thus, a third dimension that we should care about if we are interested in interrupting and subverting social injustices and inequality is associational justice; that is defined by the degree of participation by individuals or groups in decisions which affect the conditions in which they live and act (Gewirtz 2006). It incorporates the notions of participation and of “voice,” of being able to express own needs in one’s own idiom (Young 1997a, 2006a) through processes of participative dialog. Associational justice in schooling makes the process of education as relevant as the products or outcomes. In rural schooling this dimension is vital in constructing spaces for teachers and principals’ participation in policymaking structures and in making decisions about their everyday working practices in relation to the curriculum.
These dimensions of social justice need to be considered in temporal and spatial contexts because justice may very well have different meanings for different social groups in different historical moments. As Gewirtz (2006, p. 78) alerts us, social justice has to be understood within the “competing norms” and “external constraints” that shape discourses and practices in schools. What happens in schools must be understood in relation to dominant discourses, power relations, and normative socioeconomic constraints. In this book, the impact of neoliberal policies on education in the last two decades and the context of rurality are critical to understand current discourses of social justice. Thus, I examine how discourses and practices of social justice in education have shifted from progressive politics to an economization of schooling underpinned by the need to skill-up the national workforce (Rizvi and Lingard 2010; Wyn 2009). This does not mean that social justice in education is completely abandoned, but it is reframed through neoliberal policy technologies based on monitoring and auditing of school processes and outcomes, which impact on the creation of new meanings of what counts as knowledge for students, and redefine what counts as an “effective” and ...