Participating unequally: student experiences at UWC

Abstract

This paper uses Nancy Fraser's concept of participatory parity to reflect on data gathered by and from third year students in a final year research module in the Women's and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape in 2015. During the course students developed a research proposal, collected and shared data with other students, and then used this data to write a final (externally examinable) research report. Employing a participatory photovoice methodology, the students' research focused on ways in which social and group identities had shaped their experiences of feeling empowered and disempowered on campus. Each student took two photos representing experiences of feeling empowered and two of feeling disempowered on campus and wrote narratives of about 300 words explaining and describing the experience foregrounded by each image. Students shared these narratives and accompanying images with each other, their teachers and the wider university community through a public exhibition in the library. In the paper we draw on Fraser's concepts of maldistribution, misrecognition and misrepresentation to highlight constraints to equal participation identified by students.

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

“…While a lot has been written about white silences in raced conversation (see for example Mazzei 2008), there is a dearth of literature around the coloured (non)engagement. Ngoasheng and Gachago (2017) have reflected on the challenges of addressing the legacy of differentiated experiences of oppression during Apartheid in South African classrooms elsewhere and we would like to note that had there been stronger coloured voices in the group, the way the narratives would have been constructed and the power dynamics in the group would certainly have been different.…”

“Because They Are Me”: Dress and the Making of Gender

“…The students are mentored through these components of research, given detailed feedback on each of these assignments as well as multiple opportunities to rewrite their work with the overall aim of producing a final research report that is examinable. A key aim of the module is to mentor undergraduate students into inhabiting scholarly identities with a longer term aim of working with students to publish out of this research (see, e.g., Clowes, Shefer and Ngabaza 2017;Ngabaza, Bojarczuk, Masuku and Roelfse 2015;Shefer, Strebel, Ngabaza and Clowes 2017).…”

The Scholarly Advancement of an Academic Project on Gender Justice

“…Two of our current projects funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are also specifically focused on social justice, feminist and decolonial pedagogies, both experimenting with and writing about them. Members of the WGS department have published widely, contributing to the scholarship of teaching and learning, including reflecting on our teaching and our student experiences (see, for example, Clowes 2013Clowes , 2015aClowes , 2015bClowes, Shefer & Ngabaza, 2017;Ngabaza et al, 2015;. We have contributed to a wide range of special editions of local and international journals, as well as edited volumes and participated in research projects on social justice pedagogies and reconceptualising higher education.…”