Teaching in and for Social Justice

This chapter argues for the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) as a means to advance both a socially just pedagogy and a pedagogy for social justice in higher education. The concept of a socially just pedagogy is defined and the implications of this for SOTL for social justice are discussed. Most importantly, the chapter argues for a form of reciprocity or alignment, where the kind of learning and attributes one would expect on the part of learners, would be expected of the educators, as teachers, researchers and learners. The framework is informed by earlier work done by Leibowitz (2016) and Bozalek and Leibowitz et al. (2012), as well as important writing on criticality and emotions (Zembylas 2014) troubled knowledge (Jansen 2009) and learned ignorance (Santos 2001). This discussion forms a conceptual framework against which the empirical section of the chapter is refracted. The empirical section is an outcome of an action-based and collaborative support project, consisting of seminars, workshops and other dissemination opportunities, to put into practice the ideas on social justice and SOTL that are discussed in the conceptual framework. For this, study members of the SOTL @ UJ research project interviewed both members of the project and academics who are not members. Altogether, 20 interviews have been conducted. The analysis of the interviews focuses on absences, silences, contradictions, interesting tensions and the implications of the interviews for the use of SOTL as a means towards establishing socially just pedagogies in higher education.