Owning your emotions or sentimental navel-gazing: Digital storytelling with South African pre-service student educators

2018

SAJHE

One way to approach the project of decolonising the university is to employ decolonising pedagogies, which allow the whole of people's lived experience into teaching and learning spaces, affirm this experience as worthy of scholarly attention and create a dialogue between experience and theory. Encouraging the sharing of personal stories among diverse and differently positioned students, however, brings up questions about "safe spaces". Using Tronto's ethics of care as a normative framework, we will reflect on a range of snapshots that exemplify ethical dilemmas encountered in a teacher education classroom within a digital storytelling project. Based on this analysis two main assumptions are challenged: that safe spaces exist, and that safety is something that can be bestowed on students by the lecturer. We argue for teaching and learning that facilitates a heightened self-awareness on the part of (in particular white) educators about their own gendered, classed and raced subjectivities and how these play out in the classroom-a practice of care both towards others and towards the self. This self-awareness and self-care needs to be matched by the development of facilitation skills that may help to create learning spaces that reaffirm difference among learners while also enabling generative dialogue. We conclude with practical suggestions on how to implement such an attempt at practicing the ethics of care in the classroom.

Section: Snapshotmentioning

confidence: 99%

Creating ‘safe-ish’ learning spaces—attempts to practice an ethics of care

Pam

2018

SAJHE

“…Initially located at the end of the course, it became clear there was little or no time for students to reflect more carefully on overlaps, commonalities or contradictions emerging out of the digital stories. In the absence of critical reflection the likelihood that students acquire a superficial understanding of difference risks reinscribing existing hierarchies is high (Gachago 2015;Gachago, Ivala, Chigona and Condy 2015;Gachago et al 2014, Stewart andGachago 2016;Zembylas 2013). …”

Section: Context and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Family comes in all forms, blood or not’: disrupting dominant narratives around the patriarchal nuclear family

Clowes

Condy

2016

Gender and Education

Self Cite

After nearly 25 years of democracy lives of young South African's are still profoundly shaped by the legacies of apartheid. This paper considers how these differences are produced, maintained and disrupted through an exploration of changing narratives developed by a small group of South African pre-service teachers, with a particular focus on the narratives developed around discourses of fatherhood generally and absent fathers in particular. We draw on interviews conducted with three students in which we discussed their digital stories and literature reviews. In this paper we draw attention to the limitations of digital storytelling and the risks such autobiographical storytelling presents of perpetuating dominant narratives that maintain and reproduce historical inequalities. At the same time, in highlighting ways in which this risk might be confronted, the paper also aims to show the possibilities in which these dominant narratives may be challenged. IntroductionIt is over twenty years since South Africa's transition to democracy saw the introduction of a constitution outlawing discrimination, alongside the development of legislation aimed at providing the legal foundations upon which to build a more socially just society. And while it should be acknowledged that there has been substantial change, the beginning of the third decade of democratic governance continues to see the lives of South African citizens profoundly shaped by the legacies of the past. Inequalities and differences structured around the apartheid categories of race continue to overlap with class, gender, sexuality and other subject locations to frame and shape interactions, aspirations and opportunities available to South Africans. This paper considers how some of these differences are produced, maintained and disrupted through an exploration of changing narratives developed by a small group of South African students in a diverse pre-service teacher education classroom over the course of one academic year. We draw on interviews conducted with students at the end of 2015 in which we discuss digital stories they produced at the beginning of the year as well as literature reviews towards the end of the year, in which students' evaluated research into one of the themes emerging out of the digital stories. Our focus, in this paper, is on continuities and changes in narratives developed around a specific theme that emerged strongly in both the digital stories and the literature reviews -that of fatherhood generally and absent fathers in particular. We make two key points in the paper. The first is to draw attention to the limitations of digital storytelling and the risks such personal storytelling presents of perpetuating dominant

“…This article draws from a larger study, which aimed to explore the potential of digital storytelling as a tool to transform students' engagement across difference, by sharing personal stories but also creating a space for such difficult conversations. We have reflected on the potential and limitations of digital storytelling -both as a process and a productas a socially just pedagogy elsewhere (see for example Gachago 2016;Gachago et al 2015;Gachago 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Travelling into the other's world: South African pre-service teacher education students' construction of difference, belonging and identity

Bozalek²,

Ng’ambi

2018

SAJHE

Against the backdrop of continuing racismboth overt and subtle-in South Africa's classrooms, this article describes one lecturer's attempt at facilitating conversations around race relations in South Africa with nine pre-service student educators. Using Bamberg's (2012) positioning analysis to analyse how students constructed stories of difference, belonging and identity it transpired that students tended to position themselves first and foremost along racial lines, revealing their experiences of continuing academic and social segregation. Although students expressed a desire to overcome these divides, they struggled to visualise a world where black and white students could engage beyond their comfort zones, moving beyond the narratives with which they grow up. Lugones' (1987) concept of world-travelling and her suggestion that world travelling might be more difficult for those who are at most ease in their lives, was useful to unpack and understand the different roles students performed. Students' stories also showed the importance of destabilising dominant understandings of subjectivity, by allowing the emergence of fragmented narratives in difficult conversations. Recommendations of how to use narratives to facilitate students' world travelling include the emphasis on intersectionality, fluidity and complexity in students' stories but also discuss the challenges when facilitating such a process and the importance of self-reflexivity on the part of the facilitator. Gachago, Bozalek and Ng'ambi South African pre-service teacher education students 190