Is developing new approaches to education enough? Reflections on the student voice for social justice (SVSJ) pedagogical method

Social justice discourse in higher education has been increasing in recent years, the scope of which has broadened to include systemic, institutional, and grassroots levels. Exploring and creating new approaches to education is one means of creating socially just education at the grassroots level. The student voice for social justice (SVSJ) pedagogical method is one pedagogy that adopts Nancy Fraser’s framework of (re)distribution, recognition, and representation and applies it to a higher education (HE) context. At the centre of SVSJ is student voice and active participation, whereby students become co-creators and co-developers of course content and dissemination across disciplines. Developing new pedagogies is only the first step in a long process of exploration, implementation, reflection, and revision. Working with students toward a socially just education model demands reflective practices from individual lecturers and professional group dialogue. Through such reflective practices, students’ cultural, educational, and personality differences, student voice challenges, the role of humility, assessment, and different modes of teaching (face-to-face vs online) were identified as being areas of consideration that need rethinking and reworking to enhance teaching and learning through socially just pedagogy development. Copyright © 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.