Small Stories and Tall Tales :  social justice and education

Griffiths acknowledgement of the significance of small stories told by individuals to each other highlight the absolute necessity of creating and maintaining a respectful dialogue between the Centre and the margins.  A dialogic relationship can help to counter misunderstandings and misrecognition caused by the absence of intercultural discourse, and shatter the silence about the lack of social justice in educational settings. Troubling matters like the persistent under-achievement of young people from particular communities, the unequal and mistrustful relationships between teachers and students, parents and schools, the more powerful and less powerful in society continue to be challenging. If this can happen in democratically elected, economically advanced countries, what hope is there for millions of children who are deprived of their basic human right to a decent childhood and  to very basic primary level education? But who operates from the centre and who looks on indifferently or resists from the margin, and what can educators do about it? When ethnicity is added to the equation, combined with the rise of Islamophobia in a Europe where young people’s future is at stake, the situation becomes tense both for the young people and their communities as well as educators (teachers and tutors) who want to make a difference, and who are prepared to take a risk and begin difficult conversations.

Within Europe there are urban localities which are culturally and ethnically diverse and rural or provincial localities which are relatively less so. If we believe that education has the power to transform lives in Freire’s terms, and we recognize that not all young people will get an opportunity to obtain a college or university level education, then the quality of school based education (not just schooling) becomes crucially important. The quality of teachers who will be responsible for educating young people about global citizenship, about diversity and difference, about understanding without ‘othering’, about maintaining a respectful dialogue in Griffiths’ sense, then they need to learn much more than just learning to teach literacy and numeracy.  They will need to cultivate the confidence to respond creatively to the difficult issues their own students will raise and the problems their students are bound to bring to the school - which come from their lives outside school. Inclusive education which encompasses the whole child and all kinds of children from all types of backgrounds and all kinds of abilities becomes an education which is socially just. Educating the teachers of the future is challenging. They are being taught in a climate where because of neo-liberal policies anti-racism and intercultural education is not a part of the core curriculum, where the connection between post-colonialism and difficult issues like Islamophobia are not on the agenda. It is particularly challenging to work with future teachers who belong to mostly mono-cultural, monolingual communities. This paper will open the discussion about a comparative study of two almost all white institutions of higher education where tutors are struggling to educate students (and future teachers) about risk taking and responsibility, about diversity and inequality. They are striving to work in troubling ways to encourage thinking about education imaginatively and creatively.  

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