What is Designing for Social Justice Partnership?

The Designing for Social Justice Partnership (DSJP) Programme provides educator-student teams with the opportunity to co-create/co-design courses and then to promote the scholarship of learning and teaching through co-designing, conducting, and publishing research on the effectiveness of these co-created designs. This model emphasises the cultivation of academic community, a spirit of open collaboration, forward-thinking and socially just design principles, to be shared across educators and students from multiple institutions. In the long run, the DSJP programme seeks to expand the capacity of educators in South Africa through a regional student as partners network and beyond to embrace social justice in the design and delivery of courses, while simultaneously increasing student success and advancing convergent research on its implications and long-term effects.

The Designing for Social Justice Partnership programme is based on a distinctive model that integrates three key components: the students as partners model; the scholarship of teaching and learning; and socially just learning design.

 Students as Partners

The Students as Partners movement arose to challenge conventional power relationships within universities through amplification of student voice and advocacy for meaningful student participation in teaching, research, and service (Bovill et al, 2011). In the realm of teaching, the movement recognises the expertise of undergraduate students as learners; a perspective that differs substantially from that of educators or academic staff developers. This recognition enables students to contribute meaningfully to conversations about advancing desired learning outcomes, overcoming persistent challenges and barriers, and developing courses on subjects that are personally and professionally meaningful, with an emphasis of social justice (Butcher & Maunder, 2014).

The Designing for Social Justice Partnership programme is based on similar (and successful) programmes at other universities, originally based in Australia and Great Britain (Mihan et al, 2008). The DSJP programme will be distinctive in that it extends existing models of students as partners to not only embrace social justice into their design and assessment, but to orient learning, teaching and research to the broader social context of the Global South, and South Africa specifically (see figure 1 below) (DeBie et al, 2021). By expanding spaces for student voice, the program aspires to promote agentic learning both inside and outside of the classroom (Fielding, 2001; Healey, 2012).

Students as Partners model

Socially Just Learning Design

Socially just learning design has emerged as a dynamic field in the wake of the social upheavals that were accelerated by the conditions of the global pandemic. An increasing number of educational research studies have indicated that students value learning opportunities that are embedded in larger social contexts, especially those that address issues which students find personally or academically meaningful. Indeed, the lack of social context has been identified as a barrier to persistence in STEM degrees for women and students in historically under-represented populations. While typical instructional design / learning design models do engage with learners and context, they do not necessarily do so on a deeper level. More socially just or equity-focused models intentionally foreground the historical and socio-political, economic context of a learning intervention, but also focus on the positionality of designer / lecturer and learner and unpack how positionality impacts on design decisions and relationships within design teams. Design models such EquityXDesign (2016) argue that only if the design process itself is equitable or socially just, i.e. reflects on how power and privilege play out in the design process, one can design outputs that are socially just or equitable. This framing is especially relevant to the South African context, marred by high inequality and a call for more context-sensitive and diverse approaches to student support and engagement.

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Universities in South Africa have placed increasing emphasis on the production of high-quality research that contributes to scholarly conversations taking place both nationally and internationally, including the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Academics in South African universities are well-positioned to serve as leading scholarly voices in socially just teaching and learning practices, a subject that has become increasingly prominent as the global pandemic has served to exacerbate persistent inequities around the world. To play this leadership role, universities will need to strengthen support structures, reduce persistent barriers, and provide clearly recognised pathways for teacher-scholars. Engagement in SoTL serves not only to enhance scholarly productivity, but also to contribute to teaching transformation, as it provides space for reflection as well as intensive engagement with evidence-based practice (Felten & Chick, 2018). Recently, public SoTL scholars have increasingly called for widening the circle of reciprocity to include the broader social and economic context in which teaching and learning take place (Friborg & Chick, 2022); an expansion of vision that mirrors the addition of the community circle.  The expansion also includes the inclusion of students as co-researchers. Historical models of undergraduate research have, however, tended to be exclusive, reserved only for students deemed as highly competent/skilled and destined for post-graduate work. As emphasis has shifted from research production to undergraduate research as pedagogy, however, universities have been searching for evidence-based strategies to increase more equitable engagement in inquiry-guided learning. One model that has shown particular promise is the engagement of students in undergraduate research related to teaching and learning. Because students are already experts in their own learning, that positionality can serve to reduce barriers to entry while simultaneously increasing student voice in SoTL research and pedagogical practice (Felten et al, 2013).

Stay tuned for more!