Conference Program

The figure of the incomplete puzzle was used by a secondary school student in the context of a recent study on educational justice (Milligan, L., Balarin, M., et al., 2025). It was the most concrete expression of a feeling of disconcertedness and disorientation, of not knowing how to articulate and understand different ideas, that has consistently appeared in my work with young people living in the vast informal settlements that surround Peru’s urban spaces (Alcázar et al., 2020; Balarin, 2011; Balarin et al., 2017). Whether in relation to social, environmental, citizenship or history issues, these incomplete puzzles emerge in the context of what I have characterised as the shallow pedagogies that predominate in many Peruvian schools, especially those catering to students from disadvantaged backgrounds (Balarin & Rodriguez, 2024).

Shallow pedagogies have become widespread over the past three decades, during which Peru has implemented outcomes-based curricula and active teaching methods. This has led towards a marked displacement of knowledge and educational purpose in classrooms (Biesta, 2015). Similar problems have emerged in other countries in the Global South implementing these kinds of curricular and pedagogical reforms (Allais, 2014; Hoadley, 2017; Schweisfurth, 2011).

A key characteristic of these shallow pedagogies is the profound disconnection and frequent contradiction between young people’s everyday experiences, marked by precarity and injustice, and the normative ideas that they are presented with in school around citizenship, social inclusion or the role of personal effort in attaining wellbeing. Additionally, schools present young people with mostly surface, scattered and closed knowledge, without inviting them to explore, deepen or make meaningful connections (Balarin & Rodriguez, 2024; González et al., 2017). This not only limits young people’s capacity for critical thinking but also their possibility of understanding complex phenomena and making sense of the world.

The presentation will explore the encounter between young people’s experiences of growing up in precarious contexts and school experiences marked by shallow pedagogies. It will discuss how these experiences influence their transitions into adulthood, their understandings of citizenship, their aspirations and capacity to navigate life. The discussion will be based on findings from the JustEd Study (Milligan, L., Balarin, M., et al., 2025), which used qualitative participatory methods to explore secondary school students’ learning and experiences of intercultural, transitional, gender and environmental justice and how these shape their attitudes and dispositions towards sustainable futures. It will also draw on findings from two earlier studies on marginalised citizenship (Balarin, 2011) and precarious youth transitions (Balarin et al., 2017) that provide additional support for the arguments.

Shallow pedagogies limit young people’s possibilities for engaging in and generating knowledge, thereby constituting a major form of epistemic injustice at the heart of education (Fricker, 2007, 2015). The presentation will include a discussion of what it might take to establish more epistemically just pedagogies that can provide young people with the resources needed to make sense of their worlds and help them navigate their way towards complex and uncertain futures.