Is it possible to teach social justice as lived capability?
The Shared Humanity Module (SH Module), conceptualised and piloted in 2019, premises a socially just civil society that is able to address the humanitarian challenges of our time, and protect the rights and freedoms of all people as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The Bill of Rights and the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996. The Shared Humanity Module is offered as an interdisciplinary module to registered students in the 2nd-year of studies and beyond, with representation from all ten SU faculties.
Kahneman (2011) states that the individual’s inherent bias and prejudiced way of seeing the world can be stemmed through the awareness of self and our role in creating the conditions for social justice or injustice to prevail. This conceptual understanding of our embodiment and personal identity as dialectically linked to our expression through actions and projects we take up creates the mechanisms to explore ways of shaping the self-awareness towards an empathic way of living and leading in a complex world.
The Shared Humanity Module integrates this learning theory and methodology into the learning design so as to centre social justice at the core of the student learning journey as follows:
1)The theoretical construct on the model includes the work of Paulo Freire (1970); Mezirow (2009) Kahneman (2011); Cargas et. al. (2017) and Amartya Sen’s (2005).
2)The methodological frameworks involve Critical Thinking Model of Paul and Elder (2010) and Kolb’s (2011) theory of experiential learning amongst others provides the tools for social justice praxis and practice.
As an online Module the methodology comprises of 3 phases mirroring Kolb’s learning cycle as follows:
Experiencing and reflecting (asynchronous on SUNLearn); Conceptualising (synchronous, live-online seminar) and Learning integration and application (asynchronous on SUNLearn).
The Shared Humanity Module intentionally sets out to develop graduates with an understanding of their responsibility as citizen-leaders, as custodians of an invaluable democracy, ‘holding the state and its leadership accountable, and ensuring the country's developmental state ambitions are protected’, Khambule, (2021).
The Module is set-up as a participatory action research project and we look forward to sharing the first set of research data with you at SOTL.
