Permeating the social justice ideals of equality and equity within the context of Early Years: challenges for leadership in multi-cultural and mono-cultural primary schools

Abstract

The ideology and commitment of social justice principles is central to Early Years practice, however, the term social justice in education is complex and remains contested. This paper explores the ideology of social justice through links between equality and equity and how it is embedded within Early Years, and what remain the potential challenges for leadership.Interviews in English multi-cultural and mono-cultural primary schools were conducted.Findings showed that the ideology of social justice, equality and equity was interpreted differently. Multi-cultural schools appear to use a greater variety of activities to embed social justice principles that involved their diverse communities more to enrich the curriculum. In mono-cultural schools leadership had to be more creative in promoting equality and equity given the smaller proportion of their diverse pupil and staff population. Tentative conclusions suggest that the vision for permeating equality and equity in Early Years, at best, is at early stages.

Leadership for professional learning towards educational equity: a systematic literature review

“…Finally, a number of articles point to the deliberate use of 'external resources' to promote social justice. These include teacher recruitment (DeMatthews & Izquierdo, 2016), as well as collaboration with the wider community (Blank, 2015), early childhood educators (Mistry & Sood, 2015), and private schools (Scanlan, 2010).…”

Elementary educator job satisfaction in the age of accountability

“…Accountability measured by a single set of criteria ignores other factors that may influence student learning (Ladson-Billings, 2013), and the emphasis on testing drives instruction to improve testing performance (Jäger, Merki, Oerke, & Holmeier, 2012). Students become defined as data points without taking into account the unique abilities of each student, resulting in conflict between teacher beliefs and organizational beliefs (Mistry & Sood, 2015;Pollack, 2013).…”