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312.Influences of Social Justice representations in primary school students for motivation and engagement in schools. A comparative study between Spain and Argentina.

The present study explores ideas of Primary school students about Social Justice in Madrid and Buenos Aires, analyzing possible differences between the responses by gender, grade or country. Specifically, we have studied these ideas in students of 4th (9-10 years old) and 6th grade (11-12 years old) of four public schools of Primary education in Madrid and Buenos Aires.
Our research group agrees with a 3R´s model of Social Justice based in Fraser (2008) because we think that allows analyzing different dimensions in Education (Jacott and Maldonado, 2012):
- Redistribution (Rawls, 1979; Sen, 2009) of educative resources in a fair way.
- Recognition (Fraser and Honneth, 2006) as respect to the differences and inequalities in education, and active promotion of them.
- Representation(Fraser, 2008) (also called participation) as the full participation in social life, especially for those who have been systematically excluded.
These three concepts are not independent, but must be considered as interconnected in the struggle for social justice.
We believe that it is essential to explore conceptions of children, for promote a change towards a quality education, that incorporates the ideas of the children in relation into the social justice, not only in educational questions, but also social and political
The instruments used had been a questionnaire and an interview, which consisted of a set of dilemmas about hypothetical situations. The participants had to make a decision between three possible alternatives (in the questionnaire), or proposed a solution for the raised dilemma (interview). The main results obtained in the questionnaires indicate statistically significant differences by gender, grade and country of participants with respect the dimensions of recognition and representation as well as in the global index of social justice. These results show that in these dimensions, girls, students of 6th, and participants of Madrid have ideas that are closer to social justice than boys, students of 4th, and participants of Buenos Aires, respectively. At present, the answers given by children in the interviews are being analyzed in qualitative categories order to deepen in the development of students' thinking about these social justice issues.

Author(s):

Almudena Juanes    
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Spain

Vanesa Sainz    
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Spain

Liliana Jacott    
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Spain

Antonio Maldonado    
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Spain