The scholarship of teaching and learning from a social justice perspective

ABSTRACT

We argue that there is a reciprocal relationship between all scholarly activities, most importantly between teaching, learning, research and professional learning. The article builds on the work of others who call for a social justice approach to inform the SoTL. It focuses on the implications for professional learning, as an aspect of the SoTL which has been neglected. The tripartite account of participatory parity as advanced by Nancy Fraser is shown to be a valuable frame to describe instances of social justice, as well as the kind of institutional arrangements that should be instituted to support participatory parity. Alongside this, the notion of a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ is shown to be an effective, but challenging means to advance awareness of justice and injustice amongst academics. The article draws on examples from three action based research projects run by the authors.

KEYWORDS:

• Scholarship of teaching and learning
• social justice
• participatory parity
• professional development
• pedagogy of discomfort

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This research was funded by the National Research Foundation, Grant No: 90384.

Notes

1. For the rest of this article, we use the term ‘socially just pedagogy' as a shorthand, to refer to pedagogy for social justice as well.

2. HDIs and HAIs are South African terms used to denote universities that were mainly for black students and under-resourced, or mainly for white students and well resourced, during the apartheid era.