TITLE:
Inequality in Imagination amongst Marginalised Learners: Teachers Pounding Away with a Hammer
AUTHORS:
Wade Cafun, Labby Ramrathan
KEYWORDS:
Social Justice, Imagination, Education, Formal Equality, Substantive Equality, Policy, Marginalisation, Photo Elicitation, Imaginative Narratives, Focus Groups
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.9 No.12,
December
21,
2021
ABSTRACT: Imagination is supposed to act as a means by
which one’s mind is freed from the often contextual limitations to which one
becomes accustomed. But what if imagination, in the instance of already
marginalised learners serves to limit their thoughts, in particular their
abilities to imagine the possibility of attaining success? The need for
substantive equality is highlighted in this paper as such equality focuses on
the degree to which individuals have been disadvantaged when determining the
level of support required at present. Through the use of narrative inquiry, learners were given a platform from which to
express their individual experiences of inequality and their imaginings of
themselves in the future. From this, we were able to fathom the degree to which
learners’ imaginations of success were limited by experiences of inequality.
Findings suggested that mere formal equality was insufficient to aid the
emancipation of these learners and therefore a sort of substantive equality was
required. A shift in policy is thus necessitated so as to provide teachers with
a different tool to address such limited abilities to imagine.