In this performative text a narrative arts-based approach is used to explore the connections between educator identity and the current issues arising in the broader South African higher education landscape. Written as a fictional narrative it is an exploration of some of my experiences at the University of the Free State between 2014 and 2016. The post-qualitative, arts-based narrative serves to connect research practice with educator experience in higher education. As the traditional, patriarchal and colonial nature of institutions of higher education is being questioned by student movements like #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall, we have to ask how our research practices are responding to these movements. The idea of knowledge as a process is an important aspect that arts-based research illuminates in relation to social change. In this article I connect the idea of knowledge as process to the idea of pedagogy as a process which ties in with our lived experiences and interactions. As such, this text uses art as a way to illustrate the continual journey and process of moving towards socially just pedagogies. The "fictional" narrative is used as a creative exploration of innovative methodologies in trying to find a way forward into messy and uncertain spaces that characterise the complexity of the current higher education landscape in South Africa.Keywords: arts-based research; fiction; narrative; social justice; socially just pedagogies; performative text; post-qualitative research THE WHYAnother site of decolonization is the university classroom. We cannot keep teaching in the way we have always taught. (Mbembe 2015, 6)
In this performative text, we explore the events that unfolded around the #ShimlaPark incident on February 22, 2016, on the Bloemfontein campus of the University of the Free State (UFS), South Africa. The text consists of four voices; that of a student, an educator, theory, and the official report commissioned by the UFS after the #ShimlaPark incident. These voices are conceptualized as an assemblage of experience. We employ arts-based research as an affective event that enables us to generate new problems, to create new concepts that allow for the emergence of a different world.
In this article, we foreground the lived experiences of a group of post-graduate education students at the University of the Free State who explored issues of social justice in the curriculum. Our contextual and local experiences are situated as part of a call for the decolonisation of the curriculum. In this context, we view 86 Journal of Education, No. 74, 2018 curriculum as an autobiographical, lived, and storied practice (Pinar, 2012). Through our creative collaborative narrative, we focus on teacher identity and experience since this has been shown to have a major impact on the curriculum (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Furthermore, we use Kumashiro's (2002) conceptualisation of antioppressive education to highlight the messiness and discomfort of our experiences as we relearn, unlearn, and trouble oppressive knowledge in order to imagine alternatives. We posit anti-oppressive education as part of the social justice project as a useful theoretical stance in thinking around the decolonisation of the curriculum. In this article, we use a critical qualitative inquiry (Denzin, 2017) to explore what a process of decolonisation might look like; we offer an entangled view of how a collaborative narrative research methodology, identity, experience, and theory form part of the process of working towards a socially just and decolonised curriculum. Our article contributes to an existing body of work that uses collaborative and narrative methods to research issues of social justice. However, since much of the international literature on social justice education and curriculum is written in contexts far removed from our everyday experiences, we wish to make a unique contribution that is rooted in our local context and that highlights the unique experiences of South African teachers in relation to issues of social justice and the decolonisation of the curriculum.
This article is a reflection on the use of object memory in creating a collaborative artsbased narrative that explores educator experiences with transformation in higher education. The collaborative arts-based narrative that I present here emerged from my doctoral thesis in which I collaborated with participants to explore how our memories and experiences could help us understand and approach issues of social justice in education. In this article, I reflect on the way in which memory objects guided the creation of a collaborative arts-based narrative of educators' autobiographical experiences, educational encounters, and anti-oppressive education. Memory objects are used to explore educator identity, subjectivity, and experience in relation to issues of social change and social justice in higher education. Through this exploration, I hope to highlight the entanglement of context, experience, and the theoretical understandings of social justice and anti-oppressive education. The aim of this article is to reflect on how objects were used to make new connections and exciting discoveries through a collaborative narrative of memories and experiences of educators working towards social change in higher education.
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