Within an outcomes based educational system built on the principles of redress, social justice, multilingualism and multiculturalism, issues of equity in teaching, learning and assessment are increasingly on South Africa's educational agenda. This article locates itself within debates concerning the politics of representation in mainstream classrooms, in which written standard English is the dominant mode and language through which students' meanings are read and assessed. The authors, consisting of English and Art educators, have been implementing forms of 'multimodal pedagogies' in different classrooms in Johannesburg in a move to challenge the existing narrow constraints of representation permitted in mainstream schooling. Through a case study discussion of a multimodal project with disaffected Soweto youth, the authors argue that new criteria for assessment need to be developed in order to address the complexity of thinking about communication as a multiple semiotic practice and students as designers of meaning. Such criteria place human agency and resourcefulness at the centre of meaning-making, and focus on the recruitment of resources, generativity across modes, linkages and connections across modes and genres, voicing of self, community and culture, the processes of making and reflectiveness, as well as taking account of the 'community of arbiters'.
This article presents the reflections of a research team from the ZAPP-IKS project. ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project) undertook a three-year NRF-funded research project titled “Reconceptualising Poetry Education for South African Classrooms through Infusing Indigenous Poetry Texts and Practices”. The research on which we report here was undertaken as part of that project. The team consists of an English teacher, a poet and an academic. Together, they attempted a research intervention at a Johannesburg secondary school. The article presents their reflections on the challenges, successes and potentials of the attempted research intervention, which was intended to energise and inspire the teaching of English poetry by drawing from and developing indigenous knowledges and principles. Presented as a play, a praise poem and a conventional academic analysis by the school-based teacher, the university-based poet, and the university-based academic, respectively, the article offers diverse analyses as an illustration of how research relationships may be understood, experienced and represented in various ways. These analyses draw implicitly and explicitly on conceptualisations of indigeneity and indigenous knowledges, as well as decoloniality, with the conventional academic analysis making use of Erik Olin Wright’s concept of real utopias to frame its understanding of the project and the other two perspectives on it. Together they invite readers to challenge and transform the conventions that govern educational practices, research and representation, but caution against naïve idealism when doing so.
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