Social justice in education

Refers to a commitment to challenging social, cultural, and economic inequalities imposed on individuals arising from any differential distribution of power, resources, and privileges (Mills School of Education, 2019). By examining the current higher education landscape using a social justice lens, its unfair distribution and inequitable access based on geographic and socioeconomic backgrounds come to the fore. A social justice perspective examines the very structure of higher education itself and what the systems and institutions of higher education need to change to accommodate students’ diverse backgrounds and needs. This fundamentally changes the focus from previously dominant approaches that have tended to assume that individual students need to be ‘fixed’ to fit in with the dominant (typically Eurocentric) conception of higher education (Unesco).