Paper presented at HECU6, Rhodes, July 2012.

1. EXPLORING TENSIONS
BETWEEN
SENTIMENTALITY AND
WITNESSING THROUGH
DIGITAL STORYTELLING
HECU6
Rhodes University, 11-13 July 2012

2. Authors
 Daniela Gachago
 Vivienne Bozalek
 Eunice Ivala
 Janet Condy
 Agnes Chigona

4. What does this mean for us as
Higher Educators?
 South African classrooms are
ticking time bombs
 Explosive emotions and
silences
 Desire / necessity to talk /
engage with these issues
 „In a country that is
oversensitive to race talk, few
young people or adults feel
comfortable talking about race,
especially when they have to
speak about personal
experience „ (Jansen 2010, 10)

5. Post-conflict pedagogy
 For real transformation with students to
happen, these issues cannot be addressed on
a cognitive or intellectual level alone, but
require emotional engagement with the subject
(Bozalek 2011, Hemson et al 2001, Jansen 2008)

6. Politics of emotions
 Emotions are seen as relational, happening in
a shared political space, „in which students
and teachers interact with implications in
larger political and cultural struggles‟
(Albrecht-Crane & Slack, cited in Zembylas 2007, xiii).
 „The social control of emotions, and emotions
as a site of resistance to oppression, are
underexplored scholarly disciplines as well as
within pedagogical practices‟ (Boler 1999, xii)

8. Story circle
 “Stories move in circles. They don‟t move in
straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles.
There are stories inside stories and stories
between stories, and finding your way through
them is as easy and as hard as finding your
way home. And part of the finding is getting
lost. And when you‟re lost, you start to look
around and listen.”
(Lambert 2010, v).

9. Pedagogy of discomfort
 Stipulates that for both
educators and students to
develop a deeper
understanding for their own
and their shared past, it is
necessary to move outside
their comfort zone, to start to
unpack their understanding
of norms and differences
(Boler 1999, Boler and
Zembylas 2003).

10. River of Life

11. Background of the study
 Transformation in
Higher Education has
led to racially
integrated classrooms
 Social and cultural
integration are lagging
behind (Jansen 2010,
Soudien 2012)

12. Study
 55 final year ISP pre-service teacher students
 Final year project, professional course
 Digital story as a reflection on their journey to
becoming teachers
 8 weeks project
 Weekly workshops
 Focus on collaboration / sharing

13. Can digital stories be used to open up a
space for engagement with issues around
diversity across social, cultural, racial
difference?

14. Methodology
 Qualitative study
 Four focus group discussions with 20 students
right after completion of project (screening)
 Mixed groups (Pattman 2010)
 1-2 hours long
 Interviews were transcribed, searched and
organised around emergent themes
 Ethics approval through School of Education
and Social Sciences

15. Brief for students
 In your digital story reflect on:
 Your personal and educational journey in becoming a
teacher
 Your learning and teaching philosophy,
 Trace any change/transformations in your learning
and teaching beliefs, values, attitudes, and
assumptions and how these changes have come
about during the course of your studies
 Your identity as a teacher and what makes a good
teacher in your view
 The most important / most challenging roles of a
teacher
 How you experienced diversity in your journey of
becoming a teacher (in your own classroom, and in
your teaching)

16. Denise video

17. Findings

18. Opening wounds
 This story it freaked me out completely
because it sort of scratched open wounds and
not just surface wise. But I was digging
deeper into getting an understanding of me
and even just consolidating the things that I
came up with, how I felt and how it impacted
and unpacking that and sort of putting it back
where it belongs again or rearranging your
whole mode of thinking. … it‟s unnerving and
it left us sort of scattered, you know. (CF)

19. Vulnerability
 Student 1: And then I think what - what the
most challenging to me was having to read it
out aloud - the story.
Student 2: Sharing your story.
Student 1: And then there was that dot - dot -
dot moment where you just went I'm - I'm
naked. I'm just exposed… And not knowing the
responses that you are going to get ….

20. Reflection
 So my reflection actually started at home sitting
on my own thinking and as I started typing I - I
thought it would be difficult for me to start typing
out my essay because I thought there's not much
that happened in my life but once you started
typing you started realizing this took place, that
took place… everything just started coming back,
I was reliving going through, going through the
River of Life I was reliving all the - all those
phases of my life and so for me my - my true
reflection, my true going into everything in deep
[Indistinct] started at home. (CM)

21. Interplay of emotions and
reason
 I don‟t think we would have been able to
reflect the way we did now with our digital
story and to critically think about it if we didn‟t
do the River of life - like those steps helped us
to think critically in the end.

22. Social cohesion
 You‟ve got to delve into
the lives of people who
you‟ve been with for four
years, who you‟ve
greeted, who you‟ve
asked how are you but
just on that level. But
after Wednesday [day of
screening] you still find
people embracing each
other whom they‟ve
never ever spoken really
or hugged each other.
(CF)

23. Learning from each other
 I think earlier yesterday I spoke to [a student‟s]
story about apartheid. I told her this morning
because she wasn‟t there yesterday. I told her
that it was an eye-opener to me because - I mean
like - we didn‟t go to school up to here … I mean
she was in first year she was in our class and I
was thinking what is this old lady doing in our
class? And only as the time went by you heard
her real story and I told this morning it was a big
eye-opener for me because you know because
you always hear about - stories about Apartheid
but not as real as hers was - it was totally an eye-
opener….(CM)

24. Looking behind the surface
 You see I spoke to one student after this
viewing of the digital story - a white student
and like we were talking about the silence and
those things. Like this student said to me I
would never had said that I failed a Grade but I
also did. So I said but that is why I‟m here -
that is why I‟m - this is what made me want to
become a teacher, because somebody
showed an interest in me. And I said that is
why I put it in my digital story and she said I
would have never said in front of everyone that
I failed at school. (CF)

25. Reverting assumptions
 Sometimes you will take people for granted
and you think that this person has everything
and this person does not have a problem you
know and sometimes we always tend to use
that race thing and say I know these white
people, they‟ve got everything and they lived
life perfectly but when you compare - with
some of my stories when I compare to some of
the other people, the white people I feel like
my problem is really small to what this person
has experienced and how this person got
here. (BM)

26. More critical voices
 It changed the way we
can look each other
and then we can then
now see that this is
the person and then I
am a person that can
change - because the
way we still see each
other. But the way we
engage I don‟t think
that [Talking together].
(CF)

27. Sentimentality
 Critical voices warn against the danger of
„sentimentality of digital stories‟, arguing that it
promotes „individualistic, and naively
unselfconscious accounts of personal stories‟
(Hartley and McWilliam 2009, 14)
 Zembylas: sentimental reaction by students
identifying with the privilege feeling guilt /
defensiveness in privileged party and anger in
the victim, leading to desensitization &
disengagement (2011, 20)

28. Guilt
 It suddenly made me realise like - how
hard some of the people work here
and how strong some people actually
are. You‟d often say like - ah you
know - look at this person they never
come to class and things - or they
don‟t do their assignments but you
don‟t know that they‟re not doing it
because they were up working all
night until five in the morning like
trying to earn money - it‟s very
emotional… I was howling yesterday
and then I - I felt bad when I got home
I felt so guilty I thought but all I had to
do was ask that person all I had to do
was take an interest in them and I
haven't for four years. (WF)

29. Anger
 Sitting there with them,
looking at the story for me the
aim was not for them to feel
pity for me, because that‟s
always been an issue for me.
You don‟t feel sympathy for
me. I don‟t want you to feel
sorry for me. This is my story
and I‟m proud of it. I‟m not
ashamed of it. So for you to
feel pity it‟s not going to help.
It‟s not going to help me - I
don‟t know if you will
understand. (BM)

30.  Now in fourth year you know they expect us
to be all integrated and be a happy family
and it‟s such a false. I feel like you know
lecturers are crying we all crying but its
false because we've been with these
people for four years and we've never
bothered to ask them you know and now
we crying about their stories. (WF)

31. Conclusion
 Digital storytelling opened up important space for
emotional engagement with own identity and the
„Other‟
 Reject the notion of disparity between criticality
and emotions (Zembylas 2005, 182)
 Students can seemingly easily talk about their
own experience, but have difficulties in placing
themselves in the bigger historical picture (Aveling
2006)
 Some stories can be labelled “sentimental” and
the way they were received as “passive empathy”,
leading to pity from the part of the privileged
observer and resentment from the subjugated
storyteller (Boler 1999)

32. Recommendations
 Prepare students better for both the emotional
and cognitive labour that we are expecting from
them
 How do you teach critical thinking in a way that
transforms consciousness (Boler 1999)?
 Critical consciousness requires „knowing thyself‟
as part of the historical process‟ (Fishman and
McCarthy 2005)
 Move students beyond listening and sharing to
each other stories, but to start analysing them in
order for students to begin to deconstruct the
positions premised on the existence of clearly
differentiated identities based on race, ethnicity, or
culture (Zembylas 2011, 18).

33. References
 Boler, M., & Zembylas, M. (2003). Discomforting Truths: The Emotional
Terrain of Understanding Difference. In P. Trifonas (Ed.), Pedagogies of
difference: Rethinking education for social change (pp. 110-136). New York:
RoutledgeFalmer.
 Bozalek, V. (2011). Acknowledging privilege through encounters with
difference: Participatory Learning and Action techniques for decolonising
methodologies in Southern contexts. International Journal of Social
Research Methodology, 14(6), 469-484.
 Hemson, C., Moletsane, R., & Muthukrishna, N. (2001). Transforming
Racist Conditioning. Perspectives in Education, 19(2), 85-97.
 Jansen, J. (2008). When Politics and Emotion meet. Phi Delta Kappan,
90(5), 327-332. Retrieved from
http://www.pdkmembers.org/members_online/publications/Archive/pdf/k090
1jan.pdf
 Jansen, J. (2010). Over the rainbow - race and reconciliation on university
campuses in South Africa. Discourse, 38(1).
 Lambert, J. (2010). Digital storytelling cookbook. Elements. Berkeley, CA:
Center for Digital Storytelling.

34.  Pattman, R. (2010). Investigating “race” and social cohesion at the
University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. South African Journal of Higher
Education, 24(6), 953-971.
 Rolon-Dow, R. (2011). Race(ing) stories: digital storytelling as a tool
for critical race scholarship. Race Ethnicity and Education, 14(2),
159-173.
 Soudien, C. (2012). Realising the dream. Cape Town: HSRC Press.
Retrieved from
http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/product.php?productid=2291&freedownl
oad=1
 Zembylas, M. (2012). Teaching in Higher Education Pedagogies of
strategic empathy: navigating through the emotional complexities of
anti-racism in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education,
(April), 37-41.
 Zembylas, M. (2011). The politics of trauma in education. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
 Zembylas, M. (2007). Five pedagogies, a thousand possibilities.
Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

35. Acknowledgement
 CPUT Research into Innovations in Teaching
and Learning Fund (RIFTAL 2011, 2012)
 CPUT University Research Fund 2012
 National research foundation 2012-2015
 Facilitators and students of 2011 ISP Digital
Storytelling project