Education and Social Justice in a Digital Age

Description

In many countries the school curriculum oscillates between focusing on traditional subjects and focusing on skills that are linked to the needs of the 21st-century digital age. Rosamund Sutherland argues against such a skills-based curriculum, maintaining that, from a social justice perspective, the priority of schools should be to give young people access to the knowledge that they are not likely to learn outside school. She draws on the work of Michael Young, Lev Vygotsky, Amartya Sen and David Olson to develop new theoretical and practical insights that offer ways of changing policy and practice to improve equality and life chances for young people, while acknowledging the potential transformative role of digital technologies. This timely book will be invaluable to teachers, academics, students and policy makers interested in the ways in which the digital landscape transforms the nature of the debate about equity and social justice in education.

Rosamund Sutherland is Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education, the University of Bristol. Her research has been concerned with teaching and learning with ICT, young people's use of digital technologies outside school, and mathematics education. She has led a wide range of research projects funded by the ESRC, and collaborated with colleagues in Latin America, Europe and Africa. In this book she brings together the previous strands of her research, with a particular focus on social justice.

"This is the most refreshing book about education I have read for many years. Any teacher or future teacher, indeed anyone involved in or interested in education, will learn much from reading it. It deftly illustrates that the only way to a more just system is when knowledge is placed at the heart of all we do as teachers." Michael Young, Institute of Education "Will serve as a clear and powerful introduction to an important set of ideas." Journal of Social Policy