Diversity Literacy: Teaching for Social Justice in South Africa
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Diversity Literacy: Teaching for Social Justice in South Africa
- 1. Diversity Literacy Teaching Social Justice in South Africa Haley McEwen & Claire Kelly Intercultural & Diversity Studies of Southern Africa, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Editor's Notes
- Prepare students to function effectively and sensitively in contexts characterised by diversity Provide students with the conceptual tools needed to think critically about complex social issues
- Poststructural and postmodern traditions of the Frankfurt School Acknowledges historical context of colonialism and ideologies of white/Western superiority and African,Asian inferiority Critical approach to Diversity Critical look at constructions of difference that underpin institutional cultures and interpersonal interactions - moves beyond mere "tolerance" of difference or attempts to assimilate difference into dominant practices
- Martin-Baro (1996) added to this that conscientisation “joins the psychological dimension of personal consciousness with it’s social and political dimension and makes manifest the historical dialectic between knowing and doing, between individual growth and community organisation, between personal liberation and social transformation” a process where people become “literate in dialectic with their world” and defines literacy as “learning to read the surrounding reality” . “ reading” is not simply a cognitive task . It requires the mobilization of emotion (Montero, 2009, p. 74) and “supposes that persons change in the process of changing their relations with the surroundings, and above all, with other people” (pg. 41)
- The important thing about having a clear outcome is for your practice is that you can align everything you do with that outcome. Just to give you a sense of how the critical Diversity Literacy informed our practice the course design re content and structure are very closely informed by the imperitives laid out by social justice pedagogy and the critical diversity literacy criteria the course consist of a number of modalitities the most important being groupwork.
- our groupwork is not just group work, it's co-operative learning groups and it's fundamental to a achieving a Critical Diversity Literacy
- I now want to speak to the outcomes quite specifically
- course does not guarantee that all students will be deeply committed to transforming unequal power relationships,
- Individualised and competive nature of academia, these characteristics are challenged in implementing this course, and we think speaks to broader challenges to social justice pedagody. In the class room (Micro) : Co-operative learning : struggled to work in groups Interdisciplinarity vs. interfaculty: university thought this would be the problem wrt to student preparedness, but the problems we encountered wrt students experiencing difficulty was to do with structural things like timetabling, marking convention, programme structures… something about the institutionalised rigidity of the disciplinary boundaries, “protecting of turf” – dumbing down of sociology students, not at all the case. Macro
- So that's the plan... The conceptualisation vs lived reality greatest insights not in conceptualisation , but in the teaching previous sections logic and plan, following section shares two (very different kinds of) experiences in the teaching of the course. FIRST is a challenge related to emerging identities in post-apartheid South Africa, a challenge which speaks to some of the complexities of identity social justice educators in South African face. In this exploration we illustrate how the discomfort and emotion emerging from these identity struggles provide the space for potential intellectual and affective shift. SECOND challenge is related to the structural requirements of an academic institutionwe face as social justice educators. Amongst these are for example the timeworn challenge of facilitating affective and relational process in a highly intellectual and individualist academic culture. So the first challenge emerged out of two particular incidents that occurred with my discussion group. I will share one with you today. And it started with this comment: "Black South Africans can't call themselves African" Obvious over simplifications aside (white South Africans are xenophobic too, and many black South Africans are not; excluding African’s who kill other Africans from the category of African, would leave us with very few Africans, same goes for Europeans) the theoretical and emotional tensions that emerged suggest an interesting and difficult evolution of the debate. I say difficult because the point generated emotive responses with everyone in the class. The Nigerian, who made the point, student was clearly angry, the two black South African women noticeably shut down, the white South African guy was buoyed. The rest all just kept quiet. The conversation steered to a point where the white South African guy’s “Africannes” was (very subtlety) deemed more authentic than the two black South African women and the racialisation of Africanness became moot. I, the facilitator, felt unprepared for the conversation, both in terms of the intellectual and emotional work required. It was, however, an important moment in that it illustrated precisely the contestations over Africannes, the way in which ‘race’ is implicated, and our investments in these. More importantly, it provided the space to explore these contestations and how we are invested in them.
- Having travelled the path so centrally informed by emotion and relationship, the end point Critical Diversity Literacy itself seems affected. On reflection, the eight outcomes are almost excusivey intellectual ones . Admittedly, they are intellectual outcomes which we get to through an effective and relational process, but they are intellectual outcomes that given this affective and relational process seem incomplete. If conscientisation is an affective and relational proces s, this surely means there should be a relational and affective outcome i.e. that critical diversity literacy requires an affective and relational dimension . If in fact, Critical Diversity Literacy is a reading practice , way of reading the world and how one lives in it (the epistemic outcome ), that new reading requires an explicit shift in “perspective” , or way in which one relates to, fits into the world (the ontological outcome ). What is missing from the current criteria for a Critical Diversity Literacy to be present is an e xplicit sense of oneself in relation to “all of the above” . It is one thing to be able to read hegemonic practice, for example, but it is quite another to see oneself as implicated in this practice. It is one thing to understand social processes as learned, it is quite another to see one’s own socialisation and one’s complicity in oppressive systems. A useful concept to think through this affective/realtional outcome is Wendy Hollway's (1984) notion of investment. She defines investment as “the emotional commitment involved in taking up positions in discourses which confer power and are supportive of our sense of continuity, confirming ourselves as masculine or feminine [or whatever the relevant identification][1]” (p. 205).