The importance of context

In dealing with these challenges and implementing justice-oriented reform it is necessary to take account of similarities and differences in context that, it is suggested, have implications for the nature and direction of reform. For example, and in relation to the countries studied in this special collection, justice-oriented reform must deal in each country with a legacy of colonialism that restricted access to education, particularly at higher levels of the education system, and promoted European knowledge, languages and religions over Indigenous ones. There are also important differences, however, in the nature and extent of the legacy. These include differences in precolonial education (in Peru, the Incas had well-developed, formalised systems of education, whereas the education in precolonial Rwanda and Uganda was more informal). These potentially have implications for how curricula might take account of Indigenous approaches to education and training.

There are also important differences in the colonial education policies pursued by different colonising powers affecting patterns of access for marginalised groups, the language of instruction, the degree of educational decentralisation, the nature and extent of religious influence, the degree of emphasis on academic and compared to vocational competencies and so on. The Spanish also colonised Peru for a significantly longer period (more than 300 years) than was the case with German/Belgian colonialism in Rwanda or British colonialism in Uganda (approximately 68 years in each case) meaning that colonial education was more entrenched and widespread in the case of Peru. Although Nepal was heavily influenced by the education system introduced into colonial India, it was never directly colonised, meaning that Western education was less firmly entrenched and more elitist in nature than, for example, in neighbouring India.

Further, while inequalities in education and in society, including inequalities based on class, race, gender, ethnicity, language, Indigeneity and disability are ubiquitous across all four countries, they take on distinctive forms in each with implications for the ways that the distributive, recognitional and participatory components of social justice are conceived. Furthermore, while each country has emerged from protracted conflict necessitating a focus on peace and reconciliation within the curriculum, the nature of each conflict has varied in terms of its nature (genocide in the case of Rwanda, internal armed conflict in the case of Peru and Nepal and insurgency in the case of Northern Uganda). These differences affect how conflict has impacted different regions and groups within each country, necessitating a tailored and nuanced approach to transitional justice in each case. Similarly, although each country has experienced the effects of climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental catastrophe, the precise nature of these effects has also been specific to each country with implications for how environmental justice is conceived.

There are also similarities and differences in post-independence educational reform across each country. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), education systems have been profoundly shaped by donor-driven neoliberal reform agendas. These have impacted all areas of education policy, including an increasing emphasis on decentralisation, privatisation, standardised tests, teacher policy and competency-based curriculum reform. There are also important differences. Thus, while each country seeks to implement a competency-based curriculum, this is achieved with varying degrees of success linked to local realities and differences in capacity to implement change. The same is true of efforts to integrate education for sustainable development in curricula and other areas, such as language in education policy.

Finally, education policy in each country is contested by a variety of interests within the state and civil society, although the nature of these contestations and the groups involved vary. Across Nepal, Peru, Rwanda and Uganda, diverse groups are fighting for justice in education. Marginalised communities, including ethnic and caste minorities in Nepal and Indigenous Peoples in Peru, seek cultural recognition and equitable access. Rural populations in all four countries struggle with inadequate infrastructure and resources. Gender disparities are a significant issue, with the efforts of many NGOs and community-based organisations focused on promoting educational equity for girls and women. Conflict-affected populations in Uganda and the post-genocide generation in Rwanda require tailored educational support while socio-economically disadvantaged groups in Peru and marginalised groups, such as the Batwa in Uganda, advocate for inclusive and accessible education. Understanding these diverse struggles is important for mobilising campaigns for system-wide change as will be discussed later.

The need for a systemic approach

Taking account of different contexts and given the nature and the scale of injustices in education in the four countries, realising justice in education requires more than isolated interventions or piecemeal reform efforts. Rather, a holistic reform process is required. In conceiving of holistic system-wide change, it is helpful at an ontological level to consider education systems as complex adaptive systems with interconnected elements (including various subsystems of education and training, and specialised functions such as curriculum, assessment, teacher education and so on) and in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (Mason, 2014; Andrews et al, 2017; Tikly, 2020). Such a view is helpful in understanding the nature of change in education systems and offers insights into how justice-oriented change can be achieved.

In complex systems, change is linked to the operation of positive and negative feedback loops and is, therefore, multicausal, multidirectional, non-linear and inherently unpredictable. Education systems operate in a state of dynamic equilibrium, often bordering on the edge of chaos. This is especially the case in post-conflict settings (Davies, 2004). The degree of stability achieved within a system can depend on the extent of coherence between elements in the system. As the articles make clear, there is often a high degree of incoherence within the education systems in all four countries, leading to a mismatch between different areas of policy as well as between policy aspirations and actual implementation on the ground, which undermines the goals of justice-oriented reforms.

There is a need to ensure that educational policies are aspirational and actionable, with clear implementation strategies and accountability mechanisms. In ‘(Dis)connection between curriculum, pedagogy and learners’ lived experience in Nepal’s secondary schools: an environmental (in)justice perspective’, for example, the authors (Paudel et al, 2024) show that the curriculum in Nepal’s secondary schools de-emphasises environmental education despite policy aspirations to promote environmental sustainability. This policy–curriculum gap reduces awareness and engagement with environmental issues among students. It is crucial to bridge the gap between policy and curriculum by reintegrating core environmental education components into the curriculum and providing schools with the resources to teach these effectively. There is a need for policies that support the integration of climate action projects into the curriculum, aligning educational goals with practical, community-based initiatives. Similarly, in ‘Shallow pedagogies as epistemic injustice: how uncritical forms of learning hinder education’s contribution to just and sustainable development’, Balarin and Rodríguez (2024) demonstrate how educational reforms in Peru intended to improve results and to improve classroom practice through more active pedagogies often result in shallow pedagogies due to inconsistent implementation and inadequate teacher training.

As the articles suggest, this incoherence between elements and levels of the system often exacerbates existing injustices. As argued elsewhere, closing the implementation gap requires creating an enabling environment at the school level where reforms can be iteratively adapted and implemented within the school context (Tikly and Barrett, 2013; Tikly and Milligan, 2017). A useful model here is that of a whole institutional approach that Wals and Benavot (2017) argue is necessary for creating institutions where policies, operations, contents and practices work together in an integrated fashion. In this approach, institutions are themselves understood as systems. Coherence at an institutional level is realised through concurrent changes to curriculum, extracurricular activities, teacher training, community relations, human resources, and infrastructure operations and processes. With its emphasis on developing a problem-based learning pedagogy involving students, teachers, parents and community members and on adapting the competency-based curriculum to address issues of unsustainability in the community, the model of the Eco-School outlined by Copsey et al (‘Climate action to enable quality education: exploring the potential of Eco-Schools to reverse the triple education crises in Rwanda’, 2024), can be seen as an excellent example of a whole institutional approach.

Reforming the curriculum

As several of the articles argue, there is an urgent need at a system level to implement pedagogical approaches that recognise and value students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds, integrating local knowledge and languages into the curriculum. For example, the authors of ‘Education as justice’ provide a trenchant critique of the Eurocentric nature of the curriculum in postcolonial contexts and emphasise the importance of integrating local and Indigenous knowledge systems into the curriculum and ensure all students can relate to and engage with ideas of epistemic justice. ‘Learners’ everyday experiences of violence in English-medium secondary education in Uganda’ (Milligan et al, 2024) show how enforcing English-only policies marginalises students who are more comfortable in their Indigenous languages, leading to feelings of alienation and educational disadvantage.

As recent literature on decolonising the curriculum has highlighted (see, for example, Jansen, 2019), changing the epistemic basis of the curriculum is fraught with practical and political challenges. These include clarifying what a more epistemically just curriculum might involve across diverse disciplinary areas and ensuring change is adequately resourced, including producing new curriculum materials and investing heavily in staff development. It also involves engaging in the longer term in the wider system of knowledge production, circulation, dissemination and governance that remains Western and Northern led (Tikly, 2024). As Jansen argues, transforming the epistemic basis of the curriculum, including the medium of instruction, necessitates a deep engagement with contestations over the curriculum with implications for the politics of curriculum reform. A key point of contestation is whether the curriculum should aim to foster a relatively narrow range of competencies linked to economic growth, or instead foster a wider range of capabilities required to well-being and sustainability. In low- and middle-income, postcolonial contexts, and given the hegemony of Northern interests, this requires going beyond a focus on the politics of curriculum reform at a national level and engaging with global policy agendas.

Investing in educators as agents of justice-oriented reform

As many of the contributions make clear, teachers play a pivotal role in realising justice-oriented reform. For instance, a key message from ‘Shallow pedagogies as epistemic injustice’ highlights the need for clear guidelines and support for teachers to move beyond superficial teaching methods and engage students in meaningful, critical learning processes. In ‘Learners’ everyday experiences of violence in English-medium secondary education in Uganda’, teacher training should include modules on non-violent disciplinary methods and culturally responsive teaching to reduce the reliance on corporal punishment and promote a more inclusive classroom environment. The authors of ‘Education as justice’ argue that teachers have a critical role in engaging learners with the ‘epistemic core’ of the curriculum to foster an appreciation of epistemic pluralism. This, in turn, requires teachers to have a good grasp of diverse knowledge systems and the ability to facilitate ‘pedagogical border crossing’, that is, inculcating in learners the ability to navigate and critically evaluate insights derived from diverse knowledge systems.

Investing in teacher professional development is also an investment in teacher professionalism. Indeed, it is a cause of injustice in itself that governments do not give greater priority to teachers’ professionalism. Teachers continue to be undervalued and underpaid, and teachers’ work is increasingly precarious in many LMICs. Importantly, regarding justice-oriented reform, their collective voice, expressed through teachers’ unions and professional associations, is often not considered sufficiently in education governance. This marginalisation impoverishes debates about justice-oriented reform as teachers have the most intimate knowledge of the challenges of implementing justice-oriented reform in overcrowded and increasingly diverse delivery contexts (see for example, Tikly et al, 2024).

Fostering endogenous system leadership for change

Realising change to the extent and at the scale the articles in this special collection imply means fundamentally disrupting the existing dynamic equilibrium within the education system that reproduces inequality and coloniality. Achieving such a ‘tipping point’ (in the language of complexity theory) requires a strategic approach and strong leadership at all levels of the education system to drive through reform efforts across different subsystems of education and training as well as across key areas of policy and practice including the curriculum, assessment, the provision of appropriate teaching and learning materials, and teacher education.

Of relevance here is a model of endogenous systems leadership proposed by Mitchell et al (2022). In this model, leadership at different system levels (national, regional, local and institutional) is crucial in advocating for reform, creating coherence between reform efforts across the system, and enabling local conditions to facilitate reform implementation. The term ‘endogenous’ refers to the necessity of fostering leadership embedded in the contexts in which reform efforts are targeted. In LMICs, a challenge for endogenous leadership is creating coherence between sometimes conflicting donor agendas and ensuring that these align with national and local policy priorities and frameworks. As suggested later, it means challenging and pushing back on dependency relationships between Northern-based donors and governments in LMICs while simultaneously democratising national educational governance systems.

The politics of justice-oriented reform

Achieving justice-oriented reform is ultimately a political issue. Education systems are nested and operate within a wider landscape of economic, social, cultural, political and environmental systems. In modern, postcolonial, patriarchal and capitalist societies, these systems are organised in such a way as to reproduce regimes of intersecting inequality, including those based on class, race, gender (Walby, 2009) and environmental injustice. These wider systems shape and, in turn, are shaped through interaction with, the education system. Creating more just educational systems involves understanding and engaging with, at a strategic and operational level, the consequences of intersecting inequalities rooted in wider systems.

Broader socio-economic and structural inequalities affect students’ educational experiences and outcomes, making it difficult to achieve justice-oriented goals within the education system alone. In ‘From experience to actions for justice: learners’ views on epistemic, environmental and transitional justice in Nepal, Peru and Uganda’, Shields et al (2024) highlight how socio-economic status influences students’ ability to engage with and act upon justice-related educational content. For instance, students in Peru from poorer backgrounds may struggle more to translate their education into meaningful actions due to economic constraints. Similarly, in ‘Learners’ everyday experiences of violence in English-medium secondary education in Uganda’, the authors illustrate how systemic inequalities, such as poverty and lack of access to resources, exacerbate the impacts of educational policies that do not cater to the needs of marginalised students.

Addressing wider socio-economic and structural inequalities requires policy makers to develop holistic strategies that address the broader socio-economic contexts affecting students’ learning experiences, ensuring that educational reforms are inclusive and equitable. Limited financial and material resources hinder the implementation of comprehensive, justice-oriented educational programmes. For instance, in ‘Climate action to enable quality education’, Copsey et al discuss the resource challenges schools face in Rwanda and underscore the need for policies that provide additional support to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, such as nutritional programmes, scholarships and health services, to ensure they can fully participate in and benefit from education. Despite the success of the Eco-Schools programme in integrating climate action into the curriculum, scaling up such initiatives is constrained by financial limitations. Similarly, ‘Shallow pedagogies as epistemic injustice’ points out that resource constraints limit teachers’ ability to adopt rich pedagogies and provide diverse epistemic resources to students.

One way of addressing systemic inequalities is to mobilise community resources. ‘From experience to actions for justice’ points to the importance of community involvement in education. Programmes that engage parents and community members can help mitigate some socio-economic barriers by creating a supportive and resource-rich educational environment aimed at addressing food and water insecurity, poor health conditions and mitigating the effects of climate change (Balarin and Rodriguez, 2024). The initiatives on their own, however, cannot compensate for the chronic underfunding of education and wider community services. Here the funding of education needs to link to wider struggles against poverty and inequality within the state and civil society.

A key factor shaping policy in each country is the predominance of global agendas. This has implications for justice-oriented reform, as it is often more economistic interpretations of Sustainable Development Goal 4 and of the competencies required within a competency-based curriculum that predominate. Endogenous leaders have varying abilities to adjust and modify global agendas to suit local realities depending on factors such as the degree of dependency on foreign assistance and expertise, and local capacity to develop and implement policy (Tikly, 2017). Within centralised systems such as the education system in Rwanda, the ability to determine policy is further constrained for leaders outside of the national ministry (Tikly and Milligan, 2017). This situation raises further issues concerning the lack of democracy and accountability that often exists at the global and the national scales. Nancy Fraser (2008) describes this situation in terms of a multilayered form of disenfranchisement in which leaders from LMICs are marginalised in relation to global policy-making processes while other stakeholder groups are also often excluded from national and local decision-making. This second form of disenfranchisement is pertinent because injustices in education are often in the interests of national as well as global elites. Struggles for a more justice-oriented approach in education, therefore, need to engage and articulate with wider struggles of workers and peasants, Indigenous Peoples, women, youth, LGBTQI people and people with disabilities and other marginalised groups against injustice and oppression.