Presentation by Professor Gert van der Westhuizen on Indigenous Knowledge Systems at the SOTL @ UJ - Towards a Socially Just Pedagogy Seminar series

1. SOCIALLY JUST PEDAGOGIES -
THE IMPERATIVE OF COGNITIVE JUSTICE
Gert van der Westhuizen
Department of Educational Psychology
University of Johannesburg
SOUTH AFRICA
gertvdw@uj.ac.za

2. 1. THE PROJECT OF PURSUING COGNITIVE
JUSTICE IN EDUCATION
+ The current crisis of curriculum maintenance and
mainstreaming - why change what works?
+ Absence of disruptions for curriculum change
+ Institutional visions of authenticity and
responsiveness - what do they mean? How do they
translate into curriculum practice?

3. 1. THE PROJECT OF PURSUING COGNITIVE
JUSTICE IN EDUCATION (2)
+ Clarifying agendas: developing socially just
pedagogies to contribute to the DEMOCRATIC project
+ Problematising our sense of agency and personal/
professional trajectories: practices are guided by
beliefs and developed in community

4. UNDERSTANDING THE CONCEPT OF COGNITIVE
JUSTICE
COGNITIVE
Mind; thinking; analysis; knolwedge; perceptions; problem
solving; critical thinking...
JUSTICE
What is right; fair, just, equal; adequate...

5. 2. NOTIONS OF COGNITIVE JUSTICE (1)
Shiv Visvanathan (2011): European remnants in Indian social life and
class struggles...
"The idea of cognitive justice is rooted in a search for survival realizing
that a distributive justice that pays no attention to the survival of
knowledges is incomplete. While there is an adversarial quality to
aspects of it, there is agonal element, a sense of play, of dialogue that is
not afraid of asymmetry. There is a sense of curiousity, of playfulness that
also demands a hearing.
The idea of cognitive justice is not about an abstract notion of rights. It
seeks not an empty universalism for an abstract idea of humanity but it is
a pluralistic search for an embedded idea of the social in which each
form of the social is anchored in a particular way of knowing.

6. 2. NOTIONS OF COGNITIVE JUSTICE (1)
Cognitive justice embodies an ethics of memory. To put it
more specifically, it confronts an ethics of memory against an
ethics of innovation which enables the dispensability or
disposability of groups dubbed as waste or obsolescent. The
defeated or the marginalized have a right not to be displaced.
But cognitive justice goes beyond the idea of rights. What it
challenges first is the linearity built into a development
sequence which labels the tribe and peasant as backward, or
as ancestors to the industrial. In their idea of the post
industrial society, tribal and craft societies are synchronic as
our contemporaries and not be museumized as
ancestors" Visvanathan (2011).

7. 2. NOTIONS OF COGNITIVE JUSTICE (2)
Catherine Odora Hoppers SARCHI Chair
Development Education:
Transformation by enlargement, from colonial control,
knowledge neglect, subjugation,
to
empowerment, emancipation, restorative action

8. 2. NOTIONS OF COGNITIVE JUSTICE (2)
Odora Hoppers (2010; 2012) - with refercence to Rural
communities who are "knowledge rich and
economically poor":
"Cognitive justice is based on the recognition of the
plurality of knowledge and expresses the right of the
different forms of knowledge to co-exist without duress."
And the academy Odora Hoppers (2010) - knowledge
from below; anchoring the institution in African
Society; indigenously rooted futures...

9. 2. NOTIONS OF COGNITIVE JUSTICE (3)
Neville Alexander: Language and knowing -
importance of mother tongue and emancipation in
education
Crain Soudien: social dynamics of knowledge
Salim Vally: Knowledge in neoliberal era and problem
of marketisation of higher education
Tsediso Makoelle: reinventing inclusion as cogntive
justice

10. 3. COGNITIVE JUSTICE AND SOCIALLY JUST PEDAGOGIES
- QUESTIONS OF EDUCATION PRACTICE
+ Accepting the 'ethicality' of practice beyond approaches
such as constructivism, acknowledging the range of cultural
and linguistic realities experienced in terms of the self and the
other, sameness and otherness... (Ippolito 2005)
+ Making learning more equitable: learning equity as i)
equality of access to learning opportunities and materials, ii)
fairness and balance in content and perspectives of materials
and facilitation, iii) quality of the actual learning experiences
and the extent to which those experiences enable meaningful
and ‘deep’ learning, and iv) adequacy and success of
learning, meeting individual needs (Van der Westhuizen 2012).

11. 3. COGNITIVE JUSTICE AND SOCIALLY JUST PEDAGOGIES
- QUESTIONS OF EDUCATION PRACTICE (2)
+ Reconsidering Dialogic learning; Conversations
for Learning
+ Advancing cognitive/conceptual literacy (UCT
research)

12. 4. COGNITIVE JUSTICE AND SOCIALLY JUST PEDAGOGIES
- QUESTIONS OF RESEARCH PRACTICE
Scholarships of practice - consider more authentic,
relevant and responsive research methodologies and
paradigms
Chilisa 2011 - INDIGENOUS RESEARCH PARADIGM
AND METHODOLOGIES -

13. CONCLUSION
Need to stay with questions on the politics of knowledge, own
practices and assumptions as intelelctuals, consequences of
actions, and contributions to the democratic project