Affective justice
https://hail.to/methodist-church-of-new-zealand-emessenger/article/xopRDJP
This is the sixth in a series about social justice in education.
Previous blogs have discussed educational justice as fairness, seen through the lenses of distribution, recognition, and participation, respectively. In this blog we consider the dimension of affective justice including the basic witnessing and experience of care in formal education. This blog draws on the work of feminist political scientist Joan Tronto and of Kathleen Lynch and colleagues at the Equality Studies Centre, University College Dublin.
Realising affective justice means that everyone who participates in education has the capability, freedom, and opportunity to experience both caring and being cared for on an equal basis. As Joan Tronto has pointed out, however, a more realistic goal in our imperfect world may just be reducing some of the worst instances of affective justice. The term affective justice incorporates the view that feelings, emotions, moods, and the like are important constituents in nurturing an environment (workgroup, organisational, relational, built, natural) that is conducive to meaningful living. The affective aspects of human experience need to be articulated, learned, and practised if they are to become durable dispositions in social life.
In terms of affective equality, John Baker, Kathleen Lynch and colleagues observe that ‘inequalities in people’s access to relations of love, care and solidarity are […] hard to quantify, but they are perfectly familiar’. This may be especially obvious when such relations are absent, as they often are, both from social policy and institutional practice, and, more abstractly, from liberal debates about what equality and justice actually mean. On this argument, we should be able to clearly recognise when there is an absence or insufficiency of care in educational relations and practice. This being so, why does the issue of affective justice (care, love, and solidarity) not seem to figure more explicitly in our curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and learning imaginaries?
When we think about the purposes of education, caring (including love and solidarity) may not be at the top of many people’s list. Caring is often trivialised, marginalised, or erased from the public sphere where social institutions like schooling take place, and relegated to the private, domestic sphere as ‘women’s work’ or as solely a matter of self-responsibility. But, as Joan Tronto has observed, when we place care close to the centre of human life, the world looks different. For Tronto, the word care implies more than taking an interest. It also implies, first, an engagement with something or someone other than oneself; and second, that care will prompt some form of action. In this sense, she says, to care implies ‘the acceptance of some form of burden’.
In the 1990s, Tronto and her colleague Berenice Fisher developed the following definition:
On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.
Tronto identifies four features of their definition. As well as human interaction: (i) it includes caring for objects and the environment; (ii) it is not merely dyadic or individualistic; (iii) it varies among cultures; and (iv) it is ongoing: both practice and disposition. Tronto and Fisher also identified four interconnected phases of caring: (i) caring about (recognising the need and accepting that it should be met); (ii) taking care of (assuming some responsibility and determining how to respond to the need); (iii) care-giving (directly meeting needs for care, typically involving physical work and direct contact with those in need of care); and (iv) care-receiving (only through the responses of the objects of our care can we know that needs have been met). In 2013, Tronto added a fifth phase of care to the framework: Caring with. Caring with means that needs are met collectively, democratically, and fairly. The first four phases of care focus on individual actions; the fifth phase imagines a collective commitment to and benefit from the principles involved with everyone participating in decisions about the fair allocation of caring responsibilities, in order to reduce the huge macro-economically-driven care imbalances that exist at all levels of society today.
On this definition, formal education and its purposes certainly start to look quite different as care becomes integral and foregrounded. So why is caring so marginal in formal education discourse? Baker, Lynch, and colleagues make a distinction between our growing awareness of the ‘centrality of emotional work to teaching and learning’ and the relative lack of attention that the emotions typically receive in education more generally. At least part of the answer may be that since the mid-twentieth century, formal education has been significantly shaped by the priority given to measurable learning goals and outcomes, and to sound pedagogy defined as the meticulous sequencing, instruction, and assessment of learners’ progression through a hierarchy of objectives.
A major influence on this conception of education has been Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. The taxonomy was first published in 1956 and revised in 2001. Originally envisaged as one of three domains of learning objectives (cognitive, affective, psychomotor), Lynch and colleagues argue that the knowledge-based cognitive domain (published eight years before the affective domain), rapidly became the focus of education policy, while the other two domains were never fully developed or adopted by governments or educators. On Lynch and colleagues’ analysis, formal education today is dominated by a knowledge-as-facts cognitive hierarchy. It gives primacy to the development of abstract reasoning and mathematical and linguistic capabilities – what Roy Nash called ‘the scholastic necessary’. For Lynch and colleagues, even the limited attention given to (measurable) emotional intelligence today is due to its value as a supplement to other ‘marketable’ capabilities and academic attainments.
In contrast, Baker, Lynch and colleagues argue that learning and teaching are deeply emotional activities and relations. As such, ‘there is a need to name the emotions so that students and teachers have a language and a space to talk about their feelings and concerns’. Moreover, we need to provide educational experiences that enable students to learn about and practise their emotional skills, and to prepare them ‘for love, care, and solidarity work’ in their lives outside and beyond schooling. More recently, Kathleen Lynch has explicitly called for systematic education in and about caring as a form of resistance to the endemic harms of neoliberal capitalism. She argues this on the basis that:
An education that does not educate about love, care and solidarity or social justice, and/or that undermines respect for care and cooperation in practice due to its intense competitiveness at formative stages of life, cannot enable or resource young people to think and act with care.
Lynch’s call to resistance echoes that part of Tronto and Fisher’s definition of care that refers to repairing our world. For educators committed to social justice, this ethical obligation to repair often means devoting much of one’s energies to children and young people who live in poverty and hardship, or who are culturally marginalised, and who commonly suffer what Robert Sennett and Jonathan Cobb called ‘the hidden injuries of class’ together with a loss of dignity. For these children, in particular, inadequate institutional attention to and resourcing of learning in and about the affective domain is an unnecessarily oppressive barrier to their engagement with the cognitive demands of academic achievement.
In the most extreme and urgent cases, these injuries require our most caring and committed educators to engage in what Lynch and colleagues call ‘love labour’. This is educational love labour in the sense that it is the deepest form of educational caring, offered by teachers and other educators to learners whose personal circumstances desperately demand it. Love labour’s responsibilities cannot be commodified or externalised, nor is it a practice or a disposition that can or should be contractually demanded of educators.
The next blog in the series considers contributive justice, or the right for everyone in education to enjoy meaningful work.
Links to blog series
Part 1: The dimensions of social justice in education
Part 2a: Fairness in education – Part 1: John Rawls
Part 2b: Fairness in Education – Part 2: Beyond Rawls
Part 3a: Redistributive justice in education – Part 1: Maldistribution
Part 3b: Redistributive justice in education – Part 2: Redistribution
Part 4a: Recognitive justice in education – Part 1: Recognition
Part 4b: Recognitive justice in education - Part 2: Disrespect
Part 5a: Participatory justice - Part 1: Domination and oppression
Part 5b: Participatory justice - Part 2:Inclusion and Representation
Bio: John O’Neill researches in the area of critical education policy scholarship. For many years he has been an education spokesperson for Child Poverty Action Group and the Quality Public Education Coalition.