Exploring Religious and Cultural Identities and the Right to Bodily Self-Determination in a South African Higher Education Context

Abstract

This article argues that it is essential to create safe spaces in which to explore conversations at the intersection between personal religious and cultural identities and human rights. To facilitate this exploration, located within a feminist research paradigm, an empathetic-reflectivedialogical approach is adopted to engage with pre-service teachers in a South African Higher Education Institution. Selected Bachelor of Education Honours students were encouraged to engage in selfdialogue and to write their self-narratives. Participating in Communities in Conversation, Communities in Dialogue, and Communities for Transformation provided the opportunity for empathetic-reflectivedialogical restorying to take place. This restorying has the potential to address the possible disconnection between the individual's personal identities when considering human rights issues, and in this instance, the right to bodily self-determination, and more specifically the termination of pregnancy. In doing so, the ways in which power operates in gendered relationships, often promoted by religious and cultural norms, is explored. In particular, female students found it empowering to engage with their "other" (male students). Both female and male students described this engagement as transformative. KEYWORDS empathetic-reflective-dialogical restorying; communities in conversation; communities in dialogue; communities for transformation; right to bodily self-determination 1 While it is recognised that there are more genders than the male and female binary, in the context of this study, "other" is used by the female students to refer to their male counterparts and vice versa.

Empathetic-reflective-dialogical re-storying: A teaching–learning strategy for life orientation

“…In the second cohort 39 participants engaged with the human rights to bodily self-determination and, more specifically, the termination of pregnancy. 40 Tables 1 and 2 show the questions that informed the engagement at the various levels in each small-scale project.…”