Identity and Visual Literacy in South Africa

Abstract

This visual essay presents several students' visual texts produced in response to the minceka project (2002) based at Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa, which explores visual representations of identity. The project is part of a year-long foundation course which aims to prepare students for the transition to mainstream degree programs in music, film, fine arts, dramatic arts and a general BA. The overall aim of the course is to improve writing proficiency and critical creative production in order to help students develop discourses of visual and performing arts, in particular key concepts that are core to this discourse. This includes concepts such as representation, medium, identity, culture, history, denotation, connotation, position and metaphor.The course works with the students' existing strengths and culturally familiar ideas in order to ensure that students' experiences are given an active place within the curriculum.The students who participate in the project often come from rural and semi-rural environments, and are new to an urban (and university) environment. The students speak multiple languages and speak English as an additional language. The students are often the most educated members of their family and yet their educational experiences have been limited. In general, they come to the course with poor English writing proficiency and are limited in their discourse for visual analysis and meaning making. While the students bring a wealth of diverse knowledge and experiences, all struggle with the transition into the academic environment.

Personalized Multimodal Instruction: Positively Impacting Lives Through Invitational Education

“…The research literature provides many examples of the impact of multimodal projects in a wide range of contexts. At the university level, researchers (Brenner, et al, 2004;Wang, 2009) have explored the use of multimodal projects for articulation of identity. When two grade three teachers and university researchers collaborated, Ntelioglou et al (2014) noted the ways an urban multimodal inquiry project increased multilingual students' literacy investment, literacy engagement, and learning.…”

Literacies In and Out of School in South Africa

“…Members of the project argue that school literacies exclude the life worlds of those who participate in them, and they work with indigenous knowledge systems, cultural practices, and languages within a critical framework that takes account also of school and global literacies. Brenner and Andrew (2004), working in a university context, explore the relationship between visual literacy, identity, and knowledge and in their class assignments which focus on local craft forms, such as the minceka, a traditional cloth inscribed with narrative forms, worn by women in Limpopo Province. Mamabolo's Grade 1 children at Olifantsvlei Primary School made dolls based on traditional South African fertility figures, as part of a project exploring history, culture, and neighborhood.…”