Teacher as learner: a personal reflection on a short course for South African university educators

Abstract

Higher education is understood to play a critical role in ongoing processes of social transformation in post-apartheid South Africa through the production of graduates who are critical and engaged citizens. A key challenge is that institutions of higher education are themselves implicated in reproducing the very hierarchies they hope to transform. In this paper, I reflect critically on my experiences of a course aimed at transforming teaching through transforming teachers. In this paper, I foreground my own positionality as a white female educator as I draw on feminist theorising to reflect on my experiences as a learner in the Community, Self and Identity course. I suggest that we need to teach in ways that are more cognisant of the complexities of the constraints on personal freedom in the past if we are to contribute to the development of social justice in the future.

The Scholarly Advancement of an Academic Project on Gender Justice

“…The innovative pedagogical approaches employed in the Department have also been shared more widely through sustained contributions to the scholarship of teaching and learning. Recognising the possibilities for enhancing students' agency and expertise in their own learning, the Department has embraced digital and online methodologies, and explored contemporary pedagogical approaches, including authentic learning (see, for example, Shefer & Clowes, 2015), participatory active learning, flipped classrooms, digital technologies, photovoice methodologies (Clowes, 2013(Clowes, , 2015a(Clowes, , 2015bNgabaza et al, 2013Ngabaza et al, , 2015Shefer, Ratele & Clowes, 2018). And while much of this research has developed the scholarship of teaching and learning, it has also contributed to understandings of the day-to-day challenges and constraints that students face at the University and in their classrooms Shefer, Strebel, Ngabaza & Clowes, 2018;Shefer, 2018).…”

“…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.…”

The scholarship of teaching and learning from a social justice perspective

“…The course followed on from an action research intervention that was conducted three times with students across barriers of discipline, institution, race and class (see Leibowitz et al 2012, for a full account of the student-oriented intervention) and we used many of the same educational techniques and principles in work with students and academics. The data we draw upon stem from the responses to participant feedback questionnaires to participant feedback questionnaires, reflective essays which were a requirement for completing the course, one published paper (Clowes 2013) and one conference paper authored by the academics, about their experiences of participating in the course. A total of 28 academics participated over the three years.…”

‘I act this way because why?’ Prior knowledges, teaching for change, imagining new masculinities

“…Today these long histories foregrounding 'race' continue to underpin and inform powerful discourses through contestations over 'authentic' African culture in which patriarchal behaviours are positioned as more (and egalitarian behaviours positioned as less) authentic. That teaching for diversity in contemporary South Africa continues to foreground 'race' gender, sexuality, religion ethnicity, and so on underlines just how powerful racial discourses are and does little to highlight the possibilities of feminist approaches to social justice (Clowes, 2013b). Emerging from all of this then is a popular understanding of feminism in South Africa as not simply unAfrican and anti-men but as very specifically anti-African men.…”