Symposium Introduction: Exploring the Transformative Possibilities and the Limits of Pedagogy in an Unjust World

Pedagogy and justice are two central concepts in the study and practice of education. Schools and the societies within which they are situated are characterized by varieties of injustice, including social, racial, and epistemic injustices, and pedagogy is foundational to educational practice. These two concepts can converge in a variety of ways, including when educators and schools are called on to help remedy injustices through pedagogical efforts both within and beyond the classroom.

These calls raise important philosophical questions about our understandings of pedagogy and justice and their relationship to one another. Philosophers have contributed centrally to the development of our understandings of varieties of justice and injustice, from now-classic work on the distributive, representative, and recognition-based dimensions of social justice,¹ to understandings of justice rooted in overcoming oppression and domination,² to the growing exploration of epistemic injustice,³ to the coloniality of the concept of justice in central axes of mainstream political philosophy.⁴ Contemporary understandings of pedagogy have also been informed by philosophical and theoretical perspectives that have become cornerstones informing the thinking and practice of scholars of education, teachers, and educational leaders.⁵ And in recent decades, decolonial theory has called for deeper consideration of the ways that both pedagogy and justice are situated within colonial contexts and logics.⁶ These examinations of both justice and pedagogy ground much contemporary work in philosophy of education, whose scholars are well-positioned to help deepen our understanding of the relationship between pedagogy and justice and the implications of that relationship for educational practice.

Considering the relationship between these two core concepts, this symposium asks whether pedagogy either is necessarily or should be justice-oriented or transformative of unjust conditions. Exploring this conceptual and normative provocation, further questions arise: Is such an understanding of pedagogy too demanding in the nonideal context of schooling in North America (or other contemporary schooling contexts)? If pedagogy is central to justice (either conceptually or normatively), are current dominant understandings of pedagogy in need of revision? Is pedagogy properly understood as justice? Or should pedagogy go beyond the limits of dominant notions of justice? These questions push us to clarify what pedagogy is in practice and what it should be, both in ideal conditions and in the nonideal conditions in which we currently find ourselves.

In contrast to views that pedagogy either is necessarily or should be justice-oriented, two challenges arise. First, consider the challenge that pedagogy is insufficient for justice. If pedagogy cannot deliver justice, expecting pedagogy to move toward justice may be unfairly demanding of educators — reflecting a broader problem in North America, and the United States in particular, of expecting schools to fulfill a wide array of social functions that extend well beyond squarely educational aims. A second challenge questions whether justice, particularly conceptions of justice grounded in colonialism, is the right aim for pedagogy. On this view, a focus on justice limits the transformative potential of pedagogy. These challenges call for critical and context-responsive examinations of pedagogy and justice.

The papers in this symposium explore this relationship.⁷ In the process of developing this issue, we initially considered the idea of “pedagogy-as-justice,” focusing on the transformative potential of pedagogy. We then expanded our theme to “pedagogy and justice” in order to embrace critical stances on the relationship between pedagogy and justice as well. We asked contributors to theorize the relationship between pedagogy and justice, to explore philosophizing for struggle as a transformative (pedagogical) practice, to draw on various conceptions of justice (e.g., social, racial, epistemic, etc.), and to propose novel approaches to understanding “pedagogy.”

This collection of articles offers a range of perspectives: authors explore pedagogy both within and beyond the classroom; speak to varieties of justice including decolonial, liberal, social, and epistemic; and approach these discussions both generally within society and education and more specifically within higher education. Nassim Noroozi offers a provocative account of pedagogy as justice in which she argues that pedagogy should be understood as inherently transformative of injustice. Her essay is followed by two pieces — one authored by Catherine Walsh, and one co-authored by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Xamuel Bañales, Leece Lee-Oliver, Sangha Niyogi, Albert Ponce, and Zandi Radebe — that explore decolonial pedagogies and argue that appeals to justice (particularly in the liberal canon) are either insufficient to combat colonialism or in fact reinforce it. These pieces challenge us to reconsider the relationship between pedagogy and justice within decolonizing work, drawing our attention to specific cases, including the implementation of an ethnic studies requirement in California universities. The final two essays consider the limits and possibilities of pedagogy for advancing two particular forms of justice. Caitlin Brust and Rebecca Taylor consider the responsibilities of college educators to resist epistemic injustice within their classroom practices, and Chrissy Hernandez, Sheeva Sabati, and Ethan Chang offer reflections on how their own pedagogical practices support their commitments to a vision of justice that is transformative and liberatory. Together these essays offer varied perspectives on the relationship between pedagogy and justice grounded in engaging practical contexts. Below we offer more detail on the contributions of each paper in turn.

In her paper, Noroozi engages with a juxtaposition of pedagogy with justice and pedagogy as justice. For Noroozi, the term “pedagogy” is not restricted to the educational, nor is pedagogy understood as having only to do with methods of teaching. Rather, pedagogy is seen as the concrete act of an emancipatory conceptual architecting: “an arrangement of meaning so that it would be impossible to not see injustice anymore.” Pedagogy-as-justice, on her view, thus concerns itself with exposing injustice in transformative ways, and as such it is an ethical undertaking. Noroozi shows that philosophizing for struggle is inherently pedagogical and that pedagogy is at heart transformative. Seeing pedagogy as justice consequently deems “the arrangements of meanings to engage others in the issues pertaining to injustice” as important as writing or thinking about those very struggles. She analyzes a case of her own public philosophical engagement against war, in which she delineates some central attributes of pedagogy-as-justice, namely its preoccupation with grounding abstract and anonymous concepts within their contested historical realities; its commitment to wrestling with the “opacity of concepts” or with “dishonest reasonings” that end up promoting suffering and injustice; the precarities inherent in undertaking pedagogy-as-justice; and a possible genealogy of the practice going back to Socrates' own public philosophical engagements. Noroozi's consideration of pedagogy-as-justice pushes us to see these two concepts as inextricably connected.

Offering a contrasting view on pedagogy and justice, Walsh questions the centrality of justice to decolonial pedagogy. She begins by acknowledging that notions of social justice are rooted in critical pedagogies, but goes on to argue that justice is insufficient for decolonial praxis. She explores a pedagogy that goes beyond justice by looking at it as a methodology grounded in peoples' realities, subjectivities, histories, and contexts of sociopolitical, epistemic, and existence-based struggle. Through reflections on a number of “pedagogical guides” including Paulo Freire, M. Jacqui Alexander, Juan García Salazar, and Frantz Fanon, Walsh offers a first-person account of her “coming to pedagogy as political praxis” through “thinking-theorizing-doing with others.” Walsh's reliance on Fanon's concept of action, framing pedagogy as actional (meaning preparing to act with respect to the lived structural colonial condition) and foregrounding Fanon's work as pedagogical, provides a vital creative perspective. She approaches justice through her argument (with Fanon) in order to emphasize decolonial(izing) pedagogies of and for life. Walsh's exploration of decolonial praxis invites readers to consider these and their own “pedagogical guides” in moving toward decolonial and transformative possibilities.

In their essay, Maldonado-Torres, Bañales, Lee-Oliver, Niyogi, Ponce, and Radebe also center the relationship between decolonial pedagogy and justice. They focus on the relationship between decolonial pedagogy, exemplified through higher education ethnic studies programs, and conceptions of justice that they see as enmeshed with coloniality. Expanding on the questions Walsh raises about the relationship between pedagogy and justice, they argue that appeals to justice and social justice are not sufficient to secure decolonial justice, nor to “prioritize the struggle against coloniality,” and that in fact these appeals often serve to reinforce coloniality. Primarily focusing on the case of the implementation of an ethnic studies requirement in the California State University system, they illustrate the ways in which appeals to justice and social justice often ran counter to the values of decolonial pedagogy and the demands of decoloniality. In doing so, they position pedagogy as a decolonial modality in order to combat predominant conceptions of justice, particularly those conceptions that have maintained or bolstered colonial logics. They thus provide a skeptical take on an apparent benevolence that uses the language of justice as a tool to keep at bay more critical terminologies and projects of transformation that put in question the legitimacy of the liberal and neoliberal order.

Approaching pedagogy and justice from a different angle, Brust and Taylor explore the relationship between pedagogy and justice in the context of higher education through the framework of epistemic injustice, focusing on injustices that harm people in their capacities as epistemic agents. Grounded in evidence that higher education institutions in the United States are characterized by unjust conditions, they examine the responsibilities of college educators to resist epistemic injustices that arise in these conditions through their pedagogical practices. Brust and Taylor acknowledge that the roots of these injustices are structural and thus require structural interventions as well. But while pedagogy is not sufficient to secure epistemic justice on their view, they do see a role for individual educators in responding to epistemic injustice, particularly within seminar-style classrooms. Ultimately, what emerges in their essay is a qualified view of the potential of pedagogy to advance justice in the context of higher education, with the caveat that resisting epistemic injustice in higher education also calls for collective action from faculty in pursuing deeper structural remedies.

In another essay that considers the possibilities of justice-oriented pedagogy within higher education, Hernandez, Sabati, and Chang reflect on how their own pedagogical practices relate to their commitments to a conception of justice that is liberatory and transformative of oppressive conditions. In a series of personal reflections, they identify the foundations of their praxis in Black and women of color feminisms and in the work of educators and organizers committed to liberation. They offer detailed and engaging examples from their own efforts to advance justice through their pedagogy, inviting readers to reflect on their own pedagogical praxes and the possibilities that may lie within them. They highlight the importance not only of fostering in their students an understanding of oppressive systems, but also of creating space for students to imagine liberatory possibilities.

Together the papers in this symposium call on us to pause and consider our understanding of pedagogy and its relationship with various conceptions of justice — social justice, transformative justice, epistemic justice, and the coloniality of justice, to name a few. These authors invite us to consider a range of understandings of pedagogy, and in turn they call on us to question whether justice should be a primary aim of pedagogy or whether it is insufficient to guide us toward more fundamental aims like decolonization, liberation, and transformation. The ways that these contributors defend, respond to, or challenge the view that pedagogy is (central to) justice offer insights into the limits and possibilities of pedagogy itself as a transformative practice against manifold struggles, and as such they provide a vigorous debate about the transformative potentials and the limits of pedagogy in an unjust world.