Abstract
Based on the model of Social Justice in Education (3-R´s):
Keywords: Democracyeducationparticipationpolitical orientationsocial justiceteacher training
Introduction
Nowadays, it is possible to find a great diversity of definitions about the social justice concept. In recent decades, different theoretical perspectives have coincided in working with a common social justice conception. On this subject, it is important to highlight two achievements in the last decades: On the one hand, several authors have managed to agree on the need to introduce a concept as important as is social justice in the education. On the other hand, the "Three-dimensional Model of Social Justice" (Fraser, 2008) has achieved the creation of a base to work social justice in education with guarantees. This model is formed by three dimensions:
Problem Statement
Unfortunately, we live in societies with inequalities generated by different kinds of injustices. Some of those injustices that most affect modern societies are: Racism, male chauvinism, classism or homophobia. These discriminatory behaviours have existed for centuries, however nowadays new types of injustices are continually appearing. A recent example is the concept of aporophobia (Cortina, 2000; Martínez, 2002), that refers to the exclusion of the poorest people in society. Another example of marginalization related to education is
Regarding the evolution of the school coexistence in Spain, it is important to emphasize that the number of bullying victims have been increasing in recent years. The coexistence in the classroom is one of the topics more investigated for several areas of Education, Psychology or Sociology. In spite of the progress achieved in "Education for Social Justice", there are no less challenges ahead in this area. The representation and attitudes towards social justice that new generations of citizens acquire, may determine the more or less fair coexistence of future societies. Obviously, the influence of the education institutions and the work of the teachers in this process could play an important role. It is relevant to note the research by Borrero, Conner, & Mejia (2012), that show a comparative descriptive analysis of projects within two teacher preparation programs (one focused on training undergraduates and one focused on training graduate students). This research illustrates how service-learning when is connected with student participation, prepares prospective educators to teach for social justice. Their analysis highlights the common and distinctive features of these two approaches to integrating service-learning, student voice, teacher education and social justice, and offers evidence about how prospective teachers at different stages in their teacher education can be challenged to rethink their understandings and approaches to the young people that they will teach. Therefore, the social justice representation of students and teachers have an effect in their actions (or inactions) of their own schools (Jacott et al., 2014). However, there are not so many quantitative researches on students and teachers representations about social justice and other psychosocial variables (for example political orientation) involved and their implications education. Thus, the link between the
Research Questions
One of the main questions in this research is to confirm the possibility of evaluate the three-dimensional social justice representation through a quantitative method. In this sense, a research of the social justice representation of approximately a thousand teachers and students in Spain (Jacott et al., 2014) concludes that: In sixth course of primary education, girls have a higher mean value than boys in all factors of social justice. In addition, the same research shows that there are differences in social justice representations of some groups of students and teachers. For example, teachers of social sciences subjects have a more elaborated representation on the redistribution dimension and teachers of experimental sciences have more elaborated representation on recognition and representation dimensions. Based on data like the previous ones, it could be crucial to research which psychosocial variables are related with more or less elaborate social justice representations (redistribution, recognition, representation). Consequently, for us it is essential to know if the social justice representations of undergraduate teacher training students are correlated with aspects such as political orientation, the level of citizen participation and other conceptions of reality. There is already evidence that social justice representations are not the same in all students and teachers. The next step for us is to analyse what other factors could be related to these differences and how to be able to reverse them.
Purpose of the Study
One main aim of this research is to analyse the social justice representations of undergraduate teacher training students. We propose a quantitative evaluation of the social justice participant’s representation in coherence with the three-dimensional model. For this purpose, the social justice scale used and previously tested (Etchezahar, Barreiro, Jacott, & Maldonado, 2016), is evaluated through statistical analysis. In addition, another main purpose is to know how political orientation interacts with each dimension of social justice.
Research Methods
In this research, 121 undergraduate teacher training students of the Autonomous University of Madrid participated. On the one hand, a Likert-Scale questionnaire of social justice (Etchezahar, Barreiro, Jacott, & Maldonado, 2016) is used to analyse the student’s social justice representation. This questionnaire contains 30 items (10 items belonging to each dimension) related to daily life issues and the agreement or disagreement (1-Strongly disagree / 5-Strongly agree) that participants have (for example: “
Findings
First of all, we analysed social justice representation of the participants. After the application of this scale, a
As in previous studies (for example, Jacott et al., 2014), the results showed positive moderate correlations between the three social justice dimensions, coinciding with the three-dimensional model. In addition, there are statistically significant correlations (
Finally, we analyze how the three social justice dimensions are related to the participant’s beliefs about the role that the government should take in the economic distribution (evaluated through agree/disagree with the item:
Conclusion
First, with regard to the quantitative scale of social justice used, the results show that it has adequate psychometric characteristics to evaluate the three-dimensional construct of social justice. It is important to highlight that redistribution, recognition and representation are moderately correlated with each other. These correlations show that although each dimension evaluates different aspects of social justice, these three dimensions are part of the same construct (three-dimensional model of social justice) and can be quantitatively evaluated.
Regarding the analysis between the social justice dimensions and the political orientation: The more political self-positioning the participants have toward the right-wing, the less elaborate is their social justice representations (particularly remarkable in recognition dimension). We found these negative correlations with the redistribution and participation dimensions, although the index of these correlations is less intense (approximately half) than with recognition dimension. Consequently, based on the three R that form social justice, the recognition dimension is the one that plays a key role with respect to political orientation. In the future, it would be interesting (with a more heterogeneous sample of university students) to continue investigating the social justice and political orientation correlation. In addition, the political orientation factor could be introduced to the three-dimensional model of social justice. A challenge for future researches, is to determine the origin of the correlation between low elaborated representations of social justice (and the attitudes and behaviours that may result) and a right-wing political positioning. This is a model with a perspective of dynamic social justice, never definitive or completely complete and that is always subject to reflection and improvement (Griffiths, 2003).
Finally, relevant and novel information was found that shows significant differences among the participants when they were asked about the importance that should have for governments the distribution of wealth. The participants with such more elaborate social justice representations (especially redistribution and representation) are significantly more favourable towards government actions related to the equitable distribution of wealth. Therefore, the most determinant social justice dimensions in the participants to choose the government’s roles in wealth distribution are redistribution and representation dimensions. These results indicate another interesting hypothesis to continue investigating: Undergraduate training teacher student´s with low social justice representations (that according to the results correlate more with right-wing political self-positioning), could be less favourable towards redistribution policies by the government In the future, it could also be interesting to continue researching how political orientation and social justice representations influences the teacher´s daily educational practices.
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Publication Date
09 April 2019
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978-1-80296-059-4
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Future Academy
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60
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1st Edition
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Subjects
Multicultural education, education, personal health, public health, social discrimination,social inequality
Cite this article as:
Albalá, M., Maldonado, A., Etchezahar, E., & Ungaretti, J. (2019). Social Justice And Political Orientation In Education. In E. Soriano, C. Sleeter, M. Antonia Casanova, R. M. Zapata, & V. C. Cala (Eds.), The Value of Education and Health for a Global, Transcultural World, vol 60. European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences (pp. 276-282). Future Academy. https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2019.04.02.35