Book Title: Higher Education and Social Justice The Transformative Potential of University Teaching and the Power of Educational Paradox
Author: Leonie Rowan
Year of Publication: 2019
Publisher: Cham: Palgrave Macmillan
PP: 151
The book Higher Education and Social Justice: The Transformative Potential of University Teaching and the Power of Educational Paradox authored by Leonie Rowan, a renowned education scholar, brings social justice in school settings, a hardly discussed phenomenon to the forefront. Underpinned by a simple foundational belief that education is the practice of freedom, she situates the discourse in one hundred and fifty-one (151) pages categorized into five chapters. The book is well presented with an easy overview and solid coherence. The author illuminates some key social justice aspects that concern higher education institutions from chapters one to five. In chapter one, the author argues that university education is key to perpetuating or transforming wider patterns of justice or inequality. Being aware of this, she cautions that this transformative potential requires in-depth knowledge of the issues that impact academic decision-making and purposeful engagement with the kinds of philosophical resources that can underpin a genuine desire to labor for a change.
An outline of an educational philosophy
fundamentally motivated by a desire to create university contexts in which diverse learners feel themselves to be included, valued, and safe is offered. She captures the beliefs that underpin all the arguments advanced in the book as firstly, education can change lives; secondly, education never has been, and never can be, a neutral act; and thirdly, if the transformative power of education is accepted, and if evidence regarding the links that exist between type/quality/length of education and the length, quality, and even a fact of life is also accepted, then university educators are confronted with an unavoidable challenge. 'However, she cautions that education's transformative potential is not always realized in ways that advantage the full population. Interestingly, this write-up is the in-depth knowledge of the subject the author brings to bear and her privy to social injustices in various levels of education delivery. She argues that in many eras, and most communities, some groups have been denied access to even basic education or educated in ways that sought to position them into pre-determined, acceptable, socially, politically, religiously sanctioned roles linked to the differences among us. Rowan lamented that even these had been acknowledged above: gender, race, class, and religion; physical ability, geographical location, age, sexuality. The author echoed a statement by Einstein (1938) that "Everything that is really great, and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom."
In chapter two, the author introduces an argument that decisions that will impact upon who might/do benefit from any educational activity must emerge from conversations about the aims, purposes, and activities associated with higher education and, as well, analysis of the environments within which we work: even as the landscape changes, shifts, and evolves around us.
This is remarkable because, in most higher education systems, especially those in the developing and underdeveloped where unequal access to education is rife, their systems seem to be guided by new public management (NPM). This management model advocates that the efficiency of higher education institutions could be improved by introducing management techniques and practices drawn mainly from the private sector. This seems to negatively impact most minority groups' attempts to access higher education, a social justice issue. The author later in the chapter outlines the key features of environments labeled as engaging, satisfying, rewarding, and high quality and focus on terms at the centre of many current university conversations such as student-centered learning, student engagement, and student satisfaction and explored these with reference to different sources of data. Regardless of how the term is understood, the author argues that student-centered learning is often positioned as oppositional to, a radical departure from, and fundamentally better than "traditional" or "teacher-centered" learning. She illuminates an important point that students are diverse, and there is no single mechanism that will ensure all students are engaged or inspired.
Chapter three extends the conversation on social justice in school settings by using the concept of educational paradox to investigate the kinds of decision-making processes associated with the production of learning environments that diverse learners perceive to be simultaneously hospitable but charged and bounded but open. Further in the chapter, Rowan explains how decisions relating to curriculum and pedagogy can directly impact the extent to which students from very different backgrounds feel themselves to be included, valued, and respected in a learning environment. She advocates that the ways academics can or should aspire to teach must be interpreted from a location that consistently returns to the foundational question: in whose interests do we labor? The chapter reminds readers that when key educational stakeholders bring issues of student satisfaction and student engagement to the fore, they must focus on the means through which an environment might be experienced, not by a kind of ideal, or assumed, "typical" learner, but by the actual diverse learners with whom we are working.
I appreciate the book's analysis of social justice in the university setting. In chapter four, the author outlines key features of learning environments that university students most commonly linked to the belief that their voices can be heard, valued, and supported, even as they are challenged to think critically about challenging and confronting curriculum materials. Throughout the book, the author demonstrates that students are most likely to actively engage in university learning environments when they have access to materials that are intellectually charged, demanding, new, even strange and are guided through this material by teachers who are confident in their ability to create hospitable environments that are characterized by clear boundaries, high expectations, diverse forms of support, and opportunities for choice. He goes a step further by exploring some ways in which university educators can respond to the longstanding patterns of speech and silence within academic classrooms by reflecting on four further paradoxes outlined by Palmer (1998). The author re-emphasizes that all decisions made by an educator need to emerge from the understanding that students are diverse, and this diversity can shape interactions with content in powerful ways.
Chapter Five, which is the last chapter, focuses on the work teaching contributes to transformative educational agendas associated with the creation of educationally and socially just futures. The chapter further explores the extent to which the complex processes generally bundled together and labeled as "university teaching" or academic pedagogy are shaped by what might loosely be described as an academic's personality or produced through deliberate, theoretically informed decision-making. Throughout the book, the author constantly reminds academics to be cautious of the following questions: who/what is included or excluded? Who or what is valued/devalued? Who or what is celebrated or demonized? Who or what is naturalized or minoritized? Who or what is heard or silenced? If they are keen to ensure social justice in their universities. Rowan's book is a supreme intellectual achievement because it is challenging to isolate one outstanding chapter as each chapter is a replica of a tour de force. The only major criticism of this book is that the author seems to have -concentrated on students in her discussion of social justice in university settings and missed the opportunity to highlight the precarious working conditions, especially of teachers in the developing world social justice matter and fast worsening. This remark does not necessarily the book's contribution; rather, it's a clarion call to the academic community for further work on social justice.
