We have argued that there needs to be more nuance in such a system and that institutions need to be wary about the extent to which a focus on payments reduces publications to their exchange-value. The use-value of publications as contributions to knowledge becomes of secondary importance or could even be seen as a constraint on output. We have argued that the effects of the structure of incentives are particularly problematic given the complementarity between this structure and a culture of instrumentalist conceptions of research and the commodification of knowledge. Having incentives that focus on one-sided indicators, that is publication rather than knowledge dissemination, "will ultimately lower the performance of the science sector in total" (Schmoch and Schubert 2009, 165), so the consequences of these processes go far beyond individual institutions. As Macleod (2010) states:

The incentive system is a blunt instrument that serves the purposes of increasing university income rather than supporting scholarship and knowledge production in South Africa. It is essentially a managerialist solution, in which bean counting trumps over concerns for scholarship.

This study's findings echo many of the concerns in the literature (for example, Muller 2017; Tomaselli 2018; Vaughan 2008) and add the empirical data of academics' perspectives on the unintended consequences of this phenomenon. We have argued that this requires a system-level change rather than blaming individual academics who make poor choices in their desire to achieve promotion and direct incentives, or chastising universities for developing policies and practices of direct reward that mimic that of the DHET. We need to revisit the metrics used to drive knowledge production and dissemination. At present, the funding formula rewards the supply of publications without any consideration of the demand for knowledge and thereby rewards "the pursuit of mediocrity" (Vaughan 2008, 91). Looking back at our social realist underpinnings urges us to question the perverse effects of structures, such as direct incentives, that are put in place without careful thought as to the desired culture. Vaughan (2008, 96) asks a key question:

What sort of behaviour do we wish to encourage in South Africa? Should we be rewarding universities whose academics produce the greatest number of publications, without regard to quality, or should our emphasis be on a system that inspires our academics to aim for a level of scholarship which can withstand the scrutiny of an international audience?

We would hope for the latter. If we want universities to be spaces of critical knowledge production and dissemination, and if we want academics who are committed to the pursuance of that knowledge, then we need to be very careful about the structures we put in place to drive this.

 

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1 Research output per unit capita is a measurement indicator for the number of research outputs produced in a South African university. It is calculated by measuring the total number of all research outputs (publications and postgraduate graduations) by a university and then dividing that total by the total number of permanent academic staff at the university (DHET 2011).
2 NRF grant number 876460 and 94969

^rND^sAdeleye^nO. A.^rND^nC. A.^sAdebamowo^rND^sBarbour^nV.^rND^sBillot^nJ. M.^rND^nM.^sJones^rND^nM.^sBanda^rND^sBornmann^nL.^rND^nR.^sMutz^rND^sBoshoff^nN.^rND^sBozalek^nV.^rND^nC.^sBoughey^rND^sBreet^nE.^rND^nJ.^sBotha^rND^nL.^sHorn^rND^nL.^sSwartz^rND^sBunting^nI.^rND^sButler^nL.^rND^sButler^nL.^rND^sCastells^nM.^rND^sDe Jager^nP.^rND^nF.^sde Kock^rND^nP.^sVan der Spuy^rND^sGraham^nG.^rND^sHarley^nA.^rND^sHarrison^nA.-L.^rND^sHedding^nD. W.^rND^sHiggins^nJ.^rND^sKing^nD. A.^rND^sLe Grange^nL.^rND^sLee^nA. T. K.^rND^nC. A.^sSimon^rND^sMaistry^nS. M.^rND^sMcArthur^nJ.^rND^sMcGill^nM. M.^rND^nA.^sSettle^rND^sMouton^nJ.^rND^nA.^sValentine^rND^sMuller^nS. M.^rND^sMuthama^nE.^rND^nS.^sMcKenna^rND^sNeff^nM. W.^rND^sPouris^nA.^rND^sSchmoch^nU.^rND^nT.^sSchubert^rND^sShah^nA.^rND^nA.^sRajasekaran^rND^nA.^sBhat^rND^nJ. M.^sSolomon^rND^sShore^nC.^rND^sThomas^nA.^rND^nG. P.^sDe Bruin^rND^sTijdink^nJ. K.^rND^nR.^sVerbeke^rND^nY. M.^sSmulders^rND^sTomaselli^nK. G.^rND^sTownsend^nT.^rND^sVaughan^nK.^rND^sWoodiwiss^nA. J.^rND^1A01^nJugathambal^sRamdhani^rND^1A02^nSuriamurthee^sMaistry^rND^1A01^nJugathambal^sRamdhani^rND^1A02^nSuriamurthee^sMaistry^rND^1A01^nJugathambal^sRamdhani^rND^1A02^nSuriamurthee^sMaistry

ARTICLE

 

Legitimation of Poverty in School Economics Textbooks in South Africa

 

 

Jugathambal Ramdhani^I; Suriamurthee Maistry^II

^IUniversity of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Ramdhanij@ukzn.ac.za https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1401-6463
^IIUniversity of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Maistrys@ukzn.ac.za https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9623-0078

 

 

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ABSTRACT

In South Africa, the school textbook remains a powerful source of content knowledge to both teachers and learners. Such knowledge is often engaged uncritically by textbook users. As such, the worldviews and value systems in the knowledge selected for consumption remain embedded and are likely to do powerful ideological work. In this article, we present an account of the ideological orientations of knowledge in a corpus of school economics textbooks. We engage the tenets of critical discourse analysis to examine the representations of the construct "poverty" as a taught topic in the Further Education and Training Economics curriculum. Using Thompson's legitimation as a strategy and form-function analysis as specific analytical tools, we unearth the subtext of curriculum content in a selection of Grade 12 Economics textbooks. The study reveals how power and domination are normalised through a strategy of economic legitimation, thereby offering a "legitimate" rationale for the existence of poverty in the world. The article concludes with implications for curriculum and a humanising pedagogy, and a call for embracing critical knowledge on poverty in the South African curriculum.

Keywords: poverty; critical discourse analysis; ideology; legitimation; textbooks

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Introduction

The South African school curriculum is based on the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS), a policy framework that prescribes key content and skills that all South African learners should acquire before exiting the schooling system. A key challenge though is the bifurcated nature of the schooling system, with two distinct sectors: one, a small but well-functioning middle-class sector comprising well-resourced, functional schools with qualified personnel, and the other, a large dysfunctional schooling sector that services poor and working-class children (Spaull 2013). In both contexts, the school textbook (derived from the CAPS framework) continues to be an indispensable source of content knowledge. This article examines the worldviews on the content topic "poverty" that are transmitted to South African high school learners (both affluent and indigent) through the subject of Economics. In other words, it considers what legitimisations of "poverty" as studied conceptual knowledge manifest overtly, what subtexts they convey, and how critical discourse analysis (CDA) might unearth ideological persuasions not readily discernible to the untrained eye. As a point of entry into this article, a brief discussion of the state of global and South African poverty is offered with a view to contextualising this investigative focus.

The state of poverty in the world is such that half the global population is still mired in severe poverty and has access to less than 2% of the world's wealth. Because of this extreme inequality, one third of our world's population dies prematurely due to severe poverty (Pogge 2010). When an economy experiences prosperity, people who have material wealth generally do not concern themselves with those who are less prosperous. The theory of warm-glow philanthropy appears to explain the dominant motivation for why the rich disburse funds to the poor (Andreoni 2006). In such times, people also find it easy to accept the neoliberal belief that an economy adopting a market-driven approach and a social welfare system, together with a strict work ethic, can make an individual more prosperous (Lucio, Jefferson, and Peck 2016). While Erler (2012) asserts that the discourse on the plight of poor people draws on narratives that emphasise structural and contextual elements more than psychological and moral ones, neoliberal discourses foreground the individual as primarily responsible for her plight (Harvey 2007).

A prominent manner in which poverty is constructed and argued for is through the use of an economic discourse (see Avalos 1992; Bedard 1989; Bundy 2016; Minujin and Nandy 2012). This may refer to how economic systems create barriers for the poor to access institutions in society that offer, among others, employment, schooling, shelter, healthcare and security. Barriers to "gain economic power to achieve change" (Bradshaw 2007, 11) prevent economic advancement that could otherwise occur through "redevelopment, business attraction or enterprise zones" (Bradshaw 2007, 8) and entrepreneurship. It might also include "structural failings" (Bradshaw 2007, 12) of economic systems as well as constraints that prevent individuals from "making choices and investments" (Bradshaw 2007, 12) to maximise their well-being. Arguments against social welfare to assist the poor, systems that limit opportunities and resources to gain income and economic security, and capitalism or free enterprise that encourages unemployment and low wages through segregation of the poor also form part of economic discourses that posit a particular understanding of poverty (Bradshaw 2007, 12). The legitimisation of poverty using economic discourses is evident in the reliance on factors such as individual responsibility, structural limitations, discriminations within the economic system, and social welfare and globalisation. These economic discourses might stem from a neoliberal rationale that encourages individuals to become active players in the market, satisfying their own needs and accepting responsibility for their own economic problems (Lucio, Jefferson, and Peck, 2016).

Arguments that move beyond the individual point to structural limitations as preventing the poor from gaining access to the world of work and economic emancipation (Albrecht and Albrecht 2000). The economic system is designed to make it difficult for the poor to achieve economic independence (Bradshaw 2007). Economic-related reasons for poverty are attributed to the limitations caused by discrimination on the grounds of "race" and gender, and the segregation that resulted from economic changes after World War II (Albrecht and Albrecht 2000). The cyclical nature of poverty also suggests that patterns of inequality tend to repeat themselves over time (Pacheco and Pultzer 2008). Despite these repeated patterns, Pogge reminds us that the international response has not been successful in disrupting this persistent repetition (Pogge 2010). He is critical of institutional reports on poverty, suggesting that the report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which declares that over one billion people are chronically undernourished, is not treated with the gravity it deserves, especially when the World Bank asserts that its progress in eradicating poverty is "impressive" (Pogge 2010, 4). The world will not make real progress against poverty unless powerful advocates commit themselves to eradicating it (Pogge and Sengupta 2014).

In South Africa, poverty levels increased from 2011 to 2015 (Lehohla 2017). Since 2011, poverty levels have risen from 53.2% to 55.5% in 2015, which amounts to a staggering 30.4 million people who are deemed poor. While documented statistics on poverty are available in various forms and several theories and explanations are proffered, there is little research on how poverty is constructed in school textbooks used to teach economics to South African learners. It is concerning that Streib, Ayala, and Wixted (2017) have found that poverty and social class inequality are portrayed in the media as "legitimate" and as "appropriate and fair" (2016, 1). They assert that the media portrays poverty and class inequality, particularly in children's movies, as "benign" (16). Poverty is framed as non-threatening. Such portrayals are problematic because they mask the realities people are exposed to in their lives (Streib, Ayala, and Wixted 2017). The extant field of poverty theory is expansive. For a critical discussion of contemporary theories, see Ramdhani (2018), and David Brady's (2019) very recent synthesis of the key causes of poverty in which he classifies theories of poverty into three main categories, namely, behavioural, structural and political.

 

Research Problem

While statistical data on poverty are available, the extent to which poverty is understood and how it is interpreted, as well as the specific definitions presented for public consumption, are still uncertain in the South African context. Poverty as a content topic features in the subject Economics in the Further Education and Training Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS). CAPS offers a skeletal description of key topics and sub-topics to be taught. The textbook serves as an important source of disciplinary knowledge on topics such as poverty. In this article, we report on a study that examined portrayals of poverty in contemporary school economics textbooks in South Africa.

The Department of Basic Education (DBE) recognises the textbook as an effective resource for ensuring uniformity in content coverage. In the Action Plan to 2014: Towards the Realisation of Schooling 2025, the DBE (2011) emphasised the importance of ensuring that every learner has access to textbooks and that teachers are required to use textbooks in the teaching process. However, this emphasis on the textbook policy pays minimum attention to the ideological messages embedded in textbooks' content. Although textbooks play an important role in schools, they are not impartial resources (Apple and Christian-Smith 1991; Williams 1989). The concept of a "selective tradition" is used to describe how compilers of textbooks decide to include certain meanings and to omit others (Williams 1989). The content selected is then passed off as "the tradition [or] the significant past", thereby retaining the dominance of a specific set of power relations both in the economy and in the political institutions of society (Apple and Christian-Smith 1991, 3). Studies on ideological underpinnings in economics textbooks have been rare. Early research focused on the readability of economics textbooks (Gallagher and Thompson 1981; McConnell 1982). A study of introductory economics textbooks over a 10-year period (1974-1984) by Feiner and Morgan (1987) revealed the under-representation of women and minorities in the textbooks, a phenomenon also confirmed by Robson (2001). Some later research on economics textbooks focused on how specific topics such as economic dumping (Rieber 2010) and entrepreneurship (Phipps, Strom, and Baumol 2012) were framed as content to be studied.

In the only study that dealt specifically with depictions of poverty, Clawson indicates that the portrayal of poverty in economics textbooks was dominated by depictions of poverty among black people (Clawson 2002). The gap that this article wishes to address relates to the rationales for the existence of poverty that are presented in South African school textbooks, teaching artefacts that are derived from prescriptions in the South African school curriculum.

As a political institution of society, the South African Ministry of Education views education as a means to eradicate poverty, as can be seen in the rhetoric used to state the goals of the National Development Plan (DBE 2016). The ministry contends that the eradication of poverty is inhibited by economic constraints (DBE 2016). The education sector notes severe poverty among children and declares a commitment to addressing this poverty within schools. Severe poverty, however, persists, especially in the African community. A dualistic schooling system still exists within the education sector (Spaull 2013). One caters for the wealthy that is functional, while the other is for the poor and, in many instances, is dysfunctional (Spaull 2013, 14). That schoolchildren (including millions who are poor) are the recipients of state-sanctioned knowledge (via textbooks) on poverty presents a complex and compelling problematic, namely, discerning specifically what ideological legitimisations of poverty are packaged for consumption by South African learners.

In essence, the research problem that this article attempts to address arises from the multiplicity of possible explanations of poverty that prevail, the fact that this topic/concept is taught to a large section of South African learners who are in fact victims of poverty, and that there is limited knowledge of what strains of poverty theory permeate the programmatic curriculum (school textbooks) for South African learners. While we note that concepts such as economic development or inequality could well have been the research focus, these appear as broader, overarching, meta topic areas in the school economics curriculum, whereas "poverty" is foregrounded as a key economic phenomenon signalled for mandatory in-depth study.

 

A Brief Methodological Note

This study drew on the tenets of critical discourse analysis (CDA), which, according to McGregor (2003), has its roots in Habermas's (1973) Critical Theory. It allows us to understand the issues that plague societies dominated by mainstream ideology and power relationships. Conventional ideology and power relationships are preserved and maintained by the words and language in texts (McGregor 2003). For the purposes of this article, we adopted the perspective of ideology as described by Thompson (1990, 58), who explains that meaning underpinned by "symbolic forms serves to establish and sustain relations of domination". This article recognises that symbolic forms encompass a wide array of "actions and utterances, images and texts, which are produced by subjects and recognized by them and others as meaningful constructs" (59). The linguistic utterances and expressions written, in this regard, in the textbooks mask the representations of power, hegemony and the social construction of poverty. We extracted the meaning behind these utterances using "form-function analysis", "language in context analysis" and "situated meaning analysis" (Gee 2005, 54-55). The intention of CDA is to reveal the socio-political assumptions embedded in the language found in text and oral speech (for a detailed account of CDA tools of analysis of language, see McGregor 2003).

CDA is a theoretical tool used to "make sense of the ways in which people make meaning in educational contexts" and to "answer questions about the relationships between language and society" (Rogers et al. 2005, 373). Because "language is a social practice", and because not all habits, customs, or traditions in society are treated equally, it is imperative that we investigate how language is used to construct certain realities (Rogers et al. 2005, 367). The tools adopted in language can be located "everywhere" and are always "political" (Gee 2005, 1). The word "political" refers to "how social goods are thought about, argued over and distributed in society" (Gee 2005, 2). Our world "is constantly and actively being constructed and reconstructed" (Gee 2011, 29). The term "politics" is used to explain the distribution of social goods to certain people, groups and institutions at the expense of others (Gee 2011, 31). It is important to note that CDA is not without its critics. It is often criticised for being too exploratory, interpretive and politically motivated and lacking the rigour that quantitative protocols for empirical research offer (Flick 2009).

In this article the mode of analysis employed attempts to ascertain the legitimation strategies (Ferguson et al. 2009; Thompson 1990) used by textbook writers to legitimate poverty in the selected textbooks. Legitimation is the act of making something lawful and authorial, and illustrates how certain worldviews become considered "right and proper" (Tyler 2006, 376). Three techniques are typically used to legitimate preferred positions. The first, rationalisation, is where power relations are justified because reasonable explanation/s can be provided (Ferguson et al. 2009, 897; Thompson 1990, 62). The second strategy is that of "universalisation" (Ferguson et al. 2009, 897; Thompson 1990, 62). Here, the interests of a few are projected as the interests of all. The concept of legitimacy is built on the conviction of a "common interest" that goes beyond private and partial benefits (Easton 1965, 312-19; Gilley 2006, 502). The third strategy is that is of "narrativisation", in which past "traditions and stories" are offered as treasures to be cherished. These three strategies work in concert to legitimise certain value positions.

The table below shows the textbooks sampled for this study. These Grade 11 Economics textbooks were in use at the time the study was conducted and were sanctioned by the DBE.

 

 

With regard to ethical issues related to this study, due University of KwaZulu-Natal ethical clearance protocol was followed. As the textbooks are in the public domain, there was no necessity for gatekeeper permission that might apply to other empirical studies.

In the section that follows, we present one aspect of the findings of the larger study, namely that of economic legitimation as it relates to the manifestation of poverty as a concept. This brief methodology section describes the methodological approach from a meta-level. It must be noted that a systematic sorting and coding of data from the corpus of five textbooks was undertaken. For explicit details of the research protocol followed for the entire study, see Ramdhani (2018). For the purpose of this article, sample data that are germane to the argument we make have been selected and presented.

In the section that follows, legitimation strategies used by the selected economics textbooks are presented.

 

Economic Legitimation of Poverty through the Strategy of Rationalisation

In the five economics textbooks, the theme of rationalisation emerges through various themes and sub-themes. These include the following: discrimination in the economic and social systems, structural limitations, individuals bring on their own problems (deficit of need for achievement, genetically poor intelligence, laziness and irresponsibility), the effects of globalisation, access and proximity to resources, capitalism and low wages, prices of goods and a lack of infrastructure.

Discrimination in Economic and Social Systems to Rationalise Economic Legitimation of Poverty

The findings reveal that the economic system provided the foundation for discrimination (see sample data of independent and dependent clauses below). This is evident in Book A, Book B, Book C, Book D, and Book E. Below are extracts from the texts with form-function analysis:

Despite all efforts, income distribution is still not equitable [independent].

A mixed economy still faces problems of unemployment, inflation and business cycles.

Workers are still exploited in the private sector [independent]. This contributes to income inequality, increased poverty and human rights abuses.

Because the government controls the legislative process, there is a risk that it could provide excessive social and welfare services with excessive taxation of the private sector [independent]. These taxes, together with increased public sector enterprises, may reduce the private sector contribution and lead to decreased economic growth and job creation. (Book A, 58-59)

In South Africa discrimination [independent] played a great part in creating poverty [dependent] among certain groups. During apartheid [independent] the government discriminated [dependent] on the basis of race, ethnic group and gender. Few opportunities were given to some groups to obtain well-paid jobs, adequate housing, a good education or health care [independent]. (Book B, 189)

The free market [independent] is possibly the best way of solving the problem of unequal distribution [dependent] whereby new businesses create new jobs for previously disadvantaged people. However, markets take time to equalize wealth and income even after democracy has had a chance to improve matters by reducing discrimination [independent]. In such instances, the government [independent] is often called upon to the tackle the problem [dependent] head on. In South Africa economic redress is applied to improve the standard of living of all people. This is done by improving everyone's access to economic resources through equal opportunity [independent]. (Book C, 164)

To address the issue of unequal distribution of wealth and income, and poor productivity rates [dependent], we need more [independent] than just anti-discriminatory regulations. Participation and access by marginalized groups need to be increased at all levels of the economy in South Africa [independent] to redress the imbalances in the ownership and control of South Africa's resources [dependent]. (Book D, 24)

Disadvantages of a market economy.

The distribution of income is unfair, the rich become richer and the poor may be poorer. (Book E, 48)

The economic practice of discrimination is an apparent rational explanation for poverty. The theme is prevalent in the texts and can be seen through the use of words in independent and dependent clauses such as "discrimination" (Book B, 188; Book C, 164; Book D, 24; Book E, 48) and "not equitable" (Book A, 58-59). Discrimination is present in the disparity in income in the mixed economic system. The disparity is presented through the clauses, the context, and the justification for poverty. The following phrases taken from independent and dependent clauses show disparity in the distribution of income and make explicit references to poverty in South Africa: "disadvantages of mixed economies" (Book A, 58-59), "In South Africa discrimination" (Book B, 188), "The free market is possibly the best way of solving" (Book C, 164), "more than just anti-discriminatory regulations" (Book D, 24) and "distribution of income is unfair" (Book E, 48). The importance of privatisation is affirmed through the insinuation that the free market surpasses the current mixed economies of private and public (Books A, B, D and E) and all other economic systems as well.

The dependent clauses in Book A (58-59) above state the following: "Despite all efforts, income distribution is still not equitable", "still faces problems of unemployment, inflation and business cycles", and "excessive social and welfare services". The independent clauses assert the authority of the system and the regulations of the system. These assertions are linguistic illustrations of legitimate reasons for the existence of increased poverty.

The argument presented is that the mixed economy apparently encourages disparity in the distribution of income, which should be accepted as normal. What is noteworthy is the contradiction introduced with the use of the word "despite". The word "despite" (Book A, 58-59) apparently shifts attention away from the "efforts" that have been made to distribute income equitably, but it is not clear from the text what efforts have been made and which group is served by these efforts. In contrast, the word "still" (Book A, 58-59) emphasises the persistence of the problems of gaining employment in the market under a mixed system. The repetition of the word "still" (Book A, 58-59) appears to reinforce the system that legitimates private business mistreatment of the workers, and explains the increase in poverty. Book A (58-59) seems to validate this rationale by explaining that the mixed economic system contributes to poor "efficiency" and does not "reduce poverty speedily". Invariably, this subscribes to the thinking that there is unfairness and discrimination inherent in the mixed economic system.

Poverty is rationalised by presenting the disadvantages of a mixed economic system and it is apparent that a free market is favoured in Book C (164). This text states that the situation of poor people is possibly due to discrimination arising from not having access to "equal opportunities" to wealth and income. The words "the free market is possibly the best way" (Book C, 164) influence the reader's acceptance of the discrimination inherent in the choice of an economic system. Book D (24) is in agreement with this way of explaining the lack of "access by marginalized groups" due to inequity in the "distribution of wealth and income" arising from a lack of "participation" in the economy.

Poverty is explained using the rationalisation of prejudice, as indicated by the word "discrimination" in Book B (189). The findings demonstrate that prejudice was practised using racial, cultural and gender categorisations. The implication is that the marginalised groups did not get access to jobs that paid well, decent homes and respectable education and health care. In Book B (188), with respect to the distribution of "opportunities" in terms of access to "well-paid jobs, adequate housing, a good education or health care", discrimination and unfairness seem to be the basis of the explanation. The phrases "distribution of income is unfair" (Book E, 48) and "the poor may be poorer" (Book E, 48) appear to support the theme of discrimination being used to explain and rationalise the existence of situations of unequal access, and hence the prevalence of poverty in South Africa.

In Book E (48), the discussion is about the "disadvantages of a market economy", but the use of the word "may" in this discussion creates uncertainty for the reader. This apparent uncertainty is evident in the boldness of the title, which can be seen as a strategy of "topicalisation" (McGregor 2003, 5). Topicalisation places a particular sentence or words in a topic spot, and thus influences the reader to think in a particular way. In this instance, the reader is being manipulated to think of the free market as the market of choice. However, ambiguity is introduced with the use of the word "may", which creates uncertainty that discrimination in the free market is responsible for the fact that "the rich become richer and the poor may be poorer" (Book E, 48). The ambiguity creates uncertainty about whether the free market situation could worsen poverty. There is an implicit favouring of the free market as the system of choice. The implication is that in Books A, B, C, D and E, the economic practice of discrimination is used to explain poverty in the texts. Discrimination against the poor within the free market system (capitalism) is promoted through unethical behaviour.

The recurring theme of the segregation of marginalised people is observed in clauses in Book A (58-59), B (188), C (164), D (24) and E (48). The solution to inequality is the free market system, according to the texts. This proposition may influence the reader's acceptance of the discrimination in the choice of an economic system.

Structural Limitations Used to Rationalise the Legitimation of Poverty

Structural factors limit the opportunities for employment and provide a reasonable explanation for the poverty that exists in South Africa. These structural factors were listed with groups of words in the independent clauses in Books A, B, C, D and E. A list of potential structural explanations was identified in the texts. These were used to explain the economic structures that are given prominence and placed in independent clauses, such as "income inequality" (Book A, 158), "economic growth" (Book B, 190), "[c]ertain structures which exist in the economy such as access to markets" (Book C, 26), "economically marginalized" and "excluded from the decision-making processes in the economy" (Book D, 24), and "production in Africa" (Book E, 240).

While both Book A (158) and Book B (190) cite the issue of "unemployment" as a dependent clause, Book A offers the explanation that this results from the widening of the "rich-poor gap", whereas Book B (190) explains that "reducing unemployment can alleviate poverty". The explanation in Book B goes further by naming the policies of the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Act (GEAR) used by the government to reduce unemployment. Book A (158) and Book C (26) both list the subject of unequal access to the market through resources. Book A (158) and Book D (24) list the matter of probable gender discrimination against women as another explanation. Book A, while it has structural factors in common with Books B, C and D as discussed in the previous sentence, also deviates from them by including "education", "family size", "cultural and personal preference", "inheritance" and "globalization" (158) with the structural factors. Book E (48), while displaying an understanding of probable structural factors and providing a very brief explanation for poverty, cites the matter of "production in Africa is so low" as a reason for the persistence of poverty.

The structural limitations present in the texts are as follows: Book A (158) cites the issues of a shortage of skills and education and gender discrimination with regard to access to the labour market. These are the underlying reasons for income disparity between the affluent and the poor. Book D is similar to Book A in naming discrimination against women. Book D posits the exclusion of women's voices from the "decision-making processes in the economy" (Book D, 24) as an explanation for their non-participation in the economy. Book B (190) uses policies such as the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) to justify the current situation regarding the position of the poor. In other words, the explanation provided is that although these policies have been implemented, a disparity in income still exists. Book C (26) gives details relating to "access to the markets" and the existence of "monopolies" as structural factors that explain the marginalisation of the poor. Book E (240) puts forth the slump in "production in Africa" as a structural factor that can be used to explain the difficulty in "finding solutions to high levels of poverty". The context of feasible structural limitations contained in the discourse of Books A to E is given as the reason for poverty.

Individual Deficits Used to Rationalise and Legitimate Poverty

The findings from Book A, B, C, D and E reveal that the strategy of legitimation is based on individual problems. Each of these books use individual factors as independent clauses to emphasise this, thereby justifying the existence of poverty.

In this paragraph, we look at the words and groups of words from independent clauses in each of the texts. Book A includes a discourse relating to "diseases" (206), indicating that the condition of poverty may be attributed to the ill health of individuals, which "decrease[s] the amount of work" (206) a person is able to perform. The text rationalises poor health, and specifically HIV and AIDs, as the likely cause of "reducing their income and driving them deeper into poverty" (206). It is also seen as a factor "which can cut off a main source of income for the family" (206). Book B's rationalisation for poverty is that "individuals may become discouraged by poverty, and they lose their self-esteem and confidence, because they cannot provide for themselves and their families" (188). This discourse may well be ambiguous. On the one hand, the implication is individuals are not encouraged to find ways to elevate their status in life. On the other hand, the discourse begins by contending that "the main impact of poverty is personal, because the most affected is the one who is poor" (188). Such ambiguity may confuse the reader insofar as it attributes poverty to individual apathy. Book B goes on to explain that this apathy could continue if the social grant is "too high" (188).

Book C, like Books A and B, looks to the individual to explain poverty. The findings in Book C claim that "endless opportunities exist for anyone to become rich, yet so few people seem able to do so-while the rich get richer, the poor get poorer" (Book C, 157). The use of the word "yet" (157) implies that even though economic opportunities exist, the poor have low achievement levels and this is the reason for their poverty. The reader is being channelled to think in this way and this is clear from the instruction that follows: "[w]ith this in mind, attempt to answer the following questions" (157). This logic is reinforced by the further reasoning that if "three million black middle class adults" (157) could take advantage of the economic opportunities, why is it the poor are not able to do this? This is clear from question two of the activities, which requires answers to the following question: "What factors are hampering poor people from obtaining their share of South Africa's wealth?" (157).

Similar attitudes are evident in Book D (121) where it is argued that the "government spends about 6% of GDP on education and South Africa's teachers are among the highest paid in the world (in purchasing power parity terms) but, despite this, quality of education remains a problem. Literacy and numeracy tests scores are low by African and global standards." The use of the words "despite this" may influence the reader into thinking that the problem of poverty should not be blamed on the government but rather on the individuals' lack of initiative to increase their proficiency in language and mathematics. This rationale is carried forward in Book E, where individuals are held responsible for their poor economic position "because they do not have the appropriate skills" (37-38), and further that "even if you do give them the skills, it will take ten to twenty years for them to find jobs" (37-38). The words "yet" (Book C, 157), "but" (Book D, 121), "they" and "even if" (Book E, 37-38) insinuate that poverty is due to individuals not taking advantage of opportunities, and suggest an unwillingness on the part of the poor to relinquish their status. The discourse in Books A, B, C, D and E relies on the agency of the individual, and not the socio-economic context, to explain poverty.

The Effects of Globalisation Used to Rationalise the Legitimacy of Poverty

The strategy of using controversies surrounding globalisation as independent clauses and as institutional factors that explain poverty is prevalent in Books A, B, C, D and E. The justification is explicit in some cases and indirect in others. The negative effects of globalisation as a probable cause of poverty is advocated very strongly in Book A. On page 208, the discourse manipulates the reader to accept that poverty exists because of "lack of education, malnutrition, violence inside and outside their homes, child labour and diseases". This situation is apparently due to "the global financial crisis ... a global problem from which we in South Africa cannot escape" and which "has a huge effect on child poverty". The reasoning is that poverty is a result of global challenges that exist throughout the world, and not only in South Africa. This manipulation in Book A is also evident in Book B. Book B's (222) position is that through the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), Africa is being marginalised in the globalisation process. The apparent argument is that Africa should pursue "its full and beneficial integration into the global economy". The text bullets one of the chief objects of NEPAD as eliminating poverty (222), but offers no explanations or details, which may suggest that NEPAD will not be able to eradicate poverty. However, the linking of the three objectives of NEPAD may imply that through growth and development, as well as increased participation in the global arena, NEPAD may eradicate poverty in Africa.

We also uncovered an incidental reference to globalisation in Book C (26), which occurs in a discussion that compares the "development and standard of living" of countries within Africa. This text does not use the words global or globalisation but the use of the words "African countries" suggests a comparative African approach. It also suggests that a low economic growth rate and increased populations appear to be the reason for the poverty crisis in African countries.

Book D uses an ambiguous discussion of globalisation to validate potentially the existence of poverty. On the one hand, the position is that "the natural resources of poor countries are often exploited by richer countries" (225). On the other hand, Book D asserts that the "fight against poverty can only be won if it is a global effort, with the richer countries supporting the poor countries in their fight against poverty" (225). The implication is that poor countries are dependent on affluent nations to solve their poverty predicament. Book E (251) uses a straightforward approach to vindicate and support globalisation as being "able to reduce the poverty level by a large margin".

Access and Proximity to Resources Used to Rationalise Poverty

A strategy of legitimation used to rationalise poverty, which Books A, B, C, D and E share to a greater or lesser extent, relates to access to, and the proximity of, resources. Book A emphasises the "lack of productive resources" (206) by placing the writing in bold and also by crafting the words "in poor countries, there are not enough productive resources" (206) as an independent clause. This topicalising and inclusion as an independent clause are intended to rationalise the reality of poverty. The text positions poor countries' lack of access to resources that can increase production as a possible reason for poverty. These resources include the following: first, human resources are insufficient due to impoverishment, health issues and low education levels; second, poor maintenance of natural resources; third, a lack of infrastructure in "poor rural villages" as a result of short-term economic decisions that do not favour saving; and finally, "[e]ntrepreneurship is non-existent, because of a lack of education and skills development" (206).

The positioning of access to resources to rationalise poverty also materialises in Book C and Book E. On page seven, Book C uses the following words as a heading: "Accessibility of the Economically Marginalised Groups". Book E includes the issue of access to resources by subscribing to the following definition of poverty: "Poverty can be defined as a condition in which a person or a family does not have the resources to satisfy basic needs such as food, shelter, transport and clothing" (175). Book B asserts that the government may be able to provide better access to resources and, therefore, reduce poverty by giving consent for "projects to be started and that as soon as these projects become economically viable, they can be privatized" (56-57). Book D relies on the issue of development to explain the "access to basic needs" (175) by the poor. The implication is that not having access to and not being within the vicinity of resources is a justification for poverty.

Using Capitalism to Rationalise Poverty

Capitalism is also used as a strategy to legitimate poverty. Book A (52) states that one of the disadvantages of a free market system is that "the distribution of income is not equitable". Wealth that is created apparently goes to those with capital. Hence, the rich become richer and the poor become poorer. The unemployed, sick, and homeless suffer. To convince the reader, a detailed explanation is provided to illustrate the disadvantages of capitalism, and this is presented using bullets. These include the following: first, "[r]esources are often under-utilised or not efficiently utilised". Second, "the distribution of income is not equitable". Third, "the freedom of choice does not apply to the poor". Fourth, "the profit motive can lead to the exploitation of workers". Fifth, "the use of technology and capital leads to increased unemployment levels and poverty". Sixth, "freedom of enterprise can lead to under-provision of merit goods" and "the market economy has no mechanism for reducing the equalities between the rich and the poor" (Book A, 52). These independent clauses emphasise the reasons for poverty under capitalism.

Book B discusses the problems of capitalism and the need for the involvement of the government. The discussion ends with the following quiet insertion: "As soon as these projects become economically viable, they can be privatized" (Book B, 56-57). This style of writing paradoxically both blames capitalism for poverty and vindicates it as a means of ending poverty. Books B, C, D and E all argue in this paradoxical manner, with the likely intention to confuse the reader into believing that poverty exists because of capitalism, but capitalism is required to end it. This is evident in the activity given in Book D, with two questions on capitalism and one question concerning the command system and the poor. The context of capitalism as a discourse is applied as a potential explanation for the situation of the poor. The apparent presentation of the definition of capital as neutral may be misleading. The reader may be led to a false understanding that capitalism's only role is to obtain and utilise capital to enable financial and economic operations. However, the apparent social power of wealth distribution and its accompanying effects that exploit the poor are masked.

Low Wages, Prices of Goods and Poor Infrastructure to Rationalise the Legitimacy of Poverty

The findings show Books A, B, C, D and E use low wages, the prices of goods, and poor infrastructure as a strategy to rationalise poverty. These texts prioritise certain economic instruments to explain the possible poverty of people relative to low wages and consumption. The following quotations from independent clauses are used in the texts: "A country's income distribution" (Book A, 157) and "the standard of living in developing countries is generally low-mostly due to low income" (Book E, 159). These clauses explain the disparity in spending between the rich and the poor. The discourse in both texts (A and E) comments on the disparity in spending between the rich and the poor, with the poor having difficulty in purchasing basic or essential items of food. We believe it is reasonable to assume that this disparity in spending is attributed to the differences in income between the rich and the poor, with the poor having a very low income. The rich have access to a variety of products and choices. The poor are denied access to goods and services as well as infrastructure. These patterns of denial are carried through in the following discourse contained in Books B, C, and D. Book B (11) contains the following quotations from independent clauses: "[g]ood jobs, earnings, and allowances", "[r]ecent economic growth", "[a] lack of economic opportunity", and "[t]he informal sector". These clauses are used to explain the inability of the poor to take advantage of the products and services in the manufacturing sector. These independent clauses reveal the following:

• First, an apparent acknowledgement of the importance of having a decent income for the poor;

• Second, that this denial of access to a decent income probably fuels labour unrest;

• Third, that the challenges in the labour market are recognised as a "development issue" (11) for South Africa that has been topical for the past 20 years;

• Fourth, that the informal and formal sector roles may have an impact, with the informal sector playing a significant role in creating income for "70-90%" (11) of the people.

"Marginalized groups" (Book C, 26), "example" and "income elasticity" (Book D, 109) are used to explain the expenditure of the poor on essential goods. The implication is that this is due to low wages or a lack of wages. Book D speaks of "economically marginalized" (Book D, 109) people. Here, the example of a candle is used, an essential item that is required by marginalised people who do not have access to electricity. The change in demand for such an essential item is affected by changes in the income of the poor. In Book E (159), the standard of living of marginalised people is captured as "low income that results in poverty" and "people who struggle to meet their basic needs". The implication of the discourse on low wages, the price of goods, and the lack of infrastructure is that these present presumed reasons for poverty.

 

Discussion

Although Brady categorises poverty theories into three distinct groupings (behavioural, structural and political), he laments the somewhat insular manner in which researchers in these sub-fields work to negate or nullify one another's hypotheses (Brady 2019). He argues instead for integration and greater interdisciplinarity as scholars of poverty. It must be noted that writers of school economics textbooks (usually experienced school teachers and economics curriculum specialists/advisors in South Africa) may not be poverty specialists. As such, the causes of poverty and the theoretical bases for such causes are not comprehensively articulated nor effectively categorised. It is also important to recognise that poverty is only one of an array of topics that feature in the school curriculum. It might thus be unfair to expect nuanced/sophisticated explanations of poverty that might be found in a textbook exclusively on poverty. Textbook authors appropriate existing theories of poverty deemed to be constructively aligned to the content specifications of the CAPS, the national policy statement that spells out the state's ideological orientation. This "worthy" and "valued" knowledge is selected and programmed for study by school learners. The Department of Basic Education sets up content vetting committees to assess the validity and relevance of textbook content, a screening process that attends to issues of content accuracy and unwarranted bias and prejudice as it relates to race and gender in particular. This latter emphasis is particularly salient in the South African context given the country's history of racial prejudice and contemporary gender discrimination. While these appear as commendable objectives of such screening committees, the data and the analysis presented above suggest that less overt bias as it relates to the subliminal messages embedded in state-sanctioned content goes completely undetected. Textbook publishers, in their quest to remain on preferred, officially sanctioned and recommended catalogues, adhere tightly to CAPS prescriptions and proceed to compile their texts accordingly. It is in essence a strategic compliance so as to be favourably positioned in the lucrative school textbook market.

So, while textbook content selection is presented as transparent and state-approved, there is much to be concerned about in terms of what is projected as truths in disciplinary subject fields where there are stark theoretical contestations. It may be reasonable to argue that school textbook publishers (and their commissioned writers) may not be consciously culpable and that there may have been no malicious intent at the time of writing. It does, however, raise concern, given that particular distortions (of truths) are in fact prevalent in the selection of school textbooks under study, that similar patterns might be at work in other school subjects. Of importance are the implications that these findings have for the various stakeholders in the textbook production and consumption enterprise.

Through an intense and rigorous CDA protocol, this study was able to discern that poverty is legitimated using the legitimating strategies described above and that the causes of poverty are presented to the potential reader in a somewhat random fashion. In essence then, while the various articulations of the causes of poverty might well fall into any of Brady's three sub-categories (behavioural, structural or political), these explanations live at a somewhat superficial level. This study revealed how particular legitimating strategies work as convincing mechanisms or techniques to position particular truths. In this instance, it becomes clear that through distinctive linguistic sequencing and discourse appropriations, the concept of poverty is packaged and dispensed for consumption by the users of such textbooks. The purpose of the study was to expose what explanations of poverty prevail and what biases may be prevalent. The notion of a truthful representation is relative and possibly even elusive. What the article argues for is that textbooks should attempt to provide a balanced perspective on why poverty exists in society. This raises the issue of what this might imply for curriculum and pedagogy.

How might schoolteachers, subject advisors, examiners, or teacher educators, for example, detect and respond to ideological biases and distorted worldviews that may be evident in South African school textbooks? A somewhat "sinister" sub-plot as revealed by the focus of this study is that the poor (learners) are taught particular accounts of why poverty exists, some of which indict them for their current condition. Given that almost 65% of South Africans live below the poverty line (Lehohla 2017), classrooms are inhabited by children from varying socio-economic backgrounds, including children who hail from indigent families. It thus becomes necessary for teachers to develop high levels of sensitivity about whom their learners are. Importantly, it might well mean that teachers have to develop particular pedagogic practices that respond to their learners in a manner that is inclusive and ensures that the dignity of all children is preserved as economics is taught as a school subject. A humanising pedagogy, one that recognises and values learners as human beings and is critical of the subtext of content being dispensed, is vital (Khene 2014).

The findings of this study also have implications for teacher education. While the focus was exclusively on economics textbooks, it is reasonable to expect that the content of other school subjects (History, Geography, Business Studies) might also present controversial subtext. Teacher education needs to take cognisance of critical textbook usage as teacher preparation programmes are designed for and taught to preservice teachers. It becomes clear that teacher education must move beyond developing technical competences of teacher trainees. The issue of what to teach and how to teach (especially contentious subject material) must also receive due attention. These insights are also applicable to in-service teacher education programmes (continuing professional development) that are offered by subject advisors. Similarly, the school textbook publishing industry whose content selections determine the type of knowledge to be studied by school learners needs to be sensitive to the socio-economic contexts in which their products are used.

 

Conclusion

In this article we reported on a study that examined the legitimisations of poverty in school economics textbooks. We revealed how linguistic techniques and discourses work to legitimise particular worldviews. We exposed how ideological content might be presented as neutral and drew attention to the need for the various users of school textbooks to be vigilant of the subtext of what is presented as harmless knowledge. This study has implications for future research into, for example, how competencies to discern ideological bias might be inculcated in the South African schooling sector, which is hugely dependent on textbooks. A particularly disturbing revelation in this study was the subliminal messages about poverty that might be projected to the marginalised poor.

 

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ARTICLE

 

"Hiding within the Glass Cage": Performance Management as Surveillance-A Case of Academic Spaces as Resistance Spaces

 

 

Sadi Mokhaneli Seyama

University of Johannesburg, South Africa sseyama@uj.ac.za https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5234-0555

 

 

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ABSTRACT

Universities have become toxic sites characterised by anxiety, depression and humiliation. Following new managerialism, leadership and management in universities have been driven by the mandate of achieving efficiency, which has led to the implementation of stringent performance management systems, increasing accountability and authoritarianism. While performance management is justified as an accountability tool that drives efficiency and effectiveness, its demand for absolute transparency has created "panopticons" and "glass cages". These have produced a stifling atmosphere in academic spaces, often characterised by competing demands for high research outputs and quality teaching, thus placing academics in subjected positions where their agency is threatened. In view of academics silently constructing uncontrolled and uncontrollable spaces to avoid increasing surveillance, I argue that academics are resisting universities' demand for the invading transparency of performance management. Through a critical social constructionist case study of academics and heads of departments, this article explores the paradoxical position of performing academics-those functioning within the "performative culture" while undermining neoliberal performative inscriptions. Framed by the notion of power and resistance and drawing on critical geography and workplace resistance literature, the study reveals that academics' acts are going against the controlled daily grind of systematised practices that are often meaningless in relation to quality education. They are reimagining and reconstructing lecture halls, stairs, offices and conference spaces as "invisible" free spaces outside direct managerial control.

Keywords: performance management; academia; university; power; resistance; space; panopticon; glass cage

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Introduction

This article interrogates how academics are responding to a surveilled and controlled performance management (PM) culture, which has turned universities into toxic sites characterised by anxiety, depression, and humiliation. I argue that although academics are confined in the "panopticons" and "glass cages" of PM in universities, they are silently creating free spaces of resistance. Universities in South Africa adopted academic PM as a managerial strategy to ensure the achievement of higher education's (HE) transformational imperatives (Cloete 2014). A complex context of redressing historical inequalities of access and quality while simultaneously responding to the fast-paced, competitive global educational trends and shrinking financial resources has obliged universities to adopt corporate managerial practices. Consequently, universities have redefined structures and processes that drive institutional performance to ensure accountability and foster efficiency and effectiveness (Davis, Jansen van Rensburg, and Venter 2016). As one of the strategies to achieve accountability, academic PM serves to align all performances with institutional objectives. PM is a human resources tool, which creates a process of determining and appraising employees' performance in line with institutional strategic goals (Lorenz 2012). The PM process in universities is target-driven, scale-rated, tied to achievement rewards and requires transparent accountability through quantifiable measures (Ball 2016). Even though managerial practices, including PM, are justified as accountability tools that drive efficiency and effectiveness, they are negatively affecting universities' key functions of teaching, research and community engagement (Teelken 2012).

Unintended though it may be, within the South African context these PM practices are becoming subtle disciplinary forms that, through the manipulation of rewards and punishment, are confining and subjugating academics (Seyama and Smith 2016). As a result of these practices, a captured performance is emerging. A captured performance in this context is a subjected performance where academics' performance is tied to predefined, marketised and corporatised educational outcomes that primarily serve capitalist interests (Seyama 2018). Such performance has a colonising outcome and is effected through transparency mechanisms that place academics in glass cages under the watch of the panopticon, threatening punishment for failure to adhere to requisite performance demands (Seyama and Smith 2016). As such, academics find themselves trapped under the surveillance glare of the performative masters, which produces a stifling atmosphere in academic spaces, and places academics in controlled subjected positions where their agency is threatened (Clarke and Knights 2015). As Wessels (2015, 14) observes, such threatened agency is stifling "academics' critical, investigative and risk-taking inclination", killing the human spirit that is requisite in realising the existential purpose of higher education institutions (HEIs).

In line with Gabriel's (2008, 320) observation that "even within today's glass cages, employees create niches that are unmanaged and unmanageable", I argue that academics trapped within the confines of neoliberally constituted university corridors are crafting spaces that afford them some invisibility within highly visible spaces. In this way, they are managing to resist universities' demand for the invading transparency of target-driven PM systems and finding meaningful ways to account for their performance in their private spaces. This article provides a narrative that answers the question: How do university academics respond to the repressive surveilled academic spaces? The argument of this article is inspired by Foucault's (1977) use of Bentham's metaphor of the panopticon and Gabriel's (2008) metaphor of a glass cage, which reflects the contemporary university's demand for transparency of academics' performance. I view the glass cage as an extension of the panopticon, where its walls are replaced by glass, thus enabling total exposure and eventual control and discipline. I argue that power is embedded in the panopticons and glass cages that materialise spaces. However, within this setting, subjugating academic spaces are being turned into spaces of resistance, thus becoming spaces that enable academics to explore their emancipatory potential. For the purpose of this study, Courpasson, Dany, and Delbridge's (2017, 238) conception of resistance forms the essence of the article: "Resistance is a social experience through which individuals shape physical places and exploit the geographical blurring of organizations to develop political efforts that can be consequential." Accordingly, these physical spaces are reconfigured as free spaces outside the glare of managerial control, permitting a rejection of subjected identities (Courpasson, Dany, and Delbridge 2017). In this article, a critical examination is offered on how academics are silently constructing uncontrolled and uncontrollable physical spaces to avoid increasing organisational surveillance and control.

The article proceeds as follows. First, I position the context of education as a space that enables control and freedom. Second, I conceptualise the notions of power, subjectivity and resistance as ways to theorise academics' construction of oppositional identities and practices. Third, I briefly relate the study's methodology, and lastly, I provide the readings of academics' accounts of their oppositional identities and practices and offer concluding remarks.

 

Space as an Enabler of Control or Freedom

In recent years, questions have been asked about why academics as public intellectuals with the responsibility to interrogate institutions' ideologies, policies and practices are under surveillance (Clarke and Knights 2015; Lorenz 2012) and being complicit in their subjugation as effected through managerialism (Alvesson and Spicer 2016). Following managerialism, leadership and management in universities have been driven by the mandate of achieving efficiency, which has had the effect of creating a performative culture and increasing authoritarianism (Davis, Jansen van Rensburg, and Venter 2016). This performative culture that is enabled by academics' PM produces academics who typify productive, post-industrial blue-collar workers struggling under managerial power (Fleming and Spicer 2003). Cairns, McInnes, and Roberts (2003) argue that the what, why, how and when of academics' work have been reduced to predetermined, measurable economic activities. Consequently, academic institutions are becoming hostile environments as PM is becoming more controlling (Ball 2016), confining academics in mental and physical spaces of panoptic surveillance and measurement (Crane et al. 2008).

Panopticism as a metaphor borrowed from the prison watchtower (Foucault 1977) explains how academics are forced to behave appropriately under the watch of the disciplinary gaze of line managers. According to Seyama and Smith (2016), panopticism enacted through prescriptive performance contracts enforces visibility, which becomes instrumental in controlling and changing the behaviours of those watched. Inspired by this notion, Gabriel (2008) uses the metaphor of an organisational glass cage to illuminate people's efforts to publicise their idealised personal brands or performative identities. Gabriel (2008) points to various forms of invasive glass cages within contemporary organisations-quality reviews, appraisals, reports, checklists, and rankings. Therefore, space, objectively or subjectively defined, is of consequence in the workplace.

In academia, space is reducible to the performance stage where academic actors demonstrate their prowess in the art of "academics" and derive power through "excellent research performance" or lose power through "poor performance". Of interest is how the same glass cages become intrusive and entangle academics in perpetual exhibitionism. In this way, the glass cages lend themselves to being the chain around academics' necks-the chain being loose or tight depending on the actor's perceived levels of performance. The problem with the glass cages is that while they are critical to shaping and affirming academics' identities and value as performers contributing to institutional visions and strategic goals, they desist from being personal spaces where academics can claim their rights to autonomous identity and intellect. In this way, academic space can simultaneously serve as a subjugating and an emancipatory mechanism (Cairns 2002).

To make sense of how academics conceive of their spaces and see possibilities for resistance, it is worth considering Lefebvre's (1991) representations of lived space as being both objective (material) and subjective (mental). Cairns, McInnes, and Roberts (2003) clarify that space does not only serve a physical purpose-it also represents people's thinking and the meanings they make of their experiences within such spaces. Consequently, the uses and effects of space can only be understood in terms of how people experience it and how such experiences are key to shaping their identities in relation to their daily realities (Shields 1991). Cairns, McInnes, and Roberts (2003) argue that while organisations are engaging in subjecting panoptic practices, their contexts are an imperfect panopticon because the power exercised within is not totalising. Therefore, within the exercise of power there is embedded resistance to such power (Foucault 1980). From this emerges the dynamic of struggle (Fleming and Spicer 2008) against disciplinary technologies that are intent on eradicating employees' opposition to managerial prescriptions. Indeed, academics are existing within the conundrum where the struggle for their personal autonomy is part of their daily experiences within their workspaces. In view of academics' control through PM, it is arguable that the inclination for resistance also grows and changes depending on contexts or events. Space matters in power-knowledge relations as experienced by academics because it provides a predetermined setting for performance discipline (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983).

The conception of geographical space is both abstract and concrete (Stanek 2011). It is largely comprehensible through the objects that occupy it; however, it does not owe its existence to such objects (Shields 1991). Space, as a physical void, which contains objects, is not experienced as neutral and a container of objects. It constitutes a certain atmosphere, which influences social relations among the bodies (human) in that space (Shields 1991). Treating space this way provides an understanding of how space within a particular contextual frame constructs compliant identities as well as resistant agencies.

 

Power and Resistance: Conditions of Freedom in Organisations

The conceptualisation of power within the Foucauldian (1980) paradigm has been very influential within contemporary critical management studies (CMS) and organisational resistance research (Alvesson and Willmott 1992). Foucault (1980) concepualised power as temporary and non-enduring and within reach of everyone. Foucault believed in the simplistic nature of power-insofar as it exists and operates at all levels in varying social relations, and importantly, within individuals. In this way, power permeates all social relations, be they formal or informal, influencing discourses and practices. Contingent upon how power is exercised, it is always productive either in generating repressive actions or resistant response (Foucault 1980). In its dynamism, power is then experienced both explicitly and implicitly with varying implications. Foucault (2002, 324) emphasised that "power is exercised over subjects, only insofar as they are free". Consequently, freedom itself constitutes the exercise of power and resistance is embedded in power even in conditions of domination (Foucault 1980). Therefore, people are permanently positioned in conditions within which they can act in a number of ways, either to reproduce the effects of power relations or resist their subjugating effects (Fleming and Spicer 2008).

Historically, resistance has been conceptualised negatively within factory labour relations, representing radical responses (Thomas and Davies 2005), and thus treated harshly. However, the more nuanced, non-radical and less blatant forms of resistance are being revealed as feasible responses that are not displayed to the public and are sometimes known only to the perpetrators. Placed in a paradoxical relationship with power, resistance is imprecise and uniquely produced, and it demonstrates more than just truant behaviour (Contu 2008). Outside the collective and explicit labour resistance (strikes) against capitalist greed, "resistance can also be understood as a constant adaptation, subversion, and remodeling process of dominant discourses present in confrontations between the individual and the organization" (Thomas and Davies 2005, 387). This posture on resistance opens theorisation on academics' individualistic, subtle and concealed forms of resistance that work towards a retreat into spaces of harmony where they can carry out their ethical and social mandate (Spicer, Alvesson, and Kárreman 2009). For academics, such social good ought to be realised partly through their public intellectual role to provide social critiques of corporate organisations, institutions, government, and so forth. If PM represses this critical agency of academics, such social imperatives will be lost.

However, while there is the possibility of turning power on its head for individuals to free themselves, Contu (2008, 4) is cautious about the Foucauldian "resistance", arguing "these transgressive acts that we call 'resistance' are akin to a decaf resistance, which changes very little". However, before disregarding ways in which academics "resist" unenviable conditions, it is crucial to understand their context and feasible actions that would give them some reprieve. Jones and Patton's (2020) study demonstrates how the Slow Swimming Club (SSC) located outside the university campuses offered academics free, unmanaged and playful space to escape and disengage from the suffocating managerialism in their academic spaces. In this space, academics were able to rethink the rules of engagement in an enterprise university and provided opportunities "to be openly productive" (Jones and Patton 2020, 381):

Such enacted spacing here has increased academics' creative resistance and political leverage back on campus through greater aesthetic sensibility and cross-disciplinary collaboration, back on campus. In other words, the academic political voice has increased through what appears on the surface as a disconnected leisure pursuit. (Jones and Patton 2020, 386)

If Contu's (2008) lens is used, such acts are not yet disruptive, as they do not dismantle the power structures and discourses. However, within the academic context, micro-emancipations at a conscious and intellectual level do emerge from decaf resistance. These micro-emancipations are worthwhile insofar as they lay foundations towards macro-emancipations. The paradox whereby resistance is both mentally and materially constructed implies that a one-dimensional conception of resistance cannot be adopted.

 

Context, Case and Method

To explore critically how academics are responding to a surveilled and controlled neoliberal performative space, I undertook a critical social constructionist approach (Hosking 2008) and conducted a case study of university academics in South Africa. I drew on critical management studies' notions of power and resistance within constraining organisational spaces (Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg 2012). This was done to make sense of the panoptic and glass cage educational spaces that are emerging post the implementation of PM in HE. Public HEIs are funded by the government and are mandated accordingly to account for their performance to the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), and this process cascades lower down to individual academics. It is at this lower level where daily work encounters are influenced by PM practices, hence the focus on them.

The empirical material for this article is drawn from a larger study of South University (SU) on heads of departments' (HODs) critical leadership of PM in HE. SU is perceived to be spearheading a mandatory, prescriptive and stringent academic PM system under the deans' autocratic and instructive leadership (Seyama and Smith 2015). HODs acknowledged that neoliberal PM constrained their leadership as it created surveilled performative spaces. Of significance is that "HODs are confronted by varying expectations from the leadership as institutional representatives and safeguarding its interests, whilst at the same time academics' expectation for the HOD to be their representative and shield them from executive leadership" (Seyama and Smith 2015, 2956). Confronted by tensions emanating from neoliberal PM, HODs resorted to critical leadership's dialectical approaches in an attempt to create amenable performance spaces that enable meaningful academic performances within the repressive spaces (Seyama 2018). In this way, they engaged dialectical leadership's interconnected dimensions of consciousness, deliberation and resistance. HODs have been trying to lead with an understanding of academics' constraining context, the dilemmas of high research outputs and quality teaching, and taking the foot off the petrol when necessary. They have been willing to ensure humane perspectives are adopted when addressing challenges. Where possible, HODs have enabled flexibility in how academics achieve the university's strategic objectives, creating deliberative spaces of engagement where people feel safe to raise concerns and negotiate. Furthermore, HODs have resisted and confronted regulations that undermine academics' sense of worth and freedom (Seyama 2018). With all their efforts, HODs have acknowledged that the neoliberal agenda continues to keep a strong panoptic hold on the university's PM systems, therefore they will try to create a pleasant and meaningful working environment for academics (Seyama 2018). It is a particularly interesting case to understand how academics have reimagined and reconstructed institutional physical spaces as resistance spaces.

While this is a single case study, it is possible that emerging PM practices at SU typify academics' responses to constraining PM in other institutions. South University's PM system has been in place for more than 10 years. Both academic and administrative staff s performance is managed at various institutional hierarchical levels, with HODs managing academics' performance. Individual academics' PM contract is aligned to institutional strategic objectives and is target-driven and rewards-linked (Seyama and Smith 2016). Performance appraisals at the end of the year determine the extent to which academics have achieved or exceeded the performance targets. Performance is rewarded when the targets have been exceeded (Seyama and Smith 2016).

Following a qualitative methodology informed by CMS's project of interrogating power-knowledge relations in organisations (Alvesson and Willmott 1992), I collected data through in-depth semi-structured interviews with participants about their experiences of PM and leadership thereof. I conducted 25 interviews with SU HODs and academics. Ten of the interviewees were HODs responsible for implementing PM at departmental level, and the remaining 15 were academics whose performance was managed by the HODs. All participants were full-time employees with academic experience ranging between five and 20 years and held positions as lecturers, senior lecturers, associate professors and full professors. Data was gathered during two academic semesters, post the signing of the performance contract earlier in the semester and after the mid-year performance reviews. These periods were outside the year-end performance appraisals, where academics' performance is judged against the specific contracted targets, then rewarded or penalised accordingly.

Post-interview field notes were also used to make sense of the impressions I had of the interview process and the participants. To ensure relevant and meaningful participation, purposive and snowball sampling, using consenting informant participants who pointed out other colleagues as potential participants, was selected. To avoid the possibility of identification, pseudonyms were used and individual contextual description was excluded from the report.

As an exploratory study, data analysis was driven by what emerged from the conversations between the participants and me. Using the strategy of applied thematic analysis, all the responses to a single question, "How are you coping and surviving in this performative space?", were extracted. In the first phase, the process involved recognising, analysing and reporting patterns within the data (Saldaña 2009). To do this, the data was arranged in line with the research questions, and then Saldaña's (2009) approach was employed to the process of manual coding, which consists of a number of stages, starting with pre-coding. Pre-coding offered a first glance or impression of the data. In the second phase of analysis, critical scholarship was used as an analytical tool and "one of the purposes of this style of criticism is to read and write to alter or shift public knowledge by illustrating how that knowledge has been constructed" (Sloop 2004, 18). This was done by distilling Foucauldian notions of power and resistance that could explicate how academics were responding to the surveilled environment. The extracted text was read, and a set of initial codes and explanations developed. Using an iterative codebook of text, two coders independently coded all text.

 

Findings: Resistance Tactics

The findings emerged from the reading and reflection on the materiality of academic physical spaces as free spaces reimagined by academics as mechanisms of resistance in a performative entrepreneurial university. Within this setting, the article shows how academic spaces, experienced as panopticons and glass cages, constitute subjugating spaces that can be turned into resistance spaces. Noting that the glass "is also liable to crack, break, and collapse" (Gabriel 2008, 313), I argue that the academic spaces within participants' terrain are becoming spaces that enable academics to explore their emancipatory potential in reclaiming their primary purpose-critique, autonomous knowledge production and critical conscientisation of students. Emerging from the analysis of participants' accounts of surviving the paradoxical and uncomfortable setting are five resistance spaces: lecture rooms, stairs, offices, and conference and special interest group spaces. Each of these reveals a unique way in which academics use physical spaces to engage their agency to emancipate themselves from suffocating PM spaces.

Resistance in Lecture Rooms

Aaron (academic), in recognition of the university as a structure embedded with power dynamics, posits the following:

I understand that we can within the particular space ... manoeuvre. We can have liberated spaces within that system [performance management]. So ... for me, what we need to critique is the space ... the entrepreneurial university ... as a structure, so then we can talk about structural agency. Within the structure, we find agents who may or may not have agency to change or transform the structure.

In relation to Aaron's view, some academics in this study used lecture rooms as resistances spaces to initiate nuanced resistance against the panopticon and glass cage forces as related to PM. As a common point of disquiet in the performative culture, the demand for high research outputs is one source of resistance. For instance, Zama (academic) offers a compelling argument against academics who are using perceived "unethical" practices to achieve more research units:

Yes, you're getting the units but are the papers ... you're producing ... groundbreaking? Are they making sense to the humanity? Or are we writing papers for the sake of writing papers? And, I'm ... one of those people reluctant in writing papers for the sake of writing papers. Otherwise ... you're just proliferating the space with something that is already ... known. And, so, I'd rather spend my time with my students.

In defiance, the academic is deliberately choosing the lecture room as his resistance space rather than going to a conference or sitting in his office writing what he calls meaningless articles. Like Anderson's (2008) participants, he is disregarding the expected output targets. Instead, he is pursuing what he perceives to be worthy in line with the primary goal of education, which is facilitating learning for students' development as critical and active citizens.

Sharne (academic) is also using the lecture room as a resistance space where she engages students on the constraining political, social and economic conditions of the country:

I realise that I have to choose between the quality of my teaching and research outputs. But I get my inspiration from engaging with students beyond the disciplinary content. It is important for me that we engage students on political and social issues facing our country. In a world obsessed with capitalism and control of people, I have to conscientise my students to engage in the ethics of self-care. They need to understand issues of control like governmentality.

Sharne brings debates on political and social issues into the classroom so that students can begin to critically interrogate their impact on society and particularly on neoliberally driven universities. She talks to students about Foucault's (1977) notions of panopticism and governmentality that are useful as lenses through which students can understand how power is exploited to control people. She sees these mechanisms as ideal to facilitate students' development of a consciousness about power in their daily lives. In this way, she hopes such engagements form the basis of students' critique and that they build towards an ethic of self-care as emphasised by Foucault (1980). Notwithstanding his criticism of research, Zama acknowledges its positive role in the university, noting:

It's a catch 22 situation in my view as the students want to associate themselves with the high performing institution. But that high performance doesn't have time for them because now the lecturers that are supposed to be engaging with them are busy researching.

Carly (HOD) also uses the lecture room as a space of resistance. She regards herself as a change agent, an academic activist who will defy the governmentalising discourses and practices perpetuated in her discipline's curriculum. She explains:

I'd say I would use it [lecture space] once again to break through the cracks and openings. I deconstruct the whole role and I find the space to actually empower ... students. I ... search for empowering moments in a curriculum which may be static. ... I see myself as a change agent. I see myself as developing the agency of learners. ... I deviate from the prescribed work very often and going to places where I know I'm helping them to open their minds and develop vertically.

While the lecture room is a "legitimate" space for compliant performativity, in this instance Zama, Sharne, and Carly use it as a space outside the reach of managerial control. They use it for critical performativity (Spicer, Alvesson, and Kárreman 2009), which is a refusal to subjugate students (Ball 2016).

Resistance on the Stairs

Patrick (HOD) refuses to perpetuate a commodified student subjectivity, and he has creatively chosen the institution's stairs as a resistance space. Patrick has initiated an exercise project where he and his students walk up and down the stairs from the ground floor to the upper floor for about 30 minutes every morning before class. The essence of this project as a politically meaningful act is that Patrick uses this time to resist the demand for high research outputs that ought to be attained at the expense of teaching. The pillar of Patrick's resistance is his fundamental position about his role as a teacher. He stresses:

I think teaching and learning are a serious priority. The greater majority of academics are here to develop the students ... and they have been ... pushed away from that priority to some extent or to a large extent.

Patrick believes that teaching is paramount in a university and that academics need to spend more time with students to assist them with also developing their "soft skills"- life skills outside the fundamental discipline knowledge and competencies in non-curriculated socio-political activities. He explains:

The purpose of the stairs project is to help strengthen the individual ethic. So that when difficulties do come then they have the capacity to resist that temptation or whatever it is. It is simply doing something that other people might look at it and say, oh you are so stupid; can't you just use a lift [instead of walking up all the stairs]. But you're standing up for something you believe to be better and you stick with it. I believe that using an elevator is ... a metaphor for somehow to the top without effort. So, I believe for any success on any individual person and myself in particular you need to subject yourself to difficulties. Not too difficult that you fail.

On the face of it, the stairs are an objective free space, with no other meaning than its physical purpose. Nevertheless, they offer Patrick a meaningful space outside his office where he should be writing research articles:

I'm going on with my stairs. I'm not sure that the research effort ... would produce some of the results that I'm producing ... Because I know when you talk to people about this particular project, they love it. They think this is the answer to a social degeneration that has happened and is happening.

On the stairs, Patrick wages his struggle against the performative demand for research production and instrumentalist education that narrowly focuses discipline knowledge. He is emphatic that he does not care if he does not meet the research targets. If the project does contribute to his research, it would be incidental.

Resistance behind the Office Doors

In the era of surveilled PM, it is apparent that employee visibility has become an enabling control tool used by institutions to enforce economically subjected identities. The question is whether employee invisibility is an emancipatory or resistance tool. At SU, it appears that some academics, such as Gerry (academic) and Sarah (academic), are choosing invisibility within a transparent performative space to wage their battle against subjected identities. Under the gaze, they are finding ways to be invisible, denoting the metaphor of "hiding within the glass cage". They are content in this seclusion and being on the fringes of the obligatory performative spaces.

Gerry and Sarah choose to close their office doors, which seems to go against the unwritten corporate or institutional policy of keeping office doors open. Open office doors indicate not only an academic's presence at work, but also more importantly that they are working. Gerry does use the space accordingly, as she spends extended hours in the office beyond the prescriptive office working hours. Her struggle with surveillance emanates from her colleagues' perceptions that she is less competent because she does not have a PhD. As a junior, she is treated with suspicion. Her movements and activities are closely monitored. She reports:

I don't care what happens outside my office. I sit in my office and work hard and I am going to publish and become a professor as well. This is my space and I do what I want in here.

Here the academic is demonstrating that the confines of the office provide a "shelter" from the harsh autocratic atmosphere, and she finds comfort within the margins of the obligatory spaces, albeit limited. Sarah, in defence of closing the office door, argues:

With so many rules that one has to abide by-mostly unnecessarily because people want to stamp their powerless positional authority, I choose to do what I want. But, it's strategic. In the midst of panopticism where people want to know everything about you-where you are, what you are doing-it's good to get them guessing-feeling unsettled about your whereabouts. I know that they expect the worst of me; that I'm not in the office. So when they come with that attitude and open my door to find me there, I always think-the joke is on you. I'm not going to fit in your subjecting mould. I'm my own person.

The resistance Sarah's office space offers extends to other colleagues' offices outside her department. She notes:

My department represents a repressive space that constrains my being, so I withdraw from it and I choose to socialise with academics from other departments and faculties and that is when I get a reprieve and escape from the prying eyes.

Sarah's response is indicative of Schwartz's (2014, 111) observation that "healthy and smart people do not stay in toxic spaces that cause them harm" and it demonstrates agency and engaging in ethics of self-care (Foucault 2001), that is, refusing repression. Sarah's socialisation outside of her department offers shared spatial-social distancing. It enables her to create a space that offers emotional and intellectual safety, and nurtures harmony in sharing values and affirmation of academics as critical agents.

Resistance within Academic Conference and Self-Interest Group (SIG) Spaces

Jeremy (academic), Sharne (academic) and Abigail (academic) choose the conference and self-interest group (SIG) spaces to air their discontent with the institution's PM system. Jeremy reports:

I have my space. There are two abstract papers I have written and presented somewhere, where ... I'm indirectly attacking this mindset ... by looking at issues from a philosophical paradigm ... and my own paper that I will present at SAERA [South African Education Researchers Association]. It's clear I'm hitting on managerialism ... and my main argument is that it is making the university to become less of a university.

Sharne says:

Since I cannot be as open as I need to be in the institution, I love going to conferences. I regard them as legitimate spaces to share my intellectual freedom about the effects of managerialism. Interesting is how other academics flock to my presentations because they are facing the same conditions. If it means talking about the repressive nature of PM as a way for me to meet the requirements for conference presentations and publishing, then I'm okay with that.

Similarly, Abigail (academic) acts like a smart person by withdrawing from what causes her discomfort and problems and uses an alternative safe space: "I've learned that it can be quite brutal and it's a very unhealthy environment. So I do self-protect. I kind of withdraw from anything that can complicate." Abigail uses the SIG of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning for Social Justice (SoTL) group's space as a resistance space, indicating:

I've been very vocal about decolonisation, about how universities are run, about managerialism. I will go to sessions where the dean is sitting there and I will speak openly about how . there are kinds of mechanisms for silencing, [and] mechanisms for punishment.

Here Abigail is engaging in parrhesia (Foucault 2001) by openly and courageously speaking truth to power, while risking retribution. In this way, Jeremy, Sharne and Abigail are outside the critical institutional eye, but within a safe scholarly space that is also pertinent towards achieving the performative demands.

 

Discussion and Conclusion

Performance management (PM) of academics is justified as a necessary tool to align their performance to institutional strategic objectives, assisting with a collective approach for universities' accountability to stakeholders. Nonetheless, in the neoliberal university, the surveilled nature of PM is producing a captured performance, which is confining and subjugating academics (Seyama 2018). From this perspective, academics are not escaping the worker-labourer stereotype of being condemned to repressive PM conditions that provoke resistance. Empirical evidence in this study suggests that for academics to loosen the performative chain around their necks, they are finding spaces outside the reach of management's control. They are using academic spaces to break through the cracks and openings and repurposing them to defy managerialist approaches to education. Vieira et al. (2015, 746) refer to these emerging "forms of resistance used by academics [as a way] to re-establish the dignity of teaching practice". Vieira et al. (2015, 747) are adamant that "people need dignity and autonomy at work, and that when these conditions are not met, they manifest themselves as a strong tendency to resist and adopt deviant behaviour practices".

The findings in this article reveal that some academics are engaged in resisting the system in unique ways. They are using physical spaces within and outside the university to escape the panoptic eye and glass cage of PM or its symbolism in the way academic spaces are set up and culturised as performative spaces. These academics experience the uncomfortable surveillance glare of performative masters and they claim that there is repression beyond the paper of the performance contract. Likewise, the physicality of their space was also tied into the repression.

Despite the dispiriting context and pessimistic view of academic life (Wessels 2015), academics' acts are going against the controlled daily grind of systematised practices (Crane et al. 2008) that are often meaningless in relation to quality education. Through reimagined lecture halls, stairs, offices and conference and SIG spaces, academics in this study are loosening the performative chain around their necks. Within the exercise of power as advanced by Foucault (1980), these have become material and symbolic spaces outside the reach of management's control to resist repressive control (Crane et al. 2008). The use of lecture halls, stairs, offices and conference and SIG spaces shows that spaces of resistance take different forms, depending on the context and individuals' agential propensity to wage "productive" resistance (Fleming and Sewell 2002).

In this regard, where and how resistance is effected are significant for understanding how academics "free" themselves. As space is always productive in offering diverse meanings for different people (Lefebvre 1991), academics are putting these spaces to work in order to achieve critical performativity outcomes that serve to counter instrumentalist outcomes. In this "openness of meaning", participant academics are reconstituting captured identities and reclaiming their "own" space by reconstructing the meaning of the experienced space to refuse the prevailing domination (Mumby 2005). Some academics are using lecture halls as critically conscientising spaces that engage students beyond the confines of their discipline and enable interrogation of the influence of socio-economic and political discourses, practices and contexts on students' development and futures. The lecture halls become reflexive spaces in which students can question assumptions underpinning how education is offered in neoliberal universities. In this instance, the academics' actions are congruent with those of academics in Anderson's (2008) study who spoke with students about the disingenuous plan of managerialism to underfund resources and enforce large class sizes and less contact time, undermining meaningful teaching and learning. This orientation towards students' needs means academics are willing to re-engage education as critique-"to learn an attitude, a method, a relation to our own historicity, and our existence within and in relation to power" (Ball 2017, 35).

For academics, closing their office doors gives them privacy within the requisite transparency and protects against further intrusion on the already limited privacy. Such practices reflect resistance through distance (Fleming and Spicer 2008), which does not confront managerial control (Gabriel 2008), but uses creative and nuanced resistance tactics that do not expose them to the risk of reprisal. On the other hand, using stairs involves repurposing the university space to facilitate academics' activism. This activism as undertaken by Patrick encompasses a refusal of neoliberal subjectivity-a choice to spend more time on teaching instead of prioritising research. At the same time, this stairs project is a response to the calls for development of students as critical agents with appropriate life skills.

The findings also reveal that academics feel the burden of the glare within the institutional glass cages, and hence resort to using conference and SIG spaces as free spaces outside managerial surveillance, where there are no voices shouting them down when they raise their concerns, as would happen when inside their institution. Within the conference and SIG spaces, academics are taking their struggle outside the university, and what is significant about their tactic is that it could also serve as a space for the collective voice of academics similarly affected. In raising their voices, academics turn their voices into resistance tools that reject subjugated identities and oppressive practices (Gabriel 2008). These serve to highlight the problematic impression given by neoliberal managerialism that universities' purpose can be redefined primarily in economic terms. Shahjahan (2014, 223) views these as meaningful resistance strategies "through which we heal" and gain a sense of freedom. Such healing is paramount in view of Wessel's (2015) observation that surveilled and highly managerialist practices repress the human spirit.

In making sense of the value, meaning and productivity of academics' resistance spaces, Postma's (2015, 33) submission that "the limitation of acts of resistance is that they often remain within the logic and the problematic defined by the dominant order" is relevant. It is indeed the case in this study that academics' attempts at resistance are confined within the panopticons and glass cages of the neoliberal environment. Nevertheless, these are giving hope for some small measure of reprieve from repression and thus offer a temporary and transitory escape from the watchful eye. While participants' accounts suggest that at this point resistance tactics are not necessarily working against institutional neoliberal demands, this article argues that there is some "potency" in what Contu (2008) calls "decaf" resistance. These academics' resistance tactics are efforts to preserve some personal autonomy and respect, keeping intelligent selves intact (Clarke and Knights 2015) and dis-identifying with managerial power (Fleming and Spicer 2003). Their acts are not provoking direct or legitimate managerial punishment; however, not overlooking the typical managerial response, the punishment for such acts would possibly be meted out in the nuanced way that governmentality tactics are being used. What is noteworthy is that academics engage in these activities to mediate against demoralisation, which is detrimental to individuals' well-being and eventually to their scholarly progression. Here, the acts of academics correspond with the understanding of resistance as a coping mechanism that enables them to escape regimes of control.

Taking the radical humanist approach, which embodies the achievement of incremental micro emancipations, participants' resistance tactics are still worthy, particularly when they influence a critical consciousness of oppressive practices. A particular context with its dynamics of power determines the extent to which academics can use their resources and choose the nature and ways of resisting. Additionally, different motivations for resistance permit all accounts of resistance, explicit or implicit, decaf (Contu 2008) or productive (Courpasson, Dany, and Clegg 2012). Resistance should not be prescriptive, otherwise the same problematic deterministic and objectionable control of performativity will be invoked. This position is strengthened by Foucault's ethic of self-care, that is, choosing to do what does not destroy your soul (Postma 2015), which gives meaningful emancipation in individuals' life contexts. Fundamental to productive resistance, Postma (2015) argues, is care for the self. Such a choice enables academics such as Abigail, Carly, Zama, Gerry, Jeremy, Patrick, Sarah, and Sharne to stay true to whom they are as academic activists. For these academics, resistance spaces are consciously used to escape the glare within the glass cage, which can be quite blinding, and overwhelming-chaotic and violent to the mind (Cairns, McInnes, and Roberts 2003).

The noted spatial micro-emancipations are noteworthy insofar as they are vital towards keeping a critical view of performativity to prepare for macro-emancipations. It is in the interest of academics to recognise that most repressive tendencies are very nuanced and context bound; hence subverting them equally demands nuanced tactics and academic activists cannot always expect legislative recognition of the micro-emancipations. Generally, nuanced repressive acts are committed within the safety net of regulations. The spaces academics use as resistance spaces are personal spaces that have been part of their work life; however, the meaning and purpose of these spaces have changed following the painful panoptic and glass cage encounters. It would be interesting to explore the possibilities of resistance outcomes in cases where academics use spaces external to the university.

 

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Shahjahan, R. A. 2014. "From 'No' to 'Yes': Postcolonial Perspectives on Resistance to Neoliberal Higher Education". Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 35 (2): 219-32. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2012.745732.         [ Links ]

Shields, R. 1991. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge.         [ Links ]

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BOOK REVIEW

 

EdTech Inc.: Selling, Automating and Globalizing Higher Education in the Digital Age, by Tanner Mirrlees and Shahid Alvi

 

 

Aziz Choudry

McGiIl University, Canada aziz.choudry@mcgill.ca https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4289-7904

 

 

Routledge. 2020. pp. 190. ISBN: 978-036735989-8

Reading University of Ontario Institute of Technology professors Tanner Mirrlees and Shahid Alvi's co-authored book, EdTech Inc., several months into a global pandemic when many schools, colleges and universities in many countries are-at least in theory-engaged in remote teaching and learning highlights the urgency and relevance of their critical analysis.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, this book would have served as a timely, well-researched and compelling corrective to claims that digital technologies have "revolutionised" education. It is a welcome counterbalance to the uncritical techno-utopianism and techno-optimism held by many educators, development practitioners and policy-makers concerning EdTech-digital technology in education-not to mention the evangelical zeal of marketing strategies of companies that sell and richly profit from these technologies, including the "big five" of EdTech (Apple, Alphabet Inc., Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook) and EdTech start-ups. By the end of 2019, the EdTech industry was expected to reach US $43 billion in value. At the start of this book, the authors warn that "[t]oo often, immersion in the EdTech hype cycle distracts from the real economic and political structures, institutions and interests that are shaping and attempting to benefit from EdTech's development, diffusion, application and impact in society" (5).

The EdTech sector has effectively mobilised in and greatly benefitted from the kind of disaster capitalism ascendant during the COVID-19 era. The pandemic has given a huge boost to the sector, with the companies that sell and promote these products and platforms, alongside state agencies and educational institutions, public and private alike, bulldozing or sidelining critical perspectives, all justified through commitments to the provision of education during a pandemic, and further aided by the climate of fear and crisis that has engulfed so many.

Through a critical appraisal of capitalist relations, interconnecting the histories of higher education, the neoliberal state, technology and automation, the book pushes back at the idea that all of this is inevitable and that resistance to (or even critique of) EdTech is futile and/or a sign of being a fossil who can't keep up with times that are a-changing. Indeed, as universities increasingly model themselves on corporations, the book's authors contend that EdTech is treated "as though it has a life of its own to fundamentally transform the qualities of educational institutions while mystifying the real neoliberal restructuring of higher education, and the expanding EdTech industry's agenda to sell digital technology to enhance the bottom line" (69). How much more so, as education, teaching and learning are further reorganised in pandemic times? The kinds of sober and critical perspectives and questions posed about educational technology that Mirrlees and Alvi, Neil Selwyn (2014) and others have urged us to take seriously quickly fly out of the window, if they were ever in the room in the first place.

Divided into six chapters, EdTech Inc. digs deeply into and under the digital platform industries' emergence from and role in the restructuring of capitalism, and in turn puts their interrelationships with higher education under the spotlight. Strongly critical of the "digital revolution" euphoria and technological determinism, Mirrlees and Alvi argue that if we attend to the social, economic and political context within which EdTech has been produced, we see a reorganisation and perpetuation of existing capitalist social relations and inequities rather than a disruption or break with the past. Adopting a historically informed, critical political economy of communications framework of analysis as it historicises and dissects the reshaping of higher education, technology and the interrelations of states, capital and higher education, this book is a must-read for anybody teaching, studying or working in colleges and universities, including school teachers contending with an "online learning environment". It is an important reference for education, humanities and social science researchers and administrators-including Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) aficionados of various kinds.

The book is written in an accessible, readable style. For example, in drawing from Marxist theory to understand contemporary capitalism, I appreciated the explanation of key concepts and the spelling out of characteristics of EdTech and the global economy as much as the political economy mapping of the EdTech terrain and actors. Thus the book will likely appeal to both experienced researchers and students alike, across a range of disciplines.

The book asks how the excitement and urgency that clothe so much of the EdTech talk connect to the material conditions and realities of a deeply unequal world. Mirrlees and Alvi remind us that "[f]ar from being inclusive of all, Internet access-and access to EdTech-is stratified, both geographically and socially. The reality of the digital divide-lack of access to the Internet, a digital device and digital literacy-within and between countries deflates the naïve hope that EdTech corporations will provide everyone everywhere with quick access to a free, high-quality and empowering education" (105). I think the book could usefully engage with Ruha Benjamin's (2019) excellent scholarship on racism, science and technology, and Safiya Noble's (2018) work on how commercial search engines-and the algorithms they use-reinforce racism. An aspect of the ways in which US-dominated EdTech industries perpetuate media and knowledge imperialism is surely their capacity to reinforce white supremacy. Michael Kwet's (2019) recent work on digital colonialism also comes to mind here.

Although the book draws on many US and Canadian examples, I appreciated the efforts to explore the global dimensions of EdTech from a number of angles. Chapter 5, "Globalizing Higher Education: Platform Imperialism" considers EdTech as a key aspect of US media and platform imperialism. Given the ways in which digital technology, education and development are connected, and how in turn the globalisation of US higher education and EdTech aligns with and supports US economic and geopolitical interests, we see the latest chapter in a much longer history of US media and education as soft power throughout the world. Alongside this, the book notes the profitability of data collection through digital education platforms with the dataveillance of students and other participants yielding a goldmine of lucrative personal details, online activities, interests and content that can be commercialised.

The implications for academic labour of education "going digital" are also central to the book. We are reminded of the harsh working conditions in the production of EdTech products (e.g. Apple/Foxconn workers in China) through to the attendant precarisation of academic labour, and the Taylorisation of academic work via the expansion of massive open online courses (MOOCs), coupled with the restructuring of higher education that was already underway. The drive to make course delivery more "efficient" by automating instruction, the authors argue, leads to the deskilling, displacement and obsolescence of professors and the reconfiguration of academic labour, for example through standardised audio-video recordings of lectures that can be reproduced and transmitted without instructors needing to be present after they have uploaded their knowledge into an online platform that they do not control.

Then there is the question of the quality of the learning that the techno-solutionist expansion into public education facilitates. Mirrlees and Alvi, in tandem with many critical educationalists, see the erosion of learning that sparks and sustains critical thinking and values dialogical processes among teachers and students, discussion and human interaction. The trend is very much towards top-down, didactic instruction and the further construction (and they argue the subalternisation) of students as consumers. "The idea of the lone, self-motivated young scholar learning from a laptop and then having a eureka moment is at once myth and farce" (124), they contend. This becomes evident when we consider who has access to laptops, smartphones and other digital devices, the internet and data, and even a reliable power supply.

Notwithstanding its sombre assessment of the implications for a restructured, commodified and market-driven landscape of higher education and digital technology, EdTech Inc. ends on some notes of hope. Throughout the book, we are reminded that even in the bleakest of periods there have always been struggles, movements and dissent that have pushed back at economic and political elites and the systems maintaining their power. In doing so, the authors urge that resistance is still possible within higher education and remind us of the power of critical learning and the education praxis of face-to-face dialogical educational encounters. In their words, "[t]he pedagogy of the precariat working class compels the professor-workers to have dialogical, personalized and face-to-face exchanges with student-workers, in this case, everyone we meet and teach" (137).

 

References

Benjamin, R. 2019. Race after Technology. Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity.         [ Links ]

Kwet, M. 2019. "Digital Colonialism: US Empire and the New Imperialism in the Global South". Race and Class 60 (4): 3-26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818823172.         [ Links ]

Noble, S. U. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York, NY: New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1pwt9w5.         [ Links ]

Selwyn, N. 2014. Distrusting Educational Technology: Critical Questions for Changing Times. New York, NY: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315886350.         [ Links ]

^rND^sKwet^nM.^rND^1A01^nMüjde^sKoca-Atabey^rND^1A01^nMüjde^sKoca-Atabey^rND^1A01^nMüjde^sKoca-Atabey

ARTICLE

 

Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment from the Perspective of the Social Model of Disability: A Teaching Experience

 

 

Müjde Koca-Atabey

Ankara Medipol University, Turkey. mujde.koca.atabey@gmail.com, cemilemujde.atabey@ankaramedipol.edu.tr; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8782-2960

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This article aims to revisit the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) from the perspective of disability studies. The SPE is an issue that inevitably comes to light while teaching Social Psychology and how it contributes to a different course titled Psychological, Social and Cultural Aspects of Disabilities. The SPE presents a pioneering piece of research within Social Psychology. Similarly, the social model has reformed the concept of disability. The SPE and further studies demonstrate the importance of social forces in shaping human behaviour; that is, they explore how good people might turn evil in particular circumstances. The social model of disability emphasises the role of social oppression in creating disability. As these two courses contribute to each other, it is discussed that an appropriate level of analysis within the discipline of psychology has much to contribute to the inherently interdisciplinary field of disability studies and vice versa. Interdisciplinary curriculums might be a step towards inclusive higher education.

Keywords: Stanford Prison Experiment; disability in Turkey; disability and higher education; social model of disability; teaching psychology and disability studies

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Introduction

This article aims to provide a reanalysis of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) in relation to disability studies, more specifically in relation to the social model of disability. I am a social psychologist, and a disabled academic, whose main research and teaching specialism is the field of disability studies. I teach courses within both disciplines. This article reflects an analysis that arises while teaching Social Psychology, and how this teaching contributes to a different course titled Psychological, Social and Cultural Aspects of Disabilities. The course Social Psychology is a compulsory second-year undergraduate course; the disability studies course is a third-year elective course. The "aggression" chapter of the Social Psychology course provides an answer to an important question of mine: Do these seemingly different disciplines have more in common than would first appear? I think there is an implicit relationship between these two diverse topics. Converging evidence in the literature in this respect might be valuable and could lead to further analysis. However, before addressing these issues, it is important to highlight the fundamental features of the SPE and the social model of disability.

In the experiment, a mock prison was created in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department. The participants were selected via an advertisement. Twenty-four university students were randomly assigned as guards or prisoners. The "police", who were in fact confederates, arrested the prisoners. The participants were provided appropriate uniforms and began to live in a simulated prison environment that was created by the researchers (Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo 1973; Zimbardo 1973). The simulation was truly successful as, over time, the guards and prisoners did not refer to their experience as an experiment or simulation (Zimbardo 2006; 2007). Zimbardo (2007, 444) stated that "[i]t was a prison run by psychologists rather than by the State". Although the experiment was initially designed to last two weeks, it was ceased on the sixth day due to increased violence among the guards towards prisoners and increased psychological distress among prisoners. It was stated that the system, not the individuals' dispositions, created the unforeseeable circumstance. The 24 participants were selected among 75 applicants, as they were the ones who were psychologically healthiest; so, a sadistic character or a kind of psychopathology could not be the underlying reason for the violence or distress (Zimbardo, Maslach, and Haney 2000). Therefore, that hypothesis, which might argue in favour of personality characteristics, was disregarded (Zimbardo 2007). It was discussed that similar to that experimental setting, the real-life violence within prisons is created by the system. More specifically, limited supervision and lack of education are the sources of violence, not a few bad apples or bad barrels. For instance, it might be instructive to consider what happened in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The night shifts were especially critical in terms of displaying the harshest forms of abuse (Banuazizi and Movahedi 1975; Zimbardo 1973; 2007). Hence, it was concluded that in such a circumstance the most important feature is a system that creates and maintains a specific situation. The system is the issue that creates the evil, as the Lucifer effect indicates (Zimbardo 1973; 2007). In order to reduce this kind of prison abuse, Zimbardo (2006; 2007) repeatedly favoured greater prisoner-guard surveillance.

The social model of disability originated in Britain in 1975, contemporaneously to the SPE, which was conducted in 1971. The fundamental principles of the social model framework are described as follows:

It is society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments, by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society. (UPIAS and the Disability Alliance 1976, 4)

The model argued for a clear distinction between impairment and disability. It was argued that an inability to walk or to speak is an impairment. However, an inability to enter a building due to the steps or an inability to communicate due to a lack of technical aids is a disability (Morris 1993). In addition, the social model denied the established equation between illness and disability and put forth that it was not the doctors but the disabled people themselves who are the experts of the disability phenomena (Oliver 1996). Using the term "disabled people" rather than "people with disabilities" was a deliberate attempt to emphasise society's role in disabling people. According to this model, disability cannot be understood outside its social context (Koca-Atabey 2013; Marks 1997; Morris 1993; Oliver 1990; 1996). It was also discussed that since disability is a context-dependent phenomenon, all people are disabled in some respect (Taylor 2017). Valeras (2010) stated that disability might be conceptualised within a continuum and people might feel disabled or non-disabled depending on the circumstances.

 

Psychology and Disability Studies

As a pioneering social psychologist, Zimbardo (2007) criticised psychology for missing the big picture. According to him, clinical psychology and personality psychology are dispositionally oriented; they ask the question of whom to blame or to provide credit. In this sense, psychology becomes too specific and does not really ask big questions. Madsen (2014) stated that psychology should be much more in line with historical and cultural reality. Psychology is also criticised as discussing disability in a biased manner. As an ordinary human experience, disability receives relatively little attention within the psychology literature (Asch and McCarthy 2003) and is ignored within the curriculum (Dunn 2016). With an emphasis on issues such as loss, adjustment and psychopathology, these two disciplines, namely psychology and disability studies, have a troubled relationship (Reeve 2006). Disability-related material within introductory psychology textbooks is also limited and stereotypical in nature (Goldstein, Siegel, and Seaman 2010). Within the US undergraduate psychology curriculum, disability is mostly discussed in relation to the medical model (Rosa et al. 2016). It might be considered that disability is not included appropriately within the psychology curriculum. On the other hand, there are promising discussions about embracing both fields. For instance, community psychology is offered as an appropriate tool to integrate disability studies (Dowrick and Keys 2001; Goodley and Lawthom 2005; 2011).

Community psychology provides a paradigm shift from an individualistic, deficit approach to a systemic approach (Nel, Lazarus, and Daniels 2010). Dunbar-Krige and Pillay (2010) argued that the inability of mainstream psychology to address the needs of different groups led to the emergence of community psychology, which provides an appropriate basis for disability research. Similarly, Simpson and Thomas (2015) argued that clinical psychology and disability studies have much in common. A positive psychology of rehabilitation is also proposed (Dunn and Dougherty 2005). Livneh and Martz (2016) recently stated that the psychosocial adaptation to disability is conceptually linked with positive psychology. According to this view, emphasising the strengths and capacities of disabled people is essential. Rather than normalisation, optimisation of lives is crucial (Naidoo 2006). Within the framework of hedonic psychology, Amundson (2010) suggested that nondisabled estimators should not be used to score the quality of life of disabled people. Maslov (2012) argued that describing blindness as darkness is merely the construction of sighted people. This is in line with Hull's (2001) case, which concluded that sighted people's brains function differently to blind people's brains. Blindness entails more than losing sight, so it is not easily simulated although it may seem to be. A sighted person who closes his or her eyes would still have the shapes, figures and colours in mind. In fact, in a meeting of the American Psychological Association (APA), Zimbardo et al. (2003) argued that disability is something different than being blind, deaf or paralysed. Disability has a complex structure and is related to community, culture, economics, politics, and also global interdependencies. These arguments are in line with the basic arguments of the social model, which describes disability as a fact of life, a different life experience that might be interesting and affirmative (French and Swain 2004; Morris 1991; Oliver 1996). It was suggested that if psychology emphasises the individual in context (Forshaw 2007) or engages more on a societal and political level to influence change (Simpson and Thomas 2015), the relationship between the two disciplines might be more intimate. Watermeyer (2012) argued that disability studies ignored questions regarding the psychological and emotional aspects of experience for a long time with the fear of musicalising the phenomena. However, the possible contributions of the discipline were left out, resulting in an incomplete picture.

 

The Stanford Prison Experiment and the Social Model of Disability

The SPE clearly showed that human nature could be shaped by social circumstances (Drury et al. 2012). Therefore, the inevitable relationship between Zimbardo's main argument, the power of situation (Slavich 2009), and the social model of disability becomes much clearer. He specifically stated the following:

The dispositional approach is to the situational as a medical model of health is to a public health model. A medical model tries to find the source of the illness, disease, or disability within the affected person. By contrast, public health researchers assume that the vectors of disease transmission come from the environment, creating conditions that foster illness. Sometimes the sick person is the end product of environmental pathogens, which unless counteracted will affect others, regardless of attempts to improve the health of the individual. For example, in the dispositional approach a child who exhibits a learning disability may be given a variety of medical and behavioral treatments to overcome that handicap. But in many cases, especially among the poor, the problem is caused by ingesting lead in paint that flakes off the walls of tenement apartments and is worsened by conditions of poverty-the situational approach. (Zimbardo 2007, 8)

If we rediscuss the point and replace Zimbardo's phrase "public health" with "social model", we might reveal Zimbardo as a disability studies scholar, and this might not be that wrong. Zimbardo further stated that "everyone will be a prisoner or guard at some point in their life, because a guard is simply someone who limits the freedom of another person. Parents, spouses, and bosses do this all the time. And the recipients of this behavior? Well, they are the prisoners" (cited in Slavich 2009, 292). In a disabling society it is possible to conceptualise disabled people as prisoners and nondisabled authorities as guards. They are the people who tell the nondisabled what/how to do and what/how not to do. In fact, Finkelstein (2001) stated that in unchanged societies, disabled people are living in a social prison. The similarities do not end there. The SPE was regarded as a turning point in relation to the death of an outdated understanding of rehabilitation. Until that experiment, it was thought that prisons were places that rehabilitate criminals (Haney and Zimbardo 1998). Similarly, with the emergence of the social model, the old-fashioned, medical-based rehabilitation practices became unpopular. This kind of rehabilitation practice aimed to fix the body to fit the environment (Imrie 1997) and regarded rehabilitation as a tool for social control (Kumar 2011). Alternatively, within the social model of disability, the active participation of disabled people themselves is encouraged (for a discussion, see Shakespeare and Watson 1997). On the other hand, both the SPE and the social model of disability have important political dimensions and implications. For instance, the SPE enabled a discussion in relation to the prison system in the United States and all over the world. On the other hand, the social model served as an important framework to empower disabled people. Similarly, the social model, which originated in the United Kingdom, had significant international implications (Haney and Zimbardo 1998; Oliver 2013).

 

Conclusion

One might argue that the SPE was a single experiment but that the social model of disability is a huge social, academic and political movement. Even though this is the case in a literal sense, it is also possible to argue that the effects of the SPE are wide, varied and continuous. One of the first things that the search engines offer when you type "experiment" is the SPE (Taylor 2013). On the other hand, I am fully aware that the SPE and the social model of disability are widely criticised. For instance, it was stated that the SPE was not called an experiment because it did not test any hypotheses, identify variables, have control groups or apply the relevant statistical tests (Brannigan 2009). Similarly, Mastroianni (2015) argued that Zimbardo has a narrow situationist approach. On the other hand, the social model was criticised for creating a polarisation and a dichotomy (i.e. between impairment and disability) or being socially reductionist (Marks 1997), simplistic and misleading in some respects (Anastasiou and Kauffman 2013; Shakespeare 2004; 2006). However, these critics do not devalue the importance of the above matters.

Disability in Turkey is a chaotic phenomenon. A charity-based approach is prevalent (Bezmez 2013). The society does not treat disabled citizens as equal partners (Tufan 2008). It provides an unwelcoming environment to the disabled body (Bezmez and Yardimci 2016). The medical model is dominant (Sakiz and Woods 2014; Sakiz et al. 2015). Campbell (2009) argued that disability status is not a personal and private issue. This is the opposite in Turkey; disability is a person's own problem. The medical and individual nature of disability creates tension among disabled people. Their rights are neglected and the support that they require is based on arbitrary and unsteady rules and regulations. Not surprisingly, as an academic field disability studies has a limited space in Turkey. Psychology, on the other hand, is an increasingly popular discipline and the number of psychology departments is rapidly growing. In 2011, there were 64 departments; there were only six in 1990 (Sümer 2016). According to recent statistics, there were 79 undergraduate programmes in 2015. It was raised to 119 in 2019 (Çirakoglu 2019). In recent years, it is not that easy to investigate the quality or the quantity of the psychology departments in Turkey. There is more than one programme (i.e. one in Turkish, one in English) within some universities. Within this mass, disability is an underrepresented topic and to the best of my knowledge, the Psychological, Social and Cultural Aspects of Disabilities course was the first disability-related course offered to psychology students in Turkey (see Appendix A¹ for the syllabus). Disability as a human experience is related to all sub-fields of psychology. One of the aims of the social model is to provide an inclusive education (e.g. Oliver and Barnes 2010; Riddick 2001); emphasising similarities between these two literatures might contribute to this higher-order objective.

My article integrates two seemingly diverse literatures. Levels of analysis are important features of psychology (Dunn 2015; Slavich 2009; Talasli personal communication), and with an appropriate level of analysis psychology could fruitfully contribute to the inherently interdisciplinary field of disability studies, within both the research and teaching aspects. Currently, I include a specific section (titled "Psychology and Disability Studies: Past, Present and Future", see Appendix A for a tentative syllabus) in my disability studies course to draw attention to the similarities between the two fields. Within the same vein, the disability studies' perspective could make the psychology curriculum more inclusive. Although inclusion is mostly discussed in relation to curriculum (Bunbury 2018; Hopkins 2011), an interdisciplinary curriculum is not widely discussed. Bearing in mind that embedding disability studies into curriculums is a long and laborious process (Treby, Hewitt, and Shah 2006), disability studies and higher education both need continuous attention and the former's inclusion might result in effective and more inclusive curriculums.

 

References

Amundson, R. 2010. "Quality of Life, Disability and Hedonic Psychology". Journal for the Study of Social Behaviour 40 (4): 374 -92. https://doi.org/10.1111j.1468-5914.2010.00437.x.         [ Links ]

Anastasiou, D., and J. M. Kauffman. 2013. "The Social Model of Disability: Dichotomy between Impairment and Disability". Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 38 (4): 441-59.         [ Links ]

Asch, A., and H. McCarthy. 2003. "Infusing Disability Issues into the Psychology Curriculum". In Teaching Gender and Multicultural Awareness: Resources for the Psychology Classroom, edited by P. Bronstein and K. Quina, 253-69. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10570-018.         [ Links ]

Banuazizi, A., and S. Movahedi. 1975. "Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison: A Methodological Analysis". American Psychologist 30 (2): 152-60. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0076835.         [ Links ]

Bezmez, D. 2013. "Urban Citizenship, the Right to the City and Politics of Disability in Istanbul". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (1): 93-114. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01190.x.         [ Links ]

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1 Editorial Note - Education as Change generally does not publish appendices. This article, however, presents a compelling case for incorporating Disability Studies in university Psychology curricula in Turkey. We have decided to include the original appendix because it is central to the argument presented by the author. - Na-iem Dollie, Chief Editor, Education as Change

 

 

Appendix A - Click to enlarge

^rND^sAmundson^nR.^rND^sAnastasiou^nD.^rND^nJ. M.^sKauffman^rND^sAsch^nA.^rND^nH.^sMcCarthy^rND^sBanuazizi^nA.^rND^nS.^sMovahedi^rND^sBezmez^nD.^rND^sBezmez^nD.^rND^nS.^sYardimci^rND^sBrannigan^nA.^rND^sCampbell^nF. A. K.^rND^sDowrick^nP. W.^rND^nC. B.^sKeys^rND^sDrury^nS.^rND^nS. A.^sHutchens^rND^nD. E.^sShuttlesworth^rND^nC. L.^sWhite^rND^sDunbar-Krige^nH.^rND^nJ.^sPillay^rND^sDunn^nD. S.^rND^sFinkelstein^nV^rND^sFrench^nS.^rND^nJ.^sSwain^rND^sForshaw^nM.^rND^sFrench^nS.^rND^nJ.^sSwain^rND^sForshaw^nM.^rND^sGoldstein^nS. B.^rND^nD.^sSiegel^rND^nJ.^sSeaman^rND^sGoodley^nD.^rND^nR.^sLawthom^rND^sGoodley^nD.^rND^nR.^sLawthom^rND^sHaney^nC.^rND^nC.^sBanks^rND^nP.^sZimbardo^rND^sHaney^nC.^rND^nP.^sZimbardo^rND^sHopkins^nL.^rND^sHull^nJ. M.^rND^sImrie^nR.^rND^sKoca-Atabey^nM.^rND^sKumar^nA.^rND^sLivneh^nH.^rND^nE.^sMartz^rND^sMadsen^nO. J.^rND^sMarks^nD.^rND^sMaslov^nK. S.^rND^sMastroianni^nG. R.^rND^sNaidoo^nP.^rND^sNel^nW.^rND^nS.^sLazarus^rND^nB.^sDaniels^rND^sOliver^nM.^rND^sOliver^nM.^rND^nC.^sBarnes^rND^sReeve^nD.^rND^sRiddick^nB.^rND^sRosa^nN. M.^rND^nK. R.^sBogart^rND^nA. K.^sBonnett^rND^nM. C.^sEstill^rND^nC. E.^sColton^rND^sSakiz^nH.^rND^nC.^sWoods^rND^sSakiz^nH.^rND^nC.^sWoods^rND^nH.^sSart^rND^nZ.^sErçahin^rND^nR.^sAftab^rND^nN.^sKoç^rND^nH.^sSariçam^rND^sShakespeare^nT.^rND^sShakespeare^nT.^rND^nN.^sWatson^rND^sSimpson^nJ.^rND^nC.^sThomas^rND^sSlavich^nG. M.^rND^sSümer^nN.^rND^sTaylor^nA.^rND^sTreby^nE.^rND^nI.^sHewitt^rND^nA.^sShah^rND^sTufan^ni.^rND^sValeras^nA.^rND^sWatermeyer^nB.^rND^sZimbardo^nP. G.^rND^sZimbardo^nP. G.^rND^sZimbardo^nP. G.^rND^nC.^sMaslach^rND^nC.^sHaney^rND^sZimbardo^nP. G.^rND^nL.^sHaywood^rND^nK. J.^sHagglund^rND^1A01^nJiayi^sShi^rND^1A02^nPeter^sSercombe^rND^1A01^nJiayi^sShi^rND^1A02^nPeter^sSercombe^rND^1A01^nJiayi^sShi^rND^1A02^nPeter^sSercombe

ARTICLE

 

Poverty and inequality in rural education: evidence from China

 

 

Jiayi Shi^I; Peter Sercombe^II

^IXi'an Jiaotong University, China shijiayi@xjtu.edu.cn https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4215-3374
^IINewcastle University, United Kingdom peter.sercombe@newcastle.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6236-0269

 

 

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ABSTRACT

In 1998, the People's Republic of China implemented an education policy, the "School Consolidation Policy", which entailed merging small rural schools with larger ones. It has had a massive effect on rural people across China, and as a result of it, over 60% of schools in outlying areas have closed. The policy's implementation and effects have received little scholarly attention, despite its scale and consequences. This article investigates the policy, drawing on the nexus between critical discourse analysis and an ethnographical study conducted from 2007 to 2018. The article reviews trajectories and critical junctures shaping educational change in one rural community in north-western China, as an example of broader changes that have been occurring across the country. This is presented through four thematically interrelated episodes, over a 10-year period, illustrating the conception of the policy, its local interpretation and implementation, and its consequences as perceived by stakeholders. The recontextualisation of rural education is part of the policy, as expressed in political discourse, and is examined together with its wider impacts. Attention is paid to the local adoption of the policy at different levels of government and the challenges faced by villagers in rural China in their efforts to capitalise on educational opportunities and secure a measure of social mobility. Consequences of the policy's implementation are analysed and include rising educational inequality, social marginalisation and a lack of social mobility prospects for families affected.

Keywords: School Consolidation Policy; Chinese rural education; education-poverty trap; educational inequality

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Introduction

Under the movement of educational reform in China, seeking modernisation and competitiveness (State Council 1998), backwardness, isolation and poverty take their toll on villages that are socially, politically, and economically vulnerable. From 2001 to 2012, the Chinese central government implemented policies attempting to redistribute education resources to cope with administrative and fiscal changes in the national education system. One of those policies was the School Consolidation Policy (chedianbingxiao); it was later interpreted by national media and the public as meaning the "merger of small rural schools with larger ones", and resulted in the closure of over 60% of Chinese rural schools (Ministry of Education [MoE] 2002; 2013). In 2007, we began an ethnographic study of the educational lives of the inhabitants of Jikan (see Figure 1), a village in the inner north-west of Shaanxi Province, to witness what villagers experience in their quest to capitalise on educational opportunities and gain some social mobility. We consider institutionalised discourse over a 10-year period through four interrelated episodes demonstrating the educational trajectories and life chances of Jikaners. The integration of CDA and ethnography (cf. Krzyzanowski 2011) allows for the analysis of issues salient to an understanding of the SCP's consequences in Jikan and other rural areas in China; by considering relevant state documents and local perceptions of the effects of the SCP, the study reveals educational inequality, the marginalisation of society's lower echelons, and a consequent lack of social mobility for rurally based children.

 

The School Consolidation Policy (SCP): Initiatives and Controversies

In 1998, the Chinese State Council (SC) issued Decisions on Deepening Education Reform and Fully Promoting Quality Education (hereafter, Decisions) defining the landscape of Chinese compulsory education. To improve administrative and fiscal efficiency in education, it urged reforms that simplify administration across China. The devolution of management means local governments have more power to develop basic education in ways they choose. The State Council and Ministry of Education (MoE) control policymaking, planning, and regulations at national level. Provincial-level authorities have been tasked to enact regulations and allocate funds to counties. County education departments are meant to supervise education and manage their senior middle schools, teacher training colleges and exemplary primary and junior middle schools. To manage the remaining schools, township governments rely on funds distributed by county governments and these compensate for deficiencies in township revenues. Changes in the education system have shifted rural compulsory education administration from village and township level to county level (see Figure 1 for the administrative structure of the Chinese education system).

The 13th entry of Decisions urges local governments to restructure schoolslby merging small poor ones with larger ones (generally located far from villages, presenting logistical challenges for rural families) with a subtitle, "adjust the school layout of rural compulsory education according to local needs" (SC 1998, 13). The general public and media referred to it as the "School Consolidation Policy" (SCP), meaning the closure and merger of small schools with large ones in urban areas, nationwide.

The intention of the policy, according to Decisions (SC 1998, 13), includes the equitable distribution of resources, greater economic educational efficiency and, supposely, more balanced development in education. It is believed that grouping students into large well-equipped schools improves management and enhances quality, especially in rural areas (Liu et al. 2012; Zhao and Parolin 2011).

However, the implementation of the policy was hardly promising, given financial and administrative concerns. When township governments carry the responsibility for making up financial deficiencies with township revenues being used to manage local schools, they may use the SCP to justify the closure of schools to save funds (Shi and Zhao 2016). The correlation between the number of closed schools and the competitiveness of Chinese provinces shows that financially weaker provinces tend to close more schools to save funds and reallocate these to sectors that contribute more to the GDP, such as manufacturing (Ding and Zheng 2014). Parents have to bear more financial pressure because of longer commutes from home to consolidated schools (Yang 2010). High overheads (for parents) and long commutes (for children) have led to increased dropout rates among village pupils (Zhao and Parolin 2011), which contravenes the intentions of the SCP. Road safety is a risk, as traffic accidents with casualties have occurred involving packed school minibuses, which have caught national attention (CNTV 2012). Over-sized urban classes of 70-100 students have raised pedagogical difficulties in dealing with students' varied academic levels. The closure of rural schools has also led to the loss of certain local cultural features, including traditional arts, food, and festivals, and has caused instability in local communities, with increased divorce and crime rates (Fan 2006; Xiong 2007).

Following controversies around the SCP, the State Council adjusted the policy in 2012 to compel local governments to rebuild teaching centres and primary schools where necessary (SC 2012). This adjustment has been interpreted by the public as the end of the SCP era (CNTV 2012). In the media and academia, the SCP's consequences are widely discussed (as reflected in aforementioned literature). The central government has, since 2012, issued several administrative remedies to regulate boarding schools, support the mental health of left-behind children, and relocate primary schools, where necessary (SC 2016; 2018). Officials at different levels of government write "self-inspection" reports considering the causes, consequences, and remedies of the SCP. However, the pace of school closure has become hard to decelerate. From 2001 to 2012 there was a decrease of 49.4 million in rural student enrolment (see Table 1). The number of rural primary schools in China declined by 62.75% between 2001 and 2012 (MoE 2002; 2013). In 2018, rural primary schools were still closing at a rate of 16 per day (Liwei 2018).

Issues related to the SCP are frequently analysed macroscopically, at the level of the organisation, with developmental issues dominating discussion. There is, however, relatively little discussion of policy implementation in rural areas or the effects on rural children. The lives of rural students who have been affected by the SCP suggest poor quality education, unpleasant school experiences and long-suffering peasant parents. Peasants' voices are not generally heard, and they lack channels to speak for themselves; furthermore, the wider public is not generally known for its sympathy towards lower social groups. However, as this research shows, shifts in the meaning and focus of the SCP, at all levels of government, contribute to the justification and legitimisation of the policy, making the closure of schools pervasive but unchallenged in ways that can alter the direction of the SCP.

This is part of a larger consideration of how collective conformity tends to run through the process of policy, as shown here. The different levels of government tend to justify the policy by framing its implementation as a task to satisfy the demands of the central government. Furthermore, age-long perceptions of rural residents as lacking personal ambition and enterprise (indicated by their lack of material success) and that sacrifice is necessary for advancement further silence rural communities, who reluctantly accept changes imposed on them. The SCP has not necessarily been implemented through coercion; rather, it has been imposed through the marginalisation of rural communities, which has been naturalised in political discourse in the current context of Chinese educational reforms, as has happened in other national contexts (see, for example, Sen 1999).

 

Background

Jikan is a village in north-western China (see Figure 1), located in the Huangtu Plateau, and it is used here to consider the effects of the SCP. It is isolated with one dirt road leading to the nearest town, 15 kilometres away. Wealthier villagers commute by motorised transport, while poorer villagers walk or take a free ride if they need to travel. The removal of Jikan Primary School left pupils with no choice but to live as boarders or in rented houses near town schools or to remain in Jikan and wake two to three hours earlier than usual to reach town schools.

Most Jikan residents live by manual farming and raising livestock. Dry soil and weather make only a few plants available to cultivate, including jujubes, wheat and potatoes. The steep slopes (see Figure 2a and 2b) restrict the use of modern farming equipment, e.g. combine harvesters. Most farms rely on manual labour or limited use of tractors.

Rural and urban annual incomes in Jiaxian, where Jikan is situated, are 28% and 24% lower than in the nation overall (see Table 2), respectively, because the county is in north-western China, which relies largely on agriculture and is less developed than other parts of the country. However, Jiaxian County has a larger rural annual income per person than Jikan village, as those in Jikan mostly live on a national subsidy (around USD30 monthly), making their annual income rather low, overall.

From 2006 to 2016 the population of Jikan dropped from 467 to 124 (73.4%), as much of the workforce moved elsewhere, joining the growing national trend towards migrant work. Jikan residents who migrate to towns earn more than those who remain in their village. In China, the number of migrant workers is increasing considerably (see Figure 3) due to economic incentives, as their monthly net income is considerably higher than those of rural residents.

Jikan Primary School was a two-storey building (see Figure 2a and 2b). According to the village head, in the 1990s and early 2000s, there were at most nine teachers and 120 students at the school. Starting around 2001, enrolment decreased, as some children followed their parents to other counties when more rural parents sought better incomes in urban areas. When this study was conducted, in 2007, there were 25 students and three teachers at the school. Within Jikan, the school constituted a significant institutional setting, bringing together villagers for special events. Closed in 2008, it has since been used occasionally for storing crops at harvest time.

When this study was conducted (2007-2018), basic education was being restructured across China. This included the devolution of management, rising competition among schools, and readjustment of public school structures. In the arena of rural education, the SCP was meant to improve management capacity and enhance education quality. However, in many cases it led to mounting inequalities in the distribution of educational resources and the marginalisation of rural families.

 

Methodological Considerations

Our connection to Jikan dates from 2007. From 2007 to 2017, the first author returned and stayed for 10 days each year. Between 2011 and 2017, research was conducted into English language education in Yulin, the prefecture where Jikan is located (Shi 2016). The resulting ethnographical research depicts social processes linked to language education in which many poor migrant children are deprived of social mobility as a result of the leverage of English in high-stakes national exams. Concomitantly, from 2016 to 2018, attention was directed towards Jikan villagers who have children in primary and junior middle schools, which were targeted by the SCP. Interviews were conducted among Jikan students and families to gain an understanding of their educational experiences. In the intervening period, there has been continuing interest in the educational experiences of Jikaners. Ethnography in this context is useful for exploring the lives, experiences and meanings constructed by rural community members (e.g. Liu et al. 2012).

The research follows a scholarly tradition of integrating critical discourse analysis (CDA) and ethnography, from critical framing to analysis and representation (Fairclough 1995; 2001; Krzyzanowski 2011; Sercombe 2010). Ethnography and CDA both have an interest in contextual impacts and power relationships embedded in language use (Shi 2015). CDA analyses discourse practices as socially constituted events to demystify discourse and power relations (Wodak 2009). Ethnography also focuses on tensions between structure and agency, or macro policy and micro agency power, in influencing policy implementation. Ethnography provides researchers with the means to analyse agency and roles that local practitioners manifest in policy processes; CDA provides a foundation for dealing with policy substance, and a focus on power and ideology in policies (Krzyzanowski 2011).

We adopt Fairclough's (1995) three-dimension model derived from the ethnography of communication. This recognises that each instance of discursive practice can be seen as a language text, and is situated within a broader social structure. The dimensions are interrelated: discourse is the link between the text and sociocultural practice, and how a text is produced and interpreted depends on sociocultural practices, of which language forms a part; discourse shapes the text and leaves "traces" in surface features. We consider Jikaners' interpretations of ways that macro-level policies impact the implementation of the SCP and how local policy interacts with macro-level policy. Also examined are relationships between texts (oral and written), practices, and broader political and social structures. Official texts are analysed, as are interviews conducted with local officials, teachers and villagers. Regarding the former, we show how texts contribute to the institution of rural education as part of larger sociological processes. We pay attention to textual devices that contribute to the justification of power and inequality. The purpose is to contextualise SCP texts and identify local adaptations between 2007 and 2018.

The ethnography breathed life into the discourse analysis, focusing on the perspectives and practices of participants. The combination of CDA and ethnography allows one to see how discursive constructions of social practices interact over time and across contexts. It provides a foundation for understanding the recontextualisation of the SCP in local contexts, how this is related to policy texts, and what this means for Jikan's villagers.

 

From Resistance to Conformity: Implementing the SCP in Jikan Village

The following sections are structured around four episodes that mark critical junctures along the educational path of Jikaners, and also represent the SCP's process, from its emergence and interpretation to its subsequent implementation by local government proxies, in schools and local families. The respondents include the following: a.) the last groups of primary school children before the school was closed in 2008, including the 25 students in our 2007 study, as well as some who had transferred after the introduction of the SCP in 2001 (there was a decline in students from 2001: first, there were constant rumours that the school would be closed; second, teachers were transferred to town schools from 2001; and third, parents sought better incomes and left the village); b.) some Jikaners whose children used to attend Jikan village school, and c.) some parents who come from Jikan but currently live in other parts of Yulin and had children in primary school at the time of the study. The study then manifests the trajectory changes for Jikaners before and after the implementation of the SCP. Students and parents interviewed included only those who agreed to talk about their perceptions and experiences. The analysis demonstrates the inappropriateness of the SCP from the perspectives of some officials from lower levels of government, Jikaner students and their parents.

Episode 1: "Our School Is Safe (from Being Closed)" (Interview with Jikan Village Head, 2007)

The SCP is the 13th entry of Decisions (State Council 1998). The policy was printed and delivered to every education bureau across China for implementation. Then began the large-scale school closures, over a decade (outlined in section 2, above). In Shaanxi Province, various levels of government held meetings, wrote reports and arranged sessions to ensure the implementation of the SCP (SEB 2004; YEB 2005). Yulin, where Jikan is situated, was no exception, as 4278 rural schools and teaching centres were closed between 2001 and 2012.

Jikan Primary School was also partly affected by the SCP prior to its closure (in 2008). Some Jikan children, mostly males, moved to other counties with their parents. Boys are more likely to be allocated educational resources when parents decide which child to take with them to a city, where expenses are higher than in villages (cf. Duan et al. 2013; see also Lumadi [2012] regarding the South African context in which females are given less education opportunity than males, which further restricts their chances of social mobility). Among Jikan school students who graduated from junior middle school, girls are more likely to attend secondary professional schools or vocational middle schools where they learn skills to enter the workforce. Boys, however, generally have more chance of entering a senior middle school, increasing the possibility of entering higher education following a highly competitive national examination.

Jikan parents are aware that a schooling hierarchy exists; only when educational opportunities of higher status are unavailable do parents send their children to vocational schools. Education remains the exclusive means of social mobility for Jikan children. Parents' perceptions of their children's future success are typically based on getting into a university, and thereafter securing a decent government job, which is desirable due to its long-term security and benefits. Most Jikan parents of students who commute to middle schools agree that their children's schoolwork is very demanding. They use expressions such as "bear pain" and "endure bitterness" to describe the adversity in studying. The idea of "diligence for success" originates in Confucian thought whereby academic success requires suffering. An old Chinese saying states "only by enduring extreme pain can one become the upper class". This theme arises in many studies of the education-poverty trap (e.g. Brown and Park 2002; Ha and Yan 2018) in which it is found that poor rural students believe diligence will help them overcome their families' weak socioeconomic status. The parents in this study expressed support for their children's efforts and their own sacrifices, which are regarded as necessary to help achieve their children's future educational goals. As one parent explained:

Getting into a university is very hard ... I tell my kids: If you endure bitterness now, you will have a good life tomorrow. If you try to play around, you come back, raise goats and work on the farm. When you get into university, you will have a job. Everything will be all right . We endured bitterness all for you. We cannot help more, but to feed you and provide clothes. You are the ones who study. (Notes 2007/08/04)²

Parents' sacrifices put further pressure on children (see Paine and Delany 2000). The middle school students from Jikan who were interviewed found schooling stressful. They mentioned that not failing their parents is a key reason for their diligence, followed by getting into a university and having a good future. Extensive government support is not expected because of a belief that "diligence for success" justifies the tremendous effort rural children must make to capitalise on opportunities to achieve success. Social mobility, however, is affected by other factors, including government policies, social welfare, educational opportunities, and local administrative choices.

Six teachers at Jikan primary school were transferred to town schools after the SCP was implemented elsewhere in Jiaxian County in 2001. Three substitute teachers stayed in Jikan. In rural China, substitute teachers generally have relatively low-quality education degrees and little if any teacher training experience (Sargent and Hannum 2009). When it emerged that certified teachers were difficult to retain, more Jikaners moved away to pursue better opportunities for their children. Several nearby schools were closed and many Jikaners worried about the future of their village school. As one parent commented:

Teachers stopped coming ... The school does not look like a school anymore. If it continued, it would be closed as well. Without a school, children would have to walk dozens of li to school. Who would pick them up? Who can afford for all of them to stay in student accommodation? (1 li = approximately 500 meters; Notes 2007/08/12)

Several parents talked to the government-appointed village head, who also had children at Jikan Primary School. He went to the county educational bureau and enquired at several offices, asking who was "in charge". He was subsequently chased away by a guard, who told him to wait for a "notice" and not to return otherwise. The village head told his fellow villagers to relax, as he assured them: "Our school is safe" (safe means anquan and that a school is exempt from being closed; interview with village head, 2007/08/12).

Episode 2: "The Best Steel Should Be Used to Make the Edge of the Knife" (Interview with Local Education Officer, Mr Zhang, 2008)

The SCP was initiated as the 13th entry in Decisions on Deepening Education Reform and Fully Promoting Quality Education (SC 1998, 13), subtitled, "readjustment of school layout of rural compulsory education according to local needs". The Chinese text is less than 200 characters:

According to the principle of proximity of primary schools, the relative concentration of junior middle schools, optimisation of educational resource allocation, there is a need to rationally plan and adjust the layout of schools. Under the premise of providing convenience for students to attend the nearest schools, rural primary schools and teaching points should be merged appropriately. In areas with inconvenient transportation, the necessary teaching points should be retained, to prevent the likelihood of student dropouts due to school restructuring. The layout of schools should be planned, together with: the renovation of dilapidated buildings, formalisation of academic norms, urbanisation development and migration relocation. The adjusted school buildings and other assets should be guaranteed to develop education. Where necessary, boarding schools should be opened.

According to the text, local governments were required to alter educational provision according to local needs, such as (in)convenience of the school commute, academic norms, and migrants' relocation. Yet, the text leaves much unsaid and lacks clear directives, leaving various policy vacuums. Shortly after it was issued, Decisions (SC 1998) was sent for review and implementation by lower levels of government. The Shaanxi Education Bureau (where Jikan is situated) issued several texts, and passed these to lower levels of government. The authors of Suggestions on Inspection of Shaanxi Province's Achievement in Promoting Basic Education, issued by an inspection team from the central government and the SEB, spoke highly of counties where the SCP had been implemented (SEB 2004, 4):

In accomplishing the national policy in developing basic education, county education bureaus can, under the request of provincial governments, carefully fulfil the task of adjusting school distribution, and better school conditions. For instance, Yanchuan County, according to the plan, adjusted the number of schools from 437 to 334. It accomplished the task of primary school adjustment. In Zhashui County, 15 senior schools were reduced to 10, the average number of classes in schools increased from 6 to 12, letting the junior middle school coverage increase from less than 10000 to 13700; 279 primary schools (with only Grade 1-3) were cut to 197, teaching points reduced from 350 to 269.

The SEB (2004) has stated the provincial education bureau's alignment with the national government in accomplishing adjustments and further pronounced its power over county education bureaus, ensuring the closure of schools is a "task" that must be accomplished, rather than a locally tailored and negotiated policy. The text presupposes the factuality of a previous state of schools and positively evaluates changes brought about by the SCP, using language such as "carefully fulfil", and "better school conditions". While the policy is seen as regulatory, it is viewed as beneficial and an obligatory task for lower levels of government.

The provincial document was sent to every prefecture, county and township education bureau to "study" (SEB 2004, 1). In 2005, the Yulin Education Bureau (YEB) (the prefecture that administers Jikan), issued a document praising counties able to accomplish the task of closing many schools to "enlarge educational scale and efficiency, and optimize education resources allocation" (YEB 2005, 4). Between 2001 and 2012, the number of rural primary schools was reduced from 4827 to 549 in Yulin (YEB 2013), meaning only 11.4% of local schools were retained (see Table 3).

It should be noted there were indications that local governments were under financial pressure to support local schools, caused by a shift in the burden of education supply to county governments (cf. Ding and Zheng 2014; also see the discussion above). The SEB (2004, 3) shows the government also relied partly on donations to cover deficiencies in funding:

Comrades in Zhashui have altogether raised funds of over 219,000 RMB, among which 31,000 RMB was raised this year. They have set up a committee to send out an initial written proposal to raise funds, setting up moral steel to the fund-raisers and have created an enthusiastic trend in donation. ... Villagers have sacrificed a lot of their holidays to clean the building ... they have saved a lot of funds.

The discourse elides human participants from policy texts, supporting the implementation of the SCP and the unquestionable authority of the central government. In our study of the SCP in Jikan, vagueness can be seen in addition to the absence of accountability and due process. According to the procedures of the Jiaxian Education Bureau, a fact-finding visit should assess the necessity and feasibility of closing local schools. Government servicemen, in charge of basic education, were sent to villages to check the condition of the school. Mr Zhang, a serviceman from Yulin Education Bureau, was given the responsibility of implementing the SCP in Jikan, along with two colleagues. They went to Jikan Primary School to assess teaching quality, campus conditions, and the feasibility of the SCP.

According to villagers, the team stayed for a day, talked to the village management council, then left hurriedly. Questions were asked about the condition of the local school, including numbers of students, teachers, and classrooms, along with enrolment and dropout rates. There was no mention of implementing the SCP, according to the village head. Subsequently, the SCP was implemented in Jikan, without notice, in July 2008. In a meeting held for village heads in Jiaxian County, Jikan village's head was told by a county official to announce the news of the implementation and to "work with the villagers". Teachers and students were told to begin their autumn semester (September to January) in a town school (8 kilometres away), one month in advance.

In their study, Shi and Zhao (2016) found 79% of villagers were not consulted about when their schools were to be closed, a factor in villager dissatisfaction over the SCP. As might be expected, Jikaners showed a degree of objection, and gathered to write a protest letter. This was never sent, as no one was willing to take the initiative. The village head declined, as he felt obliged not to challenge the government, saying:

They came here and said that they were to check the school condition and asked questions about numbers of students and teachers. They never mentioned anything about closing or consolidating the school. We knew nothing when they decided to close the school. . Villagers, with children in the school, certainly felt inconvenienced about the changes and how this would affect their children's trip to school. Many children are too young to be transferred. Even if they are provided with student accommodation, one would feel worrisome. ... Schools in other villages were closed, and it's the norm not to disobey. ... It won't work if you complain. (Notes 2008/8/22)

The SCP has become normalised for villagers and the wider populace, and is viewed as not to be challenged. However, the closure of a school reduces the chances of children attending any school, and means families who seek alternative school arrangements will likely be split up, or forced to move, incurring further hardship (see the discussion above and below), factors also mentioned by Xiong (2007), Yang (2010), Liu and Xing (2016). An informal interview with Mr Zhang (who led the implementation of the SCP in Jikan) was conducted. Questions about the imposition of the SCP in Jikan were addressed to Mr Zhang. There was no mention of villagers' circumstances as a result of the change. Jikan Primary School had, according to Mr Zhang, backward teaching conditions and a small number of students, which are considered key for the implementation of the SCP. There were confrontations with local villagers during the process of the SCP's implementation, but he kept saying that the closure of Jikan's school followed directives from above:

We did everything according to the instructions of the upper government, to enlarge education scale and efficiency. ... Small schools like Jikan's are hard to keep. They have low education efficiency. Education resources are limited. . The best steel should be used to make the edge of the knife. (Notes 2008/10/04)

Mr Zhang's interpretation of the SCP encapsulates three themes important to an understanding the SCP's implementation. First, the implementation has shifted from being a policy that considers local needs (as suggested in Decisions [1998]) to a matter of "must-do" (as shown by the interpretation among lower levels of government). Local-level officials legitimised the closure of Jikan Primary School, aligning with the upper levels of government and following orders rather than accommodating parents' perceptions and needs regarding local educational provision. Second, rural schools are marginalised in daily discursive practices, which describe rural education as "backward" and "inefficient", as seen in the response of state proxies such as Mr Zhang. Third, when there was an apparent shortage of educational resources, the rationale was to redistribute these to larger urban schools. The metaphor "the best steel should be used to make the edge of the knife" is significant because it is underpinned by economic imperatives (as the metaphor shows), and places these above the needs of the rural poor. The metaphor serves as a device to naturalise the sacrifice of rural schools, economically speaking, and, the allocation of more resources to better schools, mostly in urban areas.

In the annual report of the Yulin Education Bureau (YEB 2009, 3), some counties, including the Jiaxian branch, were praised for "accomplishing the task" of "adjusting local schools' educational layout" and "reducing the number of schools according to its schedule". Using positive terms, such as "accomplishing" tasks in basic education, allows the bureau to sound authoritative, but blunts the truth that the decision results in considerable educational challenges for villagers affected by such decisions.

Episode 3: "The Students Lack Discipline" (Interview with a Teacher in a School to Which Some Jikan Children Were Transferred, 2013)

Following the closure of Jikan Primary School (2008), the remaining 25 Jikan students were moved to a town primary school on the outskirts of Jiaxian. Waking up at four or five o'clock in the morning for the long commute to school soon made it very difficult for some Jikan children, especially younger ones, to follow the school curriculum. Nearly every Jikan student interviewed recalled missing school regularly. They soon lagged behind in their studies, which meant that some of them (as well as their parents) gave up hope of entering middle school. In Jiaxian, the number of middle schools was cut from 10 to six, of which only one has a senior middle school branch, making competition to secure a place disproportionately challenging. By the end of 2011, the third year after Jikan Primary School's closure, of the last group of 25 children in Jikan Primary School in our 2007 study, 10 dropped out of primary or junior middle school. Unlike previous children in Jikan, who could at least complete their primary education in the village and had a chance of continuing their education, these left formal education early. Some returned home to help with farm work; others went to work as migrant manual labourers.

Some accommodation in Jiaxian was arranged for village students who lived too far away to commute to the nearest school. Over half of the 25 children from our 2007 study have experienced living in a primary school dormitory. According to a survey conducted by the Yulin Education Bureau in 2012, 49.35% of rural Yulin primary school students out of 127 189 and 47.6% out of 51 269 rural middle school students stay in boarding schools or private houses (YEB 2013). For children between six and 15, living apart from their parents during weekdays or the whole semester was not a cheerful experience. Elsewhere in China, rural boarding students comprise around 40% to 60%, and many have reported psychological issues (Zhou et al. 2005). Internet cafés attract these young pupils. Although the national government has banned those under 18 from these, the chance to make money from children prompts café owners to provide services for them surreptitiously. Some Jikan children, between 10 and 14, regularly use internet cafés, while some students have begun smoking and drinking.

The transfer of students from rural areas has meant some urban schools have become overcrowded, with more than 90 students in a class. Most schools have doubled or tripled the number of classes following the implementation of the SCP. The oversized schools with oversized classes have led to class management issues, and concomitantly lower teaching quality. One Jikan student commented:

We were stuffed in a room. Students sat in the classroom aisles and teachers could not walk around. ... They could not know what we were doing down there. ... You can read novels, eat or sleep. (Notes 2012/5/16)

Many teachers consider the poor educational backgrounds, diverse academic levels and discipline problems among migrant children as major difficulties in their classes. The situation becomes more severe when migrant parents cannot provide support, due to busy schedules and low educational levels. Below is an extract from an interview with one teacher, 60% of whose students have a migrant background (some Jikan children were transferred to the school between 2009 and 2013):

Our students come from migrant worker families. . These students have poor backgrounds. Most of them cannot keep up with the classes. ... Their parents, you know. I've been teaching students three years and I haven't seen most of them. ... They do not communicate with me. ... So the class is hard to manage. The students lack discipline. Habits of learning are poor as well. Students don't do homework carefully ... arriving at school late. They are not active in the classes. The parents are busy making money to raise the family. They don't understand the issues. (Notes 2013/5/19)

This episode, though initially easy to comprehend, encapsulates many issues related to the ways in which migrant children live and study in a city. Students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds experience bullying and social exclusion. Migrant worker children can be identified easily, since they generally appear with torn clothes and ragged schoolbags. They tend to be reticent, sitting in class quietly. When they speak, inaudibly or in a "strange" accent, other children tend to sneer. Some scholars have also reported psychological issues and difficulty with social engagement among migrant children in urban schools (e.g. Zhou et al. 2005).

These issues tend to affect negatively a school's performance. Sometimes migrant children are neglected by teachers, who refer to them as "retards", "stupid", or "lazy", and prioritise students with good academic grades who, mostly, are from urban backgrounds. Some teachers expressed dislike of migrant children, as they distract the attention of other pupils who are more likely to succeed at school and reflect well on teachers (cf. Ding and Zheng 2014).

For village students, the chances of academic success are reduced due to a range of negative factors, including parents' inability to provide enough financial or academic support. Among primary schools in Yulin, less than 10% of migrant students have audio material to accompany English textbooks, while the ratio is above 90% for other students of urban Hukou (household registration permit). Less than 10% of migrant students attend extra-curricular classes, while the ratio is over 70% in the best schools where urban students comprise 95% of the enrolment (Shi 2016). Eighty per cent of migrant children have at least one parent working and living away from home and most are unable to gain a "distinction" in their final assessments in order to enter a middle school. Nearly 90% of students who fail their exams are from migrant worker backgrounds (Shi 2016).

Episode 4: "They Have Got Used to Living without Us ... Children of Poor Families Become Self-Sufficient Early" (Interview with a Jikan Parent, 2018)

The SCP was called into question in 2012. In a national document (SC 2012), the central government scolded local governments for "blindly implementing the SCP ... causing difficulties for rural students in getting a good quality education". In a Yulin Education Bureau report (YEB 2013, 4), the phrase "blindly implementing the SCP" was used to rebuke "some places", which passed the responsibility and blame to lower levels of government. Although mistakes have been admitted by the central government, there remains a lack of accountability, exemplified by scapegoating "some local governments" for its failings.

From 2014 to 2018, the central government issued several policies to remedy mistakes made when the SCP was implemented. It issued directives that teaching points and schools should be rebuilt where necessary (SC 2012; 2018). In Yulin, 34 schools (18 in rural areas), 13 junior middle schools (10 in rural areas), 45 teaching points, and 27 primary schools were (re)opened from 2013 to 2015 (YEB 2015). Yet, the movement of students from rural to city areas and the relocation of migrant workers have meant the reduction of rural schools has continued. Rural students continue to pour into urban areas, resulting in schools becoming further overcrowded. Many renovated rural schools have been abandoned following reopening, as there are no students to attend them. Reports show that rural and county schools were put under pressure to keep students in school (CNWest 2016). For many villagers, educational incentives encourage them to send their children to urban schools for a better chance of academic success. Meanwhile, some parents who separate from their children, due to the imposition of the SCP, prefer to send their children to urban schools for better educational opportunities. One Jikan parent commented:

If I send my boy to the township school, he would stay in a boarding school. If I send him to the county school or to Yulin, he would live in a boarding school as well. I might as well send him to Yulin. It is better for his education. (Notes 2018/2/23)

In Jiaxian, and elsewhere in China, a special kind of service, called "agency parenting" or "trusteeship classes and houses", has become popular. It includes tutoring and boarding, collecting children from school, checking homework, cooking meals and attending parents' meetings. Despite being illegal, the service is increasing due to the widespread needs it caters for. The demands on parents, especially migrant workers, who are unable to provide adequate out-of-school care for children, the low quality of mainstream education in rural settings, the restrictions on rural students' access to education in urban areas and examination-oriented education are catalysts for the growth in "agency parenting". Fees vary from 150 to 2000RMB/yuan (USD23 to 310) per month, depending on the number of children in an agency's custody and the level of service needed. Most children under agency care live with agents, seeing their parents at weekends or during school holidays, while some might go home each day after homework has been checked and dinner consumed.

In one of the primary schools in Jiaxian, attended by many Jikan children, over half with a rural Hukou live in private boarding houses near schools. Elsewhere in China, the number of left-behind children, with one or both parents' living away from home, reached 9 million in 2016 (CNBS 2017). Recognising the problem, the national government began to regulate private boarding services (SC 2018), many of which are overcrowded and in a poor condition (see Figure 4). According to a boarding house owner, extended family members, mostly grandparents, collect children from the house every two weeks. Parents show up only to pay boarding fees (Notes 2017/10/14).

 

 

There has been considerable concern about young schoolchildren lacking adequate parental care, resulting in mental health issues, misbehaviour and poor performance at school (e.g. Zhou et al. 2005). Jikan parents seem to find the situation hard to change given their challenging circumstances. As one parent said:

They have got used to living without us. Children of poor families become self-sufficient early. Otherwise, what can we do? ... If you want to walk ahead of others, you need to make sacrifices. (Notes 2018/2/19)

Similar to those in our earlier study in 2007 (see Episode 1), educational opportunities and social mobility still rely on personal endeavour. "Children of poor families become self-sufficient early" is an old Chinese saying that has become normalised and hard to challenge. Wider contributing social factors, such as educational resources and opportunities, government policies, and community support, are not really considered salient factors.

 

Discussion

The four episodes presented illustrate key moments in Jikaners' educational paths during the implementation of the SCP, including during the conception of the policy, its local interpretation and implementation over the course of a decade, and its consequences, as perceived by those affected. The characteristics of the four episodes can be seen as interconnected. Together, the four episodes depict the circumstances of rural citizens, represented here by inhabitants of Jikan, who have been socially marginalised by the implementation of the SCP. The rural-urban divide contributed to the creation and proliferation of SCP implementation (Episode 1), and in turn aggravated inequality and marginalisation in rural education (Episode 2). This process does not necessarily occur through coercion but rather collective conformity, which is evident in levels of policy texts that contextualise SCP as beneficial and obligatory, and public perceptions of rural schools and communities as backward and inefficient and thus obliged to close down (Episode 2). The discursive and social practice of the SCP as a means of economising based on the notion of the backwardness of rural education (rather than on human costs such as villager satisfaction, family or mental health) further naturalises the marginalisation of rural students in the public education system under the discursive disguise of success through personal endeavour and sacrifice and through a de-emphasis on public support and social justice (Episode 3). A vicious circle emerges as the outcome of the SCP, contributing towards a wider rural-urban divide and reinforcing educational, sociocultural, and psychological gaps, which were further reinforced by rural parents' and students' naturalisation of their lowly social position (Episode 4).

First, Episode 1 spells out how the Chinese central government conceived, justified and tasked local governments with the implementation of the SCP. The children and parents affected by this policy understand the hierarchical nature of educational provision and the need for application and some degree of self-sacrifice in order to fulfil aspirations, but they also lobbied local village representatives to secure sufficiently accessible educational opportunities. The age-long perception of the causes of rural residents' marginality, which surfaces in the discursive disguise of success through personal endeavour and sacrifice, further silences the rural community and encourages them to accept, albeit reluctantly, changes imposed on them; it also overlooks the human cost of the SCP's implementation, in attempts to align local situations (through school closures) with national aspirations for greater fiscal efficiency.

However, in Episode 2 one can see that the SCP's interpretation and implementation by many local governments is understandable, given that the onus is on these state proxies to implement central government policies, as shown in certain discursive features of the SCP texts, including extensive use of modal operators and elision of human participation. These include examples such as "distribution should be rationally planned and adjusted" (SC 1998, 13) or "county governments should be under the supervision of provincial government to adjust school layout" (SEB 2004, 1). Modal operators in the SCP text involve the author's attitude towards the obligation to take action in the face of central government authority. The upper levels of government use modal forms to reproduce their authority, reflecting the absolute nature of institutional hierarchy across China. Using inanimate noun phrases, which Fairclough (2001, 141) refers to as "one genre of governance", such as "school distribution", "optimisation of educational resources allocation", and an "urbanisation process", the SCP texts create the impression that the policy has no human cost, without specific explanation as to the accountability of policy agents or who the beneficiaries are. Similar expressions abound in other policy documents (e.g. YEB 2005), legitimising the apparent necessity of implementing the SCP, and making the closure of schools pervasive but unchallenged in ways that can alter the direction of the SCP.

The schooling process in urban settings further separates rural and urban students, due to rural students' lower socioeconomic status, and other differentiating markers, including the ways in which rural students speak and dress. Additionally, poor schools' performances further reinforce their peripheralised positions and increase the onus on them academically, compounding dropout rates (which have increased with school mergers and mounting teacher indifference). Furthermore, rural migrant students face challenges related to parents with low academic levels, a lack of friends among children at urban schools, and, consequently, poor levels of integration at school (Gao et al. 2019). A vicious circle emerges, contributing towards a lack of socioeconomic progress. This is reinforced by rural parents' and students' naturalisation of their lowly social position, despite their unhappiness with the effects of the SCP and the lack of consultation between state representatives and villagers about changes in educational provision.

In Episode 3, one can notice further effects of the SCP, such as the overcrowding of urban schools due to the migration of rural families seeking better alternative educational opportunities. Other consequences include the challenges that teachers encounter in the face of overcrowded classes and the negative effects on some urban schools, as well as migrant children, who often lack family support mechanisms due to low levels of education and poor financial circumstances.

In Episode 4, one can notice the Chinese central government attempting to repair the effects of the SCP by reopening some local schools. However, at this point, many local parents had already migrated to cities and many refurbished local schools remained redundant. One can see further outcomes of the SCP whereby private provision had sprung up in various forms, such as "agency parenting" and "private boarding services", to make up for the shortfall in government provision.

The SCP has unnecessarily created a perception of the rural as "backward" and needing "modernisation", exacerbating differences between rural communities and urban society. The idea of "modernity in education" has contributed to an ideology where opportunities for educational success have become citizens' responsibility, and rural education is seen as a relatively low priority for the state. The SCP echoes what Cummins (2000) has argued regarding the ways in which dominant groups around the world have historically organised educational systems to reinforce social differences and maintain the social status quo, rather than promote social mobility. The widening gap between the rich and the poor is a major challenge identified in the educational literature. The education-poverty trap is a challenge faced internationally. For example, Lumadi (2012; 2014) reports situations where rural South African children, especially girls, are deprived of quality education as a result of long school commutes, poor facilities and unqualified teachers. Setlhodi-Mohapi and Lebeloane (2014) find that the poor quality of school management teams can further contribute to the underperformance of previously disadvantaged schools that serve learners from predominantly poor communities. Motsa and Morojele (2017) show how vulnerable rural children in Swaziland, especially orphans of HIV/AIDS parents, are discriminated against. In Korea, Kim (2017) finds that limited opportunities and deprived circumstances restrict rural children' s aspirations; they and their parents express feelings of abandonment and disappointment due to social exclusion and limited access to educational resources.

The results of these studies are similar, with the rural-urban divide reinforcing educational, sociocultural, and psychological gaps between children from different geographical backgrounds, engendering negative climates in classrooms and society, and increasing the chances of maintaining cyclical intergenerational poverty. As UNESCO (2013, 36) suggests, efforts need to be made "to ensure that resource allocation is equitable, predictable and sustainable ... [especially for] those who need them most, such as poor and vulnerable population groups". Thus, more investment in rural and migrant schools is needed (Lai et al. 2014). This research then echoes the importance of social justice in education (see Gebremedhin and Joshi 2016; Hackman 2005; Sampaio and Leite 2018). Otherwise, the invisibility of education inequality persists and continues to support larger, somewhat oppressive structures in society.

 

Conclusion

In this article, the educational landscape in Jikan has been outlined. Its significance resides in giving voice to stakeholders, especially parents, children and teachers, as well as local officials caught between demands from above and the needs of poorly educated and represented rural citizens. The article drew on critical discourse analysis and ethnography in order to review trajectories and critical junctures that shape educational change in Jikan, as an example of broader educational changes occurring across China. We paid attention to the local adaption of the SCP in the discursive practices of different levels of government and what villagers in rural China endure to capitalise on educational opportunities and secure some mobility. We concluded that the SCP has unnecessarily exacerbated the rural-urban divide. The SCP has not necessarily been implemented through coercion or enforcement; rather, it has been imposed through being naturalised and reinforced in political discourse and everyday practices in the current context of Chinese educational reforms.

 

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1 1 RMB = approximately 0.16 USD
2 Interviews and government policy texts were originally in Chinese and translated by the first author into English for the purpose of analysis. The translation has been checked by two professional translators.

^rND^sBrown^nP. H.^rND^nA.^sPark^rND^sDing^nD.^rND^nF. T.^sZheng^rND^sDuan^nC. R.^rND^nL. D.^sLu^rND^nJ.^sGuo^rND^nZ. P.^sWang^rND^sFan^nX. Z.^rND^sGao^nS.^rND^nM.^sYang^rND^nX.^sWang^rND^nW.^sMin^rND^nS.^sRozelle^rND^sGebremedhin^nA.^rND^nD.^sJoshi^rND^sHa^nW.^rND^nF.^sYan^rND^sHackman^nH. W.^rND^sKim^nH. K.^rND^sKrzyzanowski^nM.^rND^sLai^nF.^rND^nC.^sLiu^rND^nR.^sLuo^rND^nL.^sZhang^rND^nX.^sMa^rND^nY.^sBai^rND^nB.^sSharbono^rND^nS.^sRozelle^rND^sLiu^nJ.^rND^nC.^sXing^rND^sLiu^nM.^rND^nZ.^sXu^rND^nF.^sSu^rND^nR.^sTao^rND^sLumadi^nM. W.^rND^sLumadi^nM. W.^rND^sMotsa^nN. D.^rND^nP. J.^sMorojele^rND^sPaine^nL.^rND^nB.^sDeLany^rND^sSampaio^nM.^rND^nC.^sLeite^rND^sSargent^nT. C.^rND^nE.^sHannum^rND^sSercombe^nP. G.^rND^sSetlhodi-Mohapi^nI. I.^rND^nL. O.^sLebeloane^rND^sShi^nJ. Y.^rND^sShi^nY. B.^rND^nX. X.^sZhao^rND^sWodak^nR.^rND^sXiong^nX. M.^rND^sYang^nL.^rND^sZhao^nD.^rND^nB.^sParolin^rND^sZhou^nZ. K.^rND^nX. J.^sSun^rND^nY.^sLiu^rND^nD. M.^sZhou^rND^nKatleho Kano^sShoro^rND^1A01^nDeirdre C.^sByrne^rND^1A02^nDenise^sNewfield^rND^nKatleho Kano^sShoro^rND^1A01^nDeirdre C.^sByrne^rND^1A02^nDenise^sNewfield^rND^nKatleho Kano^sShoro^rND^1A01^nDeirdre C^sByrne^rND^1A02^nDenise^sNewfield

THEMED SECTION 2
EDITORIAL

 

Editorial: Decoloniality in/and Poetry

 

 

Katleho Kano Shoro^I; Deirdre C. Byrne^II; Denise Newfield^III

^Ikatlehokano@gmail.com
^IIUniversity of South Africa. byrnedc@unisa.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4436-6632
^IIIUniversity of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. newfield@iafrica.com; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7248-6025

 

 

This themed issue of Education as Change responds to the "decolonial turn" in academic and public discourse. The #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student protests at South African universities in 2015 and onwards gave public manifestation to the growing dissatisfaction with colonial models of knowledge and knowledge production. In the wake of these protests, many education activists and scholars have joined the drive to move away from such models. Nevertheless, scholarship on practical implementation of decolonisation within teaching and learning at schools and universities remains limited and requires further investigation.

This themed issue offers some ideas relating to methods of decolonising curricula and pedagogies. The focus is poetry. Although a minor, frequently marginalised component of curricula for English literature at secondary schools and the discipline of English literary studies at universities, poetry has been chosen because it offers an instructive case study of the challenges and possibilities of finding spaces for transformation within disciplines and practices. We focus on attempts to decolonise poetry from within by means of small, local interventions and reconceptualisations, which aim to re-vision poetry within and outside classrooms. These reconceptualisations are constructed variously in terms of postcoloniality, indigenisation and Africanisation, as well as poetic praxis.

Some articles identify the challenges and others the possibilities associated with attempts to decolonise poetry practices. There is a striking disparity between the lack of enthusiasm for poetry in formal classrooms and its enormous popularity in community forums. While we recognise that English remains one of the languages of settler colonialism, the discipline of English literature stubbornly occupies a major place in the curriculum and the language is widely used by poets and scholars.

This themed issue is predicated on a vision of knowledge as inhering in scholarly writing of articles, reviews and reflective pieces, as well as creative works. For this reason, the issue encompasses poems and articles, including texts that go beyond traditional scholarly formats. The articles deal with contexts in the global South: Africa, the Caribbean, Australia and India.

The articles by Louis Botha, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers and Robert Maungedzo; Denise Newfield and Deirdre Byrne; and Adam Cooper are based on research conducted under the auspices of ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project), a group of scholars, poets and teachers that received funding from the National Research Foundation for a three-year research project within the domains of Indigenous Knowledge Systems, situated in secondary school English classrooms. The articles by Katharine Naidu and Denise Newfield, and Grace Mavhiza and Maria Prozesky, are similarly based in secondary schools. Bridget Grogan advocates a contrapuntal approach to teaching African poetry in higher education. Catherine Manathunga, Shelley Davidow, Paul Williams, Kathryn Gilbey, Tracey Bunda, Maria Raciti and Sue Stanton; Malika Ndlovu; and Vonani Bila all explore the importance of poetry as a healing and spiritual practice. Suren Naicker discusses the decolonising potentials inherent in traditional spiritual poetry. Arushani Govender focuses on poetry as articulating the cultural repertoire of a specific South African sub-culture. Gerhard Genis advocates an analytical method of exploring S.E.K. Mqhayi's poetry of the Great War. Heidi van Rooyen and Raphael d'Abdon use poetic inquiry as a form of research methodology.

The poems chosen for inclusion in this special issue were subjected to the same blind review process as the articles and were evaluated for their relevance to the theme of the issue. The poems by Flow Wellington, Kirsten Deane and Kobus Moolman speak to the issue of decolonisation in different ways: through highlighting the politics of language, gender, history and memory. Poems by Brian Walter invoke the troubled relationship between complicity and empathy within different subjectivities in a decolonial context. Mosima Kagiso Phakane and Nkwana Serutle Joshua address the lingering legacy of colonial structures of thinking and feeling. Trésor Musasa Kabamba's poem reminds us of the embodied and multimodal nature of poetry. Through the poems, decolonisation is figured as simultaneously personal, political, structural and intimate.

There are four book reviews and one reflective piece included in this themed issue. The fact that poetry collections are appearing with such regularity is a by-product of the decolonisation of the poetry publishing industry and its use by previously marginalised poets.

 

Dedication

This issue is dedicated to the memory of two South African poets who passed away during the assembling of the manuscript: Myesha Jenkins and Angifi Dladla. Myesha and Angifi, your magnificent contribution to poetry, to culture and to us will never be forgotten and will continue to inspire us all.

^rND^1A01^nDenise^sNewfield^rND^1A02^nDeirdre C.^sByrne^rND^1A01^nDenise^sNewfield^rND^1A02^nDeirdre C.^sByrne^rND^1A01^nDenise^sNewfield^rND^1A02^nDeirdre C^sByrne

THEMED SECTION 2
ARTICLE

 

Towards Decolonising Poetry in Education: The ZAPP Project

 

 

Denise Newfield^I; Deirdre C. Byrne^II

^IUniversity of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. newfield@iafrica.com; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7248-6025
^IIUniversity of South Africa. byrnedc@unisa.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4436-6632

 

 

---

ABSTRACT

This article concerns ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project), which is a community of poets, scholars (including the authors), teachers and students, established in 2013 to promote, in educational systems, the work of contemporary South African poets. For the past three years (2017-2019), we have attempted through outreach and research to contribute to decolonising South African education by paying attention to indigenous poetic traditions and practices. Our research has focused on content, pedagogy and institutional practice. The article outlines and attempts to assess three interrelated components of ZAPP's research into the decolonisation of poetry and education: our research into the transformation of teaching and learning in EFAL (English First Additional Language) poetry classrooms, our ongoing research into what constitutes indigenous South African poetry today, and our research into institutional practices concerning the production and dissemination of knowledge about poetry. We draw on various conceptual frameworks to explore ZAPP's research, namely, South African poetry scholarship, decolonial theory, theories of indigeneity, theories of multimodality, posthumanism and new materialisms. The article shows both the achievements and challenges of our research efforts in the three areas of content, pedagogy and institutional practice. Its final claim is that these three areas are crucial sites of intervention in attempts at decolonising poetry in existing disciplines in research and education.

Keywords: South African poetry; ZAPP; decoloniality; education; knowledge production; indigenous knowledge systems; indigeneity; multimodality; new materialism; posthumanism

---

 

 

Introduction

This article reports on the work of ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project), a collaboration among scholars (including the authors), poets, teachers and postgraduate students interested in poetry education. It is both an activist and a research project. ZAPP responds to the urgent call in South Africa, from 2015 onwards, to decolonise education by researching and promoting the work of South African poets in a variety of educational and public contexts. For us, as for Tuck and Yang (2012), "decolonisation is not a metaphor"; rather, ZAPP has attempted to decolonise poetry in education as a material practice of transformation, that is, through practical interventions. During 2017-2019, under the auspices of an NRF-funded project titled "Reconceptualising Poetry Education for South African Classrooms through Infusing Indigenous Texts and Practices", ZAPP undertook three research activities. The first concerns the teaching and learning of English poetry in secondary school English First Additional Language (EFAL) classrooms, where most learners are not first-language English speakers, but speak a number of African languages. Here we attempted to establish whether it was possible to infuse indigenous texts and practices into curricula and pedagogy. The second is more theoretical and concerns the question of indigeneity itself: what is indigeneity in relation to contemporary South African poetry in English? The third activity concerns the production and dissemination of knowledge about South African poetry within the academy.

Our approach-and our theoretical framework in this article-draws diffractively on scholarship in the fields of decoloniality (Grosfoguel 2007; Jansen 2017; Maldonado-Torres 2007; Mignolo 2007; Santos 2016; Tuck and Yang 2012), indigeneity (Fataar 2018; Msila and Gumbo 2017; Nyamnjoh 2012; Smith 2012), multimodality (Jewitt 2014; Kress 1997; 2010; Newfield and Maungedzo 2006; Stein 2008), posthumanism and new materialisms¹ (Barad 2007; Braidotti 2013; Manning 2019; Taylor 2019). The term "diffraction" has been adapted from physics to refer to a research methodology and a way of reading. Diffraction is "a critical practice for making a difference in the world" (Barad 2007, 90). It does not set up "one approach/text/discipline against another" but rather invites a reading of the ideas of one framework or text through others (Bozalek and Zembylas 2018, 51). We diffract the above frameworks for the purposes of thicker understandings of complex phenomena, which cross the domains of literature, education, culture and politics.

The article begins by briefly discussing our chosen theoretical frameworks. After this, we outline our three research activities: in secondary schools, on the current poetry scene and the question of indigeneity, and concerning institutional processes of knowledge production and dissemination. In the first part, we narrate our unfolding relationship with a particular school as a case study of our research in schools. In the second, an ongoing project, we explain our methods of researching indigeneity in relation to contemporary South African poetry. In the third, we explore a particular instance of decolonising the production and dissemination of knowledge about poetry, namely, the colloquium. In conclusion, we sum up the achievements, challenges and failures of the project.

 

Theoretical Frameworks

The ZAPP project is an application to the field of education of common goals and principles of a group of studies that share an urgency to reconfigure ideas about political existence and about education, as mentioned above-decoloniality, indigeneity, multimodality, posthumanism and new materialisms. Our article draws on intersections across these fields, since, although they have different emphases and foci, they share a discontent with the status quo of knowledge production within and outside the academy. They all attempt to redress historical injustices, inequalities and marginalisations-political, cultural, social and economic.

Many decolonial thinkers aim to promote the decentring of colonial education-its epistemic and institutional structures-in order to complete the project of decolonising society (Kelley 2000, 27). Decolonial theorists such as Maldonado-Torres (2007), Mignolo (2007), Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015) and Santos (2016) point to the epistemological effect of colonisation, which violently imposed European ways of knowing and thinking upon colonised people, resulting in "epistemicide" (the destruction of their own knowledge and cultures, Santos 2016). Accordingly, decolonisation entails delinking from Westernised epistemologies. Studies in indigenising education aim to decolonise curricula and practices by recentring the histories and ways of knowing of formerly colonised peoples, which have been erased, hidden or marginalised. Indigenisation works to restore cultural pride in indigenous ways of knowing (Gray and Coates 2010; Iseger-Pilkington 2011). The term "indigenous", nevertheless, is problematic. In our project, we consider it as necessarily plural, since there is a plurality of indigenous cultures in South Africa. Some scholars of previously colonised societies resent the trace of its disparaging usage in colonial discourse that it still carries (Barnard 2006; Smith 2012). Jansen considers the concept of "decolonisation" to have become a political slogan (adopted twenty years into South Africa's democratic transition by activist students who feel excluded from and alienated at universities) and requiring to be subjected to "critical review" by social scientists. Furthermore, the "retreat into indigenisation" indicates the "absence of vibrant, original and creative knowledge production systems in [South] Africa" and could suggest "a narrow Africanism" rather than an expansion of appropriate intellectual pursuits (Jansen 2019, 50-74). Likewise, Kalua (2019) stresses the debt that decoloniality owes to postcolonial theory, arguing that this means decoloniality is less original than is often claimed.

We acknowledge the contradiction in the attempt to decolonise English as a discipline, given its provenance in colonial education, as Ngügï argued powerfully at the Makerere Conference of 1962 (Ngügï 1986, 5-7). English, having been imposed by the colonial regime on education, administration and commerce, and having given way to Afrikaans during apartheid, has regained dominance in the post-apartheid era. While acknowledging the merit of objections such as these, ZAPP situates itself within the project of decolonisation as a necessary attempt at redress and transformation. Its research investigates whether, to what extent and how decolonisation may be achieved through indigenisation of a particular curriculum and its concomitant practices.

Multimodal approaches aim to promote scholarly and educational attention to the full range of representational resources and platforms, in line with the changing communicational landscape, which has decentred language. Thinking and knowing are held to occur in a range of modes, including the visual, bodily, sonic and spatial, in addition to language. In particular, they emphasise the way many modes are orchestrated in complex multimodal representations and communications, as in the diverse forms in which South African poetry is materialised (Newfield and d'Abdon 2015). Studies applying multimodal pedagogies in EFAL contexts have shown the positive results of broadening the repertoire for teaching and learning (Newfield and Maungedzo 2006; Stein 2008). The question of orality is crucial in South African narrative and poetic traditions (Gunner 2004; Finnegan 2013; Kaschula 2012; Scheub 1998), which are retrieved and reconfigured in the present South African poetry scene. We consider much current poetry to have its origins in orality, for example, in its izibongo, izithakazelo and amaculo, praise poems and songs, which are hybridised today with popular global cultural forms, such as hip hop and rap, and South African urban forms, such as kwaito (see Newfield and d'Abdon 2015).

Posthumanist and new materialist approaches reject humanism's claim that humans are the measure of all things; they reject human exceptionalism and individualism (Barad 2007; Braidotti 2013; Bozalek et al. 2019). Instead they assume the relationality of all matter and a flattened ontology-human, non-human, animal, material-in the past, present and future, as well as in different geographical contexts, a relationality demonstrated by the 2020 coronavirus phenomenon. Relationality entails "intra-action", which is preferred to "interaction" in order to highlight the inseparability of people, objects, events, actions, "doings" and "becomings"-all are entangled (Barad 2007). These approaches take account of ethics and ontology as well as epistemology, and are responsible and "response-able" (Barad 2007; Bozalek et al. 2019; Haraway 2012) to the inequalities in society. Haraway reconfigures the usual concept of "responsibility" as "response-ability", which is "a praxis of care and response ... in ongoing multispecies worlding on a wounded terra" (2012, 302).

Affect, a concept that derives from Spinoza, is central to ZAPP's research framework, and is implied in the above studies. It is a critical notion in decolonising pedagogies, which value the "warm current" of desire, "indignation and the will to resist" (Santos 2016, 26). Referring to a non-personal, non-cerebral energy or force that can bring about change, affect is linked to the "non-cognitive and non-volitional expressions of life, including feeling, animation, tactility and habituation" (Roelvink and Zolkos 2015 in Kuby et al. 2019, 185). A form of productive power or "potentia" (Braidotti 2013, 136), a capacity to act or be acted upon (Braidotti 2013, 55-57, 166-7; Kuby et al. 2019, 1856; Massumi 2015), affect is manifest in education (Sousa 2016). It animates classrooms and may be evidenced in individual or group motivation or engagement, or lack of them, with concomitant results for learning or lack of it.

Together, studies in these areas make a strong case for reconfiguring education in an ethical and situated manner, being open to new ideas and response-able to the other, whether that other be conceptualised from a human, cultural, epistemological, semiotic, material or planetary perspective. In addition, they privilege an approach to education that is not only cognitive, but holistic, conceiving of teachers and learners as "intra-acting"² in multidimensional, complex, entangled relationships, contexts and histories.

 

Research in Schools: A Case Study

This section reports on our investigation into whether, and to what extent, it is possible to decolonise the curricula and pedagogies involved in teaching and learning poetry in EFAL classrooms. We chose six secondary schools in Gauteng and the Western Cape as our research sites. Space does not permit us to embark on a full discussion of our activities at all six schools, so one school is presented here as a case study. We use our chosen theoretical frameworks to shed light on the impact of our developing relationship with the school. Theories of decoloniality and indigeneity illuminate features of educational practice that need to change in order to bring about social justice. In particular, they draw our attention to elements of curricula and pedagogies that carry traces of colonial investments. Our decolonising agenda motivated us to strive to subvert these through infusing elements of indigenous material and pedagogical practices into the school. Our multimodal framework points to the fact that poetry occurs in multiple modes (such as graphic, oral, performative, and digital) and not only through the written word. In this way, it highlights the single, narrow approach to the way poetry is taught in formal classrooms. Our posthumanist and new materialist theoretical affiliation specifies that the school's geographical location, material and educational resources and its community of teachers and learners are not mere background information, but are, instead, components of the complex intra-actions that co-constitute the enterprise of teaching and learning, where material-discursive³ phenomena are entangled. Applying these frameworks diffractively directs us to attend to many features of the school's situation and teaching practices that are crucially pertinent to the teaching and learning of poetry.

The school is a well-functioning peri-urban school in the township of Soshanguve. Both teachers and learners are proud of its historical legacy; they also express satisfaction at the school's excellent pass rate in the National Senior Certificate (NSC) examinations (92% in 2018). South African schools are assessed and ranked on this statistic, which is a performative marker of the matriculation phenomenon. Education in the South African schooling system is an example of the sedimentation and performativity of relations of power and knowledge. Teachers hold knowledge, while learners do not. The type of knowledge held by teachers is premised on political interests, as may be discerned in the curriculum and in classroom pedagogies; apartheid interests still remain evident in the unequal distribution of material-discursive resources among schools. The school where we carried out our research possesses resources, such as classrooms, teachers, blackboards, desks and chairs, but is not as well-supplied with textbooks as it might be: there is, for example, only one copy of the prescribed poetry textbook in the school. The single textbook is a material object, but its scarcity results in practices such as copying and distributing copies of poems, and increases its value. In a better-resourced school in a more affluent area, every learner would receive a textbook and would thus become acquainted with the resources they need to pursue intra-actions associated with learning.

The school is located in an area of the township that is characterised by brick-and-mortar housing and tarred roads. Nevertheless, its reputation for high academic standards attracts learners from less well-resourced communities. Many of these learners arrive at school without having had breakfast, and without food, because of poverty. Hunger disables learning, creating an affective current of deprivation. The school's social justice mandate to redress inequalities and enable the learners to learn has led the management to enter into a contract with a local catering company to bring cooked food to the school daily.

We had two aims in our work at the school. First, we intended to explore the culture of teaching and learning poetry. Our second aim, which we thought far more important and time-consuming, was to decolonise the school's poetry curriculum and pedagogies through infusing indigenous texts and practices into the teaching and learning of poetry. In this way, we intended to assist in "[living] the African ideals by (among others) reflecting the indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) in education" (Msila and Gumbo 2016, iv). As the existing lists of prescribed poems for Grade 10 and 11 are out of date in relation to the current poetry scene,⁴ we intended to demonstrate practically that contemporary South African poems would prove more relatable for learners and would evoke better responses in written and oral work. We also intended, in line with decolonial pedagogies that build on a Freirean "pedagogy of the oppressed" (1968), to subvert the established hierarchy of power relations in classrooms through encouraging teachers to use learner-centred pedagogies, which are "linked to wider social movements promoting social reform and egalitarianism" (Schweisfurth 2013, 9).

With this in mind, we observed what happens in classrooms when poetry is taught. Most lessons unfolded with the teacher reading the poems aloud to the learners and then telling the class about the texts. Questions posed to learners tended to be closed, allowing learners only the option of answering "yes/no" or completing the teacher's sentences. The intra-actions in the classroom were very formal. They positioned one agent (the teacher) as firmly in charge of knowledge, while all the rest were positioned as passive receivers. The dominant modes in the classrooms were oral and written. Poems were taught mainly as texts on pages. They could be read aloud, but not performed: the oral was subsumed into the written. The classes did not provide space for multimodal understandings of poetry, or for learners to express creative responses to the poems. Under apartheid, education typically did not require sophisticated thinking from black learners; they were only required to memorise content. There has been a shift in contemporary South African secondary school education in the post-apartheid era, where slightly more analytical questions are asked in examinations, but a pass mark still depends more on memory of content than on critical thinking.

Figures of speech, where language functions at the slippery edges of meaning, combining, weaving and entangling sense, affect and paradox, were presented as technical aspects of poetry, which have a regular structure and use in poems. This is in contradistinction to Liz Gunner's account of the way figurative language in praise poetry functions to encode ambiguity and hybridity (2004). In order to understand figures of speech in poetry classrooms at our research site, learners only needed to memorise the technical aspects of their construction and apply these to particular cases. They were neither required nor encouraged to engage with the indefinable and polysemous aspects of language, which are the special qualities of poetry. If this were encouraged in the classroom, the humble metaphor or simile could become a vehicle for learners to take charge of their own learning and begin to decolonise the dominant pedagogies at the school.

The rigid teacher- and content-centred approach that dominates pedagogies of teaching and learning poetry is materialised in the CAPS (Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement) document, issued by the Gauteng Department of Education. CAPS instructs teachers about what they should teach in each section of the curriculum. It divides the curriculum into weekly sections, with instructions about what skills the learners should practise and how they should be assessed in each section. CAPS has material-discursive effects, producing oral and written intra-actions in classrooms that model its authoritarian approach. Teachers' intra-action with prescribed poems varies depending on their level of interest in the genre, which itself is circumscribed by their experiences at tertiary education level where the goal of teacher training is to instil a colonial model of "analysis" in the teachers so that they can pass it on to their learners. "Analysis" is a rigid and predetermined form of intra-action with a text, derived from British critics such as F.R. Leavis (1948) and I.A. Richards (1924). It is designed to elicit repeatable responses from learners that can be assessed unambiguously. The school's success rate in the NSC determines how desirable the school is to new learners. Teachers benefit, therefore, from teaching learners to answer questions in assessments and examinations "correctly".

In order to encourage a decolonised, indigenised and multimodal approach to teaching and learning poetry, the research team conducted workshops with teachers after school. In one particular workshop, we demonstrated that poems could be explored, dramatised, represented visually, transliterated into emojis or understood as calls to action. The teachers listened politely and found these approaches to their prescribed poetry creative, but clearly not a substitute for analysis. Our attempt at decolonising the curriculum through two approaches-introducing more contemporary South African poetry that draws on indigenous traditions and shifting the power balance in classrooms to make teaching more learner-centred-was unsuccessful. This was due to the pressure on teachers to get through the curriculum and produce assessments in which learners demonstrate their mastery of "correct" answers to the kinds of questions asked in examinations.

Learners did not respond enthusiastically to the pedagogical approaches used in most poetry lessons at the school. They understood that the teachers were under pressure to teach and train them to do well in examinations, but they found this approach "boring". A strikingly different affect was apparent in the school's vibrant Poetry Club. This meets once a week after school and is "coached" by the head of the English Department. She is no longer a "teacher"-where her role is that of a gatekeeping authority-but a "coach" who works with the learners to co-create themselves as poets. The Club is led and run by learners, who have, in this way, decolonised the space so that it is conducive to self-directed learning. Meetings are devoid of the formality that pervades classroom teaching; yet, there is respectful turn-taking and members' contributions are met with appreciation. Poetry is experienced as praxis, not as curriculum; to be done, not to be trained in. Finally, in the Poetry Club, poetry is indigenous-written by and for learners-and multimodal, being performed in gestures, vocal intonations and in collaboration with the audience.

On one occasion, the school attempted to participate in a national inter-school poetry competition supported by ZAPP (Poetry for Life), where learners were required to memorise and recite two poems from the online competition list: one from the European list and one from the list of contemporary South African poems selected by ZAPP researchers. The participants from the school willingly memorised a poem from the European list, but, against the rules of the competition, they recited poems they had written instead of prescribed South African poems. Such was the enthusiasm for creativity generated in the Poetry Club.

Unfortunately, our project to decolonise and indigenise poetry curricula and practices in secondary school EFAL classrooms was hamstrung by structural intra-actions of unequal power. "Authorities", whether at provincial or national administrative levels, or in classrooms, prescribe not only what shall be studied but how it is to be studied. The curriculum places teachers under so much pressure to complete tasks and assessments that there is little opportunity for learners to exercise either critical thinking or holistic learning choices. While this may lead one to conclude that we are back in the Foucauldian world of producing "docile bodies" (Foucault 1975, 136), this would not account for the material-discursive aspect of classroom practice, where the entanglement of educational policy, material resources, bodies that are not provided with the requirements to flourish, and a narrow view of poetry as "text" all co-contribute to an overly cerebral experience of poems as arcane, difficult and (preferably) to be avoided.⁵ This is an unfortunate legacy of colonial understandings of school education, which may take longer to undo than ZAPP's three years of engagement. Opportunities for learners to take control of their own learning do exist, nevertheless, and are taken up by learners outside classrooms, in corridors and in the Poetry Club.

 

The Contemporary Poetry Scene and the Question of Indigeneity

The second component of ZAPP's activity, which is still in process, concerns contemporary South African poetry and the question of indigeneity. Our research, as previously mentioned, is limited to poetry in English, or predominantly in English, in alignment with the terms of the research project. ZAPP probes the question of indigeneity in three ways: using extant scholarship in the fields of poetry and indigeneity, doing fieldwork research though attendance at spoken word gigs, festivals, poetry launches, broadcasts and other events to familiarise ourselves with the field of poetry as social praxis and as text, and conducting interviews with knowledge holders and practitioners⁶ in the field of poetry.

Scholarship on indigeneity and indigenisation informs our consideration of whether South African poetry in English can be considered indigenous or not, and, if so, to what extent, given the paradoxical position of English in relation to indigeneity (see, for example, Brand 2004; Fataar 2018; Msila and Gumbo 2017; Ngügï 1986; Nyamnjoh 2012). The question of indigeneity at the present time remains open, raising more questions than it answers. Does "indigenous" imply African? If so, is only poetry composed by black Africans "indigenous" or can the category be expanded to include poetry focused on Africa, African themes and cosmologies? Is poetry produced by politically subjugated groups, such as South African Indians (the descendants of indentured labourers brought to the colony by the British under false pretences between 1860 and 1911) indigenous, as Govender asks (2019)?

Motivated by a new materialist emphasis on doing, on praxis, rather than on interpretations-following Deleuze and Guattari's injunction not to ask what something means but what it does (Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 3; Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 4)-ZAPP has researched the field of performance. Some of its questions are: What role does poetry play here? Whom does it serve? What does it do? What are poetry collectives and why are they popular?⁷ What are the platforms for poetry? ZAPP has attended many live poetry performances, including poetry and jazz sessions at the now-defunct Orbit Jazz Club in Johannesburg (curated by Myesha Jenkins and Natalia Molebatsi), various iterations of the annual Word N Sound spoken word competition, poetry slam competitions hosted by Current State of Poetry, launches of poetry collections by Busisiwe Mahlangu, Gabeba Baderoon, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Makhosazana Xaba, Vangi Gantsho, Danai Mupotsa, Arja Salafranca, Raphael d'Abdon and others, poetry performances by Malika Ndlovu, Toni Stuart and the InZync Poetry collective at the Open Book Festival in Cape Town, and numerous other events. The enthusiastic reception of these events testifies to the affective and political power of poetry: "Writing and sharing poetry shows us that we are not alone in our experiences of the world and opens us up to experience the world of another. In doing so, it helps us to develop compassion" (Stuart in Xaba 2019, 156).

In addition, ZAPP has embarked on a series of in-depth interviews with indigenous knowledge holders and practitioners in the South African poetry community. These aim to elicit their views on indigeneity in their own poetry and in the contemporary poetry scene more broadly. A preliminary analysis reveals that the poets hold widely divergent views. For some, indigeneity involves tapping into knowledge and practices that are embedded in cultures in multimodal and multi-sensory ways. Poets such as Pitika Ntuli, Vangi Gantsho and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers derive strength for their creative endeavours from their relationship with ancestors, including poetic foremothers and forefathers. Other poets regard indigeneity as referring, instead, to specific geographical locations, such as the Cape Flats or Soweto. The interviews still need to be completed and fully analysed.

 

Decolonising Institutional Practice: The Case of the Colloquium

As previously stated, our project's aim is to contribute to the national project of decolonising texts and practices in disciplines and institutions, working through praxis. Disruption and transformation rather than the overthrow of established curricula, pedagogies and institutional practices pertaining to the study of English has been the goal. Zembylas (2018) speaks of "twisting" the practices deriving from Eurocentrism and Eurocentric forms of knowledge, and this is an apt term to describe our actions. We have tried to decolonise the list of poems studied in EFAL classrooms through expansion and indigenisation, as outlined in an earlier section of this article. This section discusses our attempt to "twist" a specific institutional practice concerned with the dissemination of poetry knowledge, namely, holding a colloquium. To exemplify this, we use "Decoloniality and Indigeneity in Poetry and Education", organised by ZAPP at the University of the Witwatersrand in July 2019.

A colloquium is an academic gathering at which leading scholars read papers on a particular theme or topic, which are then opened up for discussion and critique. It is a standard Western event of high status in educational institutions. Distinguished experts in a field are invited to read scholarly papers to a group of fellow experts, who may be members of a particular interest group. The Rousseau Colloquium held at Trinity College, Cambridge, UK, in 2010 serves as a representative example. The Colloquium proceedings read: "A dozen specialists were invited to read papers to an audience of about a hundred other scholars interested either particularly in Rousseau or in the 18th century in general, who discussed the papers with their authors" (Leigh 2010). This approach is followed by most Westernised institutions in the world today, including in Africa, although a loosening up of restrictions and movement to digital platforms have recently been evident. Modifications to the strict, standardised features of the traditional colloquium by the colloquium on "Decoloniality and Indigeneity in Poetry and Education" will be examined below through the lenses used in ZAPP as a whole.

The Colloquium demonstrated ZAPP's aim to reconfigure ways of knowing through a reclamation of hidden or marginalised forms and structures. This aim is implied in the design of its programme cover, which features the Thebuwa Cloth, a three-metre multimodal wall hanging produced by South African learners in a township school (Figure 1).

 

 

Utilising language and other representational modes, the cloth integrates contemporary poems in English and traditional poems in African languages with other cultural practices such as cloth-making, embroidery, photography and cartography (see Newfield 2014; Newfield and Maungedzo 2006). The Colloquium programme included 25 presentations by a diverse range of speakers from all over South Africa, in line with ZAPP's aim of bridging divisions, dismantling unequal colonial power relations, acknowledging and overturning historical privileges enacted in the academy: in short, advancing democratic education. The Colloquium sought to close gaps between the haves and have-nots and to remove white supremacy; it sought to recognise, listen, apologise, develop capacity, repair, heal and celebrate across racial, gender, class and cultural divisions.

How was this done? And what made one of the delegates exclaim during the final discussion, "This was a decolonised colloquium"?⁸ The outline below explores features that may have given rise to this evaluation.

The first feature is an inclusive, polyphonic space, which brought out from the shadows what might be called indigenous knowledge and its practices through placing on the platform not only illustrious professors, but also poetry practitioners and holders, who did not necessarily hold postgraduate degrees from or prominent posts at universities.

The first of the three main addresses was given by poet Malika Ndlovu, who performed a 40-minute suite of poems about identity, power, oppression, pain and trauma in South Africa in an alternative, poetic way of presenting knowledge. The second was Pitika Ntuli, the patron of ZAPP, a poet who writes in five of South Africa's 11 official languages. He demonstrated the poetic nature of language through improvising a series of multilingual jazz riffs on key phrases given to him by the audience. The third was Leketi Makalela, a distinguished professor of language, who provided us with a scholarly exposition of decolonising principles and pedagogies for multilingual classrooms, which included, importantly, "translanguaging".⁹ In addition to recognised poetry and education scholars, the Colloquium presenters included teachers and other educators, emergent researchers, postgraduate students, poets and youth. All were acknowledged as valid knowledge holders, given space to disseminate their views and responded to as respected contributors to the Colloquium. In this way, the usual, ring-fencing conventions were abandoned and hierarchical power relations in the holding of knowledge were unmoored.

The design of the physical space and forms of delivery were multimodal and indigenous. They served to decentre written language, not overthrow it, since written language remains a central communicative format for poetry along with spoken word. They also orchestrated language with other modal forms to create an expanded sensory experience. The visual dominance of the Thebuwa Cloth, displayed on a metal frame, was complemented by specially commissioned sketches of South African poets on the walls.¹⁰ Being attentive to the politics of space, we sought to arrange the seating differently from that in university auditoria where formal rows of fixed seats face a podium. Inspired by the Kgotla,¹¹ we arranged the chairs in a U-shape to facilitate discussion.

The format of the papers varied from papers and panels to poems accompanied by music, and from read papers to live performance. Thus, the theme of decolonising poetry education was not debated in a purely rational and cerebral way, but drew on African traditions of orality and of multimodal cultural production. The Colloquium thus acknowledged different ways of knowing and different ways of disseminating knowledge, apart from the conventional and cerebral ways of the Westernised academy. The Colloquium was a pluricultural event, representing a range of different forms of cultural production and knowledge dissemination in South Africa's different communities. Indigenisation was signified by the spatial arrangement of the venue, as well as by dress and stance (Hebdige 1979). One presentation opened with the burning of impepho as an injunction for healing, and later included the plucking of an isitolotolo (a form of Jew's harp) as part of a suite of poems (Figure 2).

 

 

The style of engagement was another decolonising feature. Eurocentric formality, conventionally associated with power and status, and manifested in self-promoting forms of linguistic sophistication, can have an intimidatory and exclusionary effect on audiences. The organisational style of the Colloquium was inclusive, warmly welcoming rather than coldly formal and distant, non-hierarchical. Chaired with a light hand, rather than presented in the carefully circumscribed ways of the white male expert, the Colloquium invited the participation of all attendees. Lively discussion was generated through affective and emotional as well as intellectual input and output.

The vexed and much-debated question of language in decolonising multilingual countries such as South Africa hung over the Colloquium. If removing English as the medium of dissemination of knowledge is required for decolonisation, this did not happen, because the ZAPP project locates itself within the discipline of English. English therefore remained in its pole position, functioning as a lingua franca, in spite of differing mother tongues for the presenters and delegates. However, the multilingual character of the South African nation was evident throughout both the formal presentations and the discussions through vibrant threads of African language usage and themes.

In this section we have highlighted the features that intra-acted (Barad 2007, 33) and sparked a decolonising circuit of affect in the Colloquium. Affect, which played a key role, was a transforming force, propelling and propelled by the above features. It was a kind of electrical circuit of motivation and energy, felt in the Colloquium as a whole, reconfiguring it. Affect activated and was activated by the intra-action of all the components constituting the Colloquium assemblage¹²-human, technological, discursive, epistemological, cultural, historical and social. Affect enabled the flow of connections between the ideas, experiences, emotions, memories and modes of delivery of presenters and delegates. In its context of de-hierarchised interaction, affect bonded the participants into a community. It also moved them forward in their different journeys of scholarly "becoming" as poets, speakers, researchers, performers, educators and theorists. The Colloquium was a "doing" (Barad 2007, 135, 178), a dynamic process of knowing and becoming, of empowerment, in contra-distinction to the disempowerment that can occur in the face of arrogant performances by competitive and individualistic speakers.

 

Conclusion

This article has outlined three components of ZAPP's research into the decolonising of poetry education. Its research into curricula and pedagogies relating to poetry in EFAL classrooms has shown the immense difficulty of infusing indigenous texts and practices into South African EFAL classrooms. The pressures of an overstuffed curriculum and of the need for success in the final matriculation examination-from heads of departments in the schools, line managers, including local and national Departments of Education-thwarted our attempt to make decolonising inroads into formal classrooms. On the other hand, spaces outside classrooms, such as the Poetry Club, were hives of poetic creativity and learning, thoroughly enjoyed by all. ZAPP's ongoing research into the nature of indigeneity in South African poetry today reinforces the fact that decolonisation and indigenisation of poetry are happening outside formal environments. The actions of poets on stages, no less than on pages, storm the bastions of what counts as "poetry", reconfiguring it as a dynamic, multimodal phenomenon with many dimensions. We celebrate the actions of poets in reconstituting and practising poetry in ways that serve them. The Colloquium unsettled the colonial certainties of what counts as knowledge, what can contribute to knowledge and how that knowledge is disseminated. It troubled what it means to be an expert and in whom expertise is constituted, twisting colonial relations of "race", privilege and power. It had a strong ethical dimension, ethics understood not in the abstract but as an embodied practice, a materialisation of a commitment to social justice.

The ZAPP project as a whole is motivated by "an ethical call to shift modes of being, doing and thinking" (Taylor 2018, 95) as redress for past wrongs, erasures and marginalisations. It speaks from the corners, the edges and thresholds of experience and the academy. It attempts to be life-giving to teachers, learners, and students, and to promote the work of contemporary South African poets. This has been a daunting and at times insurmountable challenge. On the other hand, in its diffraction of activism and research, ZAPP may be seen as a practical endeavour to decolonise and indigenise pedagogic and institutional practice. Along with the difficulties, it has opened up a range of possibilities for EFAL classrooms. It has also fostered mutually enriching collaborations between the academy and the outside world.

In the words of Lebohang "Nova" Masango:

Africa

Never again will I throw your name around

Like an old excuse

I vow to reclaim all that honours

The origin of we without fear

Bloodied but never broken

We are still here

(Masango, "To Do List for Africa", 2019)

 

Acknowledgements

We thank the National Research Foundation for their support of this project, Grant 105159. We also thank our wonderful ZAPP team with whom we have enjoyed stimulating and pleasurable times.

 

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1 Posthumanism and new materialisms are two interlinked areas of theoretical engagement, which we draw on in this article.
2 A neologism used by Karen Barad to signify "the mutual constitution of entangled agencies" (2007, 33), in contrast to the more common "interaction".
3 The term "material-discursive", used in new materialism, does not point to the fact that "there are important material factors in addition to discursive ones" but to "the conjoined material-discursive nature of constraints, conditions, and practices" (Barad 2007, 152). For example, the kinds of resources allocated to a particular school may be material things such as desks, books and chairs, but these are the effects of political ideas, agendas and policies that are discoverable only in discursive manifestations.
4 As an example, although four of the seven Grade 11 prescribed poems are South African, these are drawn from canonical works published in the previous century.
5 This is borne out by the fact that the school has elected not to study poetry for the NSC examinations for fear of decreasing their pass rate.
6 These terms refer to South Africa's drive to reclaim indigenous knowledge. The National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa established a domain of Indigenous Knowledge Systems. In our project, elders, who receive and transmit indigenous knowledge, are seen as knowledge holders. Younger poets, who draw on these traditions, are seen as knowledge practitioners.
7 The past half-century has seen the rise of numerous poetry collectives, including WEAVE, Feela Sista!, the Botsotso Jesters, InZync Poetry, the Current State of Poetry, Lingua Franca and the Mzansi Poetry Academy.
8 Horwitz, Allan Kolski, Johannesburg poet and publisher.
9 Translanguaging is a feature of language use in multilingual contexts; it is also a pedagogy that contests monolingual bias in literacy teaching and learning, and instead valorises alternation within and between languages by teachers and learners (see Makalela 2016).
10 These were commissioned from portrait artist Marco Bucceri.
11 The traditional Kgotla is a community gathering where Batswana chiefs and headmen discuss legal cases and matters of public interest, and where all are allowed an equal chance to speak. "The seating arrangement signifies the equality in the Kgotla" (Moumakwa 2010, 53).
12 "Assemblage" is a translation of the French agencement, a collection of things which have been assembled, arranged or laid out. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), who popularised the term, the component parts of an assemblage are not fixed and stable but can be displaced and replaced. Our use of the term implies a collection of different components that interact, intra-act and connect in fluid and shifting ways.

^rND^sBarnard^nAlan^rND^sBrand^nG. v. W.^rND^sGray^nMel^rND^nJohn^sCoates^rND^sGrosfoguel^nRamon^rND^sIseger-Pilkington^nGlenn^rND^sKalua^nFetson^rND^sKaschula^nRussell^rND^sMakalela^nLeketi^rND^sMaldonado-Torres^nNelson^rND^sMignolo^nWalter^rND^sNdlovu-Gatsheni^nSabelo^rND^sNewfield^nDenise^rND^nRobert^sMaungedzo^rND^sNewfield^nDenise^rND^nRaphael^sd'Abdon^rND^sNjamnjoh^nFrancis B^rND^sSantos^nBoaventura Sousa^rND^nFlow^sWellington^rND^nFlow^sWellington^rND^nFlow^sWellington

THEMED SECTION 2
POETRY

 

Decolonised Tongue

 

 

Flow Wellington

info@poetreepublications.co.za

 

 

Open your mouth,

w i d e...

Wider than the rounded constraints

of a stolen language

you try so hard to master.

Allow your tongue to time travel;

They say it cannot forget the language

of your Abogan¹.

Open your mouth,

w i d e r...

Feel the clicks and echoes return and

rise from your belly.

Remember! Remember when your gowab²

was yours and didn't need

colonial justification.

Vai-oa³!

Yours is the task of untangling twisted tongues

from censored silence-

Vkhlbagus sa cgaob tsi vais⁴

so the stories of old are forever told

with your mouth wide open.

KhoeKhoe Translations Provided by Flow Wellington

1. Abogan: Ancestors

2. gowab: language

3. Vai-oa: Remember

4. Vkhlbagus sa cgaob tsi vais: Reconcile your heart and mind

^rND^1A01^nBridget^sGrogan^rND^1A01^nBridget^sGrogan^rND^1A01^nBridget^sGrogan

THEMED SECTION 2
ARTICLE

 

Refining Contrapuntal Pedagogy: Reflections on Teaching Warsan Shire's "Home" and W.H. Auden's "Refugee Blues" to First-Year Students

 

 

Bridget Grogan

University of Johannesburg, South Africa. bmgrogan@uj.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3695-9534

 

 

---

ABSTRACT

This article reports on and discusses the experience of a contrapuntal approach to teaching poetry, explored during 2016 and 2017 in a series of introductory poetry lectures in the English 1 course at the University of Johannesburg. Drawing together two poems-Warsan Shire's "Home" and W.H. Auden's "Refugee Blues"-in a week of teaching in each year provided an opportunity for a comparison that encouraged students' observations on poetic voice, racial identity, transhistorical and transcultural human experience, trauma and empathy. It also provided an opportunity to reflect on teaching practice within the context of decoloniality and to acknowledge the need for ongoing change and review in relation to it. In describing the contrapuntal teaching and study of these poems, and the different methods employed in the respective years of teaching them, I tentatively suggest that canonical Western and contemporary postcolonial poems may reflect on each other in unique and transformative ways. I further posit that poets and poems that engage students may open the way into initially "less relevant" yet ultimately rewarding poems, while remaining important objects of study in themselves.

Keywords: contrapuntal pedagogy; Edward Said; Mikhail Bakhtin; Warsan Shire; W.H. Auden; decoloniality; empathy; affect

---

 

 

This article reports on and discusses the experience of a contrapuntal approach to teaching poetry, explored during 2016 and 2017 in a series of introductory poetry lectures in the English 1 course at the University of Johannesburg.¹ Drawing together two poems-Warsan Shire's "Home" and W.H. Auden's "Refugee Blues"-in a week of teaching in each year provided an opportunity for a comparison that encouraged students' observations on poetic voice, racial identity, transhistorical and transcultural human experience, trauma and empathy. It also provided an opportunity to reflect on teaching practice within the context of decoloniality and to acknowledge the need for ongoing change and review in order to decolonise the curriculum. In describing the contrapuntal teaching and study of these poems, and the different methods employed in the respective years of teaching them, I suggest that canonical and contemporary poems may reflect on each other in unique and transformative ways. Further, I posit that poets and poems that engage students may open the way into apparently "less relevant" yet ultimately rewarding poetry, while remaining important objects of study in themselves. In providing this analysis of my experiences, I am also advocating for a transformation within the classroom that takes account of different genres and eras of poetry, the different identities involved in its production (contributing to the transformation of the canon), the context of reading, and the inclusion of a diverse student body in the teaching and learning process. I argue that taking account of diversity within the student body extends the contrapuntal comparison of texts into a polyphonic reception of comparison and difference. In my experience, ontological access matters in the classroom, an observation that became starkly evident when these poems were approached differently and in a contrasting order in the second year of teaching them. Ontological access may be understood in two ways in educational theory: as informing the person that the student becomes through the act of learning (Barnett 2009; Dall'Alba and Barnacle 2007), and as informing an educational practice that pays attention to who the student is, the latter being strongly related to epistemological access (Vorster and Quinn 2017, 39). Although this article pays greater attention to the latter meaning of the concept, my intention was also to focus students on social justice and thus encourage an ontological shift. Ultimately, I do not believe that contrapuntal pedagogy is an end in itself, involving the simple placement of texts side by side that are not usually studied together. Instead, I argue that that it needs to be carefully considered and ordered to provide optimal access and value to contemporary South African students whose voices, in response to the texts under study, form part of the matrix of discussion and learning.

Some context and a disclaimer are required at the outset, especially in an article that forms part of a themed issue on the topic of poetry and decoloniality. Before 2016 there had been two sections of poetry taught in English 1 at the University of Johannesburg. The first was designed to introduce students to poetic techniques and devices and different poetic forms; the second provided a focus on postcolonial poetry. From 2016, when teaching on the first part of this course, I wanted to break the unwitting divide created by this structure between "general" (often canonised Western) poetry and political or postcolonial poetry. In an article in The Guardian titled "How Not to Talk about African Fiction", Ainehi Edoro (2016) criticises this divide, paying particular attention to African novels. She examines how "African fiction is packaged and circulated, bought and sold not on the basis of its aesthetic value but of its thematic preoccupation", and links this to what she terms the "anthropological unconscious of the African novel", which manifests within the history of literary criticism as an engagement with African texts merely "from the standpoint of the social or political issues they address". This "anthropological" focus emerges, she argues, in contemporary criticism wherein "African fiction is invisible except when it is reflected on a mirror of social ills, cultural themes and political concerns". Edoro calls for a consideration of African and postcolonial writing that pays equal consideration to its style and aesthetics. My aim in teaching, in keeping with this call, was to dissociate Western poetry from technique and African poetry from mere political expression and to foreground politics and technique as combining in both traditions. For the weeks when I was teaching, I adopted a contrapuntal method, structuring each week according to different themes and teaching poems from different times and contexts that explored or related to these themes. This article describes one week of teaching, which was repeated for two consecutive years, during which the thematic focus was on refugee experience.

The disclaimer, then: in South Africa, decolonisation in the university context is often synonymous with the "call to Africanise the curriculum" (Almeida and Kumalo 2018, 2); however, I am not making claims in this article for having enacted a method of decolonising the curriculum with a particular focus on (South) African writing. Both of the poets under study are British (although one is of migrant African identity and descent), and each poem focuses on a historical and current world issue: Auden's poem focuses on Jewish refugeeism in the late 1930s, and Shire's on the contemporary global refugee crisis. Within the context of the call to decolonise higher education (and the 2015 and 2016 student protests playing out at the time²), Jonathan Jansen writes: "decolonisation ... is ... a knowledge project" (2019, 2). This article applies Jansen's view of decolonisation as epistemological to an analysis of contrapuntal and polyphonic practice within the teaching of poetry. For me, contrapuntal teaching may dismantle the Western canon-often privileged in university literary syllabi-while nonetheless retaining Western literature that is held to be of value by relating it to literature of the global South. The intention is to discourage an educational focus dealing only with "poetic identities ... sanctified with laurel crowns and preserved in printed editions", as Terry Ross (2000, 4) describes the English canon. It is to avoid the "teaching of literature", as emphasised by Henry Louis Gates, as synonymous with the "teaching of an aesthetic and political order, in which no women and people of color were ever able to discover the reflection or representation of their images, or hear the resonances of their cultural voices" (cited in Guillory 1994, 7). I hold, moreover, that decoloniality should also be seen as of the world. It should acknowledge the voices of the oppressed, albeit from different places and eras, in the South African teaching context, where issues of social justice should take precedence and where students may productively reflect on, and compare and contrast, injustices that have shaped the global as well as the local. Due consideration must be paid to how the global is framed in relation to the local, and lecturers and students should explore how canonised and contemporary or otherwise marginal(ised) texts may reflect upon or provide access to one another.

In drawing together two poems from different contexts that explore similar themes, my intention is to introduce students, albeit briefly, to the productive space of comparative literature. Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism (1993), famously described comparative literature as "a field whose origin and purpose is to move beyond insularity and provincialism and to see several cultures and literatures together, contrapuntally" (Said 1994, 49). Said adopts the adjective "contrapuntal" from musical theory, adapting it to literature. In music, counterpoint (the noun form of "contrapuntal") refers to the relationship between independent voices or melodies that are interdependently linked in musical unity. Used metaphorically in literary studies, interpretive counterpoint brings together independent voices in comparison (in this case, Auden and Shire) to see how they may be viewed together-harmoniously or discordantly. Importantly, Said views the contrapuntal method as an "antidote to reductive nationalism and uncritical dogma" (1994, 49), as a means of "see[ing] some sort of whole instead of the defensive little patch offered by one's own culture, literature, and history" (1994, 49). He argues that "as we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally, with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts" (1994, 59).

A pedagogical method based on counterpoint may resist a defensive, univocal validation and reification of the Western literary canon, an accusation that may arguably be levelled against a course presenting a poet like Auden. It may also resist parochial methods of teaching, including an unnuanced decolonial approach, in which "only one culture [or identity] matters for its own sake in the classroom" (Metz 2019, 2). While Michael Garbutcheon Singh and James Greenlaw (1998, 194) provide a simple definition of contrapuntal pedagogy as "a comparative method in which teachers juxtapose Eurocentric and postcolonial texts", how this juxtaposition occurs is an important point of consideration within the classroom. The question may arise, for example, whether contrapuntal pedagogy fulfils the requirements of decolonising the curriculum if Western poetry still features prominently within it. I suggest, though, that a real benefit of comparative, contrapuntal teaching is its opening up of a space of plurality, of global literary circuitry, in which not only individual poems and identities are discussed, but also their relevance to the contemporary moment and to students' contextualised reading experience. In this way, Western literature may be decentralised as merely one part of a field of multiple, global voices, while significant literary works-many of which engage with and denounce social injustice, like Auden's "Refugee Blues"-are acknowledged and appreciated in the process. I want to open up the concept of contrapuntal pedagogy so that it does not simply reflect two or more texts in conversation with one another or being subjected to interpretation together, but also takes account of the teaching space, which consists of a diverse array of students (from different South African cultural, racial, linguistic, educational and financial backgrounds) and more factors than only the texts under study.

I therefore relate counterpoint, in music and literary studies, to the concept of polyphony, another musical term used to describe two or more lines of independent melody, taken up by Mikhail Bakhtin to inform his own theories of literature. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1984), Bakhtin explores the way multiple voices constitute individual texts, disrupting the authority of any single voice (Abrams and Harpham 2012, 86). Contrasting Dostoevsky's novels with what he identifies as the monologic fiction of Tolstoy, Bakhtin notes "a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices" (Bakhtin 1984, 6-7; italics in original). I extend Bakhtin's definition to the classroom. It is important to emphasise the polyphony and plurality of the teaching and learning space, not only in terms of a contrapuntal approach to texts, but also in relation to the multiple "fully valid voices" (Bakhtin 1984, 7) of individual students, and the relevant and contemporary issues that may be brought to bear on literature-and vice versa-in the classroom. A polyphony of voices is important when dealing with a theme such as the refugee crisis and thus highlighting the experiences of vulnerable individuals from the global South within the context of globalisation. The South African university classroom is a mixture of multilingual and multicultural identities, and with its history of apartheid and migrancy from other African states, the polyphony of the classroom adds to the multivalency of literary comparison and interpretation. A transhistorical focus on oppression and migrant experience in different contexts also foregrounds the importance of looking back to other times and across to other places to reflect on current and recurring historical and political issues and to engage with literary expressions countering social injustice. This transhistorical approach requires historicising different texts: this draws contexts into relation with each other and levels the political playing field between them as well as the literary texts emanating from them. In my classes I emphasise poetry's evocation of empathy and I also suggest to students the productive possibility of empathising across cultural or identity divides and historical time in a manner that prioritises neither canonical poetry (such as that of W.H. Auden), nor contemporary poetry (such as Warsan Shire's). Instead, transcultural empathy brings together different voices to highlight issues of social injustice and, in this case, to articulate the traumatic experience of the refugee and the affective capacity of poetry to communicate it. The call to empathy across a cultural divide also counters, in the reader's experience, the dynamics and othering of xenophobia that inform the refugee speaker's experience in each poem under study.

Teaching contrapuntally involves looking closely at the texts, authors and contexts under study: not only at how they overlap or intersect, but how they may each be received individually within the classroom. W.H. Auden's "Refugee Blues" and Warsan Shire's "Home" both explore refugee experience in the first-person voice of the refugee (although Shire's poem also makes sustained use of the second person). Completed in March 1939, Auden's "Refugee Blues" is spoken by a Jewish refugee in the turbulent lead-up to World War II. The speaker's identity in Warsan Shire's "Home" is not as readily identifiable, although it is clear that the poem is situated within the contemporary global moment. A version of the poem was first published in Shire's début collection of poetry, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (2011), as "Conversations about Home (At a Deportation Centre)". I provided students with the transcription of another version simply titled "Home", published on YouTube and performed by Shire herself.³ In contrast to the necessity of reading "Refugee Blues" as a modernist poem in print, I wanted my students to hear Shire's poem in performance and to engage with the embodied, audible affect that it expresses. Engaging with poetry in performance allows students to respond to poetic affect more readily and quickly than a perhaps belaboured first reading of a poem by first-year students, inexperienced in reading poetry, would allow. Hearing poems in performance may encourage students to think about how best to read a poem when faced with the task themselves.

Shire's performance of "Home" coincided with the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, which also corresponded with my teaching and provided contextual, topical access to the poem.⁴ As global citizens, most students were familiar with the news footage and images that flooded world media at the time and subsequently, as well as the worldwide rise in nationalism and xenophobia. Students, however, are not only global citizens or citizens of the global South: they are primarily South Africans, which means that they constitute a diverse social body. As I have mentioned earlier, classroom reflections on global injustice were framed and situated within the South African context. My teaching corresponded with a wave of xenophobic violence in South Africa itself, and the trauma expressed in both poems-in the voices of distinct, suffering individuals who had experienced violent xenophobia and racism-allowed students to reflect on South African events and the individual traumas resulting from them. The global and South African crises formed backdrops to my teaching, which focused on experience and affect, and the role and techniques of poetry in replicating and producing both. Both poems, in their use of the first-person voice (among other strategies), invite the reader directly into the refugee's experience. They therefore encourage empathetic readings and provide strongly affective, powerful counter-narratives to discourses of oppression, othering, racism and xenophobia.

It is well-established that students find poetry "hard and that teaching it therefore presents a challenge" (Fulani, Hendricks, and McCarthy 2019; Moyana 1991). My aim was to find poems that "spoke" to my students and each other, thereby multiplying points of discussion and access to poetry within the classroom. The topical theme of refugee experience in relation to current global events and xenophobic violence was one way "into" the poetry, allowing students to engage with it more readily. However, there was more to consider than simply contextualising the poems. The call for decolonisation in higher education has led to intensified reflection regarding teaching practice in the South African context, where issues of identity matter in the classroom and often become the basis for students' receptivity to the subject under study. I needed to ask myself, then: How will students relate to the texts and writers chosen in this course? I had correctly predicted that students would gravitate to Warsan Shire more readily than to W.H. Auden. Like Shire, the majority of English students at the University of Johannesburg are young, black urban women. In addition, the freshness of Shire's performance poetry holds great appeal. Laura Apol (2017) observes that the "most exciting development in the world of poetry for young people is in the arena of performance. There is a widespread renewed interest in spoken poetry for and by young people. Its growth is signaled by the emergence of hip-hop, rap, poetry slams and spoken-word poetry events." Raphael d'Abdon (2014, 78) further emphasises South African students' potential receptivity to spoken word performances when he describes spoken word poetry as one of the "most notable means of artistic expression for South African youth in the post-apartheid urban cultural milieu". In a world where digital media is proliferating, moreover, in which spoken word poetry is widely disseminated and shared, and a large proportion of students are literate, comfortable users of digital media, Shire's poetry has reach. With thousands of Twitter followers, coverage on YouTube and her poetry featured on Beyoncé's sixth album Lemonade (2016), she appeals immediately to many contemporary students.

Introducing students to W.H. Auden is more challenging. It is worth thinking here about how students who are unfamiliar with an author may encounter them initially. Beyond lectures, this encounter is most likely to occur online, and Auden's online presence may appear stuffy and intimidating to students encountering his persona and work for the first time. A Google Image search yields a series of black and white photographs, most of Auden in his old age. Austere, tweed-clad and white, his craggy looks may personify European, masculine intellectualism and produce the impression of bygone scholarly severity. From the perspective of the average twenty-first century South African student, he is distant in numerous, seemingly intractable ways: age, time, culture, citizenship, and most likely race and gender as well. It is worth asking, therefore, how such a figure may become relevant to a contemporary first-year South African student. One answer is in the subject matter of the poetry; another lies in the way in which it is taught. Introducing students to Auden's poetry by way of Shire, and suggesting that their poems, although penned by a contemporary British-Somali poet and a dead British modernist respectively, may reflect on South African issues and experiences, makes the task significantly easier.

It is not my teaching method to dwell on the identities or biographies of writers unless they are particularly relevant to the subject matter. But it is necessary to provide some historical information about the texts under study, and the experience of teaching these texts together indicated that authorial identity does matter to students and does influence affective responses to reading. Increasingly, as identity politics come to the fore in the contemporary moment, we cannot declare the author dead as, following Roland Barthes, we were wont to do in the past. As I will argue later, the way in which the poems are introduced and contextualised strongly influences students' receptivity to them. However, I also want to discuss the poems themselves, as I do in my classes. In teaching these poems together, I move quickly to discussing the speakers' voices and their representation of experience. To start a discussion in the classroom that takes note of the voices emphasised in the concepts of counterpoint and polyphony discussed above involves reading both poems closely with students, to see how each poem emphasises refugee experience and thus works to evoke the reader's empathy and response. I considered the representation and voicing of subjectivity in each poem and attempted to situate these subjectivities historically. Students were encouraged to give voice to the poems by reading them aloud in preparation for the lectures (due to the large classes, I read the poems to students during class time), and were asked to consider: Who is the "I" that is speaking? What is the "I" communicating about their experience? What is the effect upon the reader of that communication?

Auden's "Refugee Blues" explores the treatment and experience of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany just before World War II. The speaker has escaped to a new country where s/he feels alienated, vulnerable and out of place. I asked my students to identify themes that the poem explores as implicit in the refugee experience, and which contribute to the mood and affect of the poem, attempting to draw the students' voices into the discussion. From the poem, students identified the following themes of refugee experience: homelessness, alienation, restriction, death-in-life, purposelessness, disbelief (in the hatred of others), rejection, discomfort, danger, threat and war. They were then asked to find quotations in the poem that reflected each theme and to analyse these. An important aspect of teaching poetry to students is teaching them how to write about it: this is one of students' difficulties with the genre. Granting clear epistemological access is necessary for student success, and an important aspect of decolonial education (Vorster and Quinn 2017). Identifying themes, attaching them to quotations and analysing the significance of the quotations in discussion in the classroom allow students to begin to construct an informed argument while working through the poem and responding to it intellectually and emotionally. Rather than having lecture slides prepared in advance, I asked my students to help me to create them, workshopping and modelling poetic analysis with and for the class. In relation to the theme of homelessness, for example, a class discussion produced the following paragraph (I provide extracts from my workshopped lecture notes here to illustrate my notion of the polyphonic classroom, in which class dialogue actively contributes to learning):

In lines 1 and 2 of the poem, Auden uses imagery of the city to suggest that, from the refugee's point of view, all of the citizens of the city in which s/he has arrived have a home. The speaker describes "ten million souls" (line 1) who are "living in mansions" (line 2) or "living in holes" (line 2). S/he therefore describes an enormous city-the place in which they have come to live-in which the millions of people, from the rich to the extremely poor, have a place to stay. However, the third line of the poem sets up the contrast of the refugee experience, emphasising the speaker's homelessness, isolation and sense of displacement: "Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us" (line 3). This isolation is emphasised by the structure of the tercet and the fact that the third line stands on its own in relation to the rhyming couplet.

An important aspect of "Refugee Blues", which contributes to an understanding of the speaker and the context of the poem as an utterance, is that it is addressed to a specific hearer or addressee: I wanted students to engage with this terminology. This aspect of the poem-its voicing in the first-person plural ("yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us" (line 3)-also contributes to its affective dimension and I wanted students to explore this. Throughout the poem the speaker addresses someone for whom s/he has great affection, someone who is loved. S/he addresses the loved one as "my dear", a melancholy phrase of endearment that recurs in the last line of every stanza. Students are asked to consider the effect of this repetition and also the effect of experiencing the poem as an expression of intimacy between two oppressed people whose humanity is not recognised-in fact, is actively denied-outside the context of their relationship. Effectively, students are asked to consider how the speaker's relationship with the addressee contributes to the reader's empathy. Together, we composed the following analysis responding to these questions, extracted from my lecture notes of 2017:

The speaker expresses great affection for the addressee, which is evident in the repetition of the phrase "my dear" throughout the poem. Although the speaker's circumstances suggest their alienation and that they have come to a country where they receive no kindness or compassion, the fact that they address someone who loves them and whom they love in return reveals that they are entirely worthy of love and care despite the circumstances. The refugee the speaker addresses is worthy of affection and compassion too, which they receive from the speaker. By emphasising the speaker's caring relationship, the poem invites the reader to care for the speaker and their addressee too, to see their warmth and humanity, and thus to appreciate the terrible plight and alienation of the refugee. The hatred, violence and coldness that they have experienced are emphasised not only in the descriptions of horror but also because of the contrast of these to the warm emotions reflected in the speaker's relationship with the addressee, emotions nonetheless tinged with shared sadness, loneliness and paralysis within the political context.

In exploring poetic voice in Auden's "Refugee Blues" with my students, I asked them to consider how the poem's use of the first person, as well as its emphasis on the speaker addressing another with care and understanding, may invite the reader into the personal experience of the refugee. The poem both situates the reader within the perceptions of the speaker and addresses the reader as though they were the loved one themselves. The reader is simultaneously speaker and addressee and is thus doubly hailed. This doubling occurs in multiple ways, allowing the reader to experience, for example, the simultaneously spoken and voiceless condition of the refugee, the simultaneity of dehumanisation and raw, vulnerable human experience, and the dual experience of political and social hatred alongside the poignant intimacy of personal care and human worth. In addition, students considered the musical genre of "the blues", which informs Auden's poem and contributes to the poem's sense of nuanced, multivocal affect. They were asked to listen to blues music and to consider the layered empathy and attention to human suffering inherent in a poem that, as James Held (1992, 139) writes, "capitalizes on the emotional power of the blues, its themes resonant with the blues' great themes of suffering", specifically the suffering of generations of African Americans, which suggests the poem's wide view on human suffering and social injustice. This musical history drew further connections between Auden and Shire and focused further attention on transhistorical and transnational issues of "race" and marginalisation, enabling students to consider the poem as Auden's "experience of his new home after his emigration to New York in 1939" (Held 1992, 139). To balance the attention paid to listening to Shire read her own poetry, students were given the option, having been warned of disturbing footage, of viewing and listening to a YouTube version of the poem set to blues music, accompanied by Second World War images.⁵ In this video, the poem's sense of devastation is augmented by visual imagery and the resonant sense of suffering inherent in the blues.

Thus far I have provided observations based purely on Auden's "Refugee Blues". This method of discussing Auden's poem first mirrors my first year of teaching these poems. The method I employed in the second year, however, when I reversed the order of teaching, was far more effective. I suggest, therefore, that the way and order in which contrapuntal texts are taught matter. The point that I am making here is that identity matters in teaching and that the different identities of Warsan Shire and W.H. Auden, referred to earlier in this article, contributed significantly to students' reception of the poems. In an important article on decoloniality and South African higher education, Jo-Anne Vorster and Lynn Quinn (2017, 39) observe that, for black students, "curricula and pedagogic processes are often not aligned with who they are as people and it is not possible to divorce themselves-their being-from what is taught and how it is taught".

This implies that "teaching and learning is not only an epistemological project, but, in essence, also an ontological one" (39). As Vorster and Quinn argue, in South African higher education, "the discourse of epistemological access must be critiqued and explicitly understood as integrally linked to that of ontological access" (39). Similarly, Katherine J. Mayberry observes that sensitivity to identity in the classroom-to ontological access-has profound and positive implications for teaching and learning. Academics, she writes, who pay attention to identity or ontology and its role and implications in the classroom are driven "to step back from their podium and ponder the teaching role, to reconsider and in some cases redefine the goals, methods, and informing ideological assumptions of undergraduate teaching" (Mayberry 1996, 6).

Auden's "Refugee Blues" is undoubtedly a moving poem. As Yi Tang argues, the poem "addresses the serious Jewish refugee problems by evoking in its reader the intense effects of poignancy, apprehension and compassion" (Tang 2017, 442). Nonetheless, after the first year of teaching the poem in conjunction with "Home", I stepped back from the podium and pondered my teaching role, as Mayberry argues is necessitated by a focus on ontology in the classroom. The response to Auden had been subdued; later, the response to Shire was decidedly not. Initially, I had not considered how the poems should be taught, specifically in relation to each other: I had simply taught them in chronological order, assuming that contrapuntal teaching was merely "a comparative method in which teachers juxtapose Eurocentric and postcolonial texts", as Singh and Greenlaw (1998, 194) define it, and without thinking of how the juxtaposition should function. Effectively, moreover, my decision had unwittingly prioritised Auden over Shire, seemingly making her poetry relevant by virtue of its similarity to his. Placing Auden first appeared to result in students finding the lecture largely uninspiring- another ordinary, Eurocentric history or poetry lesson in which they were asked to look at black and white photographs of, for most of them, distant European history and personages, and then introduced to poetry of, consequently, limited excitement or relevance. To reveal to students the worth and poignancy of Auden's poem and to de-emphasise the focus on Western literature and history inadvertently set up by the way I was teaching (objectives that may seem contradictory, but certainly are not), something needed to shift. Flipping the order of the poems the following year changed the teaching and learning experience entirely.

There is a contemporary urgency to Shire's "Home" that can be related to her identity as a young, black, contemporary poet of African migrant heritage with influence in the global internet world and popular culture, expressing topical political and social concerns. As Anna Carasthatis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi observe of Shire's political relevance in Reproducing Refugees: Photographia of a Crisis:

Warsan Shire's "Home" went viral and became a rallying cry and was widely referenced in sympathetic discourses at the height of the refugee crisis-not only in Europe but also in protests against the Trump administration's so-called Muslim ban in the United States and demonstrations in Israel against a proposed policy which would have led to the deportation of tens of thousands of African migrants. (2020, 81)

The contemporary urgency of "Home" arises in part from the way Shire finds inspiration for her poetry. As Alexis Okeowo (2015) observes in an article for The New Yorker, "Shire has said that she is most interested in writing about people whose stories are either not told or told inaccurately, especially immigrants and refugees." She collects these stories from her family members and people she meets, "bring[ing] out her Dictaphone when relatives come to her with tales from their experiences", injecting her poetry with authenticity and understanding. Interestingly, there is also some potential and direct South African relevance to Shire's expressions of refugee experience. In an interview with Kameelah Janan Rasheed (2012), she describes spending time in South Africa:

South Africa completely changed the way I write about home. While I was there I worked with African refugees. I understood homesickness in a more direct, desperate [way]. My homesickness is privileged. Before South Africa I could not even write about home.

Whether these descriptions of "home" are related to the poem "Home" is debatable. However, "Home" strongly expresses the refugee's ambivalent feeling of homesickness in relation to a home that has become hostile, a feeling that Shire implicitly expresses in the quotation above. Drawing students' attention to Shire's experience of South African refugees was valuable in helping them to focus on the ways in which the poem may relate to the issue and trauma of South African xenophobia. Students began to reflect on the traumatic circumstances that may result in a refugee leaving home and on the compounded trauma of xenophobia experienced in the country of destination (including South Africa). Already Shire seems relevant to South African students in ways that Auden could never be. Her "race", African heritage, experience of working with African refugees in South Africa and capacity to "go viral" in the internet age situate her in the context of teaching in tangible ways. However, her poem's sentiment is echoed in Auden's. As Yi Tang observes, "[d]riven by his moral conscience, Auden attempted to use his art to affect the public in order to call for a change in refugee policy by asylum countries" (Tang 2017, 442). Teaching the poems together intensified and expanded students' responses to the theme of refugeeism, also requiring them to think of histories of oppression, ranging from the treatment of German Jews to the contemporary treatment of refugees. With ontological access in mind, teaching Warsan Shire's poem before W.H. Auden's granted him relevance and interest while also prioritising Shire and thus flouting any emphasis upon the metropolitan and canonical. Teaching Shire's poem first also focused students on important poetic techniques employed within it and presented the poem as possessing interrelated aesthetic and political significance in the same way in which "Refugee Blues" was taught later.

As with Auden's "Refugee Blues", my teaching of Shire's "Home" emphasised the speaking voice. This focus was augmented by allowing students to listen to Shire reading the poem herself. In a powerful and moving performance, Shire's voice cracks and quivers with emotion as she voices the speaker's horror at being driven from home.

Interestingly, this is the only point at which the second-person voice of the poem, which implicates the reader in the refugee's experience, shifts to the emotional vulnerability of the first person. This is reflected in Shire's sudden emotion within the recorded reading and a feature of the poem which students discussed in comparison to "Refugee Blues":

I want to go home,

but home is the mouth of a shark

home is the barrel of the gun

and no one would leave home

unless home chased you to the shore

unless home told you to quicken your legs

leave your clothes behind

crawl through the desert

wade through the oceans

The pauses in and shakiness of Shire's reading at this point (towards the conclusion of the poem) reflect the trauma expressed within it: non-verbal, emotional and embodied tone and rhythm take precedence over the language itself, thereby emphasising its meaning. In trauma and affect theory, pain and trauma are frequently described as nonverbal. Elaine Scarry, for example, in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1987), describes pain as inexpressible in language, even as obliterating the meaning-making function of language. As I have discussed elsewhere (Grogan 2014; 2018), Julia Kristeva, in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), identifies two dimensions of language. These are: the symbolic, or the aspect of language that clearly and logically conveys meaning; and the semiotic, or the affective, bodily dimension of language, evident in extra- or pre-verbal factors such as rhythm, tone, hesitation and breathing. After hearing Shire reading her poem, an affective space opened in the classroom as students engaged with it in an emotional, immediate sense. Their responses were intensified by what many students have described as an affinity with Shire and an understanding of the poem's topic and relevance. The experience of the poem is powerful and I have to warn students beforehand that topics arise within it that may upset them. Nevertheless, the power of the experience is important. I have never yet observed as strong a response in the classroom to literature in its written form. This experience offers a significant opportunity, however, to reflect back on poetry that students must read themselves. In addition to acknowledging the ontological access that Shire's poetry appears to provide, I share Deanna Roberts' sentiment: "I have found using spoken word poetry in the form of online videos entices students to explore poetry further" (2015, 103). Focusing on Shire, in my experience, allows students to recognise the significance of all poetry as an affective medium, hence the reversal of order in my teaching of the poems in the second year of presenting them. In that year, students expressed far greater understanding of Auden's "Refugee Blues" and far greater empathy for the Jewish European speaker in the 1930s who suffered such cruel oppression. The love that some of them expressed for Shire and her poem translated more freely and easily into understanding the love and care expressed by the speaker to the addressee in "Refugee Blues".

To return to Warsan Shire, the analysis of "Home" in the classroom occurred in much the same way as the class discussion that resulted in a shared interpretation of "Refugee Blues". Students were asked to identify what the poem communicated and they summed it up as "providing explanations for why it is that the refugee must leave his or her home country". They agreed that the poem is designed to show the listener or reader the refugee's history of violence and trauma and to indicate that leaving home is not a choice but a necessity. They recognised that the poem, like "Refugee Blues", is designed to encourage empathy. In looking at how the poem encourages a focus on refugee experience, three particular features were discussed. First, students were asked to reflect on the complexity and ambivalence of home, as the speaker presents it in the poem. Second, repetition or anaphora was discussed, particularly of the phrase "no one". Finally, the personification of home was addressed to identify how it contributed to the speaker's ambivalent responses to the notion of home. The following analysis emerged, taken from my lecture notes of 2017:

The poem understands that "home" is essential to the creation of an identity. It is where we come from and informs how we understand ourselves. "Home" is usually understood to be a nurturing environment to which we return for solace and affirmation. "Homesickness" is the feeling of sadness experienced when away from home, evident in the poem's description of the refugee "carr[ying] the anthem under [her] breath" (lines 18-19). However, feelings regarding home become mixed when home is violent, like "the mouth of a shark" (line 2), a place to which it is neither safe nor desirable to return, however much the refugee may yearn to do so. The combination of the fear and love of home therefore informs the refugee's ambivalent experience.

The phrase "no one" is repeated throughout the poem to emphasise the fact that "no one" would make the choice to leave home unless circumstances forced them to do so. There are a number of examples of this sentiment expressed in the poem; for instance: "no one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark" (lines 1-2); "no one leaves home unless home chases you" (line 12); "no one puts their children in a boat/unless the water is safer than the land" (lines 24-25). Each of these examples suggests that the option of staying at home is dangerous and untenable. Home is emphasised as unwelcoming and unfriendly. By repeating the phrase "no one", the speaker suggests that nobody, including the reader, could tolerate the circumstances of the speaker's home country. This encourages an understanding of the refugee's experience of terror at home and the message that "home" can in fact turn against its citizens.

Throughout the poem, "home" is personified to suggest that it has become violent and hateful. However, at the end of the poem we see a slightly different version of "home". "Home" is personified as telling the speaker to "run away from me now/I don't know what I've become/but I know that anywhere/is safer than here" (lines 94-97). This image of a "home", which is saddened by what it has become, allows the speaker to suggest that "home" still displays some degree of care and kindness, warning the speaker to get away from it. The personification at this point in the poem therefore shows that the speaker feels some degree of sympathy for "home" despite its violence, and therefore some degree of love for it.

The classroom is an affective space, in which various responses and affects circulate, constituting the experience of accessing texts and the interactive nature of the classroom itself. This article has argued that contrapuntal teaching can contribute to this affective circulation and its expansion, especially when attention is paid to the way and order in which poetry is taught, and if the unique aspects of the poems under study are read with a view to the interaction between their formal and affective components. Students respond enthusiastically to contemporary poets with whom they identify. In my own classroom, students were moved to read or listen to more of Warsan Shire's work and to Google performances of her poetry. However, they were also excited by the way in which her poem, "Home", provided access to W.H. Auden, whose modernist poetry might otherwise have appeared opaque, foreign, anachronistic and difficult. In a previous year, Auden's poem was less enthusiastically received, perhaps even lost, in the process of teaching it before a lecture on the more popular Shire. However, Auden's "Refugee Blues" circles the same themes as "Home"-refugee displacement, alienation, fear and overwhelming loss-which further opened up the theme of refugee subjectivity, allowing students to reflect in more depth not only on the poems themselves, but also on the current global refugee crisis, historical refugee experience and the pervasiveness of xenophobia within South Africa today. A polyphony of voices within the contemporary South African university classroom and an emphasis on all of these voices, including those of students, opens up discussion in exciting and productive ways. Nevertheless, students' epistemological and ontological access must be considered, contributing to curricular and pedagogical choices and providing exciting and important opportunities for responding to contemporary, historical, local and global injustice.

 

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1 The University of Johannesburg's Department of English offers a three-year undergraduate programme in the study of English literature. English 1 provides an introduction to literary genres: novels, short stories, drama and poetry. There are approximately 600 students in the class in each calendar year.
2 In 2015 and 2016, South African universities were rocked by student protests under the banner of the #FeesMustFall movement. Students across the country shut down universities in protest against unaffordable fees and financial exclusion. The protests were not only related to money: the university's colonial history and associations with whiteness came under fire and an urgent, escalating call for the decolonisation of university curricula arose.
3 Warsan Shire's reading of "Home" may be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI9D92Xiygo.
4 As of 1 March 2020, World Vision's website notes that, since the onset of the Syrian civil war in March 2011, more than 5.6 million Syrians have fled the country and 6.2 million have been displaced within it (see https://www.worldvision.org/refugees-news-stories/syrian-refugee-crisis-facts#fast-facts).
5 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krubUqbYslc

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THEMED SECTION 2
POETRY

 

New Land

 

 

Kobus Moolman

University of the Western Cape, South Africa. jmoolman@uwc.ac.za

 

 

(for Adam Small 1936-2016)

Black mountain silence.

Broken land

without breath.

Three thin white trees.

A woman with a rock on her back

where her baby used to be.

*

Bare river panting.

Steep sky

without air.

Three thin yellow dogs.

A man with a rusted spade

where his hand used to be.

*

Old words undefeated.

Old songs

without any rest.

Three thin blue chimes.

A child with a torch in its mouth

where the long night used to be.

^rND^1A01^nVonani^sBila^rND^1A02^nOlufemi J.^sAbodunrin^rND^1A01^nVonani^sBila^rND^1A02^nOlufemi J.^sAbodunrin^rND^1A01^nVonani^sBila^rND^1A02^nOlufemi J^sAbodunrin

THEMED SECTION 2
ARTICLE

 

Angifi Dladla (1950-2020): An Embodiment of Ku Femba as a Poetry Teaching Philosophy for Renewal

 

 

Vonani Bila^I; Olufemi J. Abodunrin^II

^IUniversity of Limpopo, South Africa. vonani.bila@ul.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7203-5112
^IIUniversity of Limpopo, South Africa. olufemi.abodunrin@ul.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4841-8724

 

 

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ABSTRACT

Angifi Dladla's poetry and teaching doctrines are considered tools for consciousness raising, healing and popular education for decoloniality. Through ku femba, an age-old practice that serves as a channel to cast away evil spells in a society bedevilled by violence, Dladla displays the relationship between man, ancestors and the otherworldly as a vehicle for decoloniality. His feisty narrative poems, "I Failed My Children" and "Marikana Chorus", explore the spiritual dimension and infinite possibilities of experience rooted in oral and written tradition. Dladla's Femba Writing Project, based on his philosophy of teaching poetry, affirms that poetry rooted in decoloniality reflects not only the poet's political convictions, but a shared communal experience of those on the edges of existence who are capable enough to challenge the master's voice (the voice of the Western canon) that often defines quality in poetry. Dladla is steeped in direct knowledge of the precarious life in South African townships; he draws on his accrued knowledge and on the complexities of history and memory to create and teach compelling poetry that resonates with the ordinary without falling into the trap of ghettoising his experience. Dladla's poetry and teaching philosophy challenge the colonising practices that have shaped and continue to influence the teaching of poetry in South Africa. They form part of a wider agenda of defining African selfhood in a decolonial context.

Keywords: Angifi Dladla; ku femba; decoloniality; popular education; Femba Writing Project

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Who Was Angifi Dladla?

Born on 24 November 1950 in Thaka township in Gauteng, Angifi Dladla was an established poet, with two poetry collections in English (The Girl Who Then Feared to Sleep [2001] and Lament for Kofifi Macu [2017]) and a collection in isiZulu (Uhambo), yet he is still on the edge of mainstream studies in poetry, especially in academia. For many years he was a creative writing teacher and the director of the Femba Writing Project, publishing school and prison newspapers, and the anthologies Wa lala, Wa sala and Reaching Out: Voices from Groenpunt Maximum-Security Prison. Kelwyn Sole (2010) asserts that Dladla's first poetry collection, The Girl Who Then Feared to Sleep, received widespread praise from critics for "its wide range of styles, voices and themes, its raw power and experimental freshness, and its heartfelt response to a society in which racism, violence and the misuse of power are still endemic. [He was] a poet who requires readers to look at compelling events and issues from which our first instinct has been to turn away."

Dladla's horror of violence is not a new phenomenon. He was born in the East Rand, which was almost the epicentre of violence, with many incidents of brutal necklacing, in the 1980s. It is estimated that over 14 000 politically motivated deaths occurred in South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s mainly as a result of what was termed the "Third Force's" unleashing of black-on-black violence. This was a political strategy orchestrated by the apartheid regime to maintain its oppressive supremacy over South Africa's black majority in the service of white privilege. Scores of people were hacked to death and gunned down in trains, hostels and townships such as Katlehong, where Dladla taught for many years. Dladla, a Pan-Africanist writer and Marxist sympathiser, could not ignore this grim reality of epistemic violence ravaging the country like a plague. In his own words:

Poetry demands a search for the essence of things. The deeper I go, the more I'm sucked in and in and in. I become liberated from the physical world! Take, for example, the poem "Rubbished". That was about a schoolchild who was shot [by Inkatha] and hacked and left to die at a rubbish dump in Katlehong. I wrote this poem the very day I saw the body. Then one day, after many years of seeing people dying and visiting mortuaries to identify my relatives, I wrote "Ubuntu". This poem led me to go deeper, to write "At the government mortuary", "So turned a taxi", "Our bodies", "Rotting", "Bodies", "The dead". No matter how many corpses one sees, one cannot get used to them. (Interview in Metelerkamp 2001)

 

What Is Ku Femba?

Dladla's aunt was a diviner. She could cure her patients who suffered from different ailments and conditions. She had many patients. Like most healers, she enjoyed singing and doing praise poetry. Dladla explains:

We used to call my aunt "mama". Her last specialisation was plunging into the river and disappearing without trace. She came out after three months. It was in the 60s. That fascinated me. When I was at the junior secondary school I tried to ask her about her life in the depths, but she always avoided my questions. In 1975 she moved with her Zimbabwean husband and their family to Zimbabwe. She could cure people who had ingested poison, stomach aches and those with fertility problems. She did not use medicinal herbs; to those with marital problems, she acted as a psychologist. That really worked, their problems were solved. The song I remember went like this: "Lelo dlozi ela ngenzayo/ Lelo thongo eli nguBaba/ O sikhanyisele/ O sikhanyisele Most of her songs were in the language we did not understand. People said it was XiNdau. She would say "Thokoza" when greeting anyone. (Interview with the authors, 2019)

Healing through ku femba is a delicate practice. Dladla explained the finer details of ku femba and how his poetry is an embodiment of this age-old practice that serves as a channel to cast away evil spells in a society bedevilled by greed, corruption, violence and hatred. In Dladla's poetry, which is rooted in everyday life encounters and set mainly in townships and overall the Black and African ecosphere that is characterised by centuries of neglect and uneven development, the characters often resemble a chaotic society: they are a traumatised people in need of exorcism and treatment. The characters in Dladla's poems include denizens, beggars, drunkards, political discards, the landless who yearn to return to the occupied territories, victims of the notorious necklacing, widows who mourn the violent departure of their Marikana mine-working husbands and breadwinners. These characters from our ghetto are, in our view, the reason Dladla summons the spirit of the diviner to perform ku femba to determine the spirit that may be provoking the political and economic madness in individuals and society, but more importantly, to foster balance that humans must maintain with their ecosystems. According to Dladla:

Ku femba is a type of exorcism performed strictly by an accomplished ku femba specialist. Unlike the Biblical King Solomon who used a ring or a Catholic exorcist who invokes those who are in purgatory, this one invokes the Ndau ancestor from the spirit world. When the drums have reached a certain timbre and tempo the Ndau ancestor takes over the specialist's body, sniffing out evil spirits and casting them out of the door back to the culprit who sent them. Then a breathtaking performance follows. The ancestor in the specialist' s body acts out the culprit' s unquestionable movement, voice, mannerism and boasts. That' s the opportunity for the patient and the specialist' s assistants to ask her/him questions like "Why did you bewitch me?" "What are you wearing as you speak?" (Interview with the authors 2019)

A sangoma combines ancestral powers and herbs, plants and animal fat for treatment of ailments, trauma, epilepsy, infertility and stomach aches. But Dladla, a poet whose poetry is inspired by Pan-Africanism, integrates these elements in his poetry to diagnose, chase and "steam" away demons and nightmares rooted in apartheid and colonialism that trouble township folks, using indigenous languages instead of always insisting on English. For this reason, Dladla, who understood this well, established the Femba Writing Project, whose aim is to encourage writing that is engaging and performative as well as innovative and relevant in the townships. This idea resonates with Ngügï wa Thiong'o's (1986, 4) notion that "the choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people's definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe". Msila (2020, xi) emphasises the necessity to challenge the cultural hegemony that dominated during the decades of colonial and apartheid rule.

Today, the cynicism we witness in society is mainly due to internalised aspects of Western culture. It is because of our beliefs in Western science and Western scholarship that we tend to neglect the local as we frequently underscore globalisation, perceiving the decolonial project as an antithesis of progress. Thus we realise that the first priority for the decolonisation of knowledge is cultural decolonisation.

 

How Is Ku Femba a Tool for Decoloniality in the Teaching of Poetry?

Many of Dladla's poems bring people's history into sharp focus: their struggles against apartheid, social catharsis, loss, township violence, HIV/Aids, poverty and inequality. Consequently, the answer to these historical malformations and abuses lie in the healing power of nature, the ku femba, in all its ecological ramifications and manifestations. African children are often taught Anglo-Saxon poetry, which may be good, but has little cultural relevance to their social environment and circumstances. This literature undermines the history and culture of previously colonised people and their poetic traditions. The voice of the African poet is rendered dull and absent in the classroom. Even worse, it appears to be the norm in the post-apartheid poetry classroom to teach politically correct texts in pursuit of "rainbowism" and social cohesion. Dladla (interview in Penfold 2018) considers this a dangerous terrain:

Our country will be robbed of stories from the township and rural communities. The only hope will be students who studied at the multi-racial schools. But the universe has its ways and surprises. Here we are as products of Bantu Education writing poems, plays and novels.

In our interview with Dladla (2019), he made the following claims about recorded history vis-a-vis the quintessential roles of oral/performance poetry and other narratives:

The recorded history since 1652 is not our history. Those who replaced the apartheidists after 1994 fear our history and thus marginalised it altogether and embarked on Year Zero, just like the French or rather like the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. Thus, the so-called school history books are nothing else but self-aggrandisement of the ruling class. Our history is in oral poetry and narratives, in poetry, narratives and non-fiction written by those who fought colonialism and its appendages, but certainly not apartheid; in Malombo jazz, in [Hugh] Masekela's "Stimela" song, in Phuz'ekhemisi's "Njalo-nje" song; in township and rural graves; in the food we eat like maotwana, mokgodu, manqina, skobho as if our forefathers slaughtered their livestock or game just for this and threw away the rest; in township houses and shacks as if we did not have families, in a maid's room in the white suburbs, in our independent churches who decolonised Christianity, in the makers of history like Jesse Owens, our athlete who infuriated Hitler by winning four gold medals in Germany and Leone Jacovacci, our boxer who also infuriated another supremacist Mussolini by demolishing Mario Bosiso, the Italian hero. There are great men and women who came before us. We need to humble ourselves and dig our long, painful, heroic and rich history. The benefits of knowing our history as poets are part of decolonising our writing, empowering and inspiring our people. We are all in war: Vonani [Bila] and Lesego [Rampolokeng] in their field; Caster Semenya and Serena Williams in their field against global racists; our scholars who must come up with new knowledge, and so on.

 

How Does the Poetry "Explode" and "Resound" as Ku Femba?

"I Failed my Children"

In the compelling, self-referential and confessional narrative poem, "I Failed My Children", Dladla gives an account of physical loss and the recovery of ancestral land and other social and spiritual landscapes. These were taken away as a result of colonial and apartheid machinations that made black people subservient to barbaric purposes. In this poem, the nostalgic children yearn for the rural utopia. Although urbane, they are restless. They dislike the crowded cities of fierce and roaring traffic, deadly highways, of vagabonds buried in trash under bridges who warm themselves around galley fires in winter and the zoo and prison enclosures. They helplessly watch the rich sip coffee in sit-down restaurants in affluent Sandton and other suburbs. The smog spiralling in the air in Soweto, the banalities of commercialisation and media culture make these children yearn to return to the land and nature. They persistently demand alternative ways to have an intense bond with their ancestral homes: locations from which their great-grandparents were forcibly removed under the insane and dehumanising apartheid laws such as the Natives Land Act of 1913 or the Bantu Authority Act, 68 of 1951, which provided for the establishment of black homelands and regional authorities. Born-free children want to remember the unknown past as part of liberation and a self-healing peace-building passage.

The inquisitive children, including the last-born girl who is the leader of the pack, insist dialogically that their deflated and somnambulant father pays attention to them. They want to pay homage to their ancestors. They want to be one with the cosmic forces. Their dreams are surrounded by the poignant and romantic rural picaresque and the unexplored venerable forests. Sadly, the children do not know that their felt need may flounder. This is because the loathsome and frenzied "apartheiders", and their aggressive hordes of insensible and indistinguishable ethnographers, historians, strategists, social anthropologists, cartographers, cultural commissars and the repressive military, have systematically carried out an onslaught to diminish any fragment of black people's scattered history. Ancient black civilisations, remnants of social memory, the everyday arts, black people's sense of self and collective consciousness and any iota of dignity have all been destroyed. The apartheid regime excluded the black majority on matters of governance and the economy to inflict a notion of exile, self-pity, loneliness and black people's alienation from the land, nature and the spiritual realm, thus propagating deep racial, social and political divisions and the weakening, even collapsing, of political and economic structures and the prevailing ideologies, expressions and identities of indigenous Africans. As Dladla the poet (and, equally, the textual persona in the poem) veritably laments this ongoing dialectic struggle and conflicting paradigm, "That place with its graves/ no longer exists. It's now a potato farm. " In the words of the born-free:

"No manga-manga business dad, Dad,

no pussyfooting, we now are serious.

This December, you show the way.

"We drive you where you were born,

to the house where you grew up.

We want to capture the aura.

Then we'll be complete.

"You show us the way where

your navel cord was buried.

You show us the way where bones

of your people are rooted, our ancestors.

..."

That place with its graves

no longer exists. It's now a potato farm,

so I was told. We had never returned.

We never dream to this day.

Who could return after bulldozers,

storm troopers, rottweilers bundled us

in trucks with our cats, dogs

and broken furniture to far-off locations?

(Dladla 2011, 26-7)

In Dladla's world, "there's something that the dead know", whether this be the pain of slavery, colonialism, Sharpeville, Soweto, Bhisho or Boipatong massacres, or postapartheid massacres such as Marikana and the death of 144 Life Esidimeni patients, or any social carnage, such as necklacing and xenophobia:

Something the dead know

is the head held in broken hands;

the drooping mouth-hole,

a white speck of eye

leaking a tough sort of shame,

a burnt rubber which blackens blackness

and wires which swaddle the victim

like a Pharaoh.

Something the dead know:

Bones whiter than white

shall inherit the earth.

(Dladla 2017, 78-9)

In the sequel and hybrid poem "Marikana Chorus", Dladla combines the dramatic technique of performance poetry and the prophetic voice to make the connection between the dead and the living even more symbiotic. This is part of invoking the ku femba spirit.

"Marikana Chorus"

... the ragged miners sing, kneel, burn impepho incense, sprinkle the snuff, clap hands rhythmically as they talk to the spirit people .... Around the monument they empty their hearts in dance. (Dladla 2017, 86)

In the above epigraph, the speaker summons the powers of the ancestors to help the so-called "wildcat" striking workers of the Association of Mines and Construction Union (AMCU), under the leadership of Joseph Mathunjwa, to defeat the plutocratic Lonmin mine, now taken over by Sibanye Stillwater. Dladla's deep sense of history makes us aware that the Marikana massacre saw 34 mineworkers, who were demanding a living wage and decent working conditions, slaughtered and 78 more injured on 16 August 2012.

Oral history suggests that Marikana derives from the Setswana word Marakanelo, meaning "a meeting place". The hill is also known for miracles. It is claimed that in the past invisible people could be heard singing, shouting and dancing. Traditional healers would train their apprentices on the mountain and perform rituals at this meeting place. Perhaps that is why the hill or koppie became known as Thaba ya Dimakatso or Mountain of Wonders. We can understand the claim, which Dladla highlights as tragicomic, that the Fanagalo-speaking workers consulted a sangoma who would make them brave and invisible when they confronted the police.

According to a News24 report titled "Marikana Men Queued for Muti-Police",¹Lieutenant Colonel Victor Visser told the Farlam Commission that "the men gathered at the koppie, carrying pangas, spears, and knobkerries, and believed the inyanga would sprinkle them with muti to make them brave". Sadly, the muti of the sangoma² did not protect them against the state police's bullets nor did it triple their money. In the poem "Marikana Chorus", Dladla relives and even imagines the tragic collaboration between the South African government, its alliance partners (the South African Communist Party [SACP], the Congress of South African Trade Unions [COSATU]) and international capital, implying that the state can get away with mass murder with impunity.

Your AMCU is a small cockroach,

it needs a mild spray or a toddler's toe.

It is toothless, noisome like an anus.

Today is D-day-the end

of this criminal act.

Today is your hour-the finale

Of this dastardly venture.

Come on SACP and COSATU

Close ranks, isolate, petrify AMCU

Come on People's Storm Troopers,

Encircle these bastards in the manner

That you are trained to do.

I give you a helicopter, razor wire,

Rottweilers, horses, machine guns.

Come down hard on these dissidents.

Shoot the magodukas, shoot merafes

Execute these fucken migrants!

Let our thunderbolts shame

The magic of their witchdoctors!

Come on, each shot be a kill-shot.

One, Two, Three: FIRE ...!

(Dladla 2017, 84-5)

The poet knows that the dead miners are not dead; their restless spirits must be safely repatriated to their places of origin. Sadly, the children of the stone-breaking miners have lost fathers. These men, from all over the South African nation, but mainly from the Eastern Cape, were shot several times in the back, shoulders, thighs, buttocks, groin and feet by the guns of the new government. Wives are now widows; their husbands who provided love, bread and soup are dead. There are whirlwinds in families that were once stable. This upheaval is all because of the government's collusion with international capital, through the hand of its police officers, who decided to gun down dozens of black workers. Dladla implies that the state mowed down black lives to protect the riches of the mining magnates. The dead remain restless; they speak in shrieking voices of multitudes of organised workers:

Marikana, Marikana,

tina ai funa lo New Apartheid.

World Trade Centre Accord

through TEBA and the barracoons

never was for us workers.

Marikana, Marikana

you have cartwheeled us

from Cecil Rhodes' road

into a ghostly canyon.

Marikana, Marikana,

today you know what is not new:

"The driving force of civilization".

Workers of England or Europe,

today you know what is not new:

Our blood relations, O Engels!

(Dladla 2017, 86-7)

Although 34 Lonmin workers were killed by fire from the R5 assault rifles used by the South African Police Services (SAPS), the calamitous Marikana Day has become a memorable day. It is commemorated by the people, especially the workers and supposedly "left-leaning" political parties such as the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and civil society groups as a manifestation of the actualities of ecological damage and injustices to workers generally. During these commemorations, one can see rituals for the departed souls being performed by religious sects, including traditional healers. Just after the Marikana murders, the place had to be cleansed. The spirits of the dead were collected and then repatriated to safe cultural spaces (their homes). They were not taken to modern-day alienating memory institutions, such as museums, galleries, libraries or archives in the big cities of Johannesburg and Cape Town or in foreign lands, but to warm "homes" in the villages, farms and townships where they had originated. Once back home and in the company of the clan and ancestry, it is assumed that the dead can regain their voices and unimaginable power. This would not happen if they were kept in foreign memory institutions. The dead are then connected to their ancestors through rituals that are characterised by feasting, drinking, dancing and above all, poetry performance.

The spirit repatriation and cleansing ceremony is carried out as part of family, community and cultural heritage and pride. Its aim is to promote respect, remembrance and understanding and it is a necessary sacred healing process for the grieving family, community or country to find closure. If the spirits of the dead are not properly returned to their homes, indigenous cultural experts and poets, such as Dladla, argue that disaster may strike in the form of repeated underground mining accidents, storms, floods, road fatalities and other mysterious disasters and pandemics. One can equally argue that the Marikana massacre may have dampened the spirits of voters to ignore the African National Congress (ANC) in national polls, thus gifting the opposition some of the metropolitan municipalities. Dladla's poetry of ku femba may be teaching us that the dead are saying to the structures in power-whether these be corporates or governments-that they must correct their wrongs, compensate families that lost their beloved breadwinners and pay the workers, take care of the poor, the sick and unemployed. Dladla's concern for historical reparations for damages caused to people and ecology-black labourers, their native land and mineral resources-is a demand for ethical leadership and ecological justice for the living and to set free the departed souls of the working class. This call for social justice and cultural cleansing is a crucial decolonial aspect of Dladla's poetry.

The following section interrogates Dladla's poetry teaching philosophy and how ku femba challenges the colonising practices that have shaped and continue to influence the teaching of poetry in South Africa.

 

How Does Ku Femba Mediate Dladla's Poetry Teaching Philosophy?

Dladla believed that poetry can be taught. He founded the Femba Writing Project (FWP), an initiative that takes into cognisance students' backgrounds and the tradition of poetry, like ku femba, as a style of African performance that is rooted in therapy. For Dladla (2017, 11), "Students are not potatoes in a bag, but individuals with unique personalities, unique life experience and therefore unique needs that cry for individual attention, real growth and development." Dladla further highlights his commitment to writing and teaching poetry:

The inner voice comes readily especially when I'm editing. There is excitement and joy as I concentrate on the text. That's when a flash of insight comes in. Yes, just like music and fine art, poetry can be taught. But not like in the colonial classroom where a topic and a title is prescribed to the learner, and the teacher starts with teaching poetic devices such as rhyme, figures of speech, and types of poetry. Under an able master the student feels and experiences the beauty of the music but the master does not encourage the student to play and sing like him. He just inspires. My motto is "Everyone has a story." Even a child from the kindergarten tells stories. (Interview in Penfold 2018)

Despite being unheralded and almost unknown in academia, Dladla wrote and taught poetry in schools, prisons and community centres for over 30 years, in multicultural settings. His poetry has appeared in almost all major South African literary journals, yet it is hardly made available in mainstream anthologies and the classroom. He has taught the young and old, prisoners, refugees, perpetrators of necklacing murders of the 1980s, political activists, high school students, peasants in shacks and the rich in comfort zones, the weak and uncomfortable, the politically charged and the intransigent and embittered in the East Rand, introducing them mainly to African and contemporary South African poetry, as well as critical texts from the African diaspora.

Dladla's teaching philosophy encourages students to appreciate poetry set for examination, but primarily to enjoy it and allow it to raise their consciousness before they can "deconstruct" a poem for technical analysis. Dladla believed that students can enjoy poetry and use it to develop self-love, instead of seeing themselves as savages, barbarians or commodities ready to be exploited and disposed of. They need not focus on technical inhibitions, poetic terminology, moral maps of what is good, true, beautiful or ugly. He inspired them to write original work with aesthetic considerations and for the benefit of posterity. For Dladla, teaching poetry meant the creation of space for the sharing of knowledge so that those who receive it can improve their lives and the lives of those they meet. Teaching, therefore, aimed to create renewed, energised and decolonised beings. Echoing Fanon, Ntombela (2020) contends that in decolonisation, "there is replacement of the settler, re-establishment of the marginalized and reordering". Msila (2020) argues that the decolonisation of the school system refers to the dismantling of colonial and apartheid systems that were responsible for the oppressive and marginalising divisions. Msila posits:

Decolonisation needs to move us from barbarity to freedom, from brainwashing classrooms to enriching critical sites, from stunted growth to intellectual freedom and expression. The gift of decolonized education is immense for our learners and the future in that it will ensure that the learners move beyond the realm of bondage of history to liberatory education that ensure[s] the magnification but not the romanticisation of the African continent. (Msila 2020, 5)

Dladla's teaching doctrine built students up intellectually and in all facets of human activity so that they could become positive change agents in the private and public domains for decolonial education and renewal. To understand decoloniality, Ngügï wa Thiong'o (1986, 16) grapples with the way the colonialists imposed a foreign language on African children.

The real aim of colonialisation was to control people's wealth: what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed; to control, in other words, the entire realm of life. Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonized: the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people's culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.

Steve Biko (1987), Frantz Fanon (2017) and Es'kia Mphahlele (1974; 2002) (among others) have stated that language and culture are tools for liberation for the colonised and oppressed. Vuyisile Msila and Mishack Gumbo, key figures of the current discourse about decoloniality in South Africa, emphasise that when black people use indigenous languages to express themselves instead of English they feel a sense of adequacy, resourcefulness, identity, pride and purpose. Msila has lobbied government, universities and education policy-makers to adopt holistic, inclusive and socially just curricula that are rooted in African expression and the untapped experiences of rural folk in Africa's history.

Dladla believed that the role of the teacher in bringing about this renewal did not need to perpetuate racial, gender and ethnocentric misunderstanding. He embraced the culture and customs of his people, but he wanted his students to recognise that culture adds to their social consciousness, personal identity, critical thinking, and happiness. He explains his poetry teaching philosophy and goals as follows:

My teaching methodology compels me not to rest on my laurels. I usually teach a mixed class consisting of adults, youth, children from nine years old, those who prefer English, and those who prefer the mother tongue. I come to class without a textbook, without notes or a lesson plan. Everyone has a story! To me students ... are individuals with unique personalities, unique life experiences, unique stories, and therefore unique needs that cry for individual attention, real growth and development. Each individual is an authority of his or her own story but they are not always aware of what they know, or they have forgotten it, or they just take it for granted that the reader knows as well. (Interview in Penfold 2018)

We can deduce from Dladla's teaching philosophy that he preferred the Communicative Language Teaching approach, a method that stresses communication. In Dladla's philosophy, the student unpacks factors that determine their existence, their familiar environments, their sense of beauty and the losses they have experienced. He encouraged students to create a connection between their lives and what is directly observable in their environment and bodies-what may be regarded as the quotidian- a representation and reproduction of everyday reality. These tasks were carried out either as classwork or homework and students were encouraged to work dialogically or in silence, depending on the nature of the student, as a key component of transferring knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to the learners that will make them recognise their common needs and dangers and prepare them to be Africans without inferiority complexes.

Dladla inspired his students to listen, read and write poems, but more importantly, to develop opinions about themselves and the world so that they could challenge their own underdevelopment and powerlessness. He stimulated students' sense of imagination by providing them with free-writing poetry exercises, usually based on memory and history. For example, in Mene Tekel, Dladla's play about the scourge of necklace murders in the 1980s, he used the boys and girls who had been affected by necklacing as performers. After the performances, the parents invited the poet for lunch or supper, and asked: "How did you do that? SAP [South African Police] failed. SADF [South African Defence Force] failed. But with you ... these boys, they changed" (Metelerkamp 2001). He encouraged the violent boys and girls who fuelled chaos in the East Rand to verbalise their horrible experiences as part of snuffing out the malevolent spirits that were haunting them (as perpetrators of necklace murders) and the community (as victims). This is an effective cleansing and purification ritual, aimed at restoring the identities and reintegrating the perpetrators of ritual murders back into their families and communities.

Dladla's teaching philosophy discouraged moral arrogance and "parrot" learning. He asked his students to do research in order to discover new information, but warned them that this freedom of expression did not extend to perpetuating racial or gender stereotypes and prejudices. Although he went to class often with no textbook, notes or a lesson plan, he was able to adjust to the expectations of his usually overcrowded class because of years of experience in poetry teaching and mastery of his accommodating teaching methodology.

In June 2020 Dladla listed poets on his Facebook page who had influenced and stirred him over the years. They included the Black Consciousness poet and struggle veteran, Don Mattera (Azanian Love Song), Okot p'Bitek (Song of Lawino), Mazisi Kunene (The Ancestors and the Sacred Mountain), B.W. Vilakazi (Inkondlo kaZulu), Pushkin (The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems), D.B.Z. Ntuli (Imvunge Yemvelo), Basho (The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches), and Yannis Ritsos (The Fourth Dimension). These poets and their texts are mentioned to inspire the students to be enthusiastic about poetry and challenge remnants of coloniality in social, political and economic structures when he teaches students how to create original work that shares the idiomatic and cultural register of his community.

In Mattera (1935-), Dladla identifies one of the brave pioneers of Black Consciousness lyrical poetry in South African English and Isicamtho/Ringas (derogatorily called Tsotsitaal). Like Dladla, Mattera suffered forced removals and detention. Both have striking gifts, both pedagogic and political. Dladla's poem, "I Failed My Children" chronicles his childhood memories of being uprooted by the apartheid government from his ancestral land, while Mattera's memoir, Memory Is the Weapon (2010) is an account of life in Sophiatown (a truly cultural mosaic) from which he was forcibly removed. Both performance poets enact "sonic layering", as C.M.E. Graebner describes performance poetry and its public function. The sonic qualities of language imply "the simultaneous interaction of words, speech, music, non-verbal sounds, the poet's voice, and poetic imagery that appeal to our smell, taste and vision" (Graebner 2007, 2). As a poetry teacher and poet, Dladla would rather teach this kind of "oral" poetry in the syllabus as relevant work to inspire interest in local cultural heritage.

D.B.Z. Ntuli and Benedict Wallet Vilakazi (1906-1947) are considered fathers of modern isiZulu letters-especially poetry-and outstanding teachers and linguists. Dladla is fascinated by Ntuli and Vilakazi's commitment to education and literature. Vilakazi was the first black South African to receive a PhD in literature. In his isiZulu poem "Imbeleni", loosely translated as "Should Death Knock at My Door", the poet anticipates his demise. Critic and isiZulu poet Sandile Ngidi observes: "He wants to be buried along the road, to say hello to school children" (Ngidi 2020). One can argue that Vilakazi is calling for the necessity of recovering buried history, especially stories and memories of the people who live under the shadow of cultural shame and indignity. This yearning to give a voice to buried narratives allows Dladla and Ngidi to understand Vilakazi's poems as embodiments of communal experiences and figments of imagination that should be memorialised in irresistible lyrical, dramatic and narrative monuments. Such immortalisation of the local voice means decoloniality within the global landscape. Dladla could be celebrating Vilakazi partly because there is a famous street in Soweto, where iconic figures Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu lived, which is named in his honour.

In Mazisi Kunene (1930-2006), Dladla is attracted by the poet's commitment to indigenous languages, orature and the Zulu heritage. Mpalive-Hangson Msiska describes Kunene as an indigenous poet who saw himself as part of a specifically African tradition of written and oral culture. Most of his poetry in English was first written in isiZulu. Kunene employs such traditional genres as the funeral dirge, the war song, the praise song and the elegy. He also includes elements of traditional religion and cosmology, such as ancestor worship (Hamilton and Noel-Tod 2013, 331).

Okot p'Bitek's Song of Lawino was first published in 1966 in the Luo language. It is an epic poem that laments an African woman's cry against her husband's abandonment of the past in favour of Western traditions. Guershom Kambasu Muliro (2007) observes:

The poem poses a question: what kind of liberation should Africa take on? Should it honor its traditions, or should it adapt the European values that were already set in place during colonialism?

In Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990), Dladla may have found resonance with the Greek poet's radicalism and triumph over tribulations. His youth was marked by family devastation: economic ruin, the early death of the poet's mother and eldest brother and his father's commitment to a mental health facility after psychological disturbance. Ritsos spent four years (1927-1931) in a sanatorium to recover from tuberculosis (Poetry Foundation n.d.). These deeply felt events compare sharply with the ferocious violence and substandard living conditions of Africans in the townships, informal settlements and villages. For Dladla, the panacea for such human crisis requires the healing intervention of ku femba as a poetic mode to bring about balance between humans and nature across "race", language, class and geography. According to Poetry Foundation (2020), one of Ritsos's most celebrated works, the "Epitaphios", is a lament inspired by the assassination of a worker in a large general strike in Salonica. The poem was burned by the Metaxas dictatorship, along with other books, in a ceremony in front of the Temple of Zeus in 1936. Similarly, in "Marikana Chorus", Dladla pays homage to the striking workers who were murdered by the South African Police Services in 2012.

Dladla's approach did not bar him from reflecting on the shameful history of slavery, colonisation and grim apartheid violence, especially since he studied and taught history in high school. In class and writing workshops, he introduced radical figures such as Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, W.E.B. Du Bois, Steve Biko, Malcolm X, Robert Sobukwe and others who spoke of the undeniably heavy burden of oppression and inferiority of the black majority, as part of his quest to use history to build a truly humane society. Dladla believed a deeper understanding of decoloniality in the classroom implies building bridges between Africans in Africa and in the diaspora, fostering the appreciation of different poetic traditions, enhancing cultural solidarity and not limiting oneself to the cultural and poetic ghetto. He achieved this objective by steadily introducing his students to a varied set of poetic traditions and influences such as anti-imperialist poet Amiri Baraka's "A Poem for Black Hearts" (1965), a tribute to Malcolm X, a popular figure during the US civil rights movement who was assassinated in 1965.

For all of him, and all of yourself, look up

black man, quit stuttering and shuffling, look up,

black man, quit whining and stooping, for all of him,

For Great Malcolm a prince of the earth, let nothing in us rest

until we avenge ourselves for his death, stupid animals

that killed him, let us never breathe a pure breath if

we fail, and white men call us faggots till the end of

the earth.

Another of Dladla's favourite poems is Leopold Sedhar Senghor's³ "Prayer to the Masks" (1945), in which the speaker looks back to his ancestral African roots as a source of strength and cultural decolonisation as he fights European colonisation:

Masks! Oh Masks!

Black mask, red mask, you black and white masks,

Rectangular masks through whom the spirit breathes,

I greet you in silence!

And you too, my panther headed ancestor.

You guard this place, that is closed to any feminine laughter, to any mortal smile.

You purify the air of eternity, here where I breathe the air of my fathers.

When students hear stories such as Malcolm X's, which are similar to their experience, they often reflect on their domestic icons such as Andries Tatane, a 33-year-old who was shot and killed by police officers during a service delivery protest in Ficksburg in the Free State province. They pour out their emotions through stories, songs and poems, vividly aware of the narrator of their tales, in their languages of choice (not always English). This methodology implies that even in the absence of the facilitator or teacher, students can empower themselves provided they are self-driven, serious, honest, disciplined, able and accentuate the positive and thrifty with resources at their disposal. Dladla echoes Ngügï's sentiments (1986, 97) that "African literature, literature of the African diaspora, and all other literatures of related experiences must be at the core of the syllabuses".

Dladla's ku femba philosophy has strong affinities with the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, who once said: "Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul. Not theories but your creative individuality alone must decide" (cited in Berold and Stacy 2017, 12). The process of making poetry, according to Dladla, is driven by achievement, correction, improvement and success.

Dladla's poetry teaching philosophy was learner-centred rather than rigidly didactic. It was not top-down, exclusive, elitist, predetermined or simply aimed at perfecting a certain technique, such as mastering the use of a poetic device. It was education for the powerless, grassroots, disadvantaged and exploited social groups such as students in broken-down schools in East Rand townships. He was concerned to teach in a way that responded to the social context. His approach was political and aimed at social change and transformation. It dramatised the harsh realities of unjust township existence and celebrated black spiritual endurance. Dladla upheld these ideals of popular education in line with Brazilian popular education theorist, Paulo Freire (1970), who steadfastly believed that the learning process should be facilitated to assert the rights of the affected community, promote robust debate, encourage questioning and confront authority if necessary. Further, it should ignite in learners the spirit of self-reliance and the building of alternative visions so that they can take full responsibility for their destinies.

In an interview with Roger Dalea and Susan Lee Robertson (2004), Portuguese-born activist Boaventura de Sousa Santos highlights that structural inequalities are the reasons that people resist corporate globalisation, including market-driven education offered by schools and universities. As a counter to this form of globalisation, Santos has proposed the creation of a Popular University of Social Movements, "a global university from below, indeed a counter-university aimed at bringing together activists of social movements and social scientists/artists engaged in participatory research-action" (Dalea and Robertson 2004, 7). Dladla's Femba Writing Project exemplified Santos's vision of a grassroots university as an instrument for decoloniality, education, empowerment and change.

Santos further argues that other forms of resistance in education should involve a complex articulation between participatory democracy and techno-democratic qualification. In his own words (cited in Dalea and Robertson 2004, 7):

We need qualified citizens for the tasks ahead but not in such a way that they become professionalised participatory citizens. Without a very wide range of qualifications for common citizens it will be impossible to promote forms of participatory democracy capable of being the organising element behind the counter-hegemonic forms of globalization.

Despite inhabiting separate geographies, Dladla and Santos shared the need to challenge corporate power through decolonial education measures and strengthen South-South cooperation. This sentiment is equally shared by the Puerto Rican sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel (2011), whose "Radical Universal Decolonial Anti-Systemic Diversality" project resonates with Dladla's ku femba, if one considers the struggles of African people against dispossession, including the fight to speak through poetry, even if it means in the ancient ku femba language of Xindawu. As opposed to the abstract universals of Eurocentric epistemologies, which subsume/dilute the particular into the same, a "radical universal decolonial anti-systemic diversality" is a concrete universal that builds a decolonial universal by respecting multiple local particularities in the struggle against patriarchy, capitalism, coloniality and Eurocentric modernity from a diversity of decolonial epistemic/ethical historical projects.

Dladla's ecosphere was constituted by ku femba as an intangible spiritual poetic presence that interacts with physically and psychologically injured communities, such as poverty-stricken learners and victims of violence. Throughout his writing and teaching career, Dladla (2017, 12) developed the guiding principles of his innovative Femba Writing Project to underlie his pedagogy of sensitivity to the spiritual realm. Dladla recalls an astonishing incident in 1979 when he was a new teacher in Vosloorus:

One day immediately after break, I was writing something on the board, and students were coming in. Then something came storming in. It was a wild man, kicking, punching, biting and scratching the hell out of me. Fortunately, the boys dragged and kicked him out. Girls were pleading to them he must not be killed "It is Mahlomola, the local madman." (Interview in Metelerkamp 2001)

After this incident, students and teachers were always laughing at him. Dladla calmly decided to write a poem titled "The Intruder". He read it in his classes and students loved it. The headmaster demanded that he reads the poem for the whole student body at the school assembly. As Dladla emphasises: "That was the end of laughter ..." (Berold 2003, 176). He had managed to cast a spell through poetry. Poetry no longer had to be taught in its usual formal Eurocentric fashion, but became a living syllabus capable of mediating and healing the fresh wounds of social strife and bringing about a decolonial turn.

The Femba Writing Project is a practical programme, which begins with students identifying their strengths and weaknesses. The safe learning space encourages learners to share experiences. It is democratic and participatory and projects (in the form of writing assignments) are carried out in class and in the broader community.

 

The Significance of Dladla's Poetry Work in South Africa

Dladla explained his role as that of a poet in the community. He was angry over poor service delivery and other government excesses, but he remained patriotic. He declared that his work was not about the illusion of a great South African landscape and wild game. Although Dladla's work was influenced by a number of writers, he did not echo their voices. His poetry is neither a mimicry of Western poetry nor the projection of an uncritical African past:

A poet is the conscience and pulse of his or her people. Our people are angry. In Afrikaans they are gatvol or very fed-up. This is demonstrated by daily service delivery protests. As expected, the police respond with overkill. The poet as a responsible citizen cannot be neutral and soft while the politicians are increasingly binge eating and hoarding more than they need amid dire poverty. Still, our leaders remain bigheaded, insensitive, and offensive. (Interview in Penfold 2018)

Dladla's observations are a sharp reminder that 26 years into democracy, the poor are damned by their own comrades who probably seek guidance from elsewhere, for example from large corporates, instead of carrying out the mandate of their constituencies. Dladla highlights that under the guise of freedom, people's expectations of a better life for all have floundered. It is as if he is evoking Frantz Fanon's (2017, 300) warning:

If we want to respond to the expectations of our peoples, we must look elsewhere besides Europe. Moreover, if we want to respond to the expectations of the Europeans we must not send them back a reflection, however ideal, of their society and their thought that periodically sickens even them. For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.

Robert Berold, the publisher of Dladla's two collections in English, notes that the poet lived in a spiritual reality and managed to observe human life without being overwhelmed by the pain we inflict on one another.

For Dladla, there was no area of life that poetry should not investigate: his range was vast, from personal joy and pain, love and family relationships, to the largest political and historical questions. Humour and satire were his subjects too. He was especially interested in poems dealing with spiritual mysteries and prophecies, both within and outside African spiritual perspectives. His concerns were always refracted through a lively and down-to-earth language: he wanted his poetry to be understandable to his own community, who were his primary audience.

Kelwyn Sole is a Marxist intellectual who has affinities with its democratic rather than its Stalinist forms. He studied and taught the literature of Black Consciousness (BC) for more than 30 years. What he found different about Dladla's work compared with the BC poets of the 1970s, when he first came across it, was that:

Angifi is a purveyor of Pan-Africanism not in terms of any Party politics, or the way some young people are using the term nowadays, but in terms of its potential as a gentle, humanising and embracing philosophy. It seems to me that we have an intellectual and creator in Angifi who bases himself in the reality of township life, and has a view of the world that starts-and radiates outwards-from there. Yet from there it radiates into the continental and global: willing to embrace, into his worldview, the creative, open-minded and progressive potential of the human race . from his basis in the reality of his own life, race, and class among his community. (Sole, interview with Vonani Bila, 2019)

In conclusion, Dladla' s philosophy of poetry teaching affirms that art is a potent tool for social healing. He encouraged his students to write about their own lives and their own experiences. They work from within, living their characters. In his words, "Great poets are not cheap singers praising what is imperfect, disposable and dying. They praise only the universe ... the Almighty God!" (interview in Metelerkamp 2001). Upon hearing about Dladla's death on 17 October 2020 aged 69, Johannesburg poet Alan Finlay described him on Facebook as "a quiet and brilliant poet, who said the hardest things in the quietest way. He never felt the need to shout" (Finlay 2020).

Rest in peace Angifi Proctor Dladla, uDibi Lwase Sandlwana, Muntu wa Bachaki, Mgabadeli!

 

References

Baraka, Amiri. 1965. "A Poem for Black Hearts". Accessed May 22, 2020. https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2013.124.3.

Biko, Steve. 2004. I Write What I Like. Johannesburg: Picador Africa        [ Links ]

Berold, Robert, ed. 2003. South African Poets on Poetry: Interviews from New Coin 19922001. Scottsville: Gecko Poetry, University of Natal Press.         [ Links ]

Berold, Robert, and Stacy Hardy, eds. 2017. The Fertile Ground of Misfortune: Teaching Practices in Creative Writing. Grahamstown: Institute for the Study of English in Africa.         [ Links ]

Berold, Robert. 2019. Unpublished interview with Vonani Bila, July 10.

Dalea, Roger, and Susan Lee Robertson. 2004. Interview with Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Globalisation, Societies and Education 2 (2): 147-60. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767720410001733629.         [ Links ]

Dladla, Angifi. 2011. The Girl Who Then Feared to Sleep. Grahamstown: Deep South.         [ Links ]

Dladla, Angifi. 2017. Lament for Kofifi Macu. Grahamstown: Deep South.         [ Links ]

Dladla, Angifi. 2019. Unpublished interview with Vonani Bila and Femi Abodunrin, July 12.

Fanon, Frantz. 2017. The Wretched of the Earth. Cape Town: Kwela Books.         [ Links ]

Finlay, Alan. 2020. "What to make of Angifi Dladla's passing. I read the news having breakfast with my teenage son this morning. Oh, shit I said. Angifi died". Facebook, October 18. Accessed December 12, 2020. https://www.facebook.com/748196476/posts/10158934354441477/?app=fbl.

Freire, P. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum.         [ Links ]

Graebner, C. M. E. 2007. "Off the Page and Off the Stage: The Performance of Poetry and Its Public Function". PhD diss., University of Amsterdam. Accessed October 4, 2020. https://hdl.handle.net/11245/L270110.         [ Links ]

Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2011. "Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality". Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1 (1). Accessed October 6, 2020. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/21k6t3fq.         [ Links ]

Hamilton, Ian, and Jeremy Noel-Tod, eds. 2013. Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780199640256.001.0001.         [ Links ]

Jung, Carl. 2020. "Learn Your Theories Well But Put Them Aside ...". Accessed May 22, 2020. http://www.quodid.com/quotes/134/carl-jung/.

Mattera, Don. 2010. Memory Is the Weapon. Johannesburg: African Perspectives Publishing.         [ Links ]

Metelerkamp, Joan. 2001. Interview with Angifi Dladla. New Coin 37 (2): 62-76. Accessed December 11, 2020. https://joumals.co.za/content/iseacoin/37/2/AJA00284459_574.         [ Links ]

Mphahlele, Es'kia. 1974. The African Image. New York, NY: Praeger Publishers.         [ Links ]

Mphahlele, Es'kia. 2002. "The Fabric of African Culture and Religious Beliefs". In Es 'kia: Education, African Humanism and Culture, Social Consciousness, Literary Appreciation, edited by E. Mphahlele. Cape Town: Kwela Books.

Msila, Vuyisile, ed. 2020. Developing Teaching and Learning in Africa: Decolonising Perspectives. Stellenbosch: Sun Press. https://doi.org/10.18820/9781928480716.         [ Links ]

Muliro, Guershom Kambasu. "The Image of the Woman/ A Literary Analysis of Okot P'Bitek's Song of Lawino and Song of OcoF. Accessed October 3, 2020. https://www.memoireonhne.com/10/10/3996/rn.

Ngidi, Sandile. "Sandile Ngidi Reading Benedict Wallet Vilakazi, Dead Poets Reading Series, April 16, 2020". Dead Poets Reading Series, YouTube video, 3:44. Accessed October 3, 2020. https ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLBjn7yWhq8.

Ngügïwa Thiong'o. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers.         [ Links ]

Penfold, Tom. 2018. "Being a Better Human: In Conversation with Angifi Dladla". Journal of the African Literature Association 12 (3): 328-40. https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2018.1553426.         [ Links ]

Poetry Foundation. n.d. "Yannis, Ritsos; 1909-1990". Accessed October 3, 2020. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/yannis-ritsos.

Senghor, Leopold Sedhar. 1945. "Prayer to Masks". Accessed October 3, 2020. https://www.dadychery.org/2011/12/14/prayer-to-masks-poem-by-leopold/.

Sole, Kelwyn. 2010. "Angifi Proctor Dladla". Poetry International Archives, 15 October. Accessed December 11, 2020. https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/17853/Angifi-Proctor-Dladla/en/tile.

Sole, Kelwyn. 2019. Unpublished interview with Vonani Bila.

 

 

1 This article was originally accessed at https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Marikana-men-queued-for-muti-police-20121108 (accessed 9 September 2019). It has since been removed from the News24 website.
2 Inyanga and sangoma are both isiZulu words for a traditional healer. Muti is slang for the medicine prepared by traditional healers.
3 Senghor (1906-2001) served as Senegal's first president from 1960 to 1980.

^rND^sDalea^nRoger^rND^nSusan^sLee Robertson^rND^sGrosfoguel^nRamón^rND^sMetelerkamp^nJoan^rND^sPenfold^nTom^rND^1A01^nMosima Kagiso^sPhakane^rND^1A01^nMosima Kagiso^sPhakane^rND^1A01^nMosima Kagiso^sPhakane

THEMED SECTION 2
POETRY

 

Bokgabo le Setso

 

 

Mosima Kagiso Phakane

University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. kgphakane@gmail.com

 

 

Tse direto re di nyantse

Di re kgomaretse magalagapa

Di elela le masika nke ya Tugela meela

Ke ditaola tsa bogologolo

Maleme a bagologolo

Ge ebe ba rutlumulla bjoko ka ditheto

Go tshikinyega le thaba ya pelo

Mekgolokwane ya gona

Legodimo le be le theoge le gokare lefase

O kwe nke lefase le opa magoswi

O kwe nke mawatle a letsa mekgosi

Bohwa ke lehumo

Re ka mokona dithai le dinonwane

Wa bogale mollo o sohlasohla tsa mohwelere dikgonye

Meno a tloswa bodutu ke dithotse le dithuthupe

Ya maotwana a mararo e bipetswe ke ditloo le ditloo-maake

E goragora nke e a tsikiditlwa

Nka le tuntetsa gare ga diema le dika

La sala le kgohlotse mahlo nke mankgohlo

Ge nka re matshidi, mahlatswa, dihletlwa

Ge nka re leselo, sego goba thitelo

Bjoko bo ka ema pho!

Gwa thunya musi wa kgakanego

Yaka pelo e rothisa ya bohloko

Bohwa ke selo se sele go rena ba kalana ye ntshwa

Re kakatletse tse sele ka tsa go kompula meratha

Ra furalela le go thuntshetsa lerole

Dijo-kgolo tsa bogologolo

Metse go swa mabapi

Tsa hloka seboka di sia ke nare e hlotsa

Ke moka re di furaletse, bongwana' magana go botswa

A ke gona ge re itlhapila diatla

Diatla tsa go relela ruri

Di a re phonyoga tsa bogologolo

 

Heritage (Translation of "Bokgabo le Setso") by Mosima Kagiso

Phakane

We were breastfed these poems

They hang onto the palates of our mouths

Flow through our veins

Like the flow of the Tugela falls

These are ancient bones

Tongues of those we descended from

They scattered brains with praises

Shook the rockiest of hearts

The ululations

Heavens descend and pulls earth into its arms

You'll hear as if earth is applauding

You'll hear as if oceans are singing praise

Heritage is wealth

We can devour riddles and indigenous stories

As the fierce fire gobbles the dry wood

Keeping our teeth company is fried and dry pumpkin seeds and maize seeds

The three-legged pot almost overflowing with nuts

Unsettled, as if being tickled

I can baptise you in proverbs and idioms

Leave you so wide eyed with shock, like an owl

I could tell you about a variety of wild berries

Mention a variety of indigenous apparatus

Brains would stand still

And smoke of confusion would fill this space

My heart sheds tears of pain

Heritage is foreign to us

We hold tightly to foreign deeds

Easily erasing the roots we descended from

One flaming house can easily lead to a stream of houses on flames

A herd of lions divided is easily outrun by a limping buffalo

Have we really discarded all these teachings, an unruly generation

Are we really erasing the roots we descended from

Slippery hands, the lessons they've fed us are slowly slipping away

^rND^1A01^nGrace^sMavhiza^rND^1A02^nMaria^sProzesky^rND^1A01^nGrace^sMavhiza^rND^1A02^nMaria^sProzesky^rND^1A01^nGrace^sMavhiza^rND^1A02^nMaria^sProzesky

THEMED SECTION 2
ARTICLE

 

Mapping Pathways for an Indigenous Poetry Pedagogy: Performance, Emergence and Decolonisation

 

 

Grace Mavhiza^I; Maria Prozesky^II

^ISTADIO, Faculty of Education, South Africa. gracem@stadio.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1304-4788
^IIUniversity of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Maria.Prozesky@wits.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9747-037X

 

 

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ABSTRACT

Poetry is notoriously unpopular in high school English classrooms all over the world, and English FAL (First Additional Language) classrooms in South Africa are no exception. We report on a pedagogical intervention with Grade 11 learners in a township school in Johannesburg, where the classroom was opened to indigenous poetry and identities by allowing learners to write and perform their own poetry in any language and on any topic. Rejecting essentialist notions of indigeneity as defined by bloodline or "race", we work with a notion of indigenous identity as fluid and performative, and as inescapably entwined with coloniality. We argue that indigenous poetry, meanings and identities were emergent in the open space created by the intervention. To further explore this emergence, we discuss pedagogy itself as performative, an interaction between teacher and learners in which knowledge is built, stories told and identities sedimented. We focus on what can be learned about possible pedagogical pathways for an indigenous poetry pedagogy from the learners' performances. We identify the constraints and potentialities for a decolonial pedagogy that arise when the classroom is opened to indigenous poetry, and ideas for what such a decolonial pedagogy would look like. The findings suggest that new ways of thinking about the ethics and politics of poetry in the classroom are required, some general to all indigenous pedagogies, and some specific to local South African traditions of praise poetry.

Keywords: indigenous poetry; decolonisation; pedagogy; performance; South African education

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Introduction

The study of poetry has been shown to promote language learning among English FAL (First Additional Language) learners, as well as to encourage learners' awareness of and confidence in their cultural identity (Farber 2015; Harris 2018; Xerri 2018). Yet poetry is notoriously unpopular in high school English classrooms all over the world, and English FAL classrooms in South Africa are no exception. The reasons for this situation are manifold. First, the poems prescribed are often foreign to the lifeworlds of learners, containing literary and historical references that limit understanding greatly for non-native speakers of English (Brindley 1980 in Finch 2003, 3), such as South African FAL learners. Poetic traditions that are more familiar to many learners are often not acknowledged explicitly in policy documents. In the South African context, these traditions include praise poetry and music genres such as hip hop and rap. Second, teachers are afraid of working with poetry, often because they feel they lack the necessary knowledge and skills, and when they do teach it they do so poorly, focusing on the technical aspects rather than the meaning of poetry (Benton 1999; Calway 2008; Jocson 2005; Riley 2012). Third, learners come to share the negative attitude of their teachers, believing that studying poetry is dull and pointless (Hanauer and Liao 2016; OFSTED 2007). Finally, in South Africa specifically, the National Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) is highly prescriptive and assessment-driven; poetry is assessed in national written examinations by means of short questions that focus on mastery of figures of speech, diction and imagery (Department of Education [DoE] 2011). This means of assessing poetry helps shape the way it is taught and reinforces the negative perceptions of it among teachers and learners.

This article reports on a pedagogical intervention that aimed to address this negative perception of poetry in a Grade 11 classroom of English FAL learners in Johannesburg, Gauteng. Grace Mavhiza, as the teacher of this class, implemented the intervention, while Maria Prozesky supported the development of the necessary pedagogy. The article hopes to contribute to a small but growing body of research on alternative pedagogies for poetry in the context of the South African public education system. Previous work has explored the effect of drawing on learners' multiliteracies (Newfield 2009; Newfield and D'Abdon 2015; Newfield and Maungedzo 2006), and of focusing on spoken-word poetry (D'Abdon 2016). These studies share the conviction that privileging the learners' own funds of knowledge is vital in promoting equity of access and social justice in education. Continuing along this trajectory, this study discusses the use of performance as a pedagogy, explicit discussion in the classroom of local lived traditions of oral poetry as poetry, and the introduction of learners' own writing of poetry in the classroom. We also explore how these tap into indigenous poetic elements and ongoing indigenous poetic traditions. As we discuss below, we understand the meaning of "indigenous", when applied to literature, as more complex than simply "originating or occurring naturally in a particular place" (Lexico 2020). In the pedagogical intervention we describe below, Grade 11 learners in a township school in Johannesburg performed poems they had written or selected, in any language/s they wished, on any topic of their choice, with explicit encouragement from the teacher to draw on izibongo and other forms of traditional poetry with which they were familiar. In striking contrast to the text-focused, close-reading poetry lesson so common in South African classrooms, these lessons were lively and unstructured, and produced real change in the learners' behaviour in their English classes. Our focus in this article is on the "pedagogical pathways" (Madden 2015, 2) revealed during the intervention: that is, the constraints and potentialities for a decolonial pedagogy that arise when the classroom is opened to indigenous poetry, and ideas for what such a decolonial pedagogy would look like.

The question of which poetry can be called "indigenous" is not simple, and the answers depend on how the term "indigenous" is understood. The relationship between indigeneity and decolonisation is also complex. We begin, therefore, with a discussion of indigenous poetry and how it can be defined in the educational context. Rejecting essentialist notions of indigeneity as defined by bloodline or "race", we work with a notion of indigenous identity as fluid and performative, and as inescapably entwined with coloniality. Such a definition allows us to understand what happened in the classroom, where, we argue, indigenous practices and identities emerged from the learners' performances. To further explore this emergence, we draw on understandings of all pedagogy as performative, since, in the interactions in the classroom, knowledge is built, stories told and identities sedimented. With this analytic framework established, we then briefly describe the intervention, and discuss the findings of our analysis of the poems the learners produced and performed. We discern a decentring of traditional classroom roles and practices, and a rethinking of the ethical role of the teacher in a decolonial pedagogy that seeks to bring to the fore indigenous poetry and identities.

 

Defining Indigenous Poetry

"Indigenous" is a contested term that cannot be reduced to the dictionary meaning of originating or occurring naturally in a particular place. The history of indigeneity as a concept is intertwined with that of coloniality and decoloniality. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues, colonisation is central to defining indigeneity:

[T]he world's indigenous populations belong to a network of peoples. They share experiences as peoples who have been subjected to the colonization of their lands and cultures, and the denial of their sovereignty, by a colonizing society that has come to dominate and determine the shape and quality of their lives, even after it has formally pulled out. (1999, 7)

She is sceptical of the arguments mounted by the descendants of colonisers, who claim indigeneity by right of birth but whose "linguistic and cultural homeland is somewhere else, [whose] cultural loyalty is to some other place" (1997, 7). Her argument, taken simplistically, would bar poetry written by South Africans of settler heritage from counting as indigenous. Such a view can seem to embrace an essentialist definition of indigeneity, reducing it to biology. In fact, by making the experience of coloniality an inextricable part of contemporary indigeneity, Tuhiwai Smith moves indigeneity onto what Nakata et al. call the cultural interface (2012, 130) and what Mignolo calls the border spaces (2000, 455). Nakata et al. see this interface as a space of contact between ongoing indigenous knowledge systems on the one hand, and, on the other, the multifarious forms of "Western knowledge presence" that reach every part of our globalised world. In this space, characterised by "the presence of both systems of thought and their history of entanglement and (con)fused practice", "contemporary Indigenous lifeworlds can now be understood and brought forward for analysis and innovative engagement and production" (Nakata et al. 2012, 26). Rather than an embodied essence, indigeneity then becomes a site of memory and of struggle, an ongoing commitment, a fluid performative identity under continual negotiation. Menezez de Sousa suggests thinking of this negotiation as happening at the level of "intra" (intra-national, intra-linguistic, and intra-cultural) rather than "inter" (international, inter-linguistic, inter-cultural) (2005, 75). In this understanding, "indigenous" poetry would include both traditional local forms and the products of ongoing creative engagement with local settler traditions and global influences. Working with this construction of indigeneity, what would matter in the poetry classroom then would be always choosing the preferential option for the indigenous, prioritising what Nakata et al. call "bringing forward" indigenous voices and viewpoints (2012, 26). This choice is an ongoing attitude that assumes different forms, depending on the positionality of the individual teacher and pupils, but which is always aware of the loci of enunciation (Mignolo 1999, 236) both in text and utterance. To speak of indigenous poetry in the classroom, therefore, is to speak of text and pedagogy as interlinked and inseparable, and always in the service of decolonisation. As Tuck and Yang starkly remind us, "decolonisation is not a metaphor": it means giving back the land, by which they mean submitting to, being beholden to the epistemology and cosmology of the first peoples (2012, 6). Ultimately, then, an indigenous pedagogy will need to be embodied in curricula through the choice of set works as well as the types of pedagogy and assessment prescribed.

Our definition of indigenous is not without problems, because what counts as indigenous and who has the right to police it are tricky questions, which we address in part in our discussion below. The definition does, however, imply a parallel definition of pedagogy that sees the classroom as a third space, to which learners and teachers alike bring their funds of knowledge (Moje et al. 2004).

 

Poetry in CAPS

In South Africa's CAPS, the teaching of poetry is addressed in terms that do not support indigenous poetry as we define it. On the one hand, the introductory section on "Approaches to teaching literature" does state that the personal response and interpretations of learners are absolutely necessary for studying literature, and that "[p]oetry should be taught, not poems" (DoE 2011, 12; italics in original), which could suggest drawing on learners' various poetic heritages in poetry teaching. The policy also states that "[c]reative writing should be closely attached to the study of any literary text", and urges teachers to "ensure that learners write poems as well" as reading them (2011, 12), which is the pedagogy used in our intervention. These points, which suggest openness to poetry as embedded in the lives and varied heritages of the learners, are, however, contradicted by the overall framing of poetry and poetry pedagogy in the curriculum statement. The introductory statement of the "Approaches" section reads:

The main reason for reading literature in the classroom is to develop in learners a sensitivity to a special use of language that is more refined, literary, figurative, symbolic, and deeply meaningful than much of what else they may read. (DoE 2011, 12)

This statement, which articulates only a partial truth about literature, talks of "a special use of language" in the singular, and so implies that literary language is unchanging across stylistic traditions, and cultural and linguistic contexts. The section on poetry is even more explicit about presenting poems as linguistic puzzles, meanings wrapped up in complicated language, saying "There are essentially only two questions a learner needs to ask of a poem: What is being said? How do I know?" The list of basic poetic techniques to be studied (DoE 2011, 23) is useful and not over-technical, but these devices are presented as "aspects" that will "enhance an understanding of the intended message" of the poem, again emphasising the poem as something dead on the page and to be dissected. At no point is poetry presented critically as embedded in cultural and literary traditions and entangled in real-world power imbalances. It is no wonder that many teachers fall back on a teacher-centred, line-by-line method of teaching and concentrate on set poems only, as Grace has found in her individual experience. In addition, as much as CAPS stipulates that there should be creativity in the literature classroom, the structure of the Annual Teaching Plan (ATP) makes such creativity almost impossible; the teacher is compelled to emphasise assessment, as this is the tool used by school management and subject facilitators to determine the work done in the classroom. Many teachers keep to a teacher-centred drilling of learners so that they fare well in the examinations.

 

Performance and Pedagogy

We draw here on Dimitriadis's notion of pedagogy as performance (2006). Dimitriadis looks to the "performative turn" in the social sciences, in which meaning is seen as contextualised performance, existing in the interactions between people and their social, material and cultural contexts (2006, 297). This "interactionist epistemology" leads to a specific understanding of pedagogy that decentres authoritative, static texts such as the curriculum and set works as guarantors of truth, and the privileged, delimited role of the teacher. In this view, "educators and students engage not in the 'pursuit of truths,' but in collaborative fictions-perpetually making and remaking world views and their tenuous positions within them" (Pineau 1994, 10 in Dimitriadis 2006, 305). When this "making and remaking" occurs in awareness of the cultural interface, and so brings forward indigenous knowledge and experience, it performs and sustains indigenous identities, and unbalances established colonial dynamics of power in the classroom.

The intervention we discuss in this article was an instance of this performative pedagogy. The teacher, working from her traditional privileged position and within the constraints of the highly prescriptive CAPS curriculum, defined the parameters of the group work project, so that the learners had freedom in creating and presenting their poems. The learners, working within these parameters, brought their varied knowledges and experiences to the task. At the intersection between these structures, the learners performed what Pineau calls "collaborative fictions", their lived understanding at that moment, as members of that classroom community, of what poetry is and who they are as poets. Herein lies the pedagogical opportunity for the teacher to witness indigenous identities being negotiated, to map the cultural interface on which these negotiations take place, and also to forward and sustain indigenous identities, poetry and practices. The teacher's own negotiations of indigeneity, whether from within indigenous heritage/s or from outside looking in, are included in this process.

We propose that the poems the learners produced, drawing on all the various genres with which they are familiar, are a type of personal narrative or "autoperformance": that is, a telling about and presenting of oneself. As Langellier and Peterson put it, this kind of narrative is "an elemental, ubiquitous and consequential part of daily life" (2006, 151), and it is more than just telling a story. As Bruner explains,

eventually the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment and purpose-build the very "events" of a life. In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we "tell about" our lives. (2004, 694)

Because poetry mediates thought and experience into language in creative ways, it has an affinity for this kind of narrative (Wissman and Wiseman 2011). During the intervention, because the learners were given freedom to produce and perform their own original poems for their classmates and their teacher, we suggest they were given a particular kind of power, the "performative power ... to select or suppress certain aspects of human experiences, to prefer or downplay certain meanings, to give voice and body to certain identities" (Langellier and Peterson 2006, 152). These meanings included the learners' lived understandings of what poetry is and what it is for, as well as the identities of poet and performer, within the learners' embodied experience. The performance of the poems in this way is a site of interpersonal contact, where indigenous identities and meanings as we have defined them can appear and develop.

In any performance, a personal narrative is shaped by context, the material, social and cultural structures of meaning-including age, gender, class, "race", ethnicity, religion, and so on. These discourses provide both the raw materials for the performance, and the constraints within which it can function (Dimitriadis 2006; Langellier and Peterson 2006). In the poetry intervention, as will be discussed in more detail below, the learners drew on a wide range of cultural texts. The learners' performative power manifested in how they position themselves and others in terms of available discourses. In some instances, a telling can be conservative, re-presenting forms and conventions so as to stabilise social norms. In other instances, a performance is transgressive, defying cultural norms as unheard stories are told and domination resisted. This phenomenon is known as emergence, in which something that was unseen before comes into being (Conquergood 1998). This emergent potential means that performance can be political in the sense that it "ground\s] possibilities for action, agency, and resistance in the liminality of performance as it suspends, questions, plays with, and transforms social and cultural norms" (Langellier and Peterson 2006, 155). Our particular interest, in this article, is the decolonial potential of the intervention as it was performed by the teacher and learners, in the context of the poetry pedagogies that are overwhelmingly common in the South African public education system. By inviting the learners to bring their own compositions into the classroom, Grace opened the kind of liminal space that Langellier and Peterson describe. By explicitly addressing their preconception that "poetry" is only the written poetry prescribed at school, as we discuss further below, she opened the space to the indigenous, in the sense we defined earlier. In this space, the privileged status of written poetic texts in the Western tradition, and the "close-reading" style of analysis, can be destabilised, allowing the option of the indigenous as a real choice for both learners and teacher. The use the learners made of this space forms the findings section of this article.

Before the learners' poems can be examined, the context of their performances and the poetic repertoires at their disposal must be discussed. In keeping with our definition of indigenous, we begin with the local traditions of oral poetry. As Mignolo (2000) points out, historically under colonisation the coevalness of knowledge traditions (their equal ancientness and sophistication) was denied, and colonial regimes of knowledge and utterance were institutionalised through school curricula and practices. The teaching of indigenous voices in the South African poetry classroom begins with local oral traditions of poetry spoken or sung as part of the everyday life of indigenous peoples.

 

Traditions of Oral Poetry in South Africa

The poetic traditions of precolonial southern Africa, often referred to using the umbrella term "praise poetry", persist into the present in many diverging hybrid forms. As Groenewald puts it, "[i]f the praise poem is Africa's most characteristic form, it has gained this reputation by the sheer diversity of performance situations in which it occurs and its host of diverse types" (2001, 31). Praises can be spoken by men or women (Somniso 2008, 140), at occasions ranging from public gatherings (such as political rallies) and ritual events (such as weddings or initiation ceremonies), to private sexual encounters (Guma 2001, 275; Groenewald 2001, 31-32). They can praise chiefs (in IsiZulu, izibongozamaKhosi), private individuals (such as the dithoko recited by a young Basotho man after his initiation), animals or objects (as when a farmer praises his herd), young people (a mother's praises of her young children, izangelo in IsiZulu) or old ones (Gunner 1979; Gunner and Gwala 1991, 67, 79; Mtshali 1976, 200). In terms of form, all poetry distinguishes itself from other utterances by using language features that are accepted as poetic in a particular community. The features that mark praise poetry are not the rhyme and regular metrical structure that are often synonymous with Western poetry. Praise poetry is highly formulaic, and features repetition, parallelism, and highly figurative language, often with archaic vocabulary or words used only in poetry; as in poetry in other traditions, indirection rather than explicit statement of meaning is highly prized (Gunner 1979, 195; Kaschula 1995, 106). Gesture is important in the poetry's meaning (Gunner 1979, 239). In fact, praises are closely related to song, chant and dance (Gunner and Gwala 1991, 1; Mtshali 1976, 203). It is the function of praise poetry that distinguishes it most clearly from Western poetic traditions. The social practice of praising serves to mediate a person's individual and societal identities and define the individual in relation to the group or the community (McGiffin 2018). Praises in all their varied forms and occasions worked "to individualize, that is, to set the individual apart from all others, to build and maintain his or her austere character and position" (Groenewald 2001, 36), within the shared set of cultural meanings (Mulaudzi 2014, 91). An example of this mediation of the personal and the social is the chief s praise singer, who had a real political role in presenting and enhancing the chief s political image to the people (Groenewald 2001, 38), but also conveyed critique of the chief s actions back to him in a critically important form of "ritual license" to speak back to power. Kai Kresse writes: "Criticizing, as well as praising, is always linked to specific currently valid criteria which are rooted in social knowledge, marking what is laudable and what should be condemned" (1998, 172). The mediating function of praising is broad and complex.

These traditional functions of praise singing have shifted as the social contexts of performers and audiences have changed. Some practices survive in forms similar to precolonial tradition, as when children are taught their clan praises (izithakazelo in IsiZulu) as a form of social and cultural orientation (McGiffin 2018). Praises are also performed at functions such as weddings, funerals and presidential inaugurations, where their function can be mediatory in the traditional sense, but also purely "ceremonial", representing traditional culture as cultural capital and so marking the occasion as significant (Groenewald 2001, 38). Non-traditional forms of praise poetry, such as "worker poetry" performed at trade union gatherings, arose in the twentieth century (Kaschula 1995). Praise poetry certainly fed into the struggle poetry of the apartheid era, in English and other languages; as Kashula argues, the praise poet's role of criticising those in power made protest poetry a familiar genre (1995, 92). Struggle poets often collaborated with or were musicians themselves.

Praise poetry is only one type of poetry with which young people in today's Gauteng classrooms are familiar, to varying degrees. Another important form is found in popular culture, which in South Africa is highly influenced by American and, to a lesser degree, by European trends. In today's globalised world, TV and the Web give South African urban youth access to both whitestream colonial cultures and to what Nopece calls "[W]estern resistance identities and subcultures such as hip hop culture and music" (2018, 210). The learners' negotiations around whether and how they resist both global and local colonial culture are sites where indigenous identities and meanings, particularly in terms of poetry, are performed. The intervention classes taught by Grace aimed to open a space where these negotiations could become visible, and so the pedagogical pathways around indigenous poetry were also discernible.

 

The Intervention

This intervention is part of a larger study that explores the impact of including indigenous poetry in the English FAL classroom at Grade 11 level. Grace played a dual role, being simultaneously the teacher of the Grade 11 class chosen for the study and the lead researcher. Forty-three (45) learners in a single Grade 11 class participated in the study; they were aged between 16 and 19 years at the time the research was carried out. Their school is situated in Johannesburg South, Gauteng, and draws its 1 200 learners from the multilingual and multicultural township in which it is situated. Most (if not all) of the 11 official languages of South Africa are spoken in this community, but the school only offers three of them at home language level. These are IsiZulu, IsiXhosa and Sesotho for the Grade 11 class selected for this study. The learners take English as FAL (First Additional Language). Poetry is optional for Grade 11 according to CAPS, but the school selects this option. Once the school has opted to teach poetry, they use the poetry anthology that is prescribed by the Gauteng Department of Education, from which a selection of the poems is made by government course curriculum planners and passed on to the school.

The pedagogical intervention took place over five lessons in total, spread over several months. During the intervention, Grace took field notes of her observations. The intervention had three stages:

Orientation

The learners were given an overview of the intervention and assured that the tasks involved were not summative assessments. Grace then led the learners through an introductory exercise, in which they had to think about their poetry experiences outside school and share their ideas and experiences. The learners at first did not classify izibongo as poetry; they believed that the term applies only to the prescribed poetry they studied in their English classes. They called praise singing "entertainment", explaining that at home it is tradition that at family gatherings someone who is good at clan praises will entertain everyone by performing. When Grace pressed them to explain more about why izibongo are entertaining, the learners cited the performers' use of gestures, which make the performance lively, and the proximity of the izibongo to their lives, their daily successes and challenges. The class consisted of 43 learners from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and Grace allowed them to work individually or in small groups as they chose.

First Round of Presentations: Personal Poetry

Learners then worked independently in their groups, at home or another chosen out-of-school space, to write or select a poem and prepare to present it for the class using the mode/s of their choice (an illustrated text, digital presentation, or live performance with optional artefacts). The learners were also told that they were free to use any language with which they felt comfortable. This freedom given to the learners was intended to support effective teaching and learning by building a culturally supported, learner-centred context, whereby the strengths students bring to school are identified, nurtured, and utilised to promote student achievement (Richards, Brown, and Forde 2007). The learners had four weeks to prepare their presentations. Over the course of two lessons, the groups presented their poems; all the groups, without exception, chose live performance as their mode of presentation. There were no set criteria for the order of presentation.

Second Round of Presentations: Prescribed Poetry

The learners worked in groups (6 groups of 6 learners and one group of 7) and Grace assigned each group one of two poems selected from the prescribed poems. One Western poem and one South African poem were chosen: "Composed upon Westminster Bridge" by William Wordsworth and "The Call" by Gabeba Baderoon. Three groups worked with the Wordsworth sonnet, while four groups worked with the Baderoon poem. The learners had to prepare a multimodal presentation as homework, and then present it as before, over the course of two lessons.

 

Findings

The texts produced by the learners and Grace's field notes and photographs were analysed, focusing on the indigenous poetic forms and practices, and wider constructions of indigenous identity, as performed by the learners. These are the landmarks of future pedagogical pathways that privilege indigenous tradition and expression and thus serve to decolonise classrooms.

Indigenous as Negotiated Performance

The learners' performances were sites of social interaction, in which the learners situated themselves as speakers relative to their immediate audience (teacher and classmates) and to wider implied audiences. The performances give insight into the identities from which and the communities to whom the learners are speaking, that is, the selves they are performing. We argue that the poems reveal some of the negotiations at what De Sousa (2005) calls the "intra" level of culture in terms of indigenous identity and experience.

As will also be discussed in the next section, the praise poetry tradition is present in the learners' repertoire. One boy who performed solo recited a long poem about his grandmother:

Grandmother

She wakes up early in the morning

Before the sun rise[s] to shine to work.

Work that she hates. But does she

Have a choice? No.

She does it for us

To sleep warm, full stomach.

But what do we do?

We don't appreciate.

The saddest part is when

She lost her eyesight.

After school I had to look after her

While other children are playing soccer

The thing I like. But did I

Have a choice? No.

For my grandmother to be happy

And to be taken care of.

I had to focus on my studies

And look after her. Nothing else.

I had to expect more

Than to rest.

One day she told me that

I will be rich

Because I suffered a lot

In my childhood.

The poem is in English, yet is reminiscent of praise poetry in its recounting of the subject's deeds, and its use of parallelism ("But does she / Have a choice? No" and then "But did I / Have a choice? No"). The poem also performs the traditional function of mediating social and individual identity, as the speaker works through his struggle to reconcile his duty to his family and his individual desires.

The boy's poem is a negotiation of indigenous poetic tradition through the lenses of colonial language and contemporary experience of home life in the township. A teacher needs intimate knowledge of such ongoing, daily negotiations, if s/he is to privilege indigenous knowledge and identities in the classroom. Other poetic traditions are clearly evident in the class's performances also. Two groups wrote poems with the simple diction, stanza structure and rhyme characteristic of pop song lyrics. Both these poems expressed motivational messages, with lines such as "Before you see the rainbow / Reach your goals" (group 4) and "Life is an opportunity, benefit from it" (group 6). These poems suggest the strong presence of Western popular culture in the learners' imaginations and identities, contributing both conventional, even trite, imagery and poetic form. Group 6's song is titled "Life", which it describes using highly conventional terms such as "dream", "struggle", and "adventure", but also in places manages to convey a young person's difficulty with understanding the world in language that is simultaneously evocative and inarticulate: "Let yourself be drowned by the strange / Be able to put up with the pain / Push harder than yesterday."

Several individual performances (by 3 boys and 1 girl, respectively) were love poems. This is not surprising, since the participants are at an age to be interested in romantic relationships. The girl who performed a love poem brought as her artefact a bracelet of Zulu beadwork (see Figure 1). Such beads were traditionally used to craft love letters that a young woman would give to a young man if she liked him. Traditionally it was seen as indecent for a young woman to speak her feelings towards a young man, a belief that is still widely held. If the young man returned her feelings, he would ask the young woman what the design with its various shapes and colours meant. In most cases the meaning would be shared only between the two people in the courtship relationship or marriage.

 

 

The learner's choice to bring beads to support her performance of a love poem suggests that among some Zulu people the practice is still meaningful. She was able to use an indigenous literacy practice, which employs a traditional multimodal textual form, the beads, to express hidden emotions. In this way, the intervention created an opportunity for indigenous literacies to enter the classroom space as valued knowledge. Yet the meaning and function of these literacies have changed, since the girl presents her beaded bracelet but then also recites a poem in a verbal expression of love that would be unacceptable from a girl in strict tradition. This is an example of the "intra-cultural" negotiations that Menenez de Souza describes.

Another love poem, recited by a boy, provides a further example of these intra-cultural negotiations. His poem depends more obviously on Western popular culture than on traditional practices. It features strong parallelism as is characteristic of izibongo, although also found in Western poetic tradition. The poem reads like the lyrics of a song:

I just close my eyes

Because I might see

Your beautiful face.

I just close my mouth

Because I might talk about you

I close my ear

Because I might hear your beautiful voice

But I can't close my heart

Because I love you.

The speaker is clearly in love, but seems uncertain as to whether his feelings are reciprocated. He wishes to keep his love secret to avoid embarrassment if the beloved does not love him in return. Though the poetic means on which he draws are in the linguistic mode and more clearly influenced by global popular culture, and so are different to the material and visual modes used by the girl with the beads, the social and personal experience they are negotiating, informed by cultural norms, is the same. Such intra-cultural negotiations, which the learners are making unconsciously every day, provide an opportunity for the teacher to guide the class in discussing the value and relevance of indigenous cultural knowledge. Such discussions, although they are a necessary component of any decolonial pedagogy, will not be simple or easy, because they raise the questions of what counts as indigenous and who can decide this. Involving elder members of the local indigenous communities who are indigenous knowledge holders and practitioners is probably necessary, for example in poetry workshops at school and ultimately in developing teaching materials and curriculum policy, to supply the depth of memory the young learners may lack. A decolonial pedagogy can at least ensure that learners engage in their fluid negotiation of indigenous meanings on the cultural interface with some critical awareness.

Indigenous as Political

The freedom the intervention created allowed the learners to move away from the constraints of the prescribed curriculum, and perhaps even ideas of what counts as "poetry". As discussed above, when the liminality of performance comes to the forefront, a personal narrative becomes a "political act" (Langellier and Peterson 2006, 155) in which the speaker tells him/herself as an agent who is capable of action. Several groups of learners, in their performances, situated themselves as active commentators on the difficult conditions of their lives as they play with the poetic discourses available to them. The first group to perform their own poem is an example. This was a group of boys who sang a song of their own composition in two lines:

Ubani onendaba ukhuti kwakusihlwa i phutu noshukela, (Who cares even if we eat thick porridge and sugar for dinner,)

Sivala iminyango nama fasitela akeko umuntu uzosibona ukuthi siyahlupheka. (We close our doors and windows so that no one sees that we are struggling.)

The boys accompanied their singing with a soft beat on a traditional drum (Figure 2) and danced as they sang, moving slowly and coordinating their hand gestures with the rhythm of the song. They composed the song themselves and called it "rap music". Rap is popular with the learners in the school and in the surrounding community, and this song shares the commitment to social commentary that is central to the genre. The boys defiantly name the reality of poverty, which shapes the experience of so many in their community, through a complex tapestry of elements drawn from different poetic traditions. The first line evokes poverty indirectly in the image of an evening meal of maize porridge with sugar or salt in the absence of any meat or relish. The second line of the poem is rooted in local discourses around reputation and shame, since it is an African custom to conceal it when there is trouble in the house. A complex social reality is expressed metaphorically in the image of closing the doors and windows of the home. The boys' use of a drum references the ubiquitous presence of this instrument in traditions across Africa as a means of communication, part of religious and ritual ceremonies and festivities, and as accompaniment to izibongo. The boys drew no specific attention to the drum: it simply meshed with their performance of themselves as makers of song and poetry, while at the same time they obviously did not see any incongruity in simultaneously claiming the identity of "rappers". In their confident mixing of local and global, the boys claim their right to tell of their lives on the cultural interface.

 

 

Other groups' performances were more normative in their treatment of political figures, and they also performed their understandings of what poetry is. Three separate groups produced what could be called contemporary izibongozamaKhosi in poems praising former South African president Nelson Mandela. The community around the school was the site of violent anti-government protests during apartheid and, in Grace's experience, the elders of the community still talk about how Mandela personally intervened to restore peace in 1993 when local resident and struggle hero Chris Hani was assassinated. A trio of boys performed their poem in English, using "The Shield", a metaphorical praise name for Mandela, as the title. The two other groups were all female, one of two girls and the other a larger group of eight. Like the first group discussed above, these groups' performances embodied the close relationship between poetry, dance and song in local oral tradition. The larger group first sang a song from the musical Sarafina and then one participant recited their poem while the others hummed in the background. Both groups used movements and gestures as they performed, notably lifting clenched fists in the black power salute that is familiar in South Africa's political history. The girls in the larger group drew a picture of Mandela in which he also raises his fist in the salute. Written above his head is the traditional call Amandla (Power); with the gesture both in the image and in the performed poem, this call immediately evokes the traditional response, Ngawethu (It is ours), and so casts the viewer of the girls' multimedia performance in the role of co-performer.

These poems, in their subject matter, form, and the gestures accompanying them, draw in more straightforwardly recognisable ways on praise-poetry traditions of political commentary and identity building. Both these praise poems and the "rap" song that preceded them, however, demonstrate an indigenous identity that is concerned with the power dynamics that define indigenous lifeworlds in South Africa: one speaks against the unequal socio-economic structures inherited from colonisation and apartheid, and the others perform the memory of a moment when unequal power structures seemed to shift. A concern with the political is a necessary element of any indigenous pedagogy, since in the logic of our understanding of indigeneity, such a pedagogy is always also committed to decolonisation. This political engagement is easier in South African classes such as Grace's, since such engagement is already integral to the praise-poetry tradition, on which teacher and learners can build together.

Indigenous as Embodied

All the poems, without exception, used a direct voice rather than creating a persona or telling a story. Langellier and Peterson emphasise that performance implies embodiment, in that the learners reproduce in their embodied performances, and on their own terms, the other genres and poetry texts they have heard (2006). This embodiment, in which the learners' voice sounds freely in the classroom, is in striking contrast with the kinds of poetry classes often observed in South African classrooms, where the written text of a canonical poem remains an inert object to be parsed by the teacher while the learners, taking notes, remain silent and invisible. After the first two intervention lessons, there were already some noticeable changes in the way learners received poetry. They started reciting poems daily before the beginning of a lesson. This joy was definitely emergent from the performative nature of the intervention classes. The prescribed poems, which were authoritative because they are required in the curriculum and because of their importance in the final assessments, were pushed aside for the moment. As Dimitriadis says, "decentering texts through the performative became a key way to open up new spaces for interrogating their roles and functions" (2006, 301). This decentering is an opportunity, again, for critical decolonial pedagogy.

It is a truism that learners respond better to poems that reflect lifeworlds with which they are familiar. Understanding the dynamics of the engagement, so that it can be more actively fostered and guided towards the indigenous, is more difficult. The second stage of the intervention, in which learners chose how to present a prescribed poem, suggests some answers. Once again, all the groups chose performance as their mode of presentation. The poem "The Call" (Baderoon 2005) addresses migration, a reality with which the learners are familiar. The speaker describes receiving a phone call from her mother far away in her home country. The learners responded to this poem in performances that depended on embodiment in different ways. First, one group dramatised the poem. Three group members took the parts of the mother, the daughter and the flatmate, and the three others acted as spectators. The actors used gestures and facial expressions with great intensity to convey the fraught emotional situation and the words remaining unsaid between mother and daughter. One of the girls presented with tears rolling down her cheeks. The rest of the class watched in a silence that spoke eloquently of the emotion raised by the performance. This reverberates with Lazar's assertion (1993) that poetry can stimulate the imagination of learners and increase their emotional awareness. By embodying the poem, drawing the gestures and looks needed to bring the words to life in the classroom, the learners translated the poem into meanings drawn from the repertoire of their lifeworlds. In this way they took a poem in English and found its resonance with their local, indigenous experience.

Another group did this transculturation even more richly. They began their presentation by singing a well-known song that mixes languages, titled "Here Come Our Mothers". The song was originally sung by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and has also been widely publicised by the world music artist Daria. The presenters danced excitedly while chanting "Ngcibo" in IsiZulu: a nonce phrase that intensifies the meaning of surrounding words:

Here come our mothers bringing us presents

Ngcibo! Ngcibo! Nampayanomame! / (Sesotho: Nice treats/small gifts from mommy)

We can see apples, we can see bananas

Ngcibo! Ngcibo! Nampayanomame!

We can see cookies, we can see sweet things

Ngcibo! Ngcibo! Nampayanomame!

The whole class joined in the singing. After the song, two group members recited "The Call", while the others hummed in the background. The song about mothers, a familiar text, acted as a bridge to the prescribed poem. The learners created a genre somewhere between poetry and song and opened a shared space that was both intertextual and intermodal, in which they and their classmates could explore the meaning of the poem empathetically. The group then presented the poem translated into IsiZulu (see Figure 3).

 

 

This is an example of translanguaging, which Canagarajah (2011) and Makalela (2015) define as a shuttling between languages with learners using their home languages to understand the additional language content. Learners became innovative and extra careful, as they had to come up with words that could help them not to distort the original meaning of the poem. Their linguistic competence in their home language became a resource to help them in their creative decisions in crafting their translations. Grace's acceptance of multilingualism in the English FAL classroom enabled learners to realise that English is just a language like any of the languages they speak, which is the beginning of a freedom to critique linguistic coloniality.

Though the learners did show some enthusiasm for "The Call", they were not as free as when they presented their own poems, and this restriction was even more apparent with Wordsworth's "Composed upon Westminster Bridge". As had been the case with "The Call", the learners depended strongly on information discussed by Grace in class before preparing their performances. One group brought pictures of the real bridge that they showed the class, and this seemed to help the class, who all nodded their heads to show some understanding of the poem. Then the group played a video they had found on YouTube of the poem set to music and accompanied by visuals (Darling 2016). The whole class was excited and started dancing to the song, although it was not clear whether they were enjoying the poem or the music. The use of multiple modes, which the learners accessed on the internet using their phones, did seem to help them make meaning without the teacher's interference. But at the end of the presentations, the whole class started singing "Here Come Our Mothers" again; they seemed eager to return to familiar forms of poetry. Learners interacted with the two prescribed poems in different ways from the way they performed their own poems. With the prescribed poems, learners were trying to be more formal and conservative, but with their own poems, they were innovative and showed that they were in control of the information.

The contrast with the effortlessness of the learners' engagement with multimodal, embodied poetry, whether performing or interpreting it, suggests what Tuck and Yang (2012) call the incommensurability of decolonisation and the Western liberal tradition. When the learners' experience of poetry at school and their assessment depend on poems that are so foreign, as revealed in their struggle to perform them, they have to try to speak in a voice that is not theirs, that is colonial. There is a fundamental discord between the body speaking and the voice it is trying to speak in. A pedagogy that brings forward the indigenous should ultimately strive towards decolonising the curriculum, as well as classroom practice.

Indigenous as "Africanness"

The learners seemed aware of indigenous identity as rooted in the land. Two of the learners' poems were concerned with negotiating their identities as "African" and "South African". One group of boys presented a call and response poem titled "Africa", and as their artefact the participants had the South African flag (see Figure 4).

 

 

The text of the poem allows insight into these learners' sense of a communal identity, which lies somewhere between an indigenous rootedness to the land and a sense of Westernised national identity:

Africa you are so beautiful

You even have a flag

That represent[s]you, in my own understanding ...

Red stands for landmarks

Black stands for buildings

Blue stands for water

White stands for purity

Green stands for green plants and ...

Yellow stands for sunrise

The colours of the flag represent the logos of the three major political groups (the African National Congress, Inkatha Freedom Party and National Party) who came together to form the Government of National Unity in 1994. The participants reinterpret the flag, rooting their sense of South Africanness in the physical and natural world. Their creative freedom suggests a sense of identity that is more amorphous than allegiance to a particular party, or even a particular country, since they conflate Africa and South Africa in their poem. They invoke the land, but in terms that do not bring out any characteristic features that make the South African landscape unique. Many precolonial indigenous knowledge systems are relational in the sense that they emphasise "relationships between all life forms that exist within the natural world" (Kovach 2009, 34), and perhaps the boys' poem suggests a network of relationships that include history (the troubled "red" of the "landmarks"), the human world ("buildings") and nature (the "yellow" and "green"). The place of human beings in this network is not clear, however, and the speakers do not claim indigenous ownership of land, and all that implies in Tuck and Yang's sense. Their conception of indigeneity in these terms remains vestigial.

The second poem, titled "I Am an African", was performed by two girls, who sat cross-legged on a traditional reed mat (see Figure 5). Across southern Africa, mats often function as sitting places, especially for women and children in the home, and used to be used as beds. Izangoma (traditional healers) often sit on such mats during consultations.

 

 

This group' s multimodal performance using the mat suggests a more active negotiation of indigenous identity than the previous example, as they claim and embody an "African" identity characterised by objects and practices drawn from precolonial tradition. They claim this identity joyfully, ending their poem with the line "I am proud to say I am an African". The girls seem to be purposefully situating themselves as indigenous in the sense developed by Tuhiwai Smith, since their artefact is deliberately non-Western. Like the boys' group who performed before them, these learners seem aware of widely prevalent Pan-African discourses, which locate a "consciousness of belonging to Africa" in "collective historical experiences and memories of marginalization and socio-cultural and racial affinities" (Adogamhe 2008, 10). How the claims of different indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies on the vast African continent can be reconciled with such discourses is not clear, and would have to be negotiated in any indigenous pedagogy.

The Ethics of Pedagogy on the Cultural Interface

A performance pedagogy places the teacher, whether of indigenous or settler heritage/s, in a risky space, imbued with more fluidity than they may be accustomed to. In a classroom, the teacher is conventionally seen as more knowledgeable and has authority to guide the lessons. However, in Grace's classroom, she opened the classroom to learners' knowledge and experiences: in other words, she destabilised the traditional role of the teacher (Dimitriadis 2006) and took a risk that opened the Western, colonial curriculum and classroom dynamics to decolonial knowledge-making. This risk-taking had a complex effect on Grace as a teacher. First, her experience of the intervention highlighted the stress caused by the incommensurability of the poetry curriculum and the learners' lifeworlds. During the intervention, she found classroom management much easier, as the learners' motivation was high because they loved what they were doing. As a teacher in a highly stressful environment in the public education system, Grace found these poetry classes profoundly refreshing. The learners also experienced the curriculum as constraining; after the intervention, they insisted on performing at least one poem at the beginning of every English FAL lesson, which meant Grace had to sacrifice other classroom activities while still following the Annual Teaching Plan to ensure that learners were well-prepared for assessments.

Second, privileging the indigenous requires personal decolonial work for the teacher, whose positionality becomes significant: as a teacher of Zimbabwean Shona heritage, Grace became more aware of her cultural and linguistic repertoire and her own negotiations as an indigenous person. Occupying the role of adult and teacher in a class of young learners, she could not avoid having power over their performances, her ability to meet their poems with a "so what?" (Langellier and Peterson 2006, 159). Any indigenous pedagogy requires that the teacher be extremely aware of his/her power to decide what counts as indigenous in the classroom, which is a great ethical responsibility. All too often, in English classes in South African schools, the learners have experienced the epistemic violence of their indigenous cultures being silenced. If the teacher does not recognise or validate their stories, this can lead to further trauma and further silencing of the learners (Wissman and Wiseman 2011). The teacher's role is to accompany and guide the class as they make the negotiations between ongoing precolonial heritage on the one hand and global Westernised culture on the other: the teacher must maintain his/her self-awareness as s/he continually makes these negotiations.

 

Conclusion

Growing into an indigenous poetry pedagogy, which is necessarily a decolonial pedagogy, is an ongoing process for any teacher. It is also a pathway that is not clearly marked, because indigenous meanings and identities are under continual evolution. Our findings suggest the continued resilience of the praise poetry tradition in the learners' poetic repertoires, but also the strong presence of popular culture, and a way has to be plotted between them if ongoing indigenous poetic traditions are to survive. The first salient landmark on the pathway is the paradoxical role of the teacher, whose ethical commitment to bringing forward indigenous poetry, practices and identities cannot flag, even while his/her authoritative role must be abandoned to allow the learners' indigeneity its ongoing emergence in the classroom. At the same time, the learners' increased engagement and joy in poetry classes can support and rejuvenate the teacher's efforts. Going forward, the teacher could use similarities between izibongo and some forms in prescribed Western poems to help learners understand what other poets are doing when they write. The second guiding landmark is the decolonial political commitment that goes with any effort to bring forward the indigenous. Valuing and promoting indigenous poetry in the classroom must be accompanied by critique of the ongoing inequalities caused by coloniality, whether in the English FAL curriculum, the education system or the country more broadly.

 

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THEMED SECTION 2
ARTICLE

 

"That's Schoolified!" How Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment Shape the Educational Potential of Poetry in Subject English for Black High School Learners

 

 

Adam Cooper

Human Sciences Research Council and Stellenbosch University, South Africa. ACooper@hsrc.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3605-2032

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This article explores the teaching of English poetry in two Gauteng high schools, one a suburban, former Model C school and another in Soweto. Both schools are attended predominantly by Black learners for whom English is not their first language. Nine in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with educators at the two schools. The choice of poems, pedagogy and assessment emerged as important themes in making poetry relevant and educational in South African schools. Writers from similar backgrounds, with common "race" or class-based identities, helped make poetry relevant, but were no guarantee that learners would relate to these poets. Teaching poetry was described as an intimidating experience both for learners and educators, resulting in many teachers retreating to the safe space of a defined set of teaching practices focused on figures of speech, literary devices and a line-byline analysis of the poems. While some intentions existed to teach poetry in a way that encouraged a range of interpretations and possible answers to assessment questions, the standardised matric examination shaped pedagogical practices, as educators wanted to support learners to excel. These findings are interpreted in a post/decolonial context where a range of disparate "Englishes", identities, learners and histories exist, and neoliberal education policies and practices increasingly standardise assessment processes, with implications for the teaching and learning of poetry.

Keywords: poetry; curriculum; poetry teaching; poetry curriculum; South African schools

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Language is a tool for thought and communication. It is also a cultural and aesthetic means commonly shared among a people to make better sense of the world they live in. Learning to use language effectively enables learners to acquire knowledge, to express their identity, feelings and ideas, to interact with others ... . It also provides learners with a rich, powerful and deeply rooted set of images and ideas that can be used to make their world other than it is. (Department of Basic Education [DBE] 2011, 8)

 

Introduction¹

The Educational Potential of Poetry

The epigraph is taken from the South African Department of Basic Education's Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS). It outlines the purposes of language education for secondary school learners, including sharpening their thinking and improving communication. Languages can expose learners to new ideas, expanding their worlds, inducting them into cultural and aesthetic forms that are shared among groups, including their own social groups, and in the process helping them to express their identities. The CAPS proceeds:

The main reason for reading literature in the classroom is to develop in learners a sensitivity to a special use of language that is more refined, literary, figurative, symbolic, and deeply meaningful ... . [It is] an added method of revealing, reinforcing, and highlighting their ideas. (DBE 2011, 10)

Literature is intended to expose learners to creative techniques used to enhance the ways in which ideas are shared. In this article I engage with the inclusion of one literary form-poetry-exploring how it may contribute to the objectives outlined in the CAPS statement. Research was conducted with educators at two high schools in Johannesburg: one a suburban former Model C² school and another in Soweto, Johannesburg's largest township. There were no white learners at either school. Nine in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with educators: five at the former Model C school and four at the township school. All the educators interviewed at the former Model C school were white. Each school's English department contained eight educators in total, meaning that approximately half the English educators at the two schools participated in the study. The research with educators explored the following question: How do the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment practices shape the educational potential of poetry in subject English for Black high school learners in Johannesburg?

By "educational potential" I mean the capacity to aid the processes mentioned in the CAPS: to sharpen thinking and the ability to articulate and communicate ideas effectively, as well as to induct learners into cultural and aesthetic forms shared among groups, including their own social groups. Poetry should help to build learners' identities and help them learn about others. International and South African research on teaching poetry at schools has shown that the educational potential of poetry is not always realised.

International and South African Research on Teaching Poetry

Some international research on teaching poetry found it a difficult and alienating literary form, while other work suggests that it can helpfully bridge learners' everyday and school worlds and foster their cognitive and emotional development (Benton 1999; Doug 2011; Dykmore 2012; Linaberger 2005; Wilson 2013). In terms of negative findings, poetry's language, diction and imagery have been experienced as unfamiliar and intimidating (Benton 1984). Educators describe insecurities around analysing and interpreting poetry (Benton 1999; Linaberger 2005). Poetry is often seen as elitist; British educators reported that students complained that poetry was "posh" (Doug 2011). These class-based divisions could be even more pronounced in South Africa, where class intersects with "race", meaning that English poetry could be culturally unfamiliar and alienating.

Other research has found that educators endorse poetry as important, with its educational potential linked to emotional resonance and real-life topics. Educators in some studies said poetry was relevant to life, and that it allowed students to engage through emotional responses, rather than pure rationality (Benton 1999; Wilson 2013). Poetry catalyses imaginative inquiry, cross-pollinating more rational and scientific school subjects and tasks (Young 2016). Poetry enables personal and emotional links with poems, an unusual interaction between students and the texts they generally encounter in classrooms (Doug 2011). Poetry also encourages forms of multimodal learning, combining the written word, audible voice and bodily movement (Archer and Newfield 2014; Simecek and Rumbold 2016). It has the potential to enhance both students' classroom based and real-life literacies (Dykmoke 2012). The educational potential of poetry is therefore linked to its ability to connect with learners' emotions, as well as their lives outside the classroom. The traumatic experiences that many Black South African learners face in relation to a violent society plagued by poverty and inequality may result in poetry being an important cathartic outlet. Poetry could provide a medium through which students make sense of their daily lives, in the context of a divided and confusingly fractured society, resulting in its fertile educational potential.

While little research has been conducted on poetry teaching in South African classrooms, some work indicates that poetry may hold potential if it draws on existing cultural forms, such as praise poetry and popular culture, for example hip hop (Cooper 2016; Newfield and D'Abdon 2015; Newfield and Maungedzo 2006). Promoting multimodality is important in this regard, which means not privileging written forms over oral, visual, bodily or other forms of meaning-making. Engaging with poetry outside South African classrooms has demonstrated rich potential for learning, with multimodal classroom poetry producing similar results (Newfield and Maungedzo 2006).

Some research finds poetry to be alienating, unfamiliar and irrelevant, yet other studies indicate the opposite: that poetry may catalyse connections to learners' lives outside the classroom and tap into their emotional worlds. These paradoxical findings indicate that it may be the curriculum and pedagogy-the poems chosen and the ways they are taught-that determine the educational potential of poetry.

Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

While English poetry may be alienating because it is not taught in the mother tongue of the majority of South African learners, research on Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) hints that English poetry may still have educational potential for Black South African learners. Poetry has the ability to make links with learners' everyday lifeworlds, a central focus of research on CRP. Under the banner of CRP or asset-based pedagogies, research in the United States of America has shown that meaningful classroom learning and improved academic outcomes can be attained by resonating with students' funds of knowledge (Moll et al. 1992): their cultural resources, values, worldviews and experiences. This approach refutes marginalised students' cultural resources as deficient or a hindrance to learning (Gonzalez and Moll 2002; Lee 2007; Moll et al. 1992). Instead, links between students' out of school resources and discipline-specific school learning are encouraged in efforts to enhance the education of marginalised and minority youth (Ladson-Billings 1995; Lee 2007; Moll et al. 1992). CRP aspires to integrate the values, practices and experiences of marginalised groups into the pedagogical process, drawing connections between reference points that students bring to classrooms and the knowledges and practices that they encounter at school (Moll et al. 1992; Ladson-Billings 2009). This has been shown to improve their self-esteem, interest in academic work and relationships with educators (Gay 2000; Howard 2001; Leonard and Hill 2008). Common themes in poems, such as apartheid, as well as the origins of the poets and the contexts they write about, have close connections to the real lifeworlds of Black South African learners, implying that teaching poetry may be highly relevant and beneficial.

Exploring forms of CRP through poetry could be a timely intervention in South Africa, as poetry teaching has shown rich promise for Africanising and decolonising curricula, which is sorely needed (D'Abdon 2016). Nationwide student protests at South African universities in 2015 and 2016 critiqued the colonial, irrelevant nature of university curricula. Black students felt that universities remain dominated by lingering colonial practices and knowledges, resulting in alienating and uncomfortable educational experiences. The protests have sparked research in multiple academic disciplines into what it means and takes to "decolonise" a curriculum. These protests raise the question of whether high school curricula, pedagogies and institutions are similarly plagued by forms of coloniality. While poetry may be considered a foreign genre with colonial connotations, linked to its classic forms as practised in Europe, a large body of local poetry exists, including poems by Black South Africans, indicating that it could be used to decolonise curricula.

South African poetry could be considered a form of indigenous knowledge with rich educational potential. This notion of indigeneity links knowledge forms and practices to the places where they are produced, rather than advocating for a form of essentialism. African poetry as indigenous knowledge is place-based and Africa-centred, historically forged but fluid and changing (D'Abdon et al. forthcoming). Poetry as indigenous knowledge draws on a range of linguistic and stylistic traditions and choices, with both local and global connections (D'Abdon et al. forthcoming). As a body of work, South African poetry is forged in the settler-colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid experiences, calcifying droplets of knowledge through poetry, a living archive of these interactions (D'Abdon et al. forthcoming). Here I explore the relationship between poetry, place and notions of indigeneity, asking how learners' perceptions of poems, poets and place shape what and how they learn from poetry.

To sum up, poetry holds rich educational potential to connect with learners' everyday lives in meaningful ways and to engage them by transcending purely rational and cognitive forms of inquiry, delving into emotional domains through multimodal methods of teaching and learning. This is particularly relevant in a society with traumatic circumstances and histories, such as South Africa. Despite this fertile potential, some research has found that educators struggle to teach poetry and learners experience it as elitist, unfamiliar and alienating. Connections between poetry and forms of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy highlight the potential to link learners' lifeworlds to the classroom, simultaneously prioritising their academic success and socio-political consciousness. This may be particularly useful in South Africa, where university students have recently dismissed curricula and teaching as underpinned by colonialism, rather than familiar cultural reference points. I explore how this may be achieved by delving into poetry curricula choices as well as educators' teaching and assessment practices in two high schools in Johannesburg.

 

Producing Poetic Data: Research Contexts, Interviews with Educators and Analysis

As mentioned, the research formed part of a broader project led by the South African Poetry Project (ZAPP), a collective of poetry practitioners, scholars and educators. Some educators have been drawn into the ZAPP network through their postgraduate studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, where they met academics involved in the network. A group of these educators, along with poets and academics, attend ZAPP meetings. During one of these meetings, educators from two schools volunteered their schools as research sites. The educators then introduced the research team to school management and staff and facilitated interviews with their colleagues in the English departments, as well as interactions with learners who were participating in extracurricular poetry activities.

The large, former Model C school is located in a suburb approximately 20km from central Johannesburg. It had an all-white student body in 1994, but is now attended exclusively by Black students. The Soweto school is also located approximately 20km from central Johannesburg and is attended mainly by isiXhosa-speaking and, to a lesser extent, SeSotho-speaking learners. While few of the learners at either school came from English-speaking households, learners at the former Model C school had greater English resources at their disposal and were more affluent, relatively speaking, than learners who attended the school in Soweto.

The research project was described to educators at the two schools at an English department meeting and educators were then requested to volunteer if they were prepared to participate in an individual interview. The nine in-depth, semi-structured interviews took place in empty classrooms after school, lasting approximately one hour each. Interviews were fairly open-ended, allowing the participants to interpret the questions on their own terms (Burman 1994). An interview schedule was roughly followed, probing a range of areas related to the teaching of poetry in classrooms. Interview questions explored where they have studied, heard and read poetry (inside and outside formal tuition spaces), which poems they find rewarding, challenging or unpleasant to teach, their aims, experiences and methods in teaching poetry and which poems they believe students enjoy the most.

The interviews were transcribed in full and a thematic analysis was conducted, identifying key themes in the transcripts, guided by Braun and Clarke's (2012) approach. This involved becoming familiar with the dataset as a whole and an initial generation of codes, used as the basis for identifying key themes. Interpretations were then made, assessing the relevance of these themes in relation to the dataset as a whole, the research question and contexts (Braun and Clarke 2012). A descriptive account of the findings was produced, with the key themes of the curriculum, teaching methods and assessment standing out from the initial analysis. These themes were then interpreted using relevant theoretical and analytical concepts and frameworks. The research project was approved by the ethics committee of the relevant institution and the confidentiality of all participants was maintained.

 

Findings from the Research

Theme 1: "The Moment There Is Something They Can Relate to It Opens up the Conversation": Curriculum Choices and the Relevance of Poetry

The first issue that shaped whether poetry resonated with learners at both schools was the difficulty of the language contained in the poems. An educator at the township school said:

It's a language issue. Low English. Most of the poems in the syllabus, yoh they're hard; they completely turn them off poetry, which is terrible. Kids with higher English do well. Even them, if you not thinking, writing, being creative in English every day, even English first language kids are turned off ... . [It's a] way of thinking and expressing they're not familiar with ... . If it's clearly a love poem or a self-affirmation poem that's the genre and the language is clear, then kids can really connect with that.

As this educator explained, even mother tongue English-speaking learners regularly struggle with language used in poetry, so non-native speakers are not likely to be enticed to explore these cultural artefacts and students at township schools really battle to understand the poetry set in the curriculum. Not only is the vocabulary often difficult, poetry contains a "way of thinking and expressing" that is unfamiliar to township learners. Educators at the former Model C school expressed similar sentiments:

"Eating poetry" [a poem by Mark Strand], they don't have a flipping clue. It's on a different level. They don't relate to it. "London" by William Wordsworth goes right over their heads. Not relevant to our learners. So you spend the entire hour explaining content to them and never get to that point where you can actually enjoy poetry. I actually think we should incorporate some of their musicians.

The language used, the genre of poetry, the poets and their contexts, such as Wordsworth in London, contribute to learners' inability to "relate" to the poem. Educators spend the vast majority of their time explaining what individual words mean and providing learners with information on the cultural context, inhibiting pleasure in poetry. This educator indicated that connecting with learners' cultural resources, "their musicians", may help to alleviate this discord. The concept of relevance appeared regularly in the interviews. One educator described relevance as follows:

I would have poetry that deals with issues more relevant to young people; they respond to those poems better. It comes back to their frame of reference. . But we cannot just expose them to that. I suppose that's why we still do Shakespeare. ... I would keep the mixture of poetry but would change the balance. More South African and African writers and poetry. They respond so much better. So much more participation and questions.

This educator grappled with the issue of relevance, explaining that the poetry curriculum should address familiar topics, but that learners also need to be exposed to issues that may be beyond their immediate reference points. Her mention of Shakespeare is probably due to the assumption that he engages with universal and timeless themes such as love, justice and betrayal. In the interview she realised through reflection that the same themes can be found in African texts and that these local texts are less difficult for learners to comprehend than Shakespeare. She concluded that a balance of local and international authors should be included in the curriculum and that the weighting is currently skewed in favour of authors from elsewhere. Her experiences of teaching African and South African poetry led to her view that students relate better to local poetry, with increased participation and greater willingness to engage in dialogue through questions. Relevance is therefore both related to individual poems connecting with the challenges learners face, as well as a broader issue related to the composition of the curriculum as a whole and the overall flavour of its content. She highlighted that relevance requires both familiar authors and topics, but also new ideas. Relevance was often complicated:

For poetry to be interesting they need to read poets from similar backgrounds to them. Role models in their types of communities. [But] just to say we need more African poets or more Black poets, it's not getting to the complexity of the issue. Cause you bring like Koleka Putuma poem and it's amazing ... that type of poet, like Model C school bam nails it, but here that English level and way of speaking and even some of the issues, they're not the same issues, they may be connected ... but just because a person's Black and has a history of being oppressed by white people, it doesn't mean that people are experiencing that in the same way.

This township school educator explained that poets who originate from similar backgrounds to learners help to promote poetry and make poetry relevant. However, prominent poets who grew up in the townships usually progress in their education beyond the levels reached by most township children; their knowledge of English develops exponentially and they are exposed to new contexts due to their professional success. Simply matching township schools with poets who began life in the township is therefore no guarantee that learners will relate to the work these poets ultimately produce. This educator therefore felt that, as these poets become more middle class and cosmopolitan, their work is more likely to resonate with learners at former Model C schools. Township learners will not necessarily relate to their poetry, even if they share a "racial identity".

Further insights into poetry's relevance are illuminated by one poem that educators believed learners loved and another that they felt learners disliked intensely:

I did a poem by Lebo Mashile "Tomorrow's Daughters" ... that thing. We spent 4 periods; we were meant to spend two. I try to have flexibility when it' s touching the kids. The moment there is something they can relate to it opens up the conversation. A lot of the SA poems they get it, but like the English poets, we have to do sonnets, they are tested on the Italian and the Shakespearian sonnets and that kind of poetry they battle with. I also have to research those poems a lot. I teach African and South African; we teach Achebe. I relate better to that kind of poetry, so I teach it better.

Lebo Mashile's "Tomorrow's Daughters" was described by three of the five educators at the former Model C school as a poem that formed part of the curriculum and excited learners. Unlike Shakespearean sonnets, "the language, the concepts, the ideas, the themes" of this poem are accessible to learners. It also offers a rich reservoir of meaning in terms of the themes alluded to in its figurative language, its politics and cross-references to other poets. The educator mentioned Achebe as another author whom she enjoyed teaching, illustrating the relevance of African authors in these South African classrooms.

The choice of poems also needs to be considered in relation to the curriculum as a body of work:

Next year I'm in charge of Grade 10 so I'll do it a bit differently. Because of the poems that were chosen, it's either political or extremely depressing. Whereas when they choose something by Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, they go for something about love, nature. Which I think does both of them an injustice, I don't think it gives a complete or nutshell picture.

Caricaturing African and South African poetry as only engaging with politics, while Western poetry addresses the themes of beauty, nature and love, misrepresents the entirety of these bodies of work. It also problematically insinuates that while Western poets deal with universal themes of nature, love and beauty, Africans only engage with local political conflicts such as apartheid.

There was evidence that educators found international poems that could stimulate "relevance":

Interviewer: Can you name a difficult poem to teach?

Interviewee: "London, 1802." He writes about Milton and I really struggled to get them to turn on because it was so removed from their political culture. Removed from their time. ... Then we did "Next, Please", but they responded to it better because the abstract theme in it was something they could identify with. The language in "London" was high but that wasn't the problem and they didn't do too badly on it in the test, they just studied the poem like a parrot. . I wish I could have done something with them that was a bit more relevant. And by relevant I don't mean more modern or even South African necessarily, just relevant to them.

Poetic relevance is not necessarily tied to place of origin or the identity of the author. This educator explained that Larkin's "Next, Please" was popular among the learners because they could relate to the universal theme and the language was accessible. However, Wordsworth's "London, 1802" required a great deal of contextualisation in terms of the changing values the poet felt were being eroded with the emergence of industrial society. The context in which that poem was written and the themes that it spoke to had little connection to Black high school learners in post-apartheid South Africa. Another difficult issue that further complicates the teaching of poetry, explored more substantially in the next section, is that good teaching takes time. The issue of morals and values is timeless, but to make "London, 1802" relevant would require detailed history lessons and an understanding of the poet's context. In this sense "relating to their own lives" is not simply about the themes being the same, such as morality, but the ways in which these themes play out in their particular historical context. The fact that "Next, Please" by Larkin was relevant to learners implies that relevance is not only about place or the origins of the poet, but is also linked to the pedagogy used and how educators help learners to find relevance as they navigate the distance between their own time and place and that of the poet.

Relevance was a complex issue related both to individual poems and to the corpus of poetry that was presented to learners as a whole. The accessibility of the language clearly impacted on relevance, as second- or third-language speakers not comprehending the vocabulary of the poem resulted in alienation. Writers from similar backgrounds, with common "race"-based or class-based identities, helped make the poetry relevant, but were no guarantees that learners would relate to these poets: the poets may have left the township, or may no longer focus on its cultural reference points. Educators were aware that African and South African poetry was more likely to resonate with learners, but stressed that it was good for them to experience other cultures and perspectives. Educators were reticent to perpetuate stereotypes of Western poetry dealing with universal issues and African poetry only addressing politics. It became clear in the research that relevance was not related to curriculum choices alone, but was forged in the relationship between curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.

Theme 2: Grasping at Figures of Speech: Poetry Pedagogy

Most of the participant educators said that they used a structured process to teach poetry, including a focus on poetic devices and figures of speech, as well as line-by-line analysis. One educator explained:

If they don't know figures of speech it's going to be difficult for them to engage ... . Poetic devices and figures of speech we do at Grade 8. So as they reach Grade 12 it's easier to understand. Then we go to the lines in the poem; what is the implication, what is the message, what is the poet trying to teach us. Then the learners get interest cause they compare it to their life situation. Cause once they get interested it's easier. But if you make it difficult, they won't like poetry.

Difficult vocabulary and an alien literary and cultural form led this educator to believe that breaking the process down into a number of constituent parts can enable learners to understand poetry better, generating interest. He stated that this method prepares learners for a high school experience in which poetry is an annual event, meaning that poetic devices and figures of speech provide scaffolding that can be reused and built upon as learners progress in their secondary schooling. Other educators stated that the use of these devices was for the benefit of the educators, rather than the learners:

I find it easier to teach those kinds of structures in that poetry. They're easier for teaching. That's what I feel.

Another educator agreed that the use of this highly structured teaching style helped with her insecurity around teaching poetry:

They have to number their lines. I read through the poem or one of them reads through it first. Then we'll do the structure of the poem, what is the line structure what is the stanza structure. We have a little structure bubble. Some of them come to class with their numbered lines and little structure bubbles. We discuss the vocabulary. Then we do a line-by-line breakdown. Line 1 what figures of speech, literary techniques. Then I ask them so what do you guys think this poem is about, but we don't discuss it in too much depth. I think I'm a bit insecure of teaching, I didn't do a 4-year B.Ed. So I constantly check with other educators and kids.

One of the difficulties of teaching poetry is that it is an interpretive, fairly abstract literary form, without a linear format and a singular, clear piece of knowledge that can easily be conveyed to learners. This means that the educator easily loses control of the pedagogical process in poetry teaching: they are unaccustomed to teaching this genre and it provokes anxiety. This is particularly the case for educators who feel they have not had adequate training, such as the educator above. One way of countering this insecurity is to construct a structured method for teaching poetry, a set of practices that can easily be replicated and repeated and which ensures that, at a minimum, the learners leave with a set of notes that provide evidence that teaching has taken place. Learners' written work can be used to demonstrate to school management and education department personnel that the educator is performing efficiently.

One of the problems with this approach is that poetry becomes characterised by attempts to identify correctly whether a figure of speech is, for example, a metaphor or a simile, rather than a focus on interpreting the meaning of the poem. An educator said:

I show them that our perceptions of the poem will be different and also the different figures of speech might be different ... for example the same line could be personification, can be metaphor, or hyperbole and all of us are right. So the whole point of that is that I want us to approach the poem from our own perspective and we must try analyse it. ... I'll ask them to pick up that metaphor but there will always be a child who picks up the personification so we'll have that discussion and as long as they can justify it then I welcome conflicting views.

While the educator above does indicate that she encourages different interpretations of the poem, her description indicates that the lesson centres on interpretations of the figures of speech. The purpose of the poem, the intentions of the poet and the ways in which he or she uses these devices become peripheral to the exercise; the priority shifts to breaking the poem down into its constituent parts, so that it becomes manageable and "teachable". The focus is transferred to the parts-in this case the figures of speech- rather than the meaning of the whole poem, with the primary concern being to identify and classify these correctly. Rather than using the figures of speech to help understand the poem, the figures of speech become the focus of concern in and of themselves. Poetry becomes a technical exercise to identify forms of language, rather than fulfil the aims of the CAPS, which state that poetry should aim to develop learners' identities, learners should learn about others and be exposed to new ways of expressing their ideas. One educator expressed his frustration with this state of affairs:

Interviewee: Using poems to explain figures of speech . is not a poem. It's a tickable term that's going to be tested in the exam. Who the hell writes a poem for great examples of metaphors? The way we study in a very theoretical, disconnected nature in school and make it a real thing. Poetry is an artistic expression, is a social behaviour, social event. It is a social practice, it's creative.

Interviewer: Why is it that way in school?

Interviewee: Because of the way the education system is in a long history that comes from a different tradition of poetry really. Or a tradition that favoured the written poetry as opposed to performed poetry. At some point people decided . English educators in schools decided that poetry was a good thing to have in it. But so few of those people have ever been exposed or interested in real poetry, or been to poetry recitals or heard poets speak. So they don't know actually poetry is that. You'll often hear teachers say we need to know the figures of speech. That's like you make a system into it. That's schoolified. School needs to take things in the world and like make points on them. . The irony is you just learn the constituent parts, but you don't put them into the whole again.

Part of this participant's frustration with teaching poetry at school is that what he calls "a real thing"-an active event or process-becomes transformed and divorced from its original context. In the process poetry changes from something that is alive- performed, and embodied-to dead words on a page. The reasons for "killing" poetry in this way are multiple, including some already alluded to, such as breaking poetry up into parts and focusing on specific devices that help to interpret lines of the poem, but not necessarily understand its overall meaning. Through this process, poetry teaching is based on strategies to pass tests, rather than, in line with the ambitions of the CAPS, to build learners' identities and help them to find creative and novel ways to express their thoughts.

One of the difficulties described in this process is that a necessary change of context occurs when poetry is transferred from the poet's studio, a performance space or reading room and placed in the school context. At school a certain amount of standardisation is required across the system; schools operate in rule-governed environments and they are controlled by the auspices of the state, all of which stifle and repress creativity, spontaneity and individuality. The process of "schoolifying" poetry operates to homogenise the process, in direct contradiction to the logic and purpose of poetry. Repeated readings of a poem are never identical and do not aspire to be so. However, the school system works to make things the same, uniform, with textbooks and memoranda that educators use to mark assignments. The ever-looming spectre of assessment had a considerable impact on how poetry was taught at the two schools.

Teaching poetry was described as an intimidating experience both for learners and educators. Confronted with this challenge, many educators retreated to the safe space of a defined set of teaching practices focused on figures of speech, literary devices and a line-by-line analysis of the poems. While some educators said that this made learning easier and that they could build on this knowledge in the future, these practices clearly also aided them. One educator was particularly vocal in his critique of poetry teaching at school, describing it as similar to other school learning processes that extract a practice and knowledge from its natural context, decontextualising and breaking it up into pieces, standardising it so that it is unrecognisable from its original form.

Theme 3: "There Are Some Teachers Who Won't Teach If They Don't Have a Memo": Assessment

In South Africa, secondary school culminates with the matric examinations, the most important set of assessment tasks that determine whether or not learners may continue with tertiary studies. Preparing learners for poetry in the matric examinations was described by one educator as follows:

Interviewee: With the matrics you have to prepare them for the final exam, so it's out of our control, although we know more or less what they will ask. That's also something I try not to do.

Interviewer: Teach to the test?

Interviewee: You do that with your matriculants. You know what questions they're going to ask. There won't be questions outside of the parameters of the study guide. We make copies of the important notes.

This educator admitted that although she tried to avoid "teaching to the test" in general, this is largely not possible for the matric learners. A lot is at stake in matric and many educators feel they will be doing their learners a disservice if they do not utilise practices that are likely to improve learners' results, even if these are anti-educational, such as reproducing and disseminating study guides. A fairly standardised, consistent set of questions is posed in these examinations, issues that are outlined in the above-mentioned "study guide". Educators can transcribe notes and ensure that all the learners have access to these "answers" prior to the exam. Standardised answers for poetry assessment questions were also evident in the fact that a number of educators mentioned "the memo" or memorandum, a document constructed and shared between educators that details acceptable answers to examination questions. Memos are constructed by English department educators to act as standardised, acceptable answers for tests and are then used across multiple classes. In the case of matric, memos from past examinations are distributed to schools, as educators revealed:

There are some teachers who won't teach if they don't have a memo. So they going to want to have a feeling of what the answers would be to the questions, obviously so that they can go through them for their classes. But that depends on your experience and approach to poetry. I see poetry as open to interpretation and that's how I introduce it to the Grade 11s, how poetry can change perspectives. Whereas there are other teachers who want to know that this can only be a metaphor and if it can be anything else then that must also be on the memo. It comes down to experience and it comes down to just level of knowledge you have with regard to genre, that type of poetry, and that poet.

And:

And then we have a memo meeting and I'll say this is also another way of looking at it and the child has responded. Very often we can't accept that second answer. So if we gonna teach the children "be open minded, it' s open to your interpretation", then we need to include that in the memo. In our memo discussions, we are a bit too rigid in terms of what we expect.

There was evidence in the research that educators often had good intentions to teach in an open-minded way and accept a range of interpretations for examination questions, but in practice this was made difficult by the construction of memoranda with prescribed examination answers. Many educators then worked backwards, using these memos in future classes to ensure that learners had access to the "correct" answers, inhibiting the possibility of teaching poetry in a more dynamic, interpretive, multimodal and experiential manner. The educator above indicated that this pedagogical method was due to anxiety and a lack of experience, rather than a belief that this is the only acceptable method. The fact that educators explained to the learners that, as readers of poetry, they need to be open-minded, indicates that a will existed to teach in an alternative manner. However, the reality of school life, including the pressures of examinations, the desire to be fair to all learners by having standardised answers and the fact that educators have different levels of experience, all mean that "the memo" is often retained as an invaluable tool that structures the teaching of poetry. This resulted in the subject of English being perceived in a certain light:

It's as if the English curriculum is structured around teaching them the facts. English has become a study subject like history. You get the poem; you get the notes. You study those notes, write the test. You study notes from the textbook and go and write on what you studied. Instead of feeling the language on your mouth and watching it on paper and becoming comfortable in that skin or in that tongue, to speak in that tongue. So no, I don't think they express themselves.

Similar to the educator who critiqued how poetry becomes "schoolified", this educator described how poetry is learnt on paper rather than on the tongue; it is a disembodied and uncomfortable experience, one that is largely alienating for the learner. This means that learners do not express themselves in poetry, or English for that matter, as they are reduced to automatons that are simply required to memorise and repeat what they are given in the notes and the textbook. One educator lamented how this teaching and learning process compared with her own university education, expressing disappointment in school education:

I struggle. I really really struggle. One thing I enjoyed about varsity is that I felt like this is for you and the world. It was enrichment. If you want to pass, tell me why it's a good poem. Not tell me ABC.

What does it mean that poetry is "for you and the world"? It implies that, rather than its purpose being to demonstrate that a learner can memorise certain answers and recite them, the process is designed to give learners agency, to encourage them to build a relationship with the poetry and the poems and create their own answers.

While some intentions existed to teach poetry in a way that encourages a range of interpretations and answers to assessment questions, the standardised matric examination shaped pedagogical practices around this event, as educators wanted to support learners to excel in this ordeal. Participant educators indicated that standardised assessment procedures went beyond the matric examination, as it appeared that a "memorandum" was created for school tests and examinations. Desired answers were pre-recorded on this document as the only acceptable responses, limiting learner agency and the freedom to produce alternative interpretations of the poems.

 

Discussion: Finding the "Poetry of Poetry" in a Neoliberal Education System

Research with educators teaching Black learners in Johannesburg found that the choice of poets and poems, combined with teaching and assessment methods, significantly shaped the educational potential of poetry. It highlighted that the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment need to be focused on collectively if the teaching of poetry is to become a form of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. Choosing empowering poems will not be effective if they are taught and assessed in ways that do not elicit connections with the lives of learners. Similarly, methods of teaching and assessment require a body of poems that speak to the issues and worlds inhabited by learners.

While English poetry clearly has the educational potential to make connections to learners' everyday lives, stimulating interest and classroom-based discussion, this finding was not always true across the poetry curriculum or for both schools in the study. The teaching of certain poets and poems was described as unintelligible, irrelevant and boring for learners. The accessibility and the relevance of poetry were first and foremost related to the language used in the poems and the difficulty of the vocabulary for learners studying in a language that they do not speak at home, despite it being their language of instruction at school. This intersected with the topics and contexts that the poems engaged with and the origins of the authors, as certain poems were experienced as radically unfamiliar and difficult for students to understand. Writers from similar backgrounds to learners helped make the poetry teaching more relevant but did not guarantee that the poetry would resonate with learners. Similarly, the fact that a poet originated from an unfamiliar context would not necessarily occlude the relevance of their work for South African learners. Educators felt that it was important for learners to be exposed to international poets, highlighting perspectives from elsewhere. A feeling existed that a balance was required from the curriculum, with a substantial body of South African and African poetry needed to make the material relevant for learners. That said, educators warned against creating a binary between foreign poetry that engaged with "universal issues" and South African poetry that spoke to "local politics". The issue of "relevance" was central to these debates in the eyes of educators, who believed that it was tied to the contexts, authors and themes dealt with in the poetry.

The poetry of certain South African poets provided a fertile space for promoting a form of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. Lebo Mashile's "Tomorrow's Daughters" clearly struck a chord and inspired learners, connecting classroom learning to relevant issues in their lives. "Tomorrow's Daughters" was written by a young Black South African woman and addresses the issue of young Black women becoming poets, delving into issues of racism, sexism, norms about bodies, who speaks and who is recognised. The poem exemplifies for learners that people like them can become creators of knowledge used in school textbooks and that poets can highlight issues that are relevant to their lives, including racism, social norms pertaining to bodies and the silencing of certain voices. The poem is intended to provoke socio-political consciousness, an integral component of CRP and forms of critical pedagogy that aim to explore how teaching and learning can be used to validate the experiences and perspectives of learners who are marginalised in their daily symbolic and material interactions (Giroux and Simon 1989; Ladson-Billings 2014). But the poem also makes links to other contexts, namely Emily Dickinson in nineteenth-century America. CRP is therefore not necessarily insular; it does not only address learners' cultural practices and reference points. It also holds the potential to expand their worlds and transport them to new places.

Curriculum choices that impact on the educational potential of poetry cannot be analysed independently from teaching and assessment methods. Many educators did not feel confident teaching poetry. To deal with their lack of trust in themselves, they sought refuge in the more comfortable mode of breaking poems down into manageable pieces, identifying figures of speech and helping learners to understand individual lines rather than poems as a whole. Educators were honest that these practices were not only for the benefit of learners, but also for themselves. It was acknowledged that teaching underpinned by study guides and assessment dominated by memoranda are problematic and anti-educational, but educators feared that they would leave their students at a disadvantage if they did not provide them with access to these resources that apparently helped distribute the "knowledge" needed to pass examinations.

The centrality of high stakes testing is indicative of the infiltration of neoliberal ideology and values³ into education systems in South Africa and elsewhere, presenting considerable challenges to teaching poetry in a way that is meaningful and empowering for learners. Regular inspections of workbooks by education department officials, the high stakes of standardised tests and the practice of producing memoranda with official answers further illuminate the negative effects of neoliberal policies and practices on poetry teaching. Similar findings have been observed elsewhere. Increasingly standardised assessment regimes in the United Kingdom (UK) and New Zealand have restricted the space for the teaching of poetry (Dymoke 2012). A follow up to an earlier study of poetry teaching in the UK found that educator concerns about examinations, syllabus content and time pressures were far more pronounced 16 years later, indicating that neoliberal policies and practices have had a negative effect on poetry teaching (Benton 1999).

Neoliberalism is not solely to blame for this state of affairs, as educators' insecurities about poetry teaching impacted on their practices, as demonstrated in the current study by their focus on "line-by-line" analysis and the concern with teaching figures of speech. Xerri (2013) argues that while students and educators blame assessment for the problematic way that poetry is taught in the classroom, they collude in the process. They do so by continuing to imagine poetry as an obscure literary form and by employing conventional analytical methods based on the search for hidden meaning rather than experiencing "the poetry of poetry". In Xerri's (2013) opinion, breaking poems down into individual lines destroys these literary artefacts. Neoliberalism has impacted on pedagogy and assessment practices, with negative effects on learning areas like poetry, which relies on emergent processes that lead to a range of different interpretations. However, educators collude in these processes, not necessarily because they lack effort, but due to insecurities around teaching poetry and their fears that they will not prepare students adequately.

The combination of curricula choices, pedagogy and assessment practices influenced learners' experiences of poetry in the classroom and its relevance to their lives, including their educations. If poetry is to become a form of CRP and fulfil the objectives of the CAPS, these three aspects-that form part of a unified educational process-need to be focused on collectively. Poems with great potential to engage and stimulate learners will have little effect if they are only taught by analysing figures of speech in a "line-by-line" fashion. Similarly, methods of teaching that allow learners to experience "the poetry of poetry", while also generating insights into the techniques used by poets, are unlikely to engage learners if the poems chosen for analysis are irrelevant to their worlds. If the sole intention of educators is to prepare learners for standardised examinations, it is also unlikely that the educational potential of poetry will be realised. This is not to say that examinations are irrelevant to learners, as they form an integral part of successful social mobility. It is to advocate for poems and methods of teaching that expose learners to the poetry of poetry, help build their identities, give them tools to express their ideas creatively and aid in their academic success. All of these are integral theoretical tenets of CRP and the South African curriculum outlined in the CAPS documents. This should be done while being mindful of the local and broader, global contexts in which education systems play out.

 

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1 In this article, the term "Black" denotes not an essentialised racial category, but a social construct that has relevance for learners whose families were marginalised under apartheid. For the vast majority of these learners English is not their first language. I use the term to refer to learners whose families were classified as "Black African" under apartheid, rather than the more inclusive term popularised by Steve Biko.
2 While the term "Model C" technically refers to a particular model of school governance for public schools in South Africa, it has become shorthand for former "whites-only" public schools.
3 These values coerce non-commercial spheres such as schools to operate "more like a business".

^rND^sBenton^nP^rND^sBenton^nP^rND^sBraun^nV.^rND^nV.^sClarke^rND^sD'Abdon^nR^rND^sDoug^nR^rND^sDymoke^nS^rND^sGonzález^nN.^rND^nL. C.^sMoll^rND^sHoward^nT. C.^rND^sLadson-Billings^nG^rND^sLadson-Billings^nG^rND^sLeonard^nJ.^rND^nM. L.^sHill^rND^sLinaberger^nM.^rND^sMoll^nL. C.^rND^nC.^sAmanti^rND^nD.^sNeff^rND^nN.^sGonzalez^rND^sNewfield^nD.^rND^nR.^sd'Abdon^rND^sNewfield^nD.^rND^nR.^sMaungedzo^rND^sSimecek^nK.^rND^nK.^sRumbold^rND^sWilson^nA.^rND^sXerri^nD.^rND^1A01^nTrésor Musasa^sKabamba^rND^1A01^nTrésor Musasa^sKabamba^rND^1A01^nTrésor Musasa^sKabamba

THEMED SECTION 2
POETRY

 

Xen

 

 

Trésor Musasa Kabamba

University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. tmkabam@gmail.com

 

 

Native born yet imported

but I'm still important.

Got documents and files

still might be stabbed with a file.

Borders sketched on maps by false white masters,

yet drawn in blood by our African masses.

We torment persecute and murder our own:

Xenophobes, are you loyal to your skin: like Jesus or Judas?

Our black skin is the cross borne by us

Under the weight, our vertebrae are ground to dust.

Still, our blood: beloved own, strip us bare,

and whip gashes in our backs like our skin don't tear.

Fading masters left with keys to our resources,

left knives for black throats and police forces

Slavery was the first, xenophobia the sequel

Did the Word not say we're all made equal?

^rND^1A01^nCatherine^sManathunga^rND^1A02^nPaul^sWilliams^rND^1A03^nTracey^sBunda^rND^1A04^nSue^sStanton^rND^1A05^nShelley^sDavidow^rND^1A06^nKathryn^sGilbey^rND^1A07^nMaria^sRaciti^rND^1A01^nCatherine^sManathunga^rND^1A02^nPaul^sWilliams^rND^1A03^nTracey^sBunda^rND^1A04^nSue^sStanton^rND^1A05^nShelley^sDavidow^rND^1A06^nKathryn^sGilbey^rND^1A07^nMaria^sRaciti^rND^1A01^nCatherine^sManathunga^rND^1A02^nPaul^sWilliams^rND^1A03^nTracey^sBunda^rND^1A04^nSue^sStanton^rND^1A05^nShelley^sDavidow^rND^1A06^nKathryn^sGilbey^rND^1A07^nMaria^sRaciti

THEMED SECTION 2
ARTICLE

 

Decolonisation through Poetry: Building First Nations' Voice and Promoting Truth-Telling

 

 

Catherine Manathunga^I; Paul Williams^II; Tracey Bunda^III; Sue Stanton^IV; Shelley Davidow^V; Kathryn Gilbey^VI; Maria Raciti^VII

^IUniversity of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. cmanathu@usc.edu.au; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8915-0344
^IIUniversity of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. pwillia3@usc.edu.au; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8250-4744
^IIIUniversity of Queensland, Australia. t.bunda@uq.edu.au; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6824-8713
^IVBatchelor Institute, Australia. sue.stanton@batchelor.edu.au; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1304-032X
^VUniversity of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. sdavidow@usc.edu.au; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6107-7656
^VIBatchelor Institute, Australia. kathryn.gilbey@batchelor.edu.au; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6737-7887
^VIIUniversity of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. mraciti@usc.edu.au; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0548-3702

 

 

---

ABSTRACT

The impetus to decolonise high schools and universities has been gaining momentum in Southern locations such as South Africa and Australia. In this article, we use a polyvocal approach, juxtaposing different creative and scholarly voices, to argue that poetry offers a range of generative possibilities for the decolonisation of high school and university curricula. Australian First Nations' poetry has been at the forefront of the Indigenous political protest movement for land rights, recognition, justice and Treaty since the British settlement/invasion. Poetry has provided Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with a powerful vehicle for speaking back to colonial power. In this article, a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers argue that poetry can be a powerful vehicle for Indigenous voices and Knowledges. We suggest that poetry can create spaces for deep listening (dadirri), and that listening with the heart can promote truth-telling and build connections between First Nations and white settler communities. These decolonising efforts underpin the "Wandiny (gathering together)-Listen with the Heart: Uniting Nations through Poetry" research that we discuss in this article. We model our call-and-response methodology by including the poetry of our co-author and Aboriginal Elder of the Kungarakan people in the Northern Territory, Aunty Sue Stanton, with poetic responses by some of her co-authors.

Keywords: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; Indigenous Knowledges; poetry; decolonisation; truth-telling; call-and-response methodologies

---

 

 

Introduction

Pinjarra

I heard the whispering through the trees

It was the whispers of old women

It was concern.

I heard the shouting

above me, around me, in me.

It was the shouting of old men, young men

It was fear.

I heard the sighing

floating, hanging in the air.

It was the sighing of young women

It was despair.

I heard the crying of the children

girls and boys.

It was the crying that comes with destruction It was the cry of war.

If you walk through this country

anytime

anywhere

You will hear those sounds,

if you care.¹

(Sue Jean Stanton)

I wrote the poem "Pinjarra" after one particular visit to Western Australia and when my Gurindji cousin David Cusack was living at Mandurah. He was a teacher at Mandurah Primary School. One day we decided to drive around that region surrounding Mandurah as he wanted me to see some of the beautiful trees and the general landscape of the area-away from town.

As we were driving through a particular area, wind softly blowing, grasses swaying, trees, even the lower-branched ones, standing like guards, or maybe signposts, or even memorials, watched us, stood aside for us. At first, I wanted to stop the car and take in the serene scene, but we were being beckoned further along that road. There was no other traffic or people with us in that area. As we drove further along the road, trees suddenly enveloped us, almost like forming joined arms around us, wanting to tell us something, to share a secret, give us a message-remind us.

My first feeling was sadness, it enveloped me. I felt tears come to my eyes and at first I could not understand why. And I did not understand that sudden sadness until after we drove away, and I questioned my cousin-asking what he knew about this place. He knew nothing. I could not get the location nor the feeling out of my mind or out of my heart. I visited the area again and I heard the sounds again, I felt the sadness again. I was ready for the messages. I wrote the words I felt in my heart-they were heavy, sad words. They told me I must not forget.

I researched some of the history of that region and it was only then that I knew that I had visited a killing ground-a place where many people suffered and died-a place where their voices remained-within the rocks, the soil, the water, the trees and in the breeze. The voices told me "Do not forget us-we are still here". I have since conducted a lot of research on the area and what has been documented as the Pinjarra massacre, when approximately 100 Pindjarup/Bindjareb women, men and children were ambushed and murdered near the Murray River, WA-approximately 10 km south-east of Mandurah. Mundurah is located in the Peel district of WA-named after Thomas Peel, one of the leaders of the massacre, along with Governor James Stirling.

In the last few years I made contact with Professor Len Collard, Whadjuck/Balardong Nyungar TO and Nyungar historian, and shared with him and the Nyungar people, especially of the Nyungar boodjar (country) of the place and people massacred in the south-west of Western Australia, this poem I have written titled "Pinjarra". It is a poem for Pindjarup/Bindjareb women, men and children: I will not forget them.

In recent times, high schools and universities, particularly those located in the Global South, have begun to respond to calls to decolonise education. This has involved seeking to overturn the ongoing domination of Eurocentric, Northern, scientific knowledge production and seeking to Indigenise² the curriculum (Connell 2007; Santos 2014; 2018). Poetry, in all its written, spoken and performance-based approaches, has emerged as a key creative form that enables Indigenous or First Nations voices to be heard. Poetry involves many of the features of oral knowledge production evident in Indigenous cultures and cosmologies, and echoes ancient forms of knowledge dissemination (Moreton 2006). Poetry also enables the subversion of conventional English language syntax and grammar (Hopfer 2002). As a result, poetry embodies a creative form that is particularly well-suited to decolonisation and the transformation of postcolonial curricula and societies.

In this article, we seek to investigate the deconstructive possibilities for the decolonisation of high school and university curricula evident in Australian First Nations' poetry. Inspired by the poetry of our Aboriginal Elder author, Aunty Sue Stanton, we begin with her poem, "Pinjarra", and her story behind writing the poem which illustrates the ways in which colonialism continues to whisper its deadly impact through the Australian landscape. We then carefully outline our various cultural and political standpoints as a transcultural team of First Nations and white settler researchers seeking to work together through poetry to decolonise education and create vibrant spaces for Indigenous Knowledges. We provide a brief overview of what decolonisation means to us in the Australian context drawing on the work of Smith (1999) and Andreotti and colleagues (2015). We demonstrate how First Nations poetry has been at the core of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander political protest movement for land rights, recognition, justice and Treaty since the British settlement/invasion, and how First Nations life stories and creativity shape contemporary Australian Indigenous poetry in new ways (Walker/Noonuccal 1964; Webley 2002; Whittaker 2020). Our Aboriginal authors reflect on the ways poetry has enabled processes of "Wangelanginy / Speaking ourselves back together again" in the words of Noongar author Kim Scott's (2002, 99) powerful poem. Having explored poetic pedagogical strategies we have used in university curricula, we outline the "Wandinyy³-Listen with the Heart: Uniting Nations through Poetry" research that we are engaging with on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, which is designed to decolonise Australian high school and university curricula. We then make a case for the ways in which poetry can act as a vehicle for decolonisation and for the preservation, revitalisation and ongoing growth of Indigenous Knowledges. We seek to demonstrate how our call-and-response (Sale 1992) methodology enables deep listening or listening with the heart (dadirri) (Ungunmerr-Bauman 2002) that promotes truth-telling and builds connections between First Nations and white settler communities in Australia.

Working on decolonisation requires a high level of reflexivity, self-critique, generosity and openness. It also involves carefully interrogating our own entangled histories, geographies, cultural knowledge and standpoints, as feminist scientist Sandra Harding (2004) and Torres Strait Islander scholar Martin Nakata (2007) have argued. We are a team of First Nations Australian and transcultural Australian and South African writers, who have been inspired by the work of the transcultural South African Poetry Project (ZAPP) team (Byrne 2014; Genis 2019; Newfield and Bozalek 2018; Newfield and d'Abdon 2015; Newfield and Maungedzo 2006). The ZAPP project prompted Catherine to bring together a team of First Nations and non-Indigenous colleagues from diverse disciplines and from other Australian universities to begin working on an Indigenous Australian poetry project. Catherine is an Irish-Australian woman who has a transcultural family and has used her research on doctoral education, academic identities and university history to explore her responsibilities as a settler-invader scholar. Shelley is a Jewish South African creative-writing author of 45 books and an immigrant to Australia who grew up during the apartheid era in a family of black and white people. Her scholarly work in Education and Creative Writing explores the impacts of colonisation and transgenerational trauma. Paul is a British-Italian former Zimbabwean immigrant to Australia, whose novels and critical work explore postcolonial Africa and creative writing as a decolonial discourse. Kathryn is an Alyawarre (Northern Territory) First Nations Aboriginal woman and an education researcher, who specialises in First Nations knowledges, inclusive education and critical race theories. Tracey is a Ngugi/Wakka Wakka (Southeast Queensland) senior First Nations Aboriginal woman who researches Indigenous women, decolonisation of patriarchal white institutional power and Indigenous Knowledge systems. Maria is a Kalkadoon-Thaniquith/Bwgcolman First Nations Aboriginal (Queensland) woman and social market researcher, who uses marketing tools and techniques to bring about social justice and behaviour change. Aunty Sue Stanton is a Kungarakan Traditional Owner-Custodian from Batchelor in the Northern Territory, who is an Elder Executive Advisor in Academic and Cultural Leadership and poet.

Our writing process has been to form small teams to work on sections of this article where we have expertise to offer. We then wove these sections together in order to generate our arguments about the role of poetry as a powerful vehicle for decolonisation, Indigenous Knowledges and truth-telling. We have used a polyvocal approach, where different creative and scholarly voices are deliberately juxtaposed in order to build momentum for our argument. In some sections, we felt it was important to privilege the First Nations voices among us in order to recognise the sovereignty of First Nations peoples on the lands that we inhabit. This was the case for the section inspired by the Australian First Nations poem, "Wangelanginy" ("speaking ourselves back together again") by Kim Scott (2002). We have also modelled our call-and-response methodology in this piece by beginning the article with a poem by one of our authors, Aunty Sue Stanton. Her beautiful and haunting poem, "Pinjarra", and her story of writing this poem provides us with a provocative and powerful call to care about the shocking impact of colonisation in Australia, which continues to echo through the land, if we listen hard enough. We provide some of the authors' responses to "Pinjarra" in the sections on "speaking ourselves back together again" (Scott 2002) and poetry as truth-telling.

 

Decolonisation in the Australian Context

The need to decolonise education has gained increasing momentum around the globe in recent years. Decolonial theory refers to a range of positions that argue that colonial operations of power remain present in the contemporary world despite formal independence being achieved in former colonies and that ongoing efforts need to be made to challenge and overcome these forms of power (Smith 1999). Postcolonial/decolonial theories take as their central premise the argument that "colonialism did not end with the end of historical colonialism based on foreign territorial occupation. Only its form changed" (Santos 2018, 109). As a result, there can be "no global social justice without global cognitive justice" (Santos 2014, 42). Cognitive justice involves the full and equal recognition of all of the world's knowledge systems, languages and cultural practices, not only Northern science. This is a particularly urgent issue given that it is becoming very clear that Eurocentric Northern science may have contributed to some of the challenging global environmental conditions that we are now experiencing (Cutter 2008), such as the unprecedented bushfires of the 2019 Australian summer. Decolonisation does not only refer to postcolonial societies-countries and peoples that had once been colonies. Importantly, it includes European countries (the former colonial powers), who need to examine their own cultural beliefs and practices, acknowledging the ways in which they have been unconsciously shaped by structural inequalities between cultures, classes, genders and so on inherent in European Enlightenment thinking (Smith 1999).

As Andreotti and colleagues (2015, 21) argue, decolonisation, one of the major "responses to the violences of modernity", is a complex term that encompasses a whole spectrum of different definitions and approaches. They propose a social cartography of decolonisation that incorporates a range of philosophies, desires, contradictions and tensions. They chart the spectrum of decolonial approaches as ranging from "soft-reform, radical reform and beyond reform spaces" (Andreotti et al. 2015, 25). While the soft reform space proposes that "everyone can win once we all know the rules" and emphasises "dialogue, consensus and entrepreneurship", the radical reform space argues that "the game is rigged so if we want to win we need to change the rules" and involves "antagonistic conflict". The beyond reform space suggests that the "game is harmful and makes us immature but we're stuck playing" and focuses on "agonistic conflict", while alternative spaces argue that "playing the game does not make sense" (Andreotti et al. 2015, 25). Our work on decolonisation in this article sits across the radical reform and beyond reform spaces and has a "high investment in liminality, self-implication and pluriversality" (Andreotti et al. 2015, 25).

Writing in the Australian context, Deborah Bird Rose (2004, 214) suggests that decolonisation involves "the unmaking of regimes of violence that promote the disconnection of moral accountability from time and place". So too, Australian Aboriginal poet Peter Minter (2013, 158) characterises decolonisation as "essentially attempts at ... reimagining and re-presenting place and space from an historically alert and ethically revivified sensibility". Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land was never ceded, and no Treaty was originally signed with any First Nations groups in Australia (although work on treaties is currently under way in various states, such as Victoria). Despite the overturning of terra nullius (land belonging to no one) with the Mabo decision in 1992 in Australia, the introduction of Native Title legislation in 1993 and mounting evidence that First Nations peoples carefully cultivated, farmed and managed the land prior to British invasion (Gammage 2011; Pascoe 2018), Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignties remain an unfinished business. While there have been royal commissions into the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families (the Stolen Generation) and into a range of legal and justice issues (such as Aboriginal Deaths in Custody), there has never been a truth and reconciliation commission (unlike in South Africa and Timor Leste) to address the many wrongs that continue to be perpetrated by the Australian state against First Nations peoples.

In 2017, an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Referendum Convention, held near Uluru in Central Australia, issued the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which called for the establishment of a First Nations voice in the Constitution and in Parliament, and a Makarrata (the coming together after a struggle) Commission to "supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history" (2017, 1). The conservative Liberal/National Coalition government dismissed these proposals with disinterest and, some might say, contempt.

 

Australian First Nations Poetry

First Nations peoples around the globe have used rhythms of sounds and words to form the basis of oral information transmission for thousands of years. The use of text patterns and repetitions tied to geographical landmarks and land forms the underpinning of the oldest education system in the world (Moreton 2006). In modern times, poetry, in written, spoken and song form, enables the centring of First Nations voices. First Nations performance poetry gains its power through the spoken word, which creates a visceral, felt impact on the audience. Slam poetry provides contemporary platforms for First Nations voices in Australia. The cadence and movement of performance poetry are akin to histories of oral communication and storytelling. The Australian Poetry Slam has showcased works from First Nations poets Steven Oliver (2014) and Melanie Mununggurr-Williams (2018).

Poetry also converges into rap in Baker Boy's (2017) artistic performances (https://youtu.be/dxjFNvwZUhA). Danzal Baker and, before him, the band Yothu Yindi were the first Australian Indigenous artists to have mainstream success in lyricising their Yolngu Matha language. Baker sees hip-hop as a means of reuniting First Nations youth with their heritages, cultures, histories and geographies (Israel 2017). Slam, rap, hip-hop and all forms of performance poetry build upon visual literacy, including body language and movement, which invites audiences to "read" stories and experiences through dance. The enactment of story in dance is being promoted by Torres Strait Islander group Move It Mob Style. An example of their art, including witness poetic devices of repetition, rhythm, refrain and personification can be seen at https://youtu.be/YF58MptSiOw. Through poetry, English language structures are subverted and replaced with First Nations' rhythmic, ceremonial syntax, circular notions of deep time and "a singing and dancing spirit" (Hopfer 2002, 55).

First Nations literatures often meld narrative voices together in collective dialogue (Pascal 2004). Colonial/Western narratives typically offer a succession of individual voices, whereas First Nations narratives provide pluralistic perspectives of being and belonging (for example, Kim Scott's "True Country" [2000]) (Phillips and Bunda 2018). Values of connection to family and Country pervade First Nations literature as self-esteem and self-concept stem from collective belonging rather than individualism, as perpetuated by Western cultures (Bodkin-Andrews and Craven 2013; Kickett-Tucker 2009).

 

"Speaking Ourselves Back Together Again"

Kim Scott (2002, 99), Aboriginal poet and novelist, writes in his poem "Wangelanginy" that poetry enables an opportunity of "Speaking ourselves back together again". In this section, our First Nations authors, Kathryn, Tracey and Maria respond with poetry and reflections on the ways Kim Scott's and Aunty Sue Stanton's poetry provides to "speak ourselves back together again".

Kathryn

I know my bush, I love my bush

I know other people's bush too

Some that I know intimately some

Just on the surface

Those moments of disorientation as a child

That make me realise that I know more

More than I thought I did.

Getting lost, in the Nullarbour

a panic set in, my eye

looks for detail, for subtle differences

heightened senses means I listen

I remember, I could die here I tell myself

But then I stop and I really look

And I orient myself and I really listen

And I talk out loud to that old country

And I feel it inside, and I know

And I steer the old Bedford truck

Back to the camp and jump out

And I am surprised because nobody knows

Nobody can tell the harrowing experience I just had

I could of got lost Dad

Yeah but you didn't

(Gilbey 2020)

In response to Dr Sue Stanton's poem the layers of truth and truth-telling struck me, through her words she highlights the colonial violence but also the capacity to hear and listen. Our truths and these moments are layered and I wanted to celebrate the reality of wise old Aboriginal women who know how to feel on a deeper level. Sometimes we don't celebrate our differences but get stuck in this place of needing affirmation through sameness; my heart breaks when she says I will remember them and I just wanted to say I see you old lady, as you talk to the trees.

Tracey

A heart full of love and spirit sown

Contends with unspeakable violence grown

Return to eunoia, for country, for people

Speak the words-First Nations, undeniable, seen, known

(Bunda 2020)

I take the poetic technique of quatrain to respond to Aboriginal poets and authors, Aunty Sue Stanton and Kim Scott, whose wisdoms are savoured in the framing of our collective writing. Sue asks us to listen to the sounds of country, to the spirit voices that lie within, if we care. In the constant of white noise modernity, colonisation vibrates out a monotonous bass/base rhythm to beat down on our First Nations' skin, a relentless dull throb, throb, throb penetrating deep into our bones, taking an enormous conviction to stay focused, and more to find relief. Oh, we hear the sounds of colonisation, we know them well. Oh, we know the sounds of colonisation, we hear them well. Travelling in the genes and across generations, it is a relentless pathogen. Am I calling back to colonisation with this response? Am I staging antagonistic conflict because the "colonialist" game has got me stuck? How do I see and hear and speak myself back together again as Kim Scott desires? Perhaps this is not the question to ask. Perhaps it is best to boomerang back to the first note of the colonialist riff and ask why can't the uninitiated settler invader hear and feel their own sound making? Let the coloniser occupy the liminal space and transition to a score of melodic sounds for the colonised ear to hear. For once let us hear the sounds of peace. Speak the words-First Nations, Undeniable, Seen, Known.

Maria

Bricolage Murri Self

The next generation trying to fit in

some detached from their skin.

The social script that makes them feel like

an interloper, an imposter within.

Unable to escape wicked fault lines from the past.

Resist, reject, ignore, discard.

Young Aboriginal hero,

weave the loose threads that you have collected over time

into self-stories that self-define

(Raciti 2020)

My response poem focuses on the unfolding of the "colonial project" for Aboriginal people over time, with its toxicity percolating through generations. The poem accentuates the plight of many Aboriginal youths in the 21st-century experiencing intersectionality, fluid intercultural identity and their challenge to find their place in the world. We grow into our Aboriginality and that growth is often punctuated by disapproval of self and the cloaking of many of our identities to placate the fragility of some, to feed the romanticism of others and to steel us to face the ignorance of many. The advice for our young, Aboriginal heroes is to dismiss the social script imposed upon them by others and to unapologetically forge their own path.

The last sentence of Aunty Sue Jean Stanton's "Pinjarra" poem, "You will hear those sounds, if you care", is where my thoughts linger. The shadow side of speaking our stories is the sense of being heard. It is by, with and through the listeners that the transformative, poetic power also resides. The intertwining of a poem's enchanted beholder and the poet's narrative is where sideways and seismic shifts perch. Deep, respectful listening or listening with intent by those outside of the frame-being those either consciously or unconsciously curating limited or negative narratives about Aboriginal people-is my pain point. This non-listening speaks volumes, it shouts of the epistemology of ignorance and, in effect, of a passive-aggressive disallowing of Aboriginal truths. So, while speaking ourselves back together again gives voice to our Aboriginal experiences, healing through powerful poetic moments needs listeners who hear the sounds.

Through poetry, speaking to ourselves and an audience of listeners who care has immeasurable value. Leveraging our speaking to new, open and willing listeners will enable Aboriginal truths to fully unfold, be retold and begin to be encoded into the ways of knowing and being of Australian society. There is no doubt that such a paradigm shift poses a significant challenge as the colonial project has quietened at best and extinguished at worst many dimensions of Aboriginal cultures. But despite colonial projects' best efforts, Aboriginal resilience remains. Indeed, for me, resistance and decolonisation are the manifestation of a fortified and emboldened Aboriginal resilience. Resilience inculcates hope and with hope dreams of the improbable can become the possible. For me, Aboriginal hope has not abated. As our ethnic mosaic incrementally shifts from generation to generation, the 21st-century is a canvas for change with opportunity for those who speak and those who listen.

 

Poetic Pedagogies in Schools and Universities

Poetry evokes meaning through an oral, performative discourse and therefore offers a range of generative possibilities for the decolonisation of high school and university curricula, offering a way to address the issues of the "null curriculum" (Gobby and Walker 2017) in Australian classrooms, the relative silence around First Nations' experiences and history, and the reluctance of non-Indigenous teachers in schools and university classrooms to allow non-Indigenous students opportunities to engage with Indigenous ways of being and knowing for fear of "doing things wrong".

A decolonised educational approach allows for a space in which marginal voices are positioned centrally. Colonial power relations are shifted in literature classrooms when Indigenous voices and perspectives are foregrounded. This demonstration of respect towards Indigenous students is vital for engagement in learning (Donovan 2015). Using poetry that is heard, lived, felt, and enacted, the approach asks students to respond to Indigenous poetry creatively rather than critically or analytically. The shift is towards an egalitarian, biographical experience of student participation through the writing of poetry, thus inhabiting a discourse that evokes new knowledge, new perceptions, and enables the "subjectness" of each writer/student to come into being in relationship to the text or work being heard/read/experienced.

In the higher education sector, pre-service teachers were introduced to a First Nations performer who shared her experiences of her own education, of racism, of her daughters being bullied, here and now in Queensland, through a performance poem. In response, here is an example of a poem written by a university student, Ashwita Venkatesh, using a paraphrased line from Gert Biesta, as well as a line from the "Closing the Gap" document (https://www.closingthegap.gov.au/) as "found poetry".

Learn something, for a reason, from someone!

Behind a desk in a classroom?

Or by the trees, watching the fish school?

How do we teach our children?

Equality in education they say!

But halve the gap for Indigenous children,

So what does that say about equality?

Are they not a united part of society?

Learn something, for a reason, from someone.

Is that someone you?

Halve the gap for Indigenous children.

Where is the equality?

(Venkatesh 2020; used with permission)

In both secondary and tertiary contexts, therefore, decolonisation is the aim of the content and pedagogy, and it underpins the approach to this research project, in which we acknowledge the pervasive intrusion of colonial paradigms in the way we think, speak and act, and then seek to use poetry to challenge this hegemonic discourse. Such a decolonial approach to "studying" poetry, "throws syntax out" and "subverts", liberating and transporting participants as both listeners and makers in "collaborative storying", an extended storying approach used by Bishop and Berryman (2006) in their work with Maori school students and teachers in the Aotearoa/New Zealand context.

The aim, then, is that Indigenous poets "transport their readers into engagement with new experience through their talent, their passion and play, their originality in language and structure" (Webley 2002, 64). And participants respond creatively.

Wandiny (Gathering Together)-Listen with the Heart: Uniting Nations through Poetry: A Future Event

These histories and poetic pedagogies form the basis of our plan to hold a creative gathering on Kabi Kabi land (in the Sunshine Coast) for First Nations Aboriginal poets and Elders, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal academics, university students, schoolteachers and school learners. We have called this creative gathering "Wandiny- Listen with the Heart: Uniting Nations through Poetry". Wandiny is a Kabi Kabi word meaning "gathering together" that our Project Reference Group of Kabi Kabi in the Sunshine Coast, Wakka Wakka in Ipswich and Koa in Winton Aboriginal Elders and First Nations school teachers have given us permission to use.

The aims of this creative poetry project are to:

1. build understanding of the significance of Country, history, place and culture and connection on Kabi Kabi land;

2. support the flourishing of Indigenous poetry and languages on Kabi Kabi land;

3. build cultural and knowledge exchanges between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities on Kabi Kabi land.

It is hoped that a significant potential outcome of the project will be to build links between Kabi Kabi and other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and university and school staff and students. The stories of Elders and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander poets will be presented as a "call" for sharing knowledge about Country to prioritise dadirri (Ungunmerr-Bauman 2002) or deep listening. A "response" from the transgenerational, Indigenous and non-Indigenous audience in the form of poetry writing will be gathered. This process is at once methodology for ceremony (Wilson 2008) but re-inscribes the African "call-and-response" approach (Sale 1992) within Kabi Kabi knowledge frames. We are not seeking to appropriate African approaches here, but, as Indian scholar Ananta Giri suggests, we seek to cross borders as

an act of creation rather than one of violation ... . Border crossing yields what W.E.B. Du Bois calls "double vision"-it expands our field of vision without being expansionist; it includes without consuming; it appreciates without appropriating and it seeks to temper politics with ethics. (Giri 2002, 104)

This project blends the African call-and-response theory of art with the dadirri or deep listening/listening with the heart (Ungunmerr-Bauman 2002) approaches of Aboriginal Knowledge production. We use the term dadirri with the permission of the MiriamRose Foundation. Dadirri means "deep listening, building community, be whole again, peace, silent awareness, be still and wait" (Ungunmerr-Baumann 2002). This (creative) ceremony on Country takes account of multiple cultural differences that acknowledge and make space for other voices (e.g. Aboriginal peoples who are not Kabi Kabi, Torres Strait Islander peoples, international Indigenous nations and black peoples). In this article, we have sought to model our planned approach in the Wandiny event to poetic call-and-response methodologies and dadirri in our responses to Aunty Sue Stanton's poem, "Pinjarra".

This project, therefore, is designed to be interactive, process-oriented, and innovative (Sale 1992). Such methods are propelled by audience improvisation and contribute to art being collectively meaningful to community (Sale 1992). The project addresses the following research questions:

1. What value can poetry provide as a vehicle for sharing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges, stories, histories and languages about Country?

2. What can Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander poetry regarding Country tell us about poetry as a vehicle for strengthening/reinforcing cultural identity?

The ceremony of poetry, reinvigorated as a contemporary creative tradition of Aboriginal communities, will respectfully be incorporated within the Kabi Kabi traditions of being called to Country. Elder knowledge is pivotal to leading and advising the project and the participating community/communities and individuals. Practices for being on Country will determine what can be considered as ethical conduct for being on Country and the nature and shape of relationships that evolve.

The project will also build upon the strategies used in ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project) and related research (Byrne 2014; Newfield and Maungedzo 2006; Newfield and d'Abdon 2015; Newfield and Bozalek 2018). The ZAPP project design was formed around the establishment of a transcultural project team of researchers, poets, schoolteachers and school students who sought to create spaces in the high school curriculum for poetry writing. Learning from the difficulties experienced in South Africa in generating time in the over-crowded school curriculum for poetry writing, our project team has decided upon the format of a community-based creative gathering that will produce academic and creative-writing articles and a poetry anthology.

The Wandiny approach is based upon First Nations knowledge approaches that foreground the agency of Country, the power of Story and the iterative, intergenerational and intercultural features of Indigenous Knowledge production (Manathunga et al. forthcoming; Moreton 2006; Phillips and Bunda 2018; Williams et al. 2018). We begin with a fundamental insistence that the lands we work on have agency within the project (Rose 1996; Styres et al. 2013). Aboriginal Knowledge systems are the conduit through which people are tied to Country. This approach does not limit the use of land to contemporary understanding of place-based learning, or pedagogy of place, but involves emotion, intelligence, and spiritual elements. One of the themes the Wandiny will explore will be "Country as Home". Similar to the Australian Aboriginal conception of Country, Styres, Haig-Brown, and Blimkie (2013) consider the land as sentient. Rose (1996, 7) explains:

People talk about country in the same way that they would talk about a person; they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, grieve for country and long for country. People say that country knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy. Country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with consciousness and action, and a will towards life.

Second, the project builds upon the transformative power of Telling Stories, which is central to First Nations knowledge systems and cosmologies (Dion 2009; Moreton 2016; Phillips and Bunda 2018). Speaking the truth of our lives is a moment of embodying the power of old cultures and sharing this with a contemporary audience. A (re)storying, narrative methodology will be adopted that builds on the approach developed by Phillips and Bunda (2018) combining First Nations storying approaches (Arbon 2008; Donovan 2015; King 2005; Pascal 2004) with Connelly and Clandinin's work (1990). As Connelly and Clandinin (1990, 2) argue, "people by nature lead storied lives and tell stories of those lives, whereas narrative researchers describe such lives, collect and tell stories of them, and write narratives of the experience." Phillips and Bunda (2018) and Donovan (2015) emphasise the profound significance of storying to Indigenous cultures around the globe, illustrating how Aboriginal stories are "embodied acts of intertextualised, transgenerational law and life spoken across and through time and place" (Phillips and Bunda 2018, 8). Collaborative storying (Bishop and Berryman 2006) will form an important part of our facilitation of "response" poetry during the Wandiny. Martiniello (2002, 93) emphasises how her poetry is "[s]tory without end"- "I am his [my father's] story, and his father's story, and many others besides; as I am my own, and my children' s and my grandchildren' s. This is Dreaming. It is Tjukurrpa."

The research design foregrounds First Nations approaches to knowledge production that are iterative, intergenerational and intercultural. The act of speaking and re-speaking a truth and the (re)telling of untold stories acts as a gift to the next seven generations (Dion 2009; Pawu-Kurlpurne et al. 2008). The reiteration of stories and the acts of speaking, listening, hearing and remembering are central to First Nations' knowledge creation (Dion 2009; Moreton 2016; Phillips and Bunda 2018). Knowledge production in First Nations cultures is always intergenerational and multidirectional across time and space. Knowledge builds across and between generations and interweaves the past, present and future into an intergenerational "infinite present" (Moreton 2006, 276). Intergenerational learning occurs iteratively and both ways across generations and disciplines, where First Nations and transcultural knowledges become living, community-based, and future-oriented.

Approaches to First Nations' knowledge production have always been changing and dynamic and open to shared possibilities. It is estimated that there were over 400 (maybe 700) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations, approximately 260 distinct language groups and 500 dialects prior to invasion. Australian First Nations peoples also had important trading and knowledge exchange links with peoples from Southeast Asia. It is also likely that some of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander poets, Elders and Indigenous and non-Indigenous audience members may have intercultural, hybrid personal backgrounds that transcend normative cultural groupings. Intercultural or transcultural knowledge construction is not an externally imposed agenda for First Nations and transcultural peoples but rather an everyday way of being and knowing (Casinader and Manathunga 2019).

 

Poetry as Truth-Telling

Engaging in practices of dadirri through call-and-response poetry may be able to promote truth-telling with the long-term aim of working through trauma caused by ongoing injustice (Aitkinson 2000). It is vital for the future of the Australian nation that truth-telling about our histories since the British invasion and treaty-making that addresses the sovereign rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are fully enacted. Our Wandiny approach to poetry gatherings is designed to contribute to the process of "Makarrata ... the coming together after a struggle" that was called for in the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart but has yet to be addressed. If Australia is to move forward as a vibrant and inclusive culture, then it must urgently redress this history of colonisation and move towards a strong relationship between First Nations peoples and other Australians based upon justice, self-determination and full recognition of the special place First Nations people occupy in our nation. We offer our First Nations authors' responses to the idea of poetry as truth-telling first as a gesture that recognises the sovereignties Kathryn, Tracey and Maria have in Australia.

Kathryn

I was in Adelaide in my mother's lounge room when I heard Romaine Moreton's poem "Don't Let It Make You Over" put to music and spoken on ABC radio as "Doin Time". It was one of those moments for me, that I will remember, like when Lady Di died or the Berlin Wall came down. Because when she said

If you were doin' time like a

Fine wine, brother,

You would make a beautiful bouquet.

I thought immediately of my big cousin in Townsville Prison and his fun-loving nature, his playfulness and I thought, my brother you are doin' time like a fine wine because you are a beautiful bouquet, no matter how long they lock you up for, you come out, you. And I was grateful for those spoken words that made me smile and think of him. But the weight of lengthy prison sentences incommensurate to the crimes, the sheer injustice of incarceration rates and child removals of Aboriginal people weighed there, in the background, in the foreground. Those three short sentences spoke of hope and freedom as they did of racial inequality in this country.

There is an immediacy that comes from being present; it is felt and visceral, this is why we want to have gatherings on old country, with traditional owners informing the conversations, with poets who come to share, what they have known and experienced. Because, as Aboriginal people, when we tell our truths, when we are heard, the world changes just a little bit. Surrounded by negative narratives, despair, hopelessness, a constant needing to be saved or changed, the power of the spoken and written word, to show another reality, one born in strength and knowledge. Dr Sue and her poem "Pinjarra" speaks truth to a hidden reality of shockingly brutal colonial violence. But it also shows a layer of knowledge and skill, those that can listen to country, that talk to the trees and the wind, those that can hear, what they are being told and those that through poetry communicate that to the next generations and the generations after that. So that truth is known and talked about here, because if not us then who will speak our truths to power, to a society that actively works to deny our truths, to hide them, to cover up? So we say Always was always will be Aboriginal land and we are here and we have survived, and unlike this contribution we do it concisely with a minimum of words and mountain full of strength through poetry.

Tracey

A call for truth-telling. A nation needs to respond if there is to be healing-to allow a speaking ourselves back together again, for all peoples. The truth of the impacts of colonisation are hard to hold in the ear of the settler invader yet, in the absence of deep listening, where do these truths reside? In the cracks and crevices of purposefully forgotten histories, in the complicated folding of carefully constructed images of a sunburnt country, a land for the young and free? The bodies and countries of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples hold the evidence of coloniser crimes, secrets and violences. This is what Sue Stanton heard in her poem "Pinjarra". In holding these violences, there is consequential un-wellness, de-stablisation, a fracturing for the whole of the nation. A call for truth-telling? Respond by telling the truth-that our lands were not terra nullius, that we were not "discovered", that our sovereignties exist. These truths speak us back together again and cannot be spoken by us alone for true healing will come when settler invaders speak, know and embody these truths.

Maria

The call-and-response poetic conversation for me reminds me of one of my Mother's sayings: "you're telling the story; I'm just turning the pages." We would sit outside, and with a cigarette in her hand, she would let me talk (and talk and talk), asking me enough questions to keep my soliloquy going but in ways that I knew she was listening. She didn't offer solutions, just let me figure it out for myself through my chatter.

Today, in a society bathed in the blue light of screens, we are alone together. People I encounter don't feel heard, their experiences filtered out, talked over or talked at but not talked to. Giving a poetic form to truth-telling, and knowing it has been heard, helps the poet's healing journey. The listener receives with their heart the poet's pain, then the roles are reversed, and a state of singularity transpires. The "rules" of language do not apply and through raw expression words try to give shape to unheard or unresolved experiences. The poetic conversation of a call-and-response method nurtures an intense, human connection-Speak, I hear you-among those with similar or dissimilar experiences. Such empathetic synchronicity releases untruths.

For the non-Indigenous team members in particular, writing response poetry was an attempt to decolonise their perspectives by acknowledging the colonial histories that continue to reverberate through the landscape and demonstrating their willingness to listen to and grapple with these terrible whisperings of time. In the following two poems, Shelley and Catherine respond to "Pinjarra":

After the Rain

Sometimes, after the rain, the lake

Nearby

Turns blood red

They say, the stain of the tea-tree leaves

Blown in, soaked in saline waters

Mixing with iron oxide of the earth

Surprised that they kept the name Murdering Creek

That Creek

That leads into the lake

Blood's iron oxide flows, a red reminder.

There are no plaques to mention the massacre-

But the wind through the pines whispers

In a language too soft to understand

I feel the weight of red

The heavy echo in my heart

I'm listening

Don't die, don't disappear

(Davidow 2012/2020)

Whisperings of the Beach

Slowly, I walk up the beach.

I put my feet

into the other footprints

tracking

along the sand.

My hair is

whipped around by the wind.

My face

feels the sting

of blowing sand.

The wind howls with the horror

of agonising concern,

of heart-freezing fear.

Despair sighs just below

the level of sound.

The cries of the children

echo through my heart.

My breath catches

As history's terrible record

Breaks through the shadows of Time.

What terrors took place

on this beach

as colonialism's

fracturing force

stole across Aboriginal land?

What shocking histories

Lie beneath shifting layers of sand?

Whose blood was spilled here?

Were men, women and children

forced into foaming seas?

I open my ears

to listen

to the whisperings

of the beach

because, I care.

(Manathunga 2020)

 

Decolonisation through Poetry: Building First Nations' Voices and Promoting Truth-Telling

We suggest in this article that poetry offers generative possibilities for the decolonisation of high school and university curricula. Poetry offers opportunities for First Nations voices to be heard above the throbbing, relentless white noise of colonisation that continues to reverberate in postcolonial countries such as Australia, as Tracey emphasises. Poetry captures the diversity of First Nations' lives and the challenges of intersectionality, fluid intercultural identities and cultural location, which are experienced by many Aboriginal young people, as Maria outlines. Poetry has also played a significant role in Australian and global First Nations resistance movements, which have always fought against colonisation and which are gaining strength and momentum through spoken words, prayers, chants, songs and stories (Walker/Noonuccal 1964; Webley 2002; Whittaker 2020). Spoken-word stories of strength and survival honour ancient cultural traditions as well as the ongoing cultural dynamism of Indigenous Knowledges, and they speak back to power (Moreton 2006). Australian First Nations poetry, slam, rap and hip-hop provide evocative, powerful ways to voice the truth of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' grief, anger, resistance and strength. Building upon the poetic pedagogies we have used in high school and at university, inspiration from the ZAPP team in South Africa and in close collaboration with Kabi Kabi, Wakka Wakka and Koa Aboriginal Elders and First Nations schoolteachers, we have developed the Wandiny approach. This brings together First Nations poets, Elders, university staff and students and schoolteachers and school learners in a creative poetry gathering. Our Wandiny approach to poetry call-and-response is designed to open up spaces for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander poets and Elders to "speak themselves back together again" (Scott 2002).

We also believe that our Wandiny approach will illustrate how poetry is a powerful vehicle for First Nations knowledges. Writing in Australian and a number of global contexts, scholars have foregrounded the importance of poetry as a significant vehicle for the retrieval, revitalisation and ongoing growth of Indigenous Knowledges (e.g. Byrne 2014; Genis 2019; Martiniello 2002; Newfield and Bozalek 2018; Newfield and Maungedzo 2006). Genis (2019, 60) proposes the use of "a pedagogy of poetic memory, or epipoetics" in history classrooms, which incorporates "the dynamic interplay of language (including indigenous poetry), the body (both physical and psychological remembering of the past) and the socio-cultural and physical environments in memory construction". Poetry facilitates Indigenous approaches to knowledge production, which emphasise the agency of Country, the power of story-telling and the iterative, intergenerational and intercultural nature of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Knowledges (Manathunga et al. forthcoming; Moreton 2006; Phillips and Bunda 2018; Williams et al. 2018).

We have also argued that poetry gatherings such as our planned Wandiny will promote truth-telling, which is urgently needed if Australia is to move beyond the pain and injustices of colonisation. Aunty Sue Stanton's poem "Pinjarra" and her story of how she came to write this poem illustrates how the histories of terrible massacres, which often remain unacknowledged, echo through the whisperings of the Australian landscape and must be remembered. Through the processes that will be used in our Wandiny, these shocking truths will be retold to settler Australians who have learned to engage in dadirri or listening deeply with their hearts, as Shelley's and Catherine's response poetry has sought to demonstrate.

We also suggest that adopting this Wandiny approach to poetry gatherings will help to build dialogue, knowledge-sharing and connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The poetry gatherings will be used to explore urgent and challenging topics such as the significance of Country, history, culture, connection, land rights, recognition, justice and Treaty, which are crucial to the Australian nation's sustainable and harmonious future. Creative poetry gatherings are a timely decolonial strategy to address the need for Australian truth-telling and treaty-making, given that there has never been a truth and reconciliation commission and that Aboriginal sovereignty has never been ceded. These Wandiny could contribute to the process of "Makarrata . the coming together after a struggle" that was called for in the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, which "captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination" (Uluru Statement from the Heart 2017). Our team of First Nations and settler Australians hope that the Wandiny gatherings will mark new beginnings, galvanising hopes, inspiring and imagining what might be. Wandiny, whatever their intent-to soothe, release, disrupt and inspire-bridge what was, what is and what could be.

 

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the early contributions of our colleagues Aunty Judi Wickes and Alison Willis. Aunty Judi pulled out of the project due to workload and family issues, while Alison withdrew because of the extra challenges produced by the COVID-19 crisis.

 

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1 Permission to reprint this poem by one of the authors has been sought from the periodical Southerly, which originally published this poem in 2011 (vol. 71, issue 2, p. 195).
2 We are writing within an Australian context where a capital "I" is generally used for the term Indigenous, so this is the approach taken in this article.
3 Kabi Kabi word for gathering together.

^rND^sAndreotti^nV.^rND^nS.^sStein^rND^nC.^sAhenakew^rND^nD.^sHunt^rND^sByrne^nD.^rND^sCasinader^nN.^rND^nC.^sManathunga^rND^sConnelly^nF. M.^rND^nD. J.^sClandinin^rND^sCutter^nS.^rND^sDonovan^nM. J.^rND^sGenis^nG^rND^sHopfer^nS.^rND^sKickett-Tucker^nC. S.^rND^sMartiniello^nJ^rND^sMinter^nP.^rND^sNakata^nM.^rND^sNewfield^nD.^rND^nR.^sd' Abdon^rND^sNewfield^nD.^rND^nR.^sMaungedzo^rND^sPascal^nR^rND^sSale^nM.^rND^sScott^nK.^rND^sStanton^nS.^rND^sStyres^nS.^rND^nC.^sHaig-Brown^rND^nM.^sBlimkie^rND^sWebley^nI^rND^sWilliams^nL.^rND^nT.^sBunda^rND^nN.^sClaxton^rND^nI.^sMacKinnon^rND^1A01^nNkwana Joshua^sSerutle^rND^1A01^nNkwana Joshua^sSerutle^rND^1A01^nNkwana Joshua^sSerutle

THEMED SECTION 2
POETRY

 

Black

 

 

Nkwana Joshua Serutle

University of South Africa. psjoshua.jn@gmail.com

 

 

every time someone passes on in the family

our elders command us to wear black clothes for the funeral

to mourn the corpse in the morning

to capture a memory of one of us in a coffin

to wear a feeling of a dead body inside a coffin

and when the coffin sinks

the choir hums hymns like deflated bodies

they remind us of emptiness and loneliness

of how to make a song live without a voice

of how to make a home inside a black hole

of how to stay strong within a quaking body

our elders command us not to shed tears

not to turn our bodies into tornadoes

I wish to tell them I'm cold enough to fit inside a grave

that I've been dead ever since the funeral announcement

that my body knows how breathless the grave is

I wish to tell them how dead I am

but I' m afraid to in debt their hearts with so much loss

^rND^1A01^nMalika Lueen^sNdlovu^rND^1A01^nMalika Lueen^sNdlovu^rND^1A01^nMalika Lueen^sNdlovu

THEMED SECTION 2
ARTICLE

 

Dancing with Mountains

 

 

Malika Lueen Ndlovu

Arts in Psychosocial Support CoP, South Africa. anchor@malikaspeaks.co.za

 

 

---

ABSTRACT

Poetry informed by indigenous knowledge systems, whether written, spoken or heard, offers ideal pathways for healing and transformation. Being "medicine" in the broadest non-clinical sense, it is deeply restorative as activism, as caregiving practice and as balm in the face of relentless assaults on our bodies and beings. This I exemplify in my own work alongside a range of South African poets and poetry educators, authors, healers and (arts and/or education) activists with the hope of inspiring further research and documentation of such work.

Keywords: poetry as healing/medicine; applied poetry; decolonial poetry education

---

 

 

Introduction¹

Layers and Lenses

My transdisciplinary approach in this article is a weaving of personal narrative, poetic analysis, poetry and applied-arts thinking in a dance with bodies of work that speak to decolonisation and transformation. I propose that poetry is a substantially effective methodology for decolonial activism, particularly in the educational domain, and that poetry itself can be a profoundly rich expression of decoloniality. It must be stated that poetry is used in this article to allow poetry to speak for itself and centralise the art form as equal to academic analysis in terms of sense and meaning-making. It is a form of enquiry and not merely creative embroidery around left-brain ideas and concepts. Is poetry not by its very nature r-evolutionary in shifting the ways we see, feel or consider the world around us, each other, as well as the unseen, the not yet manifest, the dream-sphere?

The world we want is one where many worlds fit. (Zapatistas)²

As an arts activist coming of age during South Africa's transition from apartheid state to democracy, I found intimate resonance with Hazel Carby's³ account:

I found the process of actually writing [the book] to be an excavation of sorts. I found myself thinking of terms like "archaeologist". I had the feeling of moving through layers, not just of history, but the layers of being and becoming in the world that have accrued to us over time and that need to be peeled away level by level. (2020)

This article, like much of my writing, may turn out to be another dig into a terrain that has so much hidden, buried and forgotten within it. Yet each time I write and speak in my own voice against a mammoth and traumatic South African past, I am progressing on the liberation journey. I believe it is so for many of us as descendants of the oppressed, marginalised, erased or silenced. To advance this initial tilling of the soil on the subject of "Decoloniality in/and Poetry", I offer an extract from my archaeological and ancestral poem, "Lydia in the Wind":⁴

(Sung) If we do not know-are we free?

How can we be?

She is held captive once again

this time by a broken chain of events

our degrees of amnesia

the root of her dis-ease

Her feet are bleeding

from this haunting dance of grief

she will only know relief

when all our ghosts are put to rest

when their stories are re-collected

returned to their place of honour

recorded in our history

embedded in our memory

(Sung) Bring in the light of consciousness

Who was she?

Who were they?

Who are we?

And with this unveiling

we see the true dimensions

to this family

we are unearthing the path

of recovery

And in the questioning

comes the who am I

out of the listening

comes through you am I

through you am I

I have structured the article into two encompassing themes. The first, Digging Close to Home, reflects upon a personal and wider socio-political past, surfaces current scenarios, accomplishments and areas of redress within the contemporary poetry domain towards transforming or enriching poetry education in South Africa. The second theme, Poetry as Homecoming and Healing, zones in on what has unfolded in recent times with regard to poetry as decolonial and therapeutic practice, as well as motivating for further research and promotion of this applied-arts form.

 

Digging Close to Home

uGogo Grace Lee Boggs⁵ states: "transform yourself to transform the world". To me, this means that, in order to engage effectively in decolonial work in South Africa and the world, we must also conduct inward decolonial work, decolonising ourselves. Acclaimed South African poet Phillippa Yaa de Villiers's poem, "Come Back Afrika", expresses how intimate and unsettling yet liberating such excavation can be.

My ancestors were fishermen and fishwives,

on my father's side

loud-mouthed, big-bottomed Ghanaians.

When I asked my father about our culture,

I wanted to know

the beats that would lead my feet

in the ways of our people and he said:

culture? Well, your grandfather played the violin

and the harpsichord.

When I asked my father

why why why did they let go of

all that rich history that Afrika gave us?

He said:

my dear

we are Africans.

Anyone looking at us can see how black we are,

why do we have to be going on and on about it?

Like Kwame Nkrumah

I am freedom's child

and my pride

is in every molecule of my being.

I am not oppressed.

Why sing that song when I have broken those chains

and stand before you as a free man?

He's deep, my father.

Maybe deep

in denial.

But maybe

Afrika is dreaming

like the world is dreaming,

and Afrika is bluesing

like the world is bluesing,

and it's beautiful

live as a runaway chicken,

as a newborn goat trying out its new knees,

Afrika is the whole world's starving child

and the universe's wise grandmother,

Afrikans are dressing up in fantasies

and walking out of the villages and into

the cities and out of the cities

and back to the villages, via the

cave and the beach and the mountain

and the moon.

There is no limit.

There is no boundary.

(de Villiers 2008, 72-73)

The expansive last stanza and concluding two lines of this poem speak to how decolonial efforts require the resources of courageous vulnerability and recognition of the limitless ways we can think. Breaking away from our oppressive and brainwashing past, this involves consciously freeing and daring ourselves to join the dots and stitch together the visionary thought tapestries we want to see manifest as change, in our lives, our country and beyond. At the heart of this article is poetry and alongside it, the learning resource and transformative power of personal story.

Shaping Influences

I grew up in Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), not-so-fondly known as "the last outpost of the British Empire". Central to my mixed ancestry was a Xhosa maternal grandmother from Kokstad in the Eastern Cape and a maternal grandfather born around 1920 in Mangete, Zululand. He was a direct descendant of King Cetshwayo's Scottish military advisor, "the great" John Dunn, with his many (mostly nameless) Zulu wives. I was born under apartheid in 1971; classified Coloured; English was my first language. At the primary school in my Coloured neighbourhood under the 1950 Group Areas Act, poetry was taught to me by Coloured teachers who saw a good grasp of the English language and an aspirant British accent, not only as a sign of intelligence, but social status. They were not at all critical of (or free to criticise) the colonial curriculum being taught. In Grade 4 (then called Standard 2) I was a 10-year-old brown girl with minimal awareness of my African-ness; I had consistently straightened hair and I was surrounded by a light-wealthy-and-white-aspirant mentality, paired with a shaming or denial of blackness by almost everyone around me. The religious literature I was being raised on included Helen Steiner-Rice greeting card poetry, narrative gospel music, the lyrics of 1960s and 1970s international musicians and bands my parents listened to (on 8-track tapes and vinyl LPs): this was my early literary diet and inspiration. Alongside the constant encouragement to read, these sources cultivated my early love affair with words and storytelling through poetry and song. In my teens these mostly Western "foreign" cultural influences were replaced by late 1980s American R&B and pop music, impacting my teen romantic and lyrical notions. The philosophical themes I was drawn to were heavily influenced by my Catholic biblical upbringing and typically adolescent questioning of the meaning of life, including religion or God's place and role in all of it. My high school poetry diet was made richer by my bursary-funded migration, aged 16 in Grade 10, to a private all-girls convent school. It was a transformative learning environment, with a building perched on a green hill overlooking the Durban harbour in a white middle-class suburb and it attempted multi- (not yet non-) racial education.

The well-worn poetry "bible" at the time was New Inscapes, first published in 1969 by Oxford University Press in South Africa and designed for South African senior high school students. This publication and a scattering of individual collections from the school library provided my heaviest infusion of English poetry, from dense classics such as Chaucer, John Donne, T.S. Eliot, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, Pope, Shelley, Keats, Frost and Wordsworth to modern poetry by acknowledged "masters" such as Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and e e cummings. These three rule-breaking poets, with their dark moods, were the type I found most attractive. They matched my teenage existential-depressive state and spurred my first poems emulating their style, bearing an emotional gravity that I only dared share with a few, lest anyone try to "save me". I believe this is my first experience of writing (poetry and journalling) as therapeutic practice. Finally I had a place for my "identity crisis" questions. Finally I had found an outlet for my heavy-hearted responses to the bizarre contradiction of life under apartheid, growing more vividly violent to me with the State of Emergency imposed in the 1980s. My life still seemed privileged and relatively untouched by the realities that my peers were experiencing in "distant" townships like Kwa Mashu, nearby Cato Manor or Claremont on the Durban South Coast, let alone compared to youth on the Cape Flats. I, as one of the quota of brown girls in a newly "multi-racial" private school, could express my guilt, shame and unbelonging, as well as the anxiety at outgrowing places where I once felt at home. Through poetry I could also expel the less obvious pain of what we would today call micro-aggressions and even fantasise about suicide as the ultimate liberation from the world's woes.

I started a Performing Arts diploma at the then Natal Technikon (now Durban University of Technology-Biko Campus) in 1991. I was feasting on protest poetry now and the tide of South African voices, including Mongane Wally Serote, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Mazisi Kunene, Gcina Mhlope, Pascal Mafika Gwala, Breyten Breytenbach, Alan Paton, Antjie Krog, Ingrid De Kok, Ari Sitas and Shabbir Banoobhai. My mostly British childhood influences took a quantum leap towards African-American voices such as Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. This initial injection of black women's voices would later lead me to performative styles such as that of Ntozake Shange, the lyricism, scathing wit and social commentary of Caribbean writers Lorna Goodison and Linton Kwesi Johnson. I was exposed decades later to Dionne Brand and the legendary Audre Lorde.

In 1998, having relocated to Cape Town, where another exponential leap in my growth as a writer and poet was to unfold, I was invited back to my hometown for the biggest international poetry event in the country: Poetry Africa. In the festival line-up, as had been the case on several stages before I left Durban, I was the only woman of colour (Coloured poets were even rarer). I would share the stage with Gabeba Baderoon⁶ only in 2005 when I returned to the festival. At that point in my mid- to late twenties, on my journey with poetry, I had never read the work of a Coloured poet, besides a handful of poems by Adam Small, Arthur Nortje and James Matthews in school curricula. Only more than a decade later would I realise how diminished these legends had been when I first encountered their work under apartheid schooling. I had never met a Coloured woman poet, let alone one of my generation, until I moved to the Western Cape in late 1996. On most professional poetry platforms prior to this move, I felt viscerally like an anomaly, as my poem "born in africa but" concisely unpacks:

Every story knows its teller

Every story has its time

born in africa but

breastfed another mother tongue

put to sleep on foreign lullabies

praying for a jesus-heaven

when i die

born in africa but

into a designated cultivated patch

flung far from the indigenous tree

strategy for carving out my destiny

born in africa but

mixed equals inferior,

rearrange that exterior

scorned for the secret

exposed by my skin

enslaving beliefs

this child was bathed in

born in africa but

i have died to

the hiding

dividing

fearful deciding

of what i am

who i should be

born in africa but

a self made prisoner

i release captivity

i am free to unfold the sacred map

no other will dictate my individual destiny

born in africa but

living before and beyond

a universe awakens in me

(Ndlovu 2000, 11)

Liberating Our Tongues and Ourselves

My years of engagement with fellow Black writers and poets across the country bear pain-filled resonances relating to our formative years. The Eurocentric and Western canon as our first introduction to what poetry looks and sounds like, presented as ultimate and superior, left its lingering impact on entire generations of Black South Africans, including those historically classified Coloured and Indian. My sense of self, identity and political education evolved with further exposure to the oceans of Black poets and poetry on the continent and its diaspora. Living in the Western Cape and studying in the Netherlands, on excursions to the United States of America (USA) and other countries, I consciously embraced Black Consciousness. I dumped the painful and cumbersome label "Coloured" as relevant to me personally, although I still accept and respect it as a historical part of my identity and early conditioning. I value its resonances with the complexities of people of mixed descent all over the world and I know this is an ongoing healing and self-dis/recovery process for many. Those who have lived it know the trauma and psychological struggle located more deeply than superficial shifts in political alliances.

In an essay "Searching for Women Like Me: Coloured Identity, Afrikaans, Poetry and Performance", Tereska Muishond decribes the time of forming a collective known as !Bushwomen:

We combined poetry with song and dance and were well received by our audiences. I noticed, however, that I was the only one speaking on Coloured identity. It certainly didn't help matters that the oppressor's language was my mother tongue. I felt like an alien in my own country and was in desperate need of a place of belonging. (2019, 143- 44)

She goes on to expound on her evolving identity and the psycho-emotional release of poetry: here, though, I want to highlight her relationship with Afrikaans. In an extract from a poem written in 1998, she expresses another layer of colonial violence by the Dutch and the Afrikaner, who tried to erase enslaved and indigenous Khoi and San peoples' contributions to this South African language:

My mother speaks a "borrowed" tongue

Its intonations and inflections I suckled from her breast

My father speaks the tongue of a proud Griqua man

Rich with wisdom and humility

But neither xi nor xê

But I speak an alien tongue

Beautiful to hear

Its sovereignty bragging in my ear

Ashamed to speak my own

Afraid to make myself known

Despite feeling disjointed

Alone

(Muishond 2019, 148)

The assumption that all people historically classified as Coloured share an oversimplified and homogeneous racial identity ("black and white makes brown") and speak Afrikaans as a mother tongue is pervasive, offensive and simply not true. Yet it would be a glaring omission if I did not mention language here. It would also overlook the extraordinary healing and decolonial work that poets as cultural activists have done and continue to do through and beyond their use of poetry, often in multimodal forms incorporating performance, music and visual art. They have been reclaiming and preserving indigenous cultural practices, and language is a central part of these. This topic deserves in-depth commentary, but within the scope of this article, I only have space to honour a few poets, such as Tereska Muishond, who make a substantial difference to "affected" communities and address toxic national narratives that perpetuate silencing, erasure and inferiority around Colouredness. I have learnt much in this regard from the work of longtime arts activists Emile Jansen of Black Noise; Jethro Louw, Garth Erasmus and Glen Arendse of Khoi Khonnexion; Nama Xam, Zenzile Khoisan, Collin "the Bushman" Meyer, Quintin "Jitsvinger" Goliath, Janine "Blaq Pearl" Van Rooi; also, those who gave birth to the Afrikaaps! production and educational programme: Adrian "Diff" Van Wyk (co-founder of InZync Poetry Sessions); the well-known Khadija Tracey Heeger; our national treasure Diana Ferrus; as well as more recent potent voices such as Shermoney Rhode and Jolyn Phillips. To conclude this focus on language and identity as part of "digging close to home", I have brought two poetry extracts into conversation with each other. The extracts come from Xhosa poet Ongezwa Mbele's poem, "Colonization: Twisting of the Tongue" (2018, 41) and Soweto-born Mandi "Poefficient" Vundla's poem "Bloody Alphabet" (2018):

ONGEZWA:

In this new school, we will learn to

twist and twang and coil

Our tongues to utter and clutter the

English

And no one will tell us

how the English language

invaded our land

invaded the unfamiliar bend of our

tongues

Speaking English will require us

to breathe from our noses

as if our living and progress

depended on it

It will be like exercising in a boot

camp

the English will scrap the Xhosa

from my palate

and be in battle with the Zulu

warriors of

Cabanga

Cacisa

Cula

Cokama

Cela

We will be the sacrificial lambs

to the acrobatics of linguistics

of bilingualism

of trilingualism

of code switching

while the English speak only speak

and learn their English

and pass their English with

distinctions

(Mbele 2018, 41)

MANDI:

When you preserve your language

Do you remember there is blood in

your alphabet?

Do you wipe your mouth when you

speak?

Do you need a noose to make the letters

'o' and 'p'

Because 'd' has always been for us

dogs

The power of white chalk on black

boards

Turns our pain into silent letters

You don't pronounce it

But you see it is there

When I was learning to speak like them

My teacher said 'm' is for monkey

I never knew that monkey was for me

That 'o' is for an ocean tied with a

noose

That classrooms are a lesson on

drowning

When they do not teach you to swim

In your language in pre-school

(Vundla 2018)

Through my own poetry and the work of other poets, it is possible to detect the ways in which the colonial agenda, through language, has shaped many of us in harmful ways we dare to name, confront, and heal from. Voicing these wounds and truths is a courageous self-liberation and recovery of ourselves, and who we truly are cannot be reduced to melanin, geographical location or exclusive ancestry. Neither can we be pinned down to purist or supremacist notions of language and static culture or suffocated by the narrow and violent politics of othering. Having exposed the colonial institutions and curricula that fundamentally shaped my relationship with poetry, my personal story also illustrated how I inherited the English language as a mother tongue. English may be my first language, but poetry is my mother tongue. Poetry is my home language- the language in which I feel most at home, in my skin and in my spirit.

Surfacing Poetry Histories and Witnessing the Shifts

From historical poetry schooling and publishing movements as old as, for example, COSAW'⁷ and CWLP's⁸ worker-centred activism, a plethora of writing workshops and retreats for local writers enabled tides of poetry to unfurl that spoke of a liberated future (not yet manifest in the 1980s). With independent publishing houses, such as iconic activist and poet James Matthews's BLAC (Black Literature, Art and Culture) in the late 1970s, Ravan Press's South African literary and arts magazine Staffrider, published from 1978 to 1993, and the famous Drum magazine, our future imagineers found expression and gave life-saving inspiration to many. Fast-forwarding and building on such legacies, historically Black universities hosted numerous events on campuses across the country that combined political mobilisation, public speaking, struggle debate and strategy. More often than not, these were also cultural events where poetry had a vital role to play in rallying activism, strategic transformation and offering a promotional platform to poets who would otherwise have remained invisible and silenced.

Then came the 1990s wave of efforts, with progressive educators in government schools exposing learners to "extracurricular" materials and local poetry by Black writers, whose work was generally not prescribed in schools or banned by the oppressive state as "propaganda". They began inviting poets and writers into school halls and classrooms to read and perform their poetry, to run creative writing workshops and youth poetry competitions. Some were elders (living archives⁹) and some were fiery young role models. While the celebrated and widely published South African poets of the time remained predominantly white, male and of English descent, the crosscurrents of change could not be stopped. They gave birth to many poetry groups, with the steady rise of Black voices and Black women's voices in particular. WEAVE (Women's Education and Artistic Voice Expression), rooted in Cape Town, and later Johannesburg-based Feelah Sista! were female-led poetry collectives and game-changers of the era. Established publishing houses were recognising the gap in the market for Black voices to be included in South African anthologies, with younger voices finding visibility here and growing audiences for live poetry events at arts and poetry festivals, both within and beyond the country's borders. There were also many independent publishing initiatives during the late 1990s and early 2000s, an increasing number of self-publishing poets, who could not wait for historically colonial and apartheid publishing houses to embrace their offerings. Many poets used self-publishing as an act of defiance and agency, for example WEAVE's Ink@Boiling Point: A 21st Century Selection of Black Women's Writing from the Southern Tip of Africa,¹⁰ which was published by the collective in 2000 and sold over 1 000 copies. Black women poets used poetry readings, stage productions, and culture, heritage and education events to promote and distribute their work and to encourage women to claim their voices by writing. In Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000-2018, editor and poet Makhosazana Xaba also significantly points out:

Black women conceptualized- and -led publishing initiatives are the most recent trajectory in the publishing industry, one that challenges patriarchy and racism at the broad political levels. Through their publishing houses these women are changing the texture of the publishing industry. (2019, 50)

Xaba mentions Rose Francis's African Perspectives Publishing, Diana Ferrus Publishers, Ntateko Masinga's Nsuku Publishing Consultancy, Vangi Gantsho and Sarah Godsell's Impepho Press, JahRose's PeoPress, Flow Wellington's Poetree Publications, duduzile zamantungwa mabaso's Poetry Potion (now including podcasts) and Tembeka Mbobo's Women in Writing. The works published by these publishing houses are evidence of indigenous poetry content being purchased and digested in print or digital format, as part of an informal curriculum: not just recreational reading. South Africa's poetry publishing history is an entire body of work that cannot be summarised here. It suffices to say that the most popular and skilled young professional poets, writers and poetry educators of this democratic era are standing on the shoulders of many. Whether they know or explicitly honour the poets whose legacies they are building upon, and what access they have to documentation and publication of these works, is hidden by the shadows of erosion and erasure. This remains an area of urgent redress. The preservation of this archive and support of intergenerational cultural heritage transfer, arts education and mentorship between generations are vital.

The post-2010 Black independent publishers, spoken-word poetry event curators and breadth of festivals over the past decade are driven by a confident, educated, social justice-oriented and/or feminist generation. They are comfortable and skilled in social media, marketing and technology, exemplifying this leap from the past towards a new future; they operate with freedom to write and say what they need to, in the ways they want to use. They occupy a multitude of platforms and print media is sometimes at risk of being the proverbial "baby that is being thrown out with the water". There are significant poetry education initiatives such as ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project), the youth-focused school poetry recitation competition Poetry for Life, numerous workshops and events attached to all the major literary festivals. Poetry Africa, the Open Book Festival's Poetica, the Abantu Book Festival, the South African Book Festival, Word n Sound, Hear My Voice, the Lingua Franca Spoken Word Poetry Movement, the Naked Word Poetry Festival and many campus-based poetry collectives and events across the country own their literary turf while enriching this soil for everyone, with an unprecedented diversity of poets and poetic forms. They continue exposing new tides of South African publications, voices and hosting courageous, interrogative decolonial conversations. They are doing rigorous decolonial work in the domains of literature education and publishing via the literature, with poetry holding a central space. Multilingualism in these spaces is more the norm than exception and age-old izimbongi¹¹traditions are being kept alive by young bloods, slotting in comfortably on event line-ups of spoken-word events, either those with an American flavour or locally curated. This is decolonial expression embodied; it enacts what the Basotho phrase thupelo implies ("teaching by example"). They own their voices, choice of language and mediums of expression with pride and purpose. D'Abdon observes that

[t]he number of academics who are taking South African spoken word poetry seriously is growing by the day (Baderoon, Boswell, Byrne, Newfield, Gqola, Bashonga, Kaschula), and South African urban centres offer several poetry communities where writers, and attentive, passionate audiences have the opportunity to share words and experiences in an atmosphere of mutual respect, support and acknowledgment. (2016, 53)

There is a rapid, unstoppable flow of poetry around the globe via the internet and social media platforms. Since the establishment of the Africa Centre's Badilisha Poetry X-Change in 2011, anyone who is interested in poetry from Africa can savour a decolonial feast of over 550 pan-African poets from 32 different countries. From emerging to established poets, all are reviewed and showcased on the same cyber-stage in their chosen language, with text and/or translation alongside the audio format. This first Africa-focused poetry podcasting platform offers a major educational resource for South African poets across generations, for researchers and for educators wanting to enrich their curricula. These kinds of free digital archives and media platforms are collapsing the historical hierarchies of access to literary resources.

 

Poetry as Healing and Homecoming

This is the resonance

Of our homecoming

We the offspring

Navigating decades of drought

Endless seasons of silencing

Inheritance line rupturing

The string may have been broken

But this chord can never be cut

(Ndlovu 2019)

I use this extract from a poem as a metaphorical and creative point of departure for the core ideas in this section. It also serves to contextualise how, regardless of colonisation's violent mission to destroy and erase evidence of our interconnectedness and our cultural heritages, there are ways in which this suffering has only fed our collective resilience. It speaks of resonance and remembering, the potent yet less visible ways in which we have survived. As an extract from a tribute to an indigenous musician playing the uhadi, a single-stringed, distinctly Khoi-San instrument, yet echoing other instruments such as the berimbau of Brazil, this resonance expands to encompass interconnected slave histories and cultures echoing through the artistic expressions of the global South.

South Africa is a nation bearing trans-generational trauma, widespread mental illness and extreme levels of violence, all exacerbated by prevailing economic injustice that continues to affect our present and all of our futures. There is no miracle cure and poetry alone certainly cannot remedy all the problems: yet I ask, "What might an inward-turning and integrative approach to decolonial activism look like and how can poetry assist or facilitate this process? Where and how does poetry play a healing role?" We may need "soft power" as a radical practice of response and resilience at this time. Art, and specifically poetry, is the "soft power" I am speaking of, a response-able rather than reactionary way. Mass action engaging people one by one, in small, then widening circles, can effect authentic transformation. We have no shortage of experienced arts activists, poets in particular, who already have the building blocks for a workable national strategy, utilising these applied-arts practices. They have years of experience in working with individuals and communities through their own or government and NGO-driven initiatives already dedicated to health, education and social welfare. We need visionary, trans-generational collaboration and innovation, not the reinvention of the wheel.

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering. (Okri 2012)¹²

Struggle poetry (as it is called) was simultaneously a weapon, an activist tool, a balm and a form of documentation for honouring individual and collective experiences of injustice, loss and learning. Publications and poetry gatherings were places of expression and release, for affirmation of the wholeness to our beings beyond the assault on our bodies. I wonder how many recognise that, regardless of the two-decade stretch into democracy, many South African poets using a variety of media, modalities and various forms of social justice activism are serving exactly the same cause in the twenty-first century. The struggle, the work on inner and outer wellness, is evidently far from over and may never be complete. The social justice movements and vast nongovernmental organisation sector South African arts activists have found ourselves in rarely acknowledge the prevalence of mental health issues, compassion fatigue, desensitisation and burnout that are found among the members and leaders of such groups. Yet the quality of our activism is strengthened or compromised by the quality of our own health and wellness. The nature of all kinds of caregiving depends on critical balance between care for the collective and care for the self.

Re-turning towards Ourselves

Understanding decolonisation as a complex, multidimensional and ongoing journey, it would be fair to say that, where colonial forces have shattered and displaced, this is the work of re-turning. This is a homecoming to the places of belonging, not only to significant physical (trauma) sites or families and communities, but also to our right to wellness and to joy. It is the reclamation and wider reintegration of indigenous knowledge systems, as a grounding influence in South African education, socialisation and to honour our heritages. As an applied artist advocating for decolonial poetry practices and curricula, there is no question as to whether poetry itself is a healing or therapeutic modality. The telling phrase, "poetry saved my life", or the necessity of poets issuing trigger warnings before speaking or posting a poem online, has become commonplace in our times.

Everything given time and nurturing, is moving toward balance and healing. Healing is organic, healing is our birthright. (Lisa Thomas-Adeyemo, in Brown 2017, 123)¹³

Within indigenous knowledge systems, belief in the therapeutic effects of art forms, each in their own way, is an integrated natural understanding. There are numerous examples of how indigenous music, song, dance and storytelling serve as medicine, reinforcing people's direct connection to the Earth along with its variety of natural medicines and the therapeutic, sacred or ritual spaces the land provides. Notions of spiritual connection and energy balance versus imbalance or blockage have been longheld, commonly understood frameworks across traditions all over the world, informing how we relate to human health or un-wellness and dis-ease. Colonial-informed healing practices and health sciences are generally dismissive of mind-body-spirit connections. The arts were historically seen as almost entirely unrelated to medicine or psychology. Interdisciplinary practices such as the art therapies¹⁴ and arts-in-medicine initiatives are relatively recent integrations. They are an overdue yet welcomed affirmation of the invaluable contribution creative expression has on the health of patients, clients and care providers alike.

While music, dance, drama and visual art therapies are widely known, poetry therapy is a unique form of psychotherapy that falls under the broader category of expressive therapy (cf. Mothibe and Sibanda 2019). Christopher Behan writes:

The poems allow linguistic space and metaphorical distance for clients to explore connections with others, engagement in the world or an alternate view of self. Poetic practices are being explored simultaneously in all sorts of therapy and community organization settings these days and present many possibilities. (2013)

The Life Righting Collective, founded by Dawn Garisch, a medical doctor and award-winning author and poet, is one South African non-profit organisation (NPO) dedicated to the healing power of writing.

Seni Seneviratne¹⁵ in her paper, "Speaking the Unspeakable: The Poetry of Witness", presented at the Beyond Reconciliation Conference in Cape Town in December 2009 aptly states:

In some way poetry engages with emotions, the felt sense of the body, images, metaphors and searches for a language, thereby making a connection to the meaning-making centers of the brain. It acts as a channel or a bridge between them. Those immediately affected by a trauma are silenced, frozen by the horror of what they have witnessed and in many instances it falls to following generations to break the silence, bring the details to light. Poets act as mediums to channel the voices of silent and silenced ancestors. (2009)

The indigenous poetry tradition of izimbongi, connected to ancestral channeling as much as they craft oral history and praise, are very much alive in South Africa. But there is also a surge of ancestral and healing work by young cultural activists from diverse backgrounds and what some refer to as healer-poets of this era. Influenced by the work of poets before them, who prioritised the sacred, ancestral and healing aspects of poetry, they are leading creators of transdisciplinary work and platforms, poetry collectives and events. They include Vangile Gantsho, Toni Stuart, Vuyokazi Ngemntu, Lwanda Sindaphi, Ronelda Kamfer, Katleho Kano Shoro, Busisiwe Mahlangu, Joyln Phillips, Koleka Putuma, Sarah Godsell, Ashley Makue, Koleka Putuma, Khanyisile Mbongwa, Allison Claire Hoskins and Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese, to name only a few. This intergenerational poetry torch is being carried predominantly by Black women and by BIPOC.¹⁶

Listening through Poetry

Listening is a foundational aspect of all healing practices, whether listening to narratives by patients/clients narratives, to the body's messaging through symptoms or physiological crises. It can also be "tuning in" to other sources of energy and guidance to activate or support the return to wellness. For poets applying their art for healing, this may also encompass intuition, inspiration and imagination. Cape Town-based South African poet, performer and spoken-word educator Toni Stuart actively promotes poetry as the art of listening in public initiatives such as her "Here to Listen" live and online installation and her writing workshops titled "The Silence That Words Come from". She describes her work as "listening for the stories that will help us heal. Poetry is how I listen" (Stuart 2020).

Listening is a way of presencing (sitting with or with-nessing): it is essential for a range of decolonial (poetry) methodologies, such as uncensored naming and re-membering processes, revisiting of literal and figurative sites of wounding and injustice, and non-confrontational yet direct dialogue. It is also a way to call in imagination, the unknown; it invites conscious play. It sparks creative collaboration and it can be used to welcome ancestral guidance and blessing of the work. This is the recognition of multiple sources and forms of truth, learning, intelligence and knowledge. It humbles us to acknowledge that what is coming through us as artists, as applied-arts practitioners or engaged in healing work of any kind, is not entirely ours. Rather, it is an interconnected web of collaborative work with spirit, ancestry, nature and with our poetry lineage. This refers to the legacies of poets who have passed on, but also to those who are currently marginalised, yet still here, who can teach us through listening. Listening can be a conscious meditative practice, the emptying of oneself, the detachment or release of fixed and weathered frameworks of thought for a while, to loosen the soil of being. Such an approach is in direct opposition to most people's idea of activism, but it wrongly assumes that listening is not an act or an activist strategy. Indeed, listening has guided my work as a poet and applied artist, shaping my language, guiding my often-improvised vocal refrains and the conscious ritual elements of my performances.

While the word and sound (music, vocal interplay and song) relationship in indigenous poetry's spectrum of multimodality is more readily understood, to conclude this section I want to point to another less obvious aspect of this dynamic. The use of vocals, live and recorded music is a common backdrop for poems presented on stage or in digital format. But this word-sound element of indigenous expression can also be understood as channeling emotion and energy within the space. Since music is the universal language, it is a way of achieving inclusivity when connecting with audiences across language and cultural difference. Sound is a common human vibrational capacity. Much more can be investigated to reveal why and how applied poetry and indigenous poetry performance affects its practitioners and audiences or receivers in the ways it does. Here I simply want to instigate curiosity and encouragement for the further exploration and research of these aspects. This expansive, transdisciplinary thinking, I believe, would enrich any form of engagement with decoloniality in/and poetry.

 

Conclusion: The Dance Continues

One cannot know the gravity of this work without tasting its light/ness. Our mutual learning or "enlightenment" deepens and expands the more we commit to "the dance". In South Africa we have already been dancing with mountains for a long time. We are also changed by the shifts in our movement. Our poets, thinkers, dreamers and imagineers know that mountains actually do move. In many ways they move us to shift perspective, to climb even higher, brave the shadows and the cold, to earn the eagle eye view from the top, to receive the gifts of the visions we are working to manifest.

 

References

Africa Centre. n.d. Badilisha PoetryX-Change. Accessed April 3, 2020. http://www.africacentre.net/badilisha-poetry-x-change/.

Akomolafe, Bayo. 2020. We Will Dance with Mountains: Let Us Make Sanctuary. Accessed April 3, 2020. https://course.bayoakomolafe.net/.

Behan, Christopher. 2013. "Rescued Speech Poems: Co-authoring Poetry in Narrative Therapy". Narrative Approaches, June 5. Accessed April 15, 2020. http://www.narrativeapproaches.com/rescued-speech-poems-co-authoring-poetry-in-narrative-therapy/.

brown, adrienne maree. 2017. Emergent Strategies: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Stirling: AK Press.         [ Links ]

Cornell, Carohn. 2000. Slaves at the Cape: A Guidebook for Beginner Researchers. Bellville: University of the Western Cape.         [ Links ]

D'Abdon, Raphael. 2016. "Teaching Spoken Word Poetry as a Tool for Decolonizing and Africanizing the South African Curricula and Implementing 'Literocracy'". Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa 21 (2): 44-62. https://doi.org/10.1080/18125441.2016.1192676.         [ Links ]

D'Abdon, Raphael, Deirdre C. Byrne, and Denise Newfield. Forthcoming. "Living Archives and the Project of Poetry Recurriculation". Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa.

Carby, Hazel. 2020. Interview with Saidiya Hartman. The Paris Review, 21 January. Accessed December 17, 2020. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/01/21/errant-daughters-a-conversation-between-saidiya-hartman-and-hazel-carby/.

De Villiers, Phillippa Yaa. 2008: Taller than Buildings. 4th ed. Cape Town: Community Publishing Project.         [ Links ]

Garcia, Sandra E. 2020. "Where Did BIPOC Come from?" New York Times, June 17. Accessed December 17, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-bipoc.html.

Mbele, Ongezwa. 2018. "Colonization: Twisting of the Tongue". In Disrupting Denial: Analysing Narratives of Invisible/Visible Violence and Trauma, edited by Sarah Malotane Henkeman, 41 -45. N.p.: New Adventure Publishing.

Mothibe, Mmamosheledi E., and Mncengeli Sibanda. 2019. "African Traditional Medicine: South African Perspective". In Traditional and Complementary Medicine, edited by Cengiz Mordeniz, 1-27. N.p. InTech Open. https://doi.org/2020.10.5772/intechopen.83790.

Muishond, Tereska. 2019. "Searching for Women Like Me: Coloured Identity, Afrikaans, Poetry and Performance". In Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000-2018, edited by Makhosazana Xaba, 139-50. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Ndlovu, Malika Lueen. 2019. "Buyel' eKhaya." Herri 1. Accessed April 4, 2020. https://herri.org.za/1/malika-ndlovu.

Ndlovu, Malika Lueen. 2000. Born in Africa But. Cape Town: Educall Harrington House.         [ Links ]

Okri, Ben. 2012. Mental Flight: An Anti-spell for the 21st Century. London: Phoenix House.         [ Links ]

Seneviratne, Seni. 2009. "Speaking the Unspeakable: The Poetry of Witness". Unpublished paper presented at the Beyond Reconciliation Conference in Cape Town, December.

Stuart, Toni. 2020. "About". Accessed April 13, 2020. https://www.tonistuart.com.

Vundla, Mandi. 2018. "Mandi Vundla Live Poetry". YouTube video, 1:48. Accessed March 31, 2020. https://youtu.be/N1TXtSktQb8.

Xaba, Makhosazana. 2019. "Black Women Poets and Their Books as Contributions to the Agenda of Feminism". In Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000-2018, edited by Makhosazana Xaba, 15-61. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

 

 

1 The title of this article is drawn from the Emergence Network's recurring course title, We Will Dance with Mountains (http://course.bayoakomolafe.net/).
2 Formed in the early twentieth century, the Zapatistas are a libertarian-socialist political and militant group whose ultimate goal was to convince the Mexican government to rewrite the constitution to include protection of indigenous rights and autonomy.
3 Carby is a foundational scholar of "race", class, and empire as critical lenses for understanding culture.
4 "Lydia in the Wind" is dedicated to the spirit of enslaved woman Lydia "Ou Tamaletjie" Williams, who died on 16 June 1910. It was first performed by Malika Lueen Ndlovu, with music by Khoi San heritage activist and visual artist Garth Erasmus, as an offsite event of the 1999 Parliament of the World's Religions. Part of a painted banner portrait of Lydia Williams produced by Garth Erasmus for the District Six Museum, the poem was also published in Slaves at the Cape: A Guidebookfor Beginner Researchers by Carohn Cornell (2000).
5 Chinese-American Grace Lee Boggs spent much of her life advocating for civil rights and labour rights and was a noted figure in Detroit's Black Power movement.
6 Baderoon was also classified as "Coloured".
7 The Congress of South African Writers (COSAW) is a South African grassroots writers' organisation launched in July 1987. Its initial aims were to promote literature and redress the imbalances of apartheid education.
8 The Culture and Working Life Project (CWLP) started in 1985 to train workers in drama, music and literature, working closely with the trade unions to organise cultural events, establish cultural structures and document cultural activity.
9 See D'Abdon, Byrne and Newfield (forthcoming).
10 Edited by three of WEAVE's founder members, Shelley Barry, Malika Ndlovu and Deela Khan (WEAVE 2000).
11 In traditional African society, a composer and orator of poems praising a chief or other figurehead and "introducing act" at public or communal gatherings.
12 From Ben Okri's epic poem, Mental Flight: An Anti-spell for the 21st Century (2012). Ben Okri is a Nigerian poet and novelist born in 1959 in Minna, Northern Nigeria, and he is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions.
13 Lisa Thomas-Adeyemo is a senior teacher for generative somatics, a training assistant for Strozzi Institute, and a community-based healer, somatic body-worker and dedicated to transformation and healing within oppressed communities (see https://strozziinstitute.com/staff/lisa-thomas-adeyemo/).
14 The South African National Arts Therapies Organisation represents the interests of arts therapists and the four arts therapy professions: art, music, drama and dance movement therapy across South Africa ( // sanato .co.za/).
15 Seni Seneviratne is a poet, freelance writer, mentor, trainer and creative consultant born and raised in Leeds, Yorkshire and is of English and Sri Lankan heritage (see www.seniseneviratne.com).
16 Black, Indigenous, People of Color (Garcia 2020).

^rND^sD'Abdon^nRaphael^rND^1A01^nKirsten^sDeane^rND^1A01^nKirsten^sDeane^rND^1A01^nKirsten^sDeane

POETRY

 

My Poetry Wants Women

 

 

Kirsten Deane

University of the Western Cape, South Africa. kirstendeane14@gmail.com

 

 

My fingers have been aching and crying when I look away. They're tired.

They've been writing about the white women and their beauty, the perfections that they carry.

My paper-cut fingers want to write about the coloured women

that hang in my curls

with their legs crossed and their arms reaching across

their chests to stop the men from staring

at their breasts,

my poetry wants to bring their eyes back to meet ours.

My hands want to write about the coffee and koeksisters

that sit on our table but only on a Sunday.

About the fulfilment a coloured woman only gets from family.

I want to write about the beautiful black women that ride the taxi

with me, their voices that have more life in them than their lungs.

My hands want to write about the colourful women

I live beside and my poetry will show

us combined into a rainbow

that doesn't end.

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THEMED SECTION 2
ARTICLE

 

South African Indian Women as Custodians of Subversive Knowledge: A Decolonial Reading of Francine Simon's Poetry

 

 

Arushani Govender

University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. arushani.govender@gmail.com; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8092-8487

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This article uses feminist perspectives on decoloniality as a lens for analysing selected poems from Francine Simon's début collection, Thungachi (2017). Simon is a South African Indian woman poet from Durban, raised by Catholic parents of Tamil linguistic heritage. Her poetry collection, while feminist and experimental, deeply captures the experiences of dispossession and loss that define the large majority of South African Indians, with particular focus on the women whose voices remain marginalised in the South African literary canon. Framed by decolonial theory, this study serves the interests of decolonising research praxis, and thereby the nature of the knowledge produced. I conducted in-depth interviews with Simon and use them as a supplementary device in executing a literary analysis of two poems: "Betel Nut", and "Tamil Familiars". These poems emphasise the use of South African Indian English and the role that South African Indian women occupy as custodians of the cultural archive in maintaining fragments of precolonial ontologies. This article finds that it is necessary to critique Simon's poetry within a decolonial, feminist framework in order to uncover its cultural complexities and contributions to counter-discourse against the Western, objectivist knowledge paradigm.

Keywords: decoloniality; South African Indian; feminist poetry; Francine Simon; Indigenous Knowledge

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Introduction¹

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean-in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight. (Lorde 2007, 37)

Lorde's definition of poetry differs from the poetry of educational institutions and mainstream, profitable literature. She argues that liberation for victims of colonialism- particularly women-cannot occur through the use of pure logic or new ideas but must take place through "old and forgotten [ideas]" (Lorde 2007, 38). Lorde's standpoint signals what Dei, Hall and Rosenberg call the "crisis of knowledge": the commodification of knowledge induced by colonial and globalising forces (2000, 3). The flux of knowledge across geopolitical borders problematically configures the displacement and suppression of indigenous philosophies and traditions, confounding all world knowledges with that of the ruling episteme (Dei, Hall, and Rosenberg 2000, 4). Lorde's view that suppressed, pre-existing ideas are the solution to reshaping black women's futures resembles theories of decoloniality. Decolonial theory is a form of anti-colonial discourse with a distinct approach to deconstructing the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. Within this field of scholarship, decolonisation is not restricted to national, geographical independence but is "a long-term process involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and psychological divesting of colonial power" (Smith 1999, 98). Theories of decolonisation frequently entail a rigorous analysis of colonialism, modernity and Western epistemology. For Lorde (2007), poetry is a vital site of colonial resistance, distinguished by its propensity to exhume silenced and marginalised ways of being.

Sharing this perspective, this article argues that Francine Simon's poetry demonstrates decolonial feminist values through its subversive representation of South African Indian women and the indigenous knowledge specific to South African Indian (SAI) culture. Simon was born and raised in Durban by Catholic-convert parents of Tamil linguistic heritage. She sees her identity as a rhizomatic structure, with each root a confluence of cultural identifiers and "femaleness" (Simon 2018, 38). In her debut collection, Thungachi (2017), Simon uses "femaleness" as "multiple inflections rather than struggling with the inability to fit into a coherent, single position" (Simon 2018, 22). As a South African, Indian, woman, Catholic, Tamil, Simon acknowledges her self as provisional and frames her poetry within themes of "non-place": by doing this, she can "provisionally situate and yet repeatedly also re-locate" (Simon 2018, 32) her identity. Her poetry, while feminist and experimental, deeply captures the experiences of dispossession and loss that define the large majority of South African Indians.

Most of Simon's poetry is based on memories of her upbringing in Durban. As part of my research for this article, I conducted in-depth interviews with the poet in order to determine the knowledge and experiences that informed her poetry. My research incorporates elements of autoethnography, given that I too am a South African Indian woman of Tamil heritage and was raised in Durban. This article provides a brief explanation of decoloniality with particular focus on feminist, decolonial perspectives, which will be used as scaffolding to construct a reading of two poems selected from the collection, namely "Tamil Familiars" and "Betel-Nut" (Simon 2017).

 

Theoretical Framework

In this section, I review scholarship on decolonisation and focus on feminist perspectives on decolonial theory, which will later be used to situate Simon's poetry. Decolonial theory emphasises the need for locally specific research that traces the historical and cultural trajectories of a given community (Dei 2002, 6). Decolonisation involves acts of resistance and posits solutions that require collective mobilisation.

In South Africa, the current decolonial project has been associated with practices of indigenisation, whereby theorists promote a reading culture from the locus of indigenous knowledge. Understanding that knowledge creation and dissemination are tools for attaining power, Akena (2012) notes that scholars are accountable to the communities they represent and must produce knowledge that has true emancipatory value. He states: "To stress the importance of indigenous knowledge as a tool for decolonization, researchers need to appreciate the complexity of the structures of colonialism and its neocolonial forms" (2012, 603). Akena stresses that the process of knowing and its associated content must disclose the levels of subjugation that are naturalised in Western academia, must reroute towards non-exploitative, non-capitalistic and non-individualist research practice, and must circulate the knowledge with honourable intentions of liberating colonised peoples. Given that I share demographic traits with Simon, and with the community she writes about, my research practice follows Akena's account of decolonised knowledge production. In addition to adhering to decolonised research methods, I offer critique framed by decolonial theory. According to Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), two main strands of thinking are prevalent in the politics and theories of decolonisation, and are integral when formulating decolonised critique. She describes them as follows:

One draws upon a notion of authenticity, of a time before colonization in which we were intact as indigenous peoples. We had absolute authority over our lives; we were born into a universe which was entirely of our making ... . The second strand of the language of critique demands that we have an analysis of how we were colonized, of what that has meant in terms of our immediate past and what it means for our present and future. (Smith 1999, 24)

For Smith, the two strands are mutually dependent and allow the reformulation of problems and solutions for both time periods: colonised time and pre-colonised time (1999, 24). Her postulation suggests that movements towards decolonising not only involve a dismantling and re-examination of colonialism and its lasting impact, but also that for previously oppressed societies, indigenous knowledge and ontology play a vital role in reclaiming autonomy and self-worth. Similarly, Ngügi (1981) makes an integral case for the politics of language in decolonisation. Ngügi highlights two roles of language: as communication and as a carrier of culture. The work of the coloniser has succeeded in destroying the function of language on both levels, in order to alienate the colonised from their immediate environment. When one views the world through a Eurocentric lens, feelings of dispossession are re-inscribed; this is attributed to loss of language, which "as culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history" (Ngügi 1981, 15). Consequently, Ngügi (1981) prescribes that African languages be reclaimed as part of a teaching, learning and writing project to establish Afrocentric attitudes, where African culture is the centre and other cultures are viewed in relation to it. Shahjahan notes that Ngügi "exemplifies the use of indigenous knowledge, here specifically language as a counter discourse to rupture the hegemony of colonial language and colonial forms of knowledge production" (2005, 219).

While my analysis acknowledges the presence of indigenous knowledge as a decolonial characteristic in Simon's poetry, I do not suggest that Simon is "indigenous". In line with contemporary decolonial scholarship-which accounts for forced migration, diaspora and hybridised identities-I use the term "indigenous" only in relation to knowledge, rather than to the geographical residency of the knowledge holder. Dei (2002, 5) supports this understanding of indigeneity when he states that knowledge is deemed to have originated from a particular place, has developed over time, and is cumulative. In this context it is possible for South African Indian citizens to acquire and dispense indigenous knowledge, despite their country of origin. Further, this article employs the following definition of indigenous knowledge:

[S]eeing the individual as part of nature; respecting and reviving the wisdom of elders; giving consideration to the living, the dead, the future generations; sharing responsibility, wealth, and resources within the community; and embracing spiritual values, traditions, and practices reflecting connections to a higher order, to the culture, and to the earth. (Dei, Hall and Rosenberg 2000, 6)

It is necessary to note that indigenous knowledge is typically understood in contrast to "Western epistemology" or "Western knowledge". Scholars of decolonisation use these terms to describe the authoritative, scientific methodologies that are used to validate, verify and engender all institutionalised knowledge (Purcell 1998, 259). Under traditional, positivist tenets of Western knowledge construction, any knowledge that cannot be tested, measured or rendered "objectively true" is considered inferior, irrational and is consequently marginalised. These characteristics mean that indigenous knowledge can have liberating and decolonising values; therefore, African theorists argue, it should be intellectualised and integrated into educational practice (Ntsoane 2005, 100).

On the other hand, Latin American theorists emphasise the struggle against epistemic coloniality by analysing modernity and coloniality as interdependent phenomena. Mignolo (2008, 14) observes four domains that are controlled by colonial power, namely the economy, authoritative forces, gender and sexuality, and knowledge and subjectivity. Hence "domination is not just economic, but it operates at all levels of interrelation between different domains of the colonial matrix or power". He suggests that the entry point to decolonisation is the last domain, for decolonisation of knowledge and being will affect the control of authority and economy by re-imagining the concept of the state (2008, 18). I refer to conceptions of decolonial theory in so far as they emphasise "the power held by local/social practice to survive the colonial and colonized encounters" (Dei, Hall, and Rosenberg 2000, 7).

In providing a reading of Simon's poetry I refrain from deconstructive analysis and adopt decolonised, feminist critique in order to align my reading with Simon's use of "femaleness" as a poetic device. Lugones (2008, 17) stresses the necessity to understand pre-colonial gender relations within indigenous societies and in order to understand how colonialism affected them. She posits that the intersections of "race", gender and sexuality must be read alongside the coloniality of power to explore how men of colour "exhibit to [sic] the systemic violences inflicted upon women of colour" (2008, 1). Lugones investigates gynecratic indigenous societies, deducing that the exchange of pluralistic spiritual beliefs for a singular, divine male being turned egalitarian tribes into hierarchical, male-dominated societies. Indigenous ontologies were destroyed, women's authority was relegated, male dominance became the prerequisite for survival, and clan structures were replaced by the nuclear family (Lugones 2008, 10). Lugones's meditations caution us against presuming the victimisation of women in indigenous societies prior to colonisation: this prejudice is itself an integral component of the coloniality of power. While her assertions significantly address the marginalisation of colonised women-and thus their descendants-her solution poses great difficulty for cases where pre-colonial social relations are not determined or are historically determined as inequitable and oppressive.

From an African feminist perspective, Nfah-Abbenyi (2005, 262) argues that a "singular" post-colonial discourse does not aptly cater for the multiple fragmentations of post-colonial women. She proposes that a pluralistic post-colonial discourse be initiated through discovering manifold theories that inexplicitly exist in language, oral literature and fiction. Furthermore, she suggests that by drawing attention to the multiple, mutable and contradictory subjectivities represented in African women's fiction, women's identity can be reconstituted in a way that undermines gender dichotomies (Nfah-Abbenyi 2005, 275). As a result, she makes the following conjecture:

The theory is embedded in the polysemous and polymorphous nature of the narratives themselves. These texts reinscribe and foreground teleological, ontological, and epistemological insights and praxes relevant to the specific histories and politics that preceded the fictional texts. (2005, 262-63)

In effect, Nfah-Abbenyi calls for a reframing of the notion of theory itself. Similarly, Gqola (2011, 7) observes that African feminist scholars "warn against reading creative sites as locations of raw material to be mined for meaning" and stress the need "to recognize that creative sites are places where theory is produced, not simply applied". Clery and Metcalfe (2018) indicate that due to the multiple, intersecting identities taken up by post-colonial women, feminism need not be restricted to issues of gender in the study of post-colonial women's literature. They argue that "these diverse and intersecting identities can lead to complex and multiple layers of oppression and exclusion, but also to possibilities for recognising commonalities of oppressions" (2018, 5). I adhere to these decolonial feminist perspectives in that my literary analysis does not merely "apply" theory but attempts an unravelling of the theory and knowledge already present in Simon's poetry.

 

Orality and Animism in "Tamil Familiars"

"Tamil Familiars" (Simon 2017, 15) is based on the regulations of Simon's maternal grandmother-a daughter of a staunch Catholic-converted family who married a Tamil man.² The poem reflects on ways of knowing and being that permeate Tamil heritage, despite one's religious affiliation or conversion. A census report taken in 1936 indicates that that the majority of Indians shipped to South Africa (83 731 out of 211 071) were Tamil-speaking (Mesthrie 1992, 9). Tamil is one of India's 22 official languages and according to Zvelebil (1974, 2), "Tamil can claim one of the longest unbroken literary traditions of any of the world's living languages".

In South Africa, the use of Indian vernaculars as home languages was virtually nonexistent by the 1980s. Ancestral languages were reserved for religious rituals and dialogues among the older generation, "yet the attachment to linguistic identities has persisted long after the vernaculars fell out of daily use ... [V]ernaculars became a sign of the past and purely of sentimental value" (Hansen 2012, 75). Tamil in present-day South Africa is a cultural identifier beyond the scope of language. It is a way of life for its speakers, often imparted to their non-Tamil-speaking descendants. Simon regrets never learning Tamil, stating in an interview, "once I got into university and I started writing poems for this collection-that was in 2011, so seven years ago, I quickly realised that I wished to have learnt that language, really like, a desperate wish to have learnt it".³ Although Tamil is familiar to Simon, she struggles to access the complete ontological worldview that comes from being a speaker-a tension repeatedly reflected in "Tamil Familiars":

Grandmother used

to warn me not to whistle;

I'd call the snakes.

She forbad me

to sleep with my hair open:

I'd wake up looking like a pichachi,

gone to hell and back.

She said not to eat

out of the pot or it would rain

on my wedding day

I did and I do.

My mother tells me not to

pick from the curry-leaf tree

when it's that time of the month.

It will die, she says.

Funny. It hasn't died yet.

And I never give a thought

to my wedding day.

(Simon 2017, 15)

The first three stanzas relay a list of warnings from the speaker's grandmother. The cautions are followed by the childlike rebellion of "I did and I do", indicating two possibilities: the speaker is not an ardent believer of the warnings, or believes them and is enticed by the idea of playing with fate. Stanza five outlines the instructions given to the speaker by her mother and makes up a third of the warnings mentioned in the poem, displaying the limitations of the mother's knowledge in comparison with that of the grandmother. Simon revealed that she is unsure of the origins of her family's worldviews, stating that, "Often nobody could really tell me".⁴ She wanted the poem to represent her family's oral culture in its naturally occurring form. She avoided consulting the internet based on an instinctual feeling: "I just had the feeling if I did that, that something would be disrupted".⁵ Simon alludes to the importance of "living archives". For Davids (2007, 81), the "living archive" is not "necessarily interested in being a part of the larger story or of being woven into the fabric of a place or event" and "does not pander to the material demands of the material archive, but once included into that archive they can be grafted into its mythologies and made to demonstrate truths". Simon accords her family's oral narratives their own space and uses her written poetry as a form of material archive that encompasses the "living archive". She blends permanence and transience by recording orality in written form.

The poem shifts from past to present; all past participles are applied to the speaker's grandmother: "Grandmother used / to warn me not to whistle", "She forbad me" and "She said not to eat". However, the mother's assertions are written in present tense: "My mother tells me not to" and "It will die, she says". Simon confirmed that her maternal grandmother had passed away and that the week of our interview marked the 10-year anniversary of her death.⁶ The use of past tense in the poem to refer to the grandmother's philosophies and the present tense for the mother's indicates the continuity of oral traditions stretched over a vast period of time. The grandmother is no longer a "living archive". Now, the mother fulfils the responsibility of imparting Tamil wisdom to the family. Furniss (2004, 158) postulates that "orality is performance", intimate and expository, and unlike the written word, it elicits an existing relationship between the speaker and listener. Simon is cognisant of her attempt to translate orality to written text and sidesteps any textual inquiry that could further tamper with the quality of knowledge that is imparted by her grandmother and mother. Once on the page, the oral vignettes become subject to the gaze, static and susceptible to multi-perspectival readings (Furniss 2004, 12). "Tamil Familiars" blurs oral and written history in order to represent the attitudes of an acutely marginalised culture. By capturing the unique subjectivities of the women and their oral traditions in the material archive, Simon contributes to the "production of counter-discourses, counter-knowledges, counter-creative acts, and counter-practices that seek to dismantle coloniality and to open up multiple other forms of being in the world" (Maldonado-Torres 2016, 10).

Furthermore, Simon questions the incongruence of animistic thinking with her Catholic upbringing. Her doctoral thesis states: "this and other superstitions that we retain coexist with our Catholic belief systems, sliding between various forms of inherited family spiritual traditions and epistemologies" (Simon 2018, 21). Simon associates animism with superstition when perceiving her family's ontology from the boundaries of scientific thinking. I have also inadvertently used the word "superstition" in our interview, sharing the same dilemma as Simon.⁷ I must reiterate that Western ontology renders human beings as possessors of agency to configure reliable knowledge through dualistic separations of mind/body and natural/supernatural (Teffo and Roux 2003, 19396). The poem reveals the tensions experienced by a speaker who is caught between differing ontologies and who is, at times, prompted to view her family's beliefs with suspicion, through the lens of Western science.

Stanza five illustrates the intimate relationship between the natural order of the female body and the spirits residing in nature. In Tamil culture, such ontology stems from Hindu karmic philosophy, which suggests that all living organisms contain souls.

Communication in this case is not a purely human ability, but occurs among all elements of nature and in this context, the curry-leaf tree can respond to signals from the menstruating, female body. The ontology in "not to eat out of the pot or it would rain / on my wedding day" suggests the interconnectedness between living beings and objects. Naidoo (2004, 9) posits that due to regional, ethnic, linguistic and class divisions among South African Indians, there is no singular standard of worship used by Hindus. Tamil formularies depict the most complex rituals due to an abundance of symbols and liturgies, making it easy "to lose track of meaning and reduce them to magic and superstition"; furthermore, "[rituals] were influenced by transplantation to South Africa" (Naidoo 2004, v).

Simon's representation of the various ontological standpoints of the three women characters in the poem illustrates one of the key goals of decoloniality: countering the scientific, objectivist paradigm of Western knowledge. Maldonado-Torres (2016, 1819) elucidates how Western epistemic violence detaches the knower from the known through Cartesian divisions of mind/body and reason/nature. The outcome is a knowing subject who is confronted by a world of objects and produces objective knowledge. Maldonado-Torres postulates that the illusion of universal knowledge is reflected through Western ontology, re-initiating self-erasure within the colonised. Simon reflexively demonstrates the speaker's (her) scepticism about her mother's and grandmother's beliefs, indicating how hegemonic frameworks have dismantled and repressed worldviews that exist outside them. At the same time, Simon represents the older women as preservers of indigenous knowledge, indicating how the knowledge has hybridised and amalgamated as it was transferred from one generation to the next. The structure of the poem captures the varied levels of knowledge holding and knowledge dissemination among the three women.

The speaker's rebellious behaviour, indicated by her refusal to abide by the rules, is not equivalent to the rejection of her elders' ontologies, but explicates a dismissal of gender relations stemming from that knowledge. Each instruction given to the speaker links to notions of being a good wife or mother. The curry-leaf tree must not die for it is integral to good cooking. A girl must not wake up looking like a pichachi⁸because such appearance would not be attractive to a potential husband. Simon (2018, 24) states, "my femaleness is influenced by familial pressures from traditional patriarchal culture, yet, this is also mediated by the changes that have accumulated in this culture over time". The poem fulfils the two strands of decolonisation outlined by Smith (1999, 24) as mentioned in the previous section. It reflects on a time before colonisation through references to animistic ontologies related to ancient Hinduism and ways of being, while also demonstrating how such ontologies have evolved and combined with a Western worldview, as the lasting effect of colonialism. Additionally, Simon's subversion of the patriarchal values imposed upon her indicates an attempt to reconstitute gender roles while drawing attention to the differing and fluctuating subjectivities of South African Indian women.

 

Language and Beyond in "Betel-Nut"

The poem "Betel-Nut" (Simon 2017, 59-60) is based on Simon's present continuous experiences at her relatives' homes in Chatsworth. Chatsworth is an Indian township about 15km south of Durban. Hansen (2006, 209) explains that Chatsworth was devised in the 1950s as a buffer between white and black residential areas in Durban during the Group Areas Act. Poorer Indians were strategically positioned on the outskirts, bordering Umlazi, while middle-class Indians were located on the boundaries of working-class white neighbourhoods. Desai and Vahed (2013, 1) note, "Chatsworth was born at the height of apartheid's madness when the government sought to ghettoize persons of 'Indian' origin into what it intended to be a frozen racial landscape". Housing approximately 350 000 residents, Chatsworth became the largest Indian suburb in the country (Desai and Vahed 2013, 2). Hansen (2012, 15-16) postulates that the shift from apartheid to democracy instituted multilayered feelings of loss among Chatsworth residents who had grown accustomed to communal intimacy, enforced by cultural enclosure and newfound economic stability. The birth of Chatsworth marked almost a hundred years since Indians were first shipped to South Africa during the system of indenture. The first ships arrived in 1860 and contained nearly seven hundred indentured migrants from various parts of the Indian subcontinent. Desai and Vahed describe this moment: "Hierarchies 'imagined' into being over a long period; divisions based on age-old customs; castes, religions, dialects, centuries in the making, unravelling. Space, time and place compressed" (2010, 1).

Given the post-apartheid imperative of geopolitically locating the country's residents as "South African", today Indians are officially known as "South African Indians" (SAI), yet widely referred to as "Indians"; these classifications are influenced by indenture and apartheid racial classifiers. The term "South African Indian" is reductive and fails to account for the differences among a heterogeneous population of 1.3 million people (Hansen 2006, 202). Hansen aptly describes the incessant flux of SAI identity as a result of numerous systems of oppression and shifts in contemporary politics:

Indians in South Africa remain, in other words, "in suspension"-in a provisional and indeterminate space: with a history of forced removals, non-recognition, of economic success against many odds; of being at the mercy of powerful forces beyond their own control. (Hansen 2006, 203)

Given the divisions and compression of contrasting Indian cultures in South Africa, "Betel-Nut" will resonate particularly with South African Indians of Tamil linguistic heritage, residents of Chatsworth and Christian converts who hold on tightly to Hindu traditions despite their religious affiliations. Simon has never lived in Chatsworth, having been raised in Durban North for the most part of her childhood, but often visits her aunts and cousins who live there, especially on festive occasions. Simon and I shared sentiments about the expectation to speak the dialect and reclaim "Indianness" when among our relatives. ⁹ The tension of being both an insider and outsider in the community is the predominant motif in "Betel-Nut" (Simon 2017, 59-60):

I am dark but

they say I'm bluffing.

I snack on tamarind seeds

sucking while Mom makes brinjal.

Black tongue, mangrove mud between my toes.

She's not like us but.

This is why I am not like them.

I wouldn't say that,

but I would say that

when she tells me all about climbing

jackfruit trees at aunty's house, she calls me

girl, losing my name.

Lately, I try out their voice: oiyoh, but it's so hard eh!

She, she don't fright for nothing.

She don't know nothing too.

It's ayyo when I check

my brand new dictionary,

a book to mark bed-made words.

The Indians, they put eyes on me except

when I go to Chatsworth

then my sentences end but.

What happened to my degree?

That's what I wonder anyway,

spitting betel-nuts, white husk.

Simon verified that she shifts to SAI dialect when among her Chatsworth relatives, identifying it as a "code switch", resulting in feelings of self-consciousness and inauthenticity. "Sometimes I would feel like I wasn't a real Indian person because I was pretending", she said.¹⁰ There is an implied reference to the power of language as a repository of local knowledge, which, if manifested, allows the acquisition of the status "real Indian". Chatsworth is a melting pot of diverse Indian linguistic and cultural heritages. Primarily, the poem interweaves Chatsworth dialect with local ways of being, echoing Ngügi's (1981) extrapolation that language is culture's collective memory bank. On a secondary level, the use of Earth imagery-vegetation, soil and plants- illustrates the speaker' s attempt to exceed language. By physically immersing her body into the land and consuming its produce, the speaker finds an alternative route to excavating her ancestral ways of knowing. I will examine how both aspects interplay in the poem.

Ngügi posits that culture is both the outcome and reflection of history and mediates understanding of the self, between the self and others, and between the self and nature, by transmitting collective realities into the spoken or written word. In effect, "culture is not transmitted through language in its universality but in its particularity as the language of a specific community with a specific history" (Ngügi 1981, 15). For this reason, language was mobilised as a colonial force in reshaping human subjectivities (Singh 2018, 69) and is centralised by decolonial thinkers as a solution to cultural reclamation (Singh 2018, 74). In the poem, the speaker is conflicted about her performative use of South African Indian dialect when surrounded by her Chatsworth family. "I am dark but / they say I'm bluffing" suggests her family's disposition to her "false" Indian identity despite their shared "racial" and genealogical attributes. The word "bluff" is often chosen in South African Indian English as a synonym for lying, or "to insist that something is true, knowing it to be false" (Mesthrie 2010, 29). The voice in italics, "She's not like us but", is a direct quotation representing the voices of the speaker's relatives. In contrast with the speaker's use of standard English, the quotations in italics serve as evidence of why she is "not like them". "But" is commonly located at the end of a sentence in South African Indian English. Mesthrie (2010, 108) postulates that the clause-final use of "but" has a "weakly adversative sense ... the primary meaning of but is 'though, really, truly', etc.". He propounds that SAI dialect is a form of "language-shift English" as a result of English replacing the culture's vernacular in daily communication (Mesthrie 1992, 3). Simon, having been educated at Model-C schools in the mostly white neighbourhood of Durban North, communicates in standard English, except when around her family or other dialect users. Outside those contexts, she re-adapts to the standard English accepted in white or educational environments.¹¹Her doctoral thesis states:

Because I simply do not hear such usages, when I am out of habitual context, and thus they contract and shrivel in my linguistic repertoire, waiting for the water of community connection so that they may once again well into the presence of the ear. (Simon 2018, 25)

According to Mesthrie (1992, 61), white South African English is used in conjunction with South African Indian English by a small group of bidialectical speakers in the country, who "tend to be young professionals employed in prestigious commercial houses" and who "run the risk of being gently ridiculed". Using incorrect syntax and the idiom oiyoh-an exclamation loosely translating to "Good Lord!", suggesting pain, surprise or sympathy (Mesthrie 2010, 10), elicits disorientation from white enunciation. Presumably, that is why Simon wishes to "try out their voice", acknowledging her limitations. Her linguistic shifts are not the task of appropriation, but an effort to speak the same language as her relatives, as a means of seeing the world from their perspectives.

Simon expressed her fascination with Rajend Mesthrie's A Dictionary of South African Indian English in our interview, and it may well be the "brand new dictionary" she refers to in stanza six. Published in 2010, Mesthrie's book is the first written compilation of SAI terminology and expressions. The speaker solemnly reflects on this as "a book to mark bed-made words", provoking the absence of orality in the intervention of objective written record. In the poem, dialect is assigned to the relatives at "aunty's house"-the ambiguous "them"-forcefully reverberating the voices of a collective. With the shift to italics, we are able to see different voices on the page and are propelled to imagine their elocutions. We see, in the phrases in italics, orality's resistance to being captured on paper, and its capacity to live beyond the page. Oiyoh is best described in the activity of speech, having no precise English word equivalent to house its complex resonances and ideological perspectives. Likewise, "they put eyes on me" is an idiom exclusive to South African Indians, used to describe bad energies emitting from an observer. The potential evil from having someone "put eyes" is thwarted by rotating a handful of salt around the targeted individual. The everyday language of Chatsworth exceeds denotation. It engages mythologies and ontologies that lead to ritualistic practice. Translation, then, reaches only the contours of a vocabulary, even when the translation is between standard English and "English in language shift". Through language shifts, the poem fluctuates on a spectrum with institutional homogenisation on one end and decolonial gestures on the other (Ramazani 2009, 8). The speaker, anticipating her family's judgment, tries to attain Indianness through the language of the Earth.

Throughout the poem, the speaker consumes a number of ingredients that are popular in Durban Indian cuisine, particularly in Tamil households. It is necessary to remember that the Cartesian view of the world sees the Earth as a sum of separable parts. Each part must be studied in isolation in order to be objectively understood (Kavanagh 2018, 43). As a result, post-colonial cultures are left with the fragmented remains of indigenous knowledge and ontologies. For South African Indians, cultural fragmentation occurs twice: first in their transplantation from India to South Africa, and then by the relocations of the Group Areas Act. The poet employs a decolonial strategy by making efforts to upset the objectivist paradigm through the speaker's appreciation of plant life as reservoirs of cultural history. In other words, through contemplating each item, the speaker gradually develops a broader understanding of the cultural discourse surrounding those items, working from the ground up, so to speak. For instance, when the speaker is accused of "bluffing", she retaliates by snacking on "tamarind seeds": a sour seed used in South Indian dishes, including brinjal¹² curry. "Mom makes brinjal" is based on the real-life image of Simon's mother cooking brinjal at her aunt's house.¹³The inclusion of this image represents the norm of Tamil women in Chatsworth, who often cook in the homes of their relatives and friends. The tamarind seed in its raw form is an acquired taste that demands an experienced palate. The dark pulp causes the speaker's physical and metaphorical "Black tongue", indicating her efforts to put her cultural modes of communication into her mouth. The "mangrove mud" induces a tropical atmosphere, allowing the speaker to move deeper into the Earth. Gradually nature moves into her body, resulting in mud "between [her] toes". She moves on to "climbing / jackfruit trees at aunty's house", thus behaving like her Chatsworth relatives and affording her mother the ability to call her "girl". "Girl" is used in South African Indian English to denote "daughter". Additionally, when a girl gets her period for the first time, she is called a "big girl", and when a woman gets married, her family and friends are referred to as the "girl's side" (Mesthrie 2010, 85). "Girl", ironically a standard English word, is riddled with traces of Indian linguistic cultures. Calling the speaker "girl" marks her belonging within the collective identity of Chatsworth people. Simon attests:

The designator Francine Simon is mediated by patterns of fixity ... and by ripples of shift, in the gesture of Indian South African parents who chose to give their eldest child an English sounding name that does not visibly or audibly enunciate "Indianness". (Simon 2018, 25; italics in original)

Losing her name altogether makes space for the assertion of Indianness. Hansen (2006, 212) observes that residents of Chatsworth perceive their neighbourhoods as intimate spaces and as "a site of strongly asserted insider-culture defined by accents, food, jokes, and, racial features". The speaker, cognisant of her white accent and struggle to "wear" a different voice, assimilates insider culture through alternative routes. She establishes her racial features, "I am dark", proceeds to instil the flavours of Chatsworth into her palate, loses her name and then is confident enough to "try out their voice", rather comically conveying both the voice and the difficulty in achieving authenticity: "oiyoh, but it's so hard eh!" Hansen (2012, 93) observes that in Chatsworth's community theatre and radio entertainment, accents are exaggerated for comic relief, furthermore, "exaggerated 'white' accents are deployed to portray the typical overambitious lahnee¹⁴who tries to expunge every trace of his Indianness". Consequently, the speaker enacts both measures of comedic entertainment, strengthening her "Indianness".

The poet uses betel nut as a metaphor for Chatsworth dialect. Betel nuts are staple items used in Tamil rituals and eaten as refreshment between meals. The speaker requires its coarse structure, its darkness and woody bitterness to reshape her tongue. The betel nut is used as a means of reaching the "cultural composite of communication" (Kavanagh 2018, 43), which the speaker must rebuild for herself before she can understand her relatives' worldviews. The imagery of vegetation outlines the ontological nature of the relationship between Indians and South African landscape, where an exploitative agricultural past is one of the culture's defining factors. The mouth and tongue are given purpose beyond their verbal duties-they constitute a palate that is tightly intertwined with nature. Through the dialect, the speaker is able to access fragments of her cultural roots, and is furthermore removed from such roots in comparison with her relatives, given that she is a bidialectal speaker.

The tension emerging from the speaker's efforts to assimilate her relatives' dialect emphasises the political power of language and its decolonial capabilities. The poem corroborates the Fanonian view that "[t]o speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture " (Fanon 1986, 8). Moreover, it shows that dialect encapsulates unique, local worldviews and mindsets. Simon's use of natural elements illustrates Ngügi's (1981, 15) reservations that "culture does not merely reflect that history, or rather it does so by actually forming images or pictures of the world of nature and nurture". If language is the image-forming liaison of culture, and if the speaker cannot adopt the desired language, she resolves the issue by focusing on the images of nature and nurture in their tangible configurations. Understanding "Betel-Nut" requires an insider's understanding of South African Indian English. I have referred to lexical definitions throughout this analysis, conveying how the poem's meanings deepen when it is read in this context. The use of language certifies the poem's local specificity and the role of language in decolonising knowledge.

 

Conclusion

The poems analysed in this article elucidate a number of decolonial themes and preoccupations. Both poems signify the importance of orality and dialect as a means of transferring generational knowledge, and thus providing counter-narratives to Western epistemology and discourse. Gunner (2000, 1) postulates that orality in Africa does not merely signal the absence of literature but must be appreciated as an alternative model that charts the development of human beings. While Indian cultures contain a long history of literacy, for South African Indians, orality flourished as compensation for broken genealogies, lost traditions and fractured cultural identities. South African Indians have lived in the country for over 150 years, experiencing a long, troublesome history of systematic oppression through indenture and apartheid. Simon's poetry signifies a need and relevance for South African Indian narratives to be perceived as movements towards decolonising outputs.

Simon's reference to oral traditions challenges Western history as a chronological, universal, coherent, totalising, patriarchal account of all human experience (Smith 1999, 30-31). "Tamil Familiars" subverts aspects of Western ontology by representing the voices of marginalised women and the significance of orality in their self-regulation. Women are portrayed as the bearers of knowledge, as the remaining links to India, and thus, to their pre-colonial cultural traditions and ways of being. Simon discloses that the characters in Thungachi (2017) are based on influential people in her life, stating in the interview that "the more you read it the more you can see that there are characters. There's a mum character, there's a dad-a little bit less of a dad character. There's a grandma character. There's an aunt".¹⁵ While the poems reveal that women are key custodians of subversive knowledge-through their cooking, their relationship with nature, their animistic ontologies, or their use of dialect-the reclamation of such marginalised knowledge is pitted against implications of women's subservience.

Hansen (2006, 216) identifies that in Chatsworth, the domestic environment is conceived as the core of Indianness, associated with cuisine, ceremonial activity and authority over women's bodies. Evidently the poems depict the speaker's elders in domestic environments, along with their concerns about marriage, cooking, and preservation of the female body. However, by centralising the voices of the women and portraying them as authoritative figures, Simon offers matriarchal narratives that contribute to what Clery and Metcalfe (2018, 10) call "feminist/community archives", as her accounts of South African Indian womanhood "describe the particular contexts in which stories are told-nationally, locally and relationally". Nfah-Abbenyi cautions against uniform generalisations of womanhood in Africa, and this easily applies to the population of South African Indian women. She postulates that "fixed identity must therefore be destabilised and by doing so, fixed relations of gender and power hierarchies can also be disorganized" (Nfah-Abbenyi 2005, 274). Simon negotiates her cultural identity through multiple dimensions of "femaleness" (itself a cultural construct).

Through her poetry and interview responses, Simon demonstrates an acute awareness of the marginalisation of SAI culture and the troublesome ironing out of SAI heterogeneity. She remedies these issues in her experimental poetry, which distils her specific variation of the South African Indian woman's experience. Her analytical and feminist reflections allow her to question the patriarchal imputations of Tamil "superstition", Catholicism and formal education, while distinguishing the power of women as sources of decolonial attributes and potential agents of ontological paradigm shift. "Betel-Nut" reflects on South African Indian English as a unique worldview informed by an attachment to linguistic identities, as a compensatory measure for the loss of Indian indigenous languages (Hansen 2012, 2). Additionally, the poem sees nature as a historical archive that has the power to ignite the speaker's connection to her cultural past, when her spoken word falls short.

Overall, Simon's poetry in Thungachi (2017) makes visible the gaps in SAI history and consequent representations of the culture. The poems discussed in this article represent memory as a collective enterprise, where an individual's memory is often accompanied by memories of others and cultural continuity depends on communal collaboration. The decolonising of South African poetry must include the poetry of all marginalised South African groups, including that of SAI women. They have been subjected to oppressive colonial practices, and are largely denied representation in anthologies and curricula. Simon's work holds significant value in the current projects of decolonising knowledge and education in South Africa. It is my intention to provoke further research into the poetry of contemporary SAI writers, whose work provokes political resistance through a reclamation and centralisation of the local and the personal.

 

Acknowledgements

I thank my supervisors, Denise Newfield and Barbara Boswell, for their intellectual guidance, immeasurable support and inspiration during my research journey. I would also like to thank the National Research Foundation (Grant no. 105159) for funding my Master's studies and making the production of this research paper possible. My gratitude goes out to Francine Simon for giving me hours of her time to conduct in-depth interviews.

 

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1 The findings presented in this article are based on my Master's dissertation (Govender 2019), which provides a critical reading of Thungachi (Simon 2017) in relation to indigenous knowledge and within the political background and socio-cultural context of the poet's lived experiences.
2 Based on my interview with Simon (Durban, 27 June 2018).
3 Based on my interview with Simon (Durban, 27 June 2018).
4 Based on my interview with Simon (Durban, 27 June 2018).
5 Based on my interview with Simon (Durban, 27 June 2018).
6 Based on my interview with Simon (Durban, 25 June 2018).
7 Based on my interview with Simon (Durban, 27 June 2018).
8 Pichachi is a Tamil word, meaning "she-demon". It is used in South African Indian dialect as a derogatory term to describe women who appear unappealing or sinister.
9 Based on my interview with Simon (Durban, 27 June 2018).
10 Based on my interview with Simon (Durban, 27 June 2018).
11 Based on my interview with Simon (Durban, 27 June 2018).
12 Brinjal is the preferred South African Indian term for aubergine.
13 Based on my interview with Simon (Durban, 27 June 2018).
14 According to Mesthrie (2010, 132), lahnee is a South African Indian slang used as a noun to describe "one's employer ... a person of means ... a White man" or as an adjective to describe someone "exceedingly rich".
15 Based on my interview with Simon (Durban, 25 June 2018).

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THEMED SECTION 2
ARTICLE

 

Reflections on Decoloniality from a South African Indian Perspective: Conceptual Metaphors in Vivekananda's Poem "My Play Is Done"

 

 

Suren Naicker

University of South Africa. naicks@unisa.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8680-930X

 

 

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ABSTRACT

Swami Vivekananda was an influential Indian saint, poet, philosopher and political revolutionary. His work can be seen as a conduit for South African Hindus who are part of the Indian diaspora, allowing them to connect with their historical, cultural and spiritual roots in the religious and conceptual world of India. The first step to decolonising those who have been subjected to colonial hegemony is to (re)connect them with their intellectual and spiritual roots, and it is argued here that this is precisely the zeitgeist behind Vivekananda's life and mission in general. His poetry is particularly valuable because he wrote in English, instead of his native Bengali, and was thereby able to reach English-speaking Hindus all over the world. In 1936 Indians in South Africa decided to adopt English as a lingua franca, both as a language of teaching and learning, and as a home language. This article focuses on one of these poems, "My Play Is Done", which Vivekananda composed in 1895 in New York. The poem presents the human condition from a Hindu perspective, which differs substantially from the Western way of thinking. This article explores these concepts within the framework of conceptual metaphor theory. With reference to metaphors used in the poem, various aspects of Hindu philosophical thought will be explored, showing how Oriental conceptual reality differs from Western thought. This provides a link to an ancient precolonial way of thinking, accessible to diasporas around the world.

Keywords: decolonisation; conceptual metaphor theory; indigenous knowledge; cognitive linguistics; Vivekananda; Hinduism; global South

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Introduction

"Decolonisation" is a buzzword in both South African politics and academia. This is a layered concept, which encompasses finding one's roots, allowing one to get in touch and reconnect with a rich cultural history that has been lost as a result of being systematically marginalised and denigrated both politically and culturally. The current generation of South African Indians (including myself) are a case in point, having accommodated and assimilated into the Western/Eurocentric linguistic and cultural norms of South African society. This process has happened systematically during the country's chequered colonial history, along religious, cultural and linguistic parameters. Colonisation gradually entrenches the belief that one's culture and beliefs are inadequate or lacking in some way (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2012, 4). Hence, the first step in reclaiming one's cultural history with unapologetic pride is getting in touch with that cultural history, which has been eroded.

The current generation of Indians in South Africa are essentially monolingual speakers of English, though most are multidialectal, or bidialectal at least (Naicker 2019a). Hence, a body of work such as Vivekananda's Complete Works, written mostly in English (very small sections have been translated), is the perfect segue for culturally disenfranchised persons in the Indian diaspora to take the first step into an ocean of wisdom that they have lost touch with. In this regard, Delgado et al. (2000, 8) mention cultures being more or less relevant to other cultures. In South Africa, Indian and Hindu culture was "less relevant" within the colonial context, but Vivekananda's teachings and writings managed to achieve relevance to colonial society and uplift the Indian diaspora. Likewise, Coolsaet (2016, 166) writes of a "hierarchization of cultural values" that precludes some groups from "participating in social interaction on equal footing with others". In this context, Vivekananda and others of his ilk elevate and instil a sense of pride in a marginalised minority group. Quijano (2007, 176) explains the colonial mindset when he argues it is not surprising that

history was conceived as an evolutionary continuum from the primitive to the civilized; from the traditional to the modern; from the savage to the rational; from pro-capitalism to capitalism, etc. And Europe thought of itself as the mirror of the future of all the other societies and cultures; as the advanced form of the history of the entire species.

Coolsaet (2016, 166) draws on the notion of "cognitive justice", explaining that it is a "a concept originating in decolonial thought" that "encompasses not only the right of different practices to co-exist, but entails an active engagement across their knowledgesystems". By bringing Hindu Indian ideas to the West, and giving the Indian diasporas around the world access to their indigenous knowledge systems, Vivekananda makes a move towards a form of cognitive justice.

In relation to decolonial thought, it is an interesting irony that Vivekananda taught and wrote almost exclusively in English. Delgado et al. (2000, 12) point out in this regard that "the most obvious [example of colonial hegemony], of course, is the reproduction of the nineteenth-century nationalist ideology: one territory, one language, one culture and the consequences it has for the post-enlightenment concept of 'foreigner' and 'citizens'". Vivekananda uses this fact to his advantage, and by using English as his medium was able to reach a far wider audience. The Indian community in South Africa adopted English as a first language, so his work is accessible to them; he took this "tool of colonisation" and used it to decolonialise.

My article is structured as follows: a brief overview of key exponents within the field of decolonial studies is discussed in the first section on "Decoloniality in the Contemporary Global South with Reference to Swami Vivekananda". Here I argue that their overall philosophy is in keeping with the crux of Vivekananda's thinking, and some comparisons are drawn. The "Background" section provides a brief overview of Swami Vivekananda's life and teachings. Thereafter, the "Theoretical Framework" section outlines the basic tenets of conceptual metaphor theory, which is a theory within the cognitive linguistics school of thought, and purports that metaphors pertain to any cross-domain mapping at the linguistic level, the conceptual level or both. After clarifying the basic assumptions of the theory, the "Analysis" section provides a brief analysis of three salient metaphors from Vivekananda's poem, "My Play Is Done". These metaphors draw on the domains of JOURNEY and HOMECOMING.¹ Various other conceptual metaphors can be found in the poem, but these are merely mentioned here, as even a superficial analysis would require at least a separate article.

My article, then, focuses on a well-known poem in the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. This influential corpus of text comprises nine volumes, and serves as the foundation of modern-day Hinduism.

 

Decoloniality in the Contemporary Global South with Reference to Swami Vivekananda

Like the term "Third World", the phrase "global South" has come to refer to a section of the world that has hitherto been disenfranchised, marginalised and denigrated by those imposing their political, linguistic and cultural hegemony on them. While the phrase "Third World" should not connote inferiority, it does allude to a hierarchy, since it refers to countries that, during the Cold War, were neither aligned with the Anglo-American side (aka the "First World") nor the Soviet Union (the "Second World"). The "global South" does not necessarily imply geographical location, since New Zealand and Australia are not included in this group, despite being in the southern hemisphere, while Kashmir is included, despite being in the northern hemisphere. I believe, therefore, that this is nothing but a euphemism for poorer countries, most of which happen to be in the southern hemisphere. I concur with Maldonado-Torres (2004, 29) in this regard, who points out that for "too long the discipline of philosophy proceeded as if geopolitical location and ideas about space were only contingent features of philosophical reasoning". This is a recurring theme in Maldonado-Torres (2004, 2931), though it raises an interesting point regarding the quandary faced by Indians in modern-day South Africa. Indians in South Africa are displaced, but have had to make several decisions regarding the degree to which they assimilate to Anglocentric norms, knowing that there is an inversely proportional relationship with regard to maintaining one's own culture and the degree of assimilation into the host nation (see Naicker 2012 and 2019a, where I argue that the point of assimilating was economic viability, since failure to inculcate indigenous knowledges into the mainstream Eurocentric culture might entail further cultural and economic marginalisation).

Maldonado-Torres (2004, 30) warns of the dangers of premising one's political and epistemological ideals on a shift from a colonial identity to "the idea of a neutral epistemic subject whose reflections only respond to the strictures of the spaceless realm of the universal". Scholars such as Quijano (2007, 168) point out that such efforts ironically lead to political strife among poor countries, leading to instability, whereby the global Western elite "are still the principal beneficiaries". Quijano (2007, 177) further argues that "it is not necessary to reject the whole idea of totality in order to divest oneself of the ideas and images with which it was elaborated within European colonial/modernity", because instead of throwing the baby out with the bath water, it is more pragmatic to make changes from the bottom up. In this regard, Vivekananda calls for a more subtle approach, using the metaphor of dew, saying that one's actions should be slow "and silent, as the gentle dew that falls in the morning, unseen and unheard yet producing a most tremendous result", adding that much of what has been accomplished in India "has been the work of the calm, patient, all-suffering spiritual race upon the world of thought" (CW-3, 61).² Speaking in the context of religion (although, in Eastern thinking, there is no separation between the religious, the practical and the political), he points out the following:

[H]ow foolish it was for an exponent of one religion to declare that another man's belief was wrong. It was as reasonable as a man from Asia coming to America and after viewing the course of the Mississippi to say to it: "You are running entirely wrong. You will have to go back to the starting place and commence it all over again." It would be just as foolish for a man in America to visit the Alps and after following the course of a river to the German Sea to inform it that its course was too tortuous and that the only remedy would be to flow as directed. (CW-3, 284)

Bolstering Vivekananda's point, for Maldonado-Torres (2004, 29), "philosophers and teachers of philosophy tend to affirm their roots in a spiritual region always described in geographical terms", though he cites Europe as being at the epicentre. Vivekananda also asserts the roots of Hinduism in India, but there is a rationale behind it: to get the message across. Hinduism adapted to the region in which it was placed, wherever that was: in the same way as the panentheistic conception of "God" in the tradition, the axiology of the religion as a whole can be seen in a similar light. It is adaptable to a particular geo-political region, yet it holds on to the fundamental tenets upon which it is premised. Regarding the issue of spiritual roots, Maldonado-Torres (2004, 31) raises the contentious issue of "authochtony [sic]", which again raises interesting questions for those comprising diasporas around the world, since they have been displaced, and had to invent new identities. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2009) raises this very question and tackles the issue of what it means to be a native, though he relies on binary oppositions, which in effect exclude marginalised groups such as the Coloured and Indian communities in South Africa. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015, 485) points out that "the deepening and widening of decolonization movements in those spaces that experienced the slave trade, imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, neocolonialism, and underdevelopment" expand the debate to include a variety of contexts, including the Indian diasporas around the world; he further mentions India in the broader context later on, but not the South African Indian situation specifically. Here Vivekananda's role in general is to ground culturally displaced Indians, despite their being away from their Motherland. Quijano (2007) ends his article with a call to allow all to choose between various languages, cultural identities and appurtenances without fear, but this would be an oversimplification, since, for example, Indian people in South Africa can wear Western dress without being accused of "cultural appropriation", whereas a White person wearing Indian dress would run the risk of being accused of such. In a different but related example, Delgado et al. (2000, 8) cite Mignolo as pointing out the lack of commensurability regarding the German-Bolivian cultural situation: there is a German channel in Bolivia that gives German news and weather, but one never finds a Bolivian channel in Germany. Again, this raises interesting questions about who is "allowed" to do what, and not, and why, but this is beyond the scope of this article. It is evident, though, that this issue is far beyond a simplistic view of colonial powers as having carte blanche to do as they wish in contemporary society.

In the South African Indian context, two things are worth noting. First, a unique dialect of English has evolved within the South African Indian community. It is unique in the sense that most of the current generation speak it as their mother tongue, yet it is uniquely identifiable as Indian, or as South African Indian. There is considerable scholarship on South African Indian English, and for an overview the interested reader is referred to such works as Barnes (1992; 1993), Naicker (2012; 2019a), and Mesthrie (1991; 1992). The existence of this language variety bespeaks an unapologetic pride within an otherwise marginalised minority in South Africa. Regarding the political and social history of the Indian community in South Africa, this has been recorded by scholars such as Dhupelia-Mesthrie (2000) and Desai and Vahed (2010), to which the reader is referred. The nuances of the community (to which I belong), together with its statistical demographics, religious and linguistic varieties, both inter- and intra-linguistic, and other aspects, are very complex. There is a lot more work to be done in this area.

The next section discusses Vivekananda's role as an influential personality both within and outside India. It will also explain how he paved the way for a new India, and brought about renewed pride in the Indian tradition, especially for the Indian diasporas worldwide.

 

Background

Swami Vivekananda was a Hindu monk, an influential poet, saint, intellectual and political revolutionary, though none of these roles can do justice to the various domains upon which he had an influence. His spiritual mentor was a Bengali mystic who went by the name of Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna never initiated anyone, but his first twelve monastic disciples founded their own order, and with Swami Vivekananda as their head, founded the "Ramakrishna Order of Monks". Vivekananda and the "brother-disciples" initiated themselves, using the mantras that Kali, who was soon to become Swami Abedhananda, took down "from a monk of the dashanami order" (Abedhananda 1970, 121). This was Vivekananda's idea, and it was here that "Naren³ took the name 'Vividishananda'" (Abedhananda 1970, 121). Thereafter, while wandering around India as an itinerant monk, "he was living as a wandering monk under the name ' Saccidananda'" (Abedhananda 1970, 175-76). He chose the name "Vivekananda" only prior to his first departure to the United States of America (USA). The name "Vivekananda" was chosen for him by one of the local princes who befriended the swami, and suggested the name based on a story that is to be found in the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (Gupta 1974), which documents real-time conversations between Ramakrishna and some of his disciples.

There is a vast body of literature in the Hindu canon that contains detailed analyses of Vivekananda's influence, both internationally and in India. The field of influence and impact he has had on visionaries and exponents from various sectors include science, industry, academia, religious thought and politics, as detailed by authors such as Chaudhuri (2005), Burke (2000), Satprakashananda (1978), Tapasyananda (2011), Bodhasarananda (2008), Mumukshananda (2003), and Dhar (1976). Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list of references, but these sources cover the main aspects of Vivekananda's influence in different domains.

The organisation that Vivekananda started is known as the Ramakrishna Math and Mission; its headquarters is known as Belur Math, north of Kolkata, and the South African branch is in Glen Anil, Durban. To date, this is arguably one of the biggest global neo-Hindu organisations, with branches all over the world. Delgado et al. (2000, 11) point out that "we cannot go back to other 'original' thinking traditions"; but Vivekananda's influence, not only within Indian communities, but also within the Western world, challenges this view. One could even argue that his work is a unique example of original thinking traditions being reintroduced to communities who had lost their connection to them; the Ramakrishna Math and Mission in South Africa is a testimony to this.

Hinduism is said to be "the oldest of the world's living religions", and has "no founder" (Sarma 1996, 3). Other idiosyncrasies, such as its not being a "book-based" religion, make it rather "difficult to distinguish between its essentials and nonessentials" (Sarma 1996, 3). Even so, broadly speaking, Hindu philosophy can be divided into two main branches, each comprising six sub-schools, which are further divided into various schools. Vivekananda repeatedly made claims such as the "latest discoveries of science seem like echoes" of Vedanta philosophy (CW-1, 3, 8). He believed that the Vedanta (being one of the six orthodox schools of Hindu thought) should form the basis of the reformed version of Hinduism that he advocated, and felt that an in-depth study of the Vedanta is all that is required to know the Hindu philosophy, adding: "I think that it is Vedanta, and Vedanta alone, that can become the universal religion of man" (CW-3, 103). Interestingly, influential scholars in the field of decolonial scholarship, such as Quijano (2007, 177), point out that "[o]utside the 'West', virtually in all known cultures, every cosmic vision, every image, all systematic production of knowledge is associated with a perspective of totality". Maldonado-Torres's thesis, which speaks of the rebellion against (Western) ontological separation, is commensurable with this point.⁴

Regarding the notion of "totality", the non-dualistic school of Vedanta, known as Advaita-Vedanta, postulates that the external material universe is only an apparition, and that people need to realise this truth, instead of mistaking the mundane objects of sense-perception as reality. There are twelve different schools of Hindu philosophico-religious thought, six of which are deemed authentic as they are premised on the Vedic texts (cf. Harshananda 2011 for a detailed exposition). In-depth knowledge is not necessary for my analysis: the important point is that the basic premises of Indian philosophical thought are the foundation of Vivekananda's thinking at the time.

The poem "My Play Is Done" was written in 1895 while the poet was in New York City, and he seemed to have become more and more aware of the fact that his mission on earth was coming to an end. In the poem he supplicates the "Divine Mother" to allow him to return "home", which for Vivekananda would be a blissful state of ananda beyond the polarities of joy and suffering. The theoretical framework and my underlying assumptions are outlined in the next section.

 

Theoretical Framework

Cognitive poetics is a fledgling field that aims to apply the findings of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) to the domain of poetry. Works by authors such as Lakoff and Turner (1989) serve as key foundations for this idea, and the reader is referred to them for a more detailed outline. Lakoff and Johnson (1989) popularised the notion of metaphor as a fundamental feature of the human conceptual system. Lakoff (2014) provides a historical overview of developments in the field. The basic tenets that are relevant to the current study will be outlined below, with the caveat that this is a streamlined version of the theory as it applies to the current study.

Lakoff and Turner (1989), exploring mostly poetic metaphors from modern English literature, showed that there are superordinate metaphors, under which subordinate metaphors are subsumed; for example, the LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor encompasses the LOVERS ARE TRAVELLERS metaphor. Examples are to be found in Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and later works by McEnery and Hardie (2012, 186). There are well-established instances of conceptual metaphors, which speakers of a given language take for granted. The article follows a convention used by Kövecses (2010, 910), where the source domain and target domain are illustrated in tabular form, and relevant aspects of the former are indicated with arrows as transferring onto the analogue in the target domain; this allows the metaphor to be parsed, resulting in a particular conception (or perhaps reconceptualisation) of the target domain. Examples used in everyday English to describe relationships include: "We are at a crossroads in this relationship"; "This is a very bumpy road"; "We're spinning our wheels"; "This is not going anywhere", and so on. These are understood as surface linguistic manifestations of an underlying conceptual metaphor, namely LOVE IS A JOURNEY, and this can be mapped in the following way:

 

 

Mapping is a process where selected elements from the source domain (aka the vehicle) are transferred to the target domain (aka the tenor), resulting in the target domain being conceptualised in a particular manner (cf. Chapter 5 in Pinker 2007). In the cited case, relevant aspects from the JOURNEY frame are mapped onto the LOVE frame, and in this context a discussion around common goals would make sense: reaching the destination would map onto some kind of culmination of the relationship, perhaps a matrimonial ceremony.

Of course, LOVE need not exclusively be seen from this perspective, so eliciting this particular source domain creates a certain perception of the target domain, which says a lot about the way this experience speaks to the lived experience of the interlocutors. Once a source domain has been chosen to illustrate a particular concept, certain aspects of the source domain need to be blocked, whereas other aspects need to be mapped. This is known as the invariance principle, initially put forth by Lakoff (1990, 54), and explained critically in more detail by Turner (1990) and Naicker (2019b). Various arguments have been proffered for why the mapping process is unidirectional (so that selected aspects from the source domain are mapped onto the target domain), but it is generally accepted that metaphors are mapped this way, notwithstanding the critiques. This is explained clearly by Evans (2014, 183), who points out that the mapping "goes in one direction". In light of this, the article will explore some of the key conceptual metaphors used by Vivekananda in one of the last poems he wrote, titled "My Play Is Done".

 

Analysis

For this purpose, the poem is cited below in its entirety; a sample of the linguistic manifestations of the relevant underlying conceptual metaphors are indicated, followed by a table illustrating the mapping between the source and target domains. Thereafter, the import of the respective metaphors will be discussed. Three metaphors are chosen for particular focus, as they all draw on WATER as a source domain; these include VIVEKANANDA'S LIFE IS A HOMEWARD-BOUND VOYAGE, EARTHLY TEMPTATIONS ARE LIKE A DRINK BEFORE A THIRSTY PERSON, and THE EARTH IS A BUBBLE. Other conceptual metaphors will be mentioned in passing, since they are not the focus of the article.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015, 490) argues that the philosophies and knowledge of colonised people undergo a process of colonialism. Vivekananda's poems in general are based on concepts and knowledge that characterise Hinduism, and these are expressed using metaphors that derive from the Hindu religion and philosophy. Interacting with his work, internalising these metaphors, can be said to be a kind of epistemological decolonisation.

The poem is taken from CW-6 (102). The lines are numbered for ease of reference:

My Play Is Done

1 Ever rising, ever falling with the waves of time,

2 still rolling on I go

3 From fleeting scene to scene ephemeral,

4 with life' s currents' ebb and flow.

5 Oh! I am sick of this unending force;

6 these shows they please no more.

7 This ever running, never reaching,

8 nor e' en a distant glimpse of shore!

9 From life to life I' m waiting at the gates,

10 alas, they open not.

11 Dim are my eyes with vain attempt

12 to catch one ray long sought.

13 On little life' s high, narrow bridge

14 I stand and see below

15 The struggling, crying, laughing throng.

16 For what? No one can know.

17 In front yon gates stand frowning dark,

18 and say: "No farther way,

19 This is the limit; tempt not Fate,

20 bear it as best you may;

21 Go, mix with them and drink this cup

22 and be as mad as they.

23 Who dares to know but comes to grief;

24 stop then, and with them stay."

25 Alas for me. I cannot rest.

26 This floating bubble, earth-

27 Its hollow form, its hollow name,

28 its hollow death and birth-

29 For me is nothing. How I long

30 to get beyond the crust

31 Of name and form! Ah! ope the gates;

32 to me they open must.

33 Open the gates of light, O Mother, to me Thy tired son.

34 I long, oh, long to return home!

35 Mother, my play is done.

36 You sent me out in the dark to play,

37 and wore a frightful mask;

38 Then hope departed, terror came,

39 and play became a task.

40 Tossed to and fro, from wave to wave

41 in this seething, surging sea

42 Of passions strong and sorrows deep,

43 grief is, and joy to be,

44 Where life is living death, alas! and death-

45 who knows but ' tis

46 Another start, another round of this old wheel

47 of grief and bliss?

48 Where children dream bright, golden dreams,

49 too soon to find them dust,

50 And aye look back to hope long lost

51 and life a mass of rust!

52 Too late, the knowledge age cloth gain;

53 scarce from the wheel we're gone

54 When fresh, young lives put their strength

55 to the wheel, which thus goes on

56 From day to day and year to year.

57 'Tis but delusion's toy,

58 False hope its motor; desire, nave;

59 its spokes are grief and joy.

60 I go adrift and know not whither.

61 Save me from this fire!

62 Rescue me, merciful Mother, from floating with desire!

63 Turn not to me Thy awful face,

64 ' tis more than I can bear.

65 Be merciful and kind to me,

66 to chide my faults forbear.

67 Take me, O Mother, to those shores

68 where strifes for ever cease;

69 Beyond all sorrows, beyond tears,

70 beyond e' en earthly bliss;

71 Whose glory neither sun, nor moon,

72 nor stars that twinkle bright,

73 Nor flash of lightning can express.

74 They but reflect its light.

75 Let never more delusive dreams

76 veil off Thy face from me.

77 My play is done, O Mother,

78 break my chains and make me free!

Conceptual Metaphor 1: VIVEKANANDA'S LIFE IS A HOMEWARD-BOUND VOYAGE

Examples:⁵

Line 1: Ever rising, ever falling with the waves of time

Line 4: life's currents' ebb and flow

Lines 33-34: Open the gates of light, O Mother, to me Thy tired son. / I long, oh, long to return home! / Mother, my play is done

Line 67: Take me, O Mother, to those shores

 

 

Import of Metaphor

In this poem Vivekananda appeals to God, conceptualised as the Divine Mother, to free him from his worldly sojourn and take him back to a place where he can be at peace after a period of strife and hard work. Though rich in symbolism, the voyage metaphor takes the form of a conceit in this particular poem, since the same metaphor is carried through from beginning to end, with various metaphors interspersed in between.

Vivekananda explains his experience through the lens of a Vedantic mindset. In the cycle of joy and sorrow, love and hate and other emotions, each experience is always paired with its counterpart, always playing on the psyche like waves and troughs, going up and down ostensibly without end. He expresses his frustration at this process, and says that he is tired of it and wants it to stop. He wants to return to the shore whence he came, which can be interpreted in various ways. Vivekananda often conceptualised his life and mission as a voyage to unknown lands, and metaphorically spoke about "launching his boat into the sea", for example (CW-8, 179). Aside from an explicit desire to return to his origin, he also calls on the Divine Mother, who is possibly the goddess Kali, to hear his plea and guide him "home". This will release him from his mission, which he feels he has now fulfilled. Further frustration is expressed at his inability to please the waves of time and life, which lead to more and more misery, and he could not stand watching people constantly being caught up in it, despite his warnings.

There are only two options: one must either forget philosophising about the world and spiritual life, and adopt a hedonistic attitude of enjoying the world and all its ostensible pleasures, notwithstanding the fact that this will be evanescent and fraught with all sorts of misery, or one can follow Vivekananda's advice and teachings in an attempt to escape from this world of misery. The poem implies that he had chosen the latter, and more and more he had come to realise that the world is like a floating bubble, and everything associated with it is empty and ephemeral.

The poem creates a sense of frustration and despair, and that, since all this seemingly endless suffering is ineffable, the "ebb and flow" of life is a "current" pulling him in different directions. Vivekananda implores the Divine Mother to provide him with solace by freeing him from the chains of the world so that he can return "home" to the shore; he says that he thinks his mission has been accomplished (his "play is done"), and that he should be allowed to return home. He says that although this is his earnest wish, he feels somewhat lost at the moment, and needs some guidance in getting his "vessel" safely back to the "shore".

Though obviously not intended, one can draw a poignant analogy between the poem and the Indian indentured labourers who were inveigled to come to South Africa, only to find themselves within the shackles of veritable slavery under the British. They arrived on ships, and many died en route. For the descendants of these labourers, reading Vivekananda's poem could take them from those harrowing voyages to South Africa (which started in 1860) to a spiritual voyage back "home".⁶

Conceptual Metaphor 2: EARTHLY TEMPTATIONS ARE LIKE A DRINK BEFORE A THIRSTY PERSON

Examples:

Line 21: Go, mix with them and drink this cup / and be as mad as they

 

 

Import of Metaphor

Vivekananda wishes to illustrate the difficulties involved in overcoming one's desires by drawing the analogy above. The metaphor of drinking can also be used for healthy experiences, as when he requests his fellow monks to pass "the Cup that has satisfied your thirst" (CW-5, 36), since here he is referring to spreading the teachings of Ramakrishna based on his philosophy of Bhakti, which is defined as "devotion; love (of God)", according to Sivananda (2015, 40)⁷.

This metaphor refers to people who do not heed the warning to refrain from indulging in worldly pleasures; even though Vivekananda understands that it may be the conventional thing to do, he points out that he cannot do more than he has already done in terms of warning them of the dangers and consequences of doing so. From a Vedantic perspective, worldly pleasures lead to suffering born of attachment, and the purpose of human life is to transcend the temptations of the senses and the attachment to the world, thereby reclaiming our oneness with the Divine Consciousness, from which we are temporarily separated.

Though Vivekananda is an avid exponent of Vedanta philosophy, he certainly does not claim that the other schools of thought are to be ignored. In this regard, he sometimes puts forth the Yoga system of Patanjali as the "how" of Hindu spiritual life, the Sankhya system as the "why", and the Vedanta as the "end". In this way, we can understand these as three complementary approaches (see Naicker [2016, 76] for more information regarding this claim). People should follow these three approaches to save themselves from the endless cycle of misery: but if they choose not to heed his call, they must accept the consequences of that and "be as mad" as the rest of the world, chasing pointlessly after worldly pleasures.

Conceptual Metaphor 3: THE EARTH IS A BUBBLE

Examples:

Line 3: scene to scene ephemeral

Lines 26-28: This floating bubble, earth / Its hollow form, its hollow name / its hollow death and birth / For me is nothing

 

 

Import of Metaphor

Just as everything has a temporary existence, so too does the earth, and here Vivekananda makes the point that he has done his job in the world, which will also only be here for a limited time, so he is ready to leave.

The title of the poem is a reference to the LIFE IS A PLAY metaphor, and, in realising that his mission is nearly accomplished, he says that his "play" is coming to a close. As part of this realisation, he points out that the entire world is but a temporary structure created out of our spatio-temporal perception. The moment we realise that the world of space and time is like a dream, and we reach a higher awareness that is no longer constrained by the limitations of the senses, the world will "pop" like a bubble, and we will realise that we are nothing but pure spirit, one with the Universal Spirit we call God. Vivekananda's point is that he has done his job reminding people of this fact, and so he now wishes to return home and implores the Divine Being, conceptualised here as the Divine Mother, who is working "through him", to hear his plea.

Having looked at the import of three metaphors from the poem "My Play Is Done"- VIVEKANANDA'S LIFE IS A HOMEWARD-BOUND VOYAGE, EARTHLY TEMPTATIONS ARE LIKE A DRINK BEFORE A THIRSTY PERSON and THE EARTH IS A BUBBLE-it should be noted that there many other conceptual metaphors in the poem as well, which touch on various themes. These include:⁸

• GOD IS A MOTHER (lines 33, 35, 62, 63, 67, 77);

• LIFE IS A PLAY (lines 35, 36, 37);

• SEEING IS KNOWING (lines 75, 76, 11, 36);

• LIFE IS A CYCLE (line 1);

• LIFE IS A DREAM (lines 48-49, 75);

• LIFE IS BONDAGE (line 78).

Regarding the metaphor GOD IS A MOTHER, it is no secret to those within the Hindu tradition that Divinity is often represented in terms of the feminine. For Vivekananda to do this is especially significant in his own life because, for a long time, he resisted the notion that God can be seen in terms of the feminine. His spiritual development is traced in various works by Nivedita (1910), Dhar (1976), Gupta (1974) and Nikhilananda (2010), which show him as an obstinate youth who was as a member of the Brahmo Samaj, a group that advocated that God is a nameless and formless entity, beyond description and transcendent. Vivekananda gradually accepted the notion that God can be present via the guru, via various avatars, and even as part and parcel of the material world, from a panentheistic perspective. This culminated in the notion that the Divine can also be experienced via various forms of the goddess in the Hindu pantheon, which Vivekananda came to accept after a long spiritual journey, as is outlined in the aforementioned sources. Perhaps drawing on the well-known Shakespearean trope, the LIFE IS A PLAY metaphor illustrates the illusory nature of one's role and identity in life, and if one maps the entailments of the source domain, insofar as one's theatrical role as an actor is temporary, and something put on for a limited time, it seems clear that the "real person" is someone (something) beyond the confines of this earthly life, when the "play is done" (assuming that Vivekananda is not being exclusive in saying that his play is done). He draws on this source domain in several contexts, pointing out, for example, that "the world is a play", and that all "are His playmates" (CW-1, 249). The SEEING IS KNOWING metaphor is quite commonplace, as evidenced by statements such as "I see what you mean", "Your argument is not really clear to me", "I understand the main idea, but I'm a bit blurry on the details", etc. Vivekananda often uses this source domain as well in contexts other than the poem under discussion, including the reference to foresight, pointing out that the majority of people "cannot see beyond a few years" (CW-1, 23). The cyclical nature of life is also fairly well known, with phrases such as "What goes around comes around" making their way into everyday parlance. The word "cycle" is used 71 times in Vivekananda's Complete Works; most uses are metaphorical and draw on various domains. The use of "cyclical" in this manner shows that the notion is not premised on the manifestation of the lexical item in this poem alone. The phrase "is a dream" appears eight times in Vivekananda's Complete Works, and is used metaphorically each time (CW-1, 163; CW-6, 36; CW-7, 52; CW-8, 204; CW-9, 22, 46, 73, 154). With the exception of one (CW-9, 154, where the phrase is used metaphorically to refer to ambition/desire), all these uses conceptualise material life/existence as an ephemeral experience that is not actually "real", premised on the non-dualistic Vedantic idea that for a phenomenon to be real, it must possess immutable consistency; without this criterion, the mere transience of phenomena precludes them from being truly "real". Any primer on Hindu philosophy would explain this idea in more detail, and for such insights the reader is referred to thinkers such as Chatterjee (1996) and Harshananda (2011). The source domain of BONDAGE appears 48 times, and 5.4% of the metaphors used in a sample from the Complete Works pertain to the notion that people are bound to this earthly life as if they are prisoners who are chained by their desires, according to a study by Naicker (2019c) on this topic.

 

Conclusion

This article has explored three conceptual metaphors pertaining to a metaphorical journey that Vivekananda conceptualises, but the theme of HOMECOMING especially stands out, as he asks his metaphorical "Mother" to open the gates and allow him back home. This metaphorical conceit is poignant and relatable if one extends the concept beyond Vivekananda's life. Many people were inveigled by offers of lucrative work in the various colonies, such as the indenture of Indians in South Africa and the West Indies-this was not unlike the slavery of (mostly) West African people who were taken to the USA between 1700 and 1808. These people know they do not really belong in the country into which they were born, but suffer from a perennial identity crisis: are they Indian, South African Indian, Black, American, or African-American? Myesha Jenkins, a well-known poet and anti-apartheid activist,⁹ American by birth and Black, moved to Johannesburg, South Africa in 1993, and says that "all these labels are vacuous" and that she "rejects them all". Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2015, 485) argues that this "is because the domains of culture, the psyche, mind, language, aesthetics, religion, and many others have remained colonized": therefore, the situation of having been colonised is very complex. Vivekananda's works offer a way to decolonise various facets of Indian diasporan identity, showing synchronicity with his thinking and other influential scholars from the global South. South African Indians who visit India often have to explain that they are not Indian, yet will happily self-identify as Indian in South Africa. This point is important because if not for Vivekananda (and other visionaries, such as Aurobindo, Yogananda and the like, though arguably also heavily influenced by Vivekananda), the Indian diaspora in South Africa would be completely disconnected from their rich cultural history. Since most South African Indians speak English as their primary means of communication, Vivekananda's works allow a disenfranchised minority group in South Africa to connect with their spiritual, intellectual and cultural roots. Perhaps Vivekananda was a visionary and knew this, or his global reach was serendipitous: he did point out on several occasions though that his teachings will one day be known "all over the world" (CW-1, 126). Through his organisation, the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, Hindu/Indian diasporas all over the world can benefit from his work.

This article has presented a glimpse into an indigenous knowledge system that Vivekananda helped re-conceptualise. This was done by way of looking at three of his conceptual metaphors:

• VIVEKANANDA' S LIFE IS A HOMEWARD-BOUND VOYAGE;

• EARTHLY TEMPTATIONS ARE LIKE A DRINK BEFORE A THIRSTY PERSON;

• THE EARTH IS A BUBBLE.

Each conceptual metaphor was introduced with at least one linguistic manifestation of it, followed by a table illustrating how the metaphor could be mapped, which in turn was expounded upon in light of Vivekananda's philosophy. Other interesting metaphors also emerge from this poem, which were explained in passing: each could be the subject of a complete study. This is fertile ground for future research, not only for themes/metaphors from this particular poem, but from Vivekananda's other poems and from the Complete Works as a whole, which is a gold mine of information for academics, researchers, spiritual seekers, philosophers and others. Through my application of conceptual metaphor theory to Vivekananda's poem, I have demonstrated that it is a viable tool, allowing the researcher to look "beneath" the surface language and explore its conceptual foundations, so it is suitable for all domains where there is a mapping across two mental spaces.

 

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank his colleague, Jolene Raison, for her insightful comments, critiques and assistance on this project.

 

References

Abhedananda, S. 1970. My Life Story. Calcutta: Ramakrishna Vedanta Math.         [ Links ]

Bodhasarananda, S., ed. 2008. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda-His Eastern and Western Admirers. Kolkata: Advaita Ashram Publication Department.         [ Links ]

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1 As is convention in the field of cognitive semantics, conceptual metaphors and domains are written in UPPER CASE.
2 For ease of reference, "CW-3, 61"' will refer to volume 3, page 61 of Vivekananda's Complete Works (1997).
3 Swami Vivekananda's pre-monastic name.
4 https://fondation-frantzfanon.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/maldonado-torres_outline_of_ten_theses-10.23.16.pdf
5 Each metaphor is illustrated by means of a few examples from the poem (or only one if that suffices to make the point); the reader is therefore invited to look at the poem more closely for other examples, since saturation point was reached with regard to justifying the postulation about the conceptual metaphors under discussion. The word(s) that activate the relevant domain is/are written in bold underline, not as in the original.
6 For more details of the process of indentured Indian labourers being brought to South Africa, see Dhupelia-Mesthrie (2000).
7 Also cf. Vivekananda (CW-5, 201), where he explains the link between this concept and the Vedanta philosophy.
8 These are the salient metaphors for my argument here. A treasure trove of other metaphors would emerge from a more in-depth analysis of the other domains, but this article focuses only on one aspect of metaphors from the domain of the JOURNEY.
9 Interview with Myesha Jenkins on 24 August 2019.

^rND^sBarnes^nL. A.^rND^sBarnes^nL. A^rND^sCoolsaet^nB^rND^sDelgado^nL. E.^rND^nR. J.^sRomero^rND^nW.^sMignolo^rND^sLakoff^nG^rND^sLakoff^nG.^rND^sMaldonado-Torres^nN.^rND^sNaicker^nS^rND^sNaicker^nS^rND^sNaicker^nS^rND^sNaicker^nS^rND^sNdlovu-Gatsheni^nS. J.^rND^sNdlovu-Gatsheni^nS. J.^rND^sQuijano^nA^rND^sTurner^nM.^rND^nBrian^sWalter^rND^nBrian^sWalter^rND^nBrian^sWalter

POETRY

 

Alice Days

 

 

Brian Walter

brian@seaberg.co.za

 

 

When my fellow poet was alive

The sewers run freely in Alice, today,

and there is a green ooze in the streets;

the gutters are full, overflowing into yards.

We walk home: teachers of Keats, and of Armah.

"This town has an Elizabethan smell,"

you note, universalizing the stench.

I smile at human kind, and invoke nosegays

-though my bones remember the plague.

The shit runs into a gully.

Upstream is that pastoral spot of trees,

the paradise flycatcher's nest,

and the spring, always, always organically wet;

downstream, muck debouches into the Tyume.

The older local writing is more mindful

of Tyume-side-where the Fort Hare campus

was first rooted in the slower times of hope,

when the river ran unspoiled, and rare birds

were seen-than now, when security fences

cut students off from the grassy banks

and the paths that led to where the nurses trained.

Today filth runs the streets, into the Tyume,

like a dream turned sour. We carefully step

over the last foul stream, on our way up home,

where at last we drink a beer in the soft dusk

in falling African light-magic time-

musing whether we will ever live to trace

the earthly forms of those diligent, upright

and caring shades: the beautyful ones, unborn.

^rND^1A01^nGerhard^sGenis^rND^1A01^nGerhard^sGenis^rND^1A01^nGerhard^sGenis

THEMED SECTION 2
ARTICLE

 

Poetic Bodies: Weavings of Bodies, Languages and Environments in War Poetry by S.E.K. Mqhayi

 

 

Gerhard Genis

University of Pretoria, South Africa. gerhard.genis@up.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6097-5681

 

 

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ABSTRACT

The creation of "poetic bodies" refers to the embodiment of poetic experience through an eclectic theoretical and methodological conceptualisation. This poetic embodiment allows for the re-membering and experiencing of poetic texts in general, and specifically, indigenous South African poetry in the classroom. At its core is the haunting of memory in poetic texts: the inter-generational experiencing of poetry is embodied in the students' responses to literature. Conjuring these poetic bodies comprises three acts of meaning-making that are woven together to create a unique experience and understanding of poetry: the Bodily, which refers to the figurative devices and images in poetry; the Inner Bodily, which relates to intergenerational memory construction; and the Outer Bodily, which encompasses social, cultural and historical contexts. In South Africa, the process of poetic embodiment is characterised by a strong sense of loss due to the country's colonial and apartheid past. The weaving of the different levels of re-membering and experiencing in indigenous South African poetry is illustrated in the war poetry of S.E.K. Mqhayi (1875-1945). His poems are used as a case study to illustrate how poetic bodies may be re-membered or reconstructed as a literary-theoretical approach to facilitate understanding and experiencing poetry with marked traces of loss.

Keywords: poetic bodies; embodiment; re-membering; intergenerational trauma; war poetry; indigenous poetry; S.E.K. Mqhayi

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Introduction: Poetic Bodies as Embodiments of Re-membering

The concept of "poetic bodies" is a literary-theoretical concept by the author (Genis 2018; 2019) that may be used to analyse poetic texts and indigenous poetry in school and university classrooms. "Poetic bodies" is a three-tiered approach to conjuring poetic texts through language, memory and performance. These three acts of constructing meaning include the Bodily or language usage, which comprises the metaphors and metonyms of loss and gain; the Inner Bodily or memory construction; and the Outer Bodily or contextualisation. The Bodily encapsulates the use of verbal and nonverbal poetic language to situate the self in the world; the Inner Bodily encompasses intergenerational memory construction through poetic devices; and the Outer Bodily refers to the socio-cultural and historical context in which poetic re-membering and performance take place (Genis 2019, 60-87). These three acts of re-membering are interwoven. Crucially, the Inner Bodily saturates both the Bodily-how and why language is used-and the Outer Bodily: the context in which meaning is constructed.

Understanding and experiencing poetry are closely linked with the concept of analysing it. Poetry that is prescribed in South African school curricula is considered by many learners and students, and even teachers, as too far removed from the learners' literacy registers and young lifeworlds, as well as being too difficult (Mavhiza 2019; Newfield and D'Abdon 2015, 511-13). This then leads to a mechanistic teaching and learning of poetry as a dead text on a blank piece of paper, accompanied by an array of technical questions on the poem (Kearney 2008; Mavhiza 2019, 86-88). Research has indicated that the multimodal embodiment or re-membering of poetry leads to greater learner interest and engagement with the genre, especially when spoken word poetry by young poets and indigenous poetry are included in the South African classroom (Mavhiza 2019; Newfield and D'Abdon 2015; Newfield and Maungedzo 2006). The concept of poetic bodies takes cognisance of this research and creates a schema through which poetry may be multimodally embodied, re-membered and experienced by the learner and teacher/lecturer alike.

The poetic body of the South African poet S.E.K. Mqhayi (1875-1945) is conjured as it is re-membered or embodied in his izibongo or praise poetry on the sinking of the troop transport, the SS Mendi (1917) in the English Channel during the First World War (Genis 2018, 154-65). War izibongo are cultural markers of trauma: conflict and war may be compared to a human disease emanating from the Freudian death instinct or Thanatos (Appignanesi and Zarate 2000, 150-51), which leaves post-traumatic scars in its wake. Mqhayi's izibongo contain examples of these psychological traces, which reveal or re-member much African post-traumatic trauma during the war and inter-war years.

The embodiment of these poetic bodies may contribute to indigenising the South African curriculum and to giving voice to creative traditions that are not included in the literary canon at school and at university. This act of re-membering refers to the multimodal experiencing of poetry through analysing its semiotic shapes; the poem as a body of text is not only a linguistic representation, but also a visual, tactile, gestural and spatial re-membering of the past in the present. Constructing these poetic bodies allows for a holistic analysis of the sensory manifestations of the poetry. Importantly, re-membering refers to the poetic act of constructing the poem, to the act of analysing the poem through multimodal/bodily experiencing, and to its subsequent understanding by the reader.

For the purposes of this article, indigenous poetry¹ refers to poetry written in the nine African languages² that evolved from the soil of South Africa. These languages were and are still used to embody narratives that are deeply embedded in the social, cultural and historical memory of South Africa. The ancient tradition of storytelling and poetry in all these languages is part of South Africa's literary fibre (Genis 2019).

 

Poetic Bodies: Weavings of Bodies, Languages and Environments

The United Nations declared 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages. The purpose of the resolution was to promote indigenous languages and to stem the tide of many of these languages' demise (UN 2016, 5). Against this background, I want to sketch the dynamic interplay of language, the psychological and physical body and the environment in the indigenous war poetry of S.E.K. Mqhayi, and how this multimodal embodiment of experience may be used to analyse indigenous poetry in the classroom. The concept of poetic bodies aligns closely with research on biocultural studies, Jungian psychoanalysis and indigenous war poetry (Bloomfield and Hanson 2015a; Genis 2018; 2019; Jung 2003).

Various researchers have highlighted the close link between literary embodiment and the experiencing of texts in all their sensory and bodily manifestations. Mandy Bloomfield and Clare Hanson (2015a, 407) refer to this as "biosocial and biocultural studies". Their research reveals that the study of "race", gender and identity within social, cultural and literary texts and contexts may be enriched by taking cognisance of the psycho-social and psycho-biological functioning of intergenerational experience.³The human body and its social and cultural experiences are inextricably linked to specific environments. These studies resonate with research that has drawn a correlation between trauma as expressed in South African war poetry (Genis 2018) and Carl Gustav Jung's archetypes within a collective unconscious (Jung 2003, 93). These primordial images-monsters, people or processes-do not stay fixed, but mutate in the minds and bodies of the poet and readers (Genis 2018, 25). Re-membering poetic bodies reveals the communal Jungian archetypes or primordial images that find expression in literature in the form of a collective "daemon, ... human being, or ... process" (Jung 2003, 94).

This re-membering or experiencing of the poetry also leads to intergenerational performativity, which is a response to the past in the present. Subsequently, the indigenous poet adds to the archetypes over time, where new heroes are created in response to changing socio-historical circumstances (Genis 2018, 157-60).

The South African war izimbongi or indigenous praise poets built on a tradition of communal hero/warrior veneration and used natural and cultural metaphors and images that were part of their collective heritage (Genis 2018, 131-85). Jung (2003) also indicates that these primordial images, which he calls archetypes, are reflected in literature. Although Jung arguably overemphasises the force of nature as an "autonomous complex" in generating the creative spark of the artist or writer (Jung 2003, 87, 93, 94), his idea does add to the nature/nurture debate and highlights the significance of cultural and natural metaphors and metonyms in literature. These archetypes may be read as poetic marks or traces in the collective literary unconscious of a people.

South African oral praise poetry or izibongo of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is laced with references to the traces of the black body (as objectified by the colonial gaze), blackness, identity, masculinity, history, culture and colonial oppression. The body as signifier of meaning is crucial in the izibongo. Indigenous South African oral poems and songs are sites, according to Liz Gunner (2008, 28), where the sonic and somatic meet each other and both meet the word. The body plays a signifying role that is as important as the words spoken in the performance of izibongo: bodily enactment resonates with the words of oral poetry and may vary depending on the socio-historical context and the idiosyncrasies of the performer. The structure of the poem can be changed as the subject of the poem-a king, chief, warrior, commoner, animal or object-and its adjectival praise-attachments constantly shift within the assemblage of the poem depending on the purpose of the performance (to praise or blame) and the performer's unique rendition (Opland 1992; 2009, 7-8).

The phrases and words employed in the war izibongo are language traces of trauma that the physical and psychological body has suffered due to certain environmental circumstances: the battlefield, civil war and colonial oppression. The izibongo reflect experience, and, in the case of war poems, the experience of trauma is influenced by environmental circumstances: post-traumatic stress on the colonial battlefield (Genis 2018, 131 -85). Liz Gunner (1995, 50) indicates that indigenous African oral poetry carries this remembrance: it is a "poetry of remembering" (Gunner 1995, 51). The past as word traces in these poems is "reactivated" or regenerated in intergenerational oral poems (Gunner 1995, 53-54).

Poetic language assists in giving order to chaos and loss (Gunner 1995, 54). Taban Lo Liyong (2018) argues that African literary forms are animistic traces that should be used to reanimate or re-instil the soul into African literary heritage. This would lead to the self-affirmation of African culture and literature vis-à-vis colonial literary imperialism (Liyong 2018, 17-28). This may be compared with Anna Neill's (2017, 1082) "soul-making" or the formation of a unique character in literature through the interplay of "body, environment, and character". These three aspects are constantly interacting and re-enacted through the izibongo's performativity. The concept of poetic bodies draws together or weaves language, body and the environment in re-animating the poetic body that is laced with intergenerational traces of loss.

 

Entry Points into Studying and Teaching Poetry about Loss

The weaving of language, memory and context creates an epistemological schema for the poetic embodiment of loss. Researchers have indicated a possible connection between the re-membering of conflict and "transgenerational epigenetic inheritance" (Bloomfield and Hanson 2015a, 406). Researchers such as Natan Kellermann (2013, 33 -37) and Angela Connolly (2011, 607-26) have studied the transmission of transand intergenerational trauma in the successors of victims of intense psychological and physical upheavals: the Holocaust and Stalin's gulags. Connolly (2011, 614) and Paul S. Saks (2008) concur that symbolising is a prerequisite for effectively dealing with trauma. Saks uses the Great War⁴ poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon as case studies, making his observations directly relevant to the context of Mqhayi's poetry. He indicates that war trauma is so concrete that initially it cannot be processed through symbolic language. Only when Owen and Sassoon could express their trauma symbolically through poetry could their psychological healing take place (Saks 2008, iii, 164-65). This illustrates the interconnectivity of the three-tiered process of embodiment: language (the Bodily) is used to give symbolic meaning to trauma (the Inner Bodily), within a specific historical war milieu (the Outer Bodily). Without language, the traumatic experience cannot be metaphorically processed and the individual's ontology is fractured.

In war poetry of the Great War, including Mqhayi's, the inside is turned outside; the soldier-poet wears his trauma on his shoulder: he suffers from shell-shock (as Owen, Robert Graves and Sassoon did) that is revealed as "cowardice"; his body is blown to bits and the inner organs are exposed (Genis 2018). Furthermore, war may be represented as a collective disease brought about by the Freudian death instinct or Thanatos drive (Appignanesi and Zarate 2000, 150-52). Its psychoanalytical traces are expressed through metaphors (condensing of meaning) and metonyms (displacing of meaning) in literature (Eagleton 1985, 157, 180). Rolf Lessenich (1999) goes as far as to state that Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon were driven by this death instinct as they volunteered instinctively for active service. Importantly, their poetry grapples with the experience of death and maiming. These war poets used metaphors to express the concrete experience of war through "a dream-text of the visionary" (Campbell 1999, 211). Their poems deal with trauma through symbolic language, which gives the nightmare a metaphysical meaning or meta-meaning.

There is undoubtedly a close link between psychological healing and the act of making art, or the re-membering of the poetic body. David Lewis-Williams (2004) links the art of creation and the dream imaginings of the artist to neuroscience. He postulates that "boiling" or "making" poetry or art rewires the nervous system in altered states of consciousness that allow for the creation of visions or dreams. This illustrates the close bond between the construction of poetic language-the Bodily-through dreams and deep imaginings or meditations: the Inner Bodily. Carl Gustav Jung (2003, 87, 93) refers to this creative act in terms of an autonomous force in the mind:

The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man [sic] who is its vehicle ... think of the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche ... an autonomous complex ... the collective unconscious.

This creative spark or the making of meaning through language, body and environment in creating poetic bodies may be likened to an ever-expanding circle or cycle of diffraction (Holbrook and Cannon 2018, 21-36; Murris and Haynes 2018, 71), which aligns with indigenous South African views of time, space and action, where the ancestral world (past) is intertwined with that of the living in the present and future (Mda 2000). This cyclical nature of existence, which incorporates the world of the ancestors, can also be found in the indigenous izibongo. Denise Newfield and Vivienne Bozalek (2019, 37) draw on Jacques Derrida and Karen Barad's concepts of the past as inhabiting present and future to describe "hauntology" in a South African context: "'hauntings' are traces of the past in the present and future" that exist in current or future spaces. It is "'Thebuwa' that means 'to speak'" (Newfield and Bozalek 2019, 38), which is an act of creating indigenous poetry through writing and performing: "Writing is ... a bodily and a spiritual action" (Newfield and Bozalek 2019, 50). They add:

The diffractive tale of Thebuwa [an indigenous multimodal classroom poetry project] has told of a journey across many borders-human and non-human-a journey of returning and re-turning, remembering and re-membering. (Newfield and Bozalek 2019, 52)

War and traumatic experience also involve crossing multiple borders, and war poetry represents a remembering and "re-membering of body parts" (Christie 2007, 237) as the poet returns to her or someone else's traumatic experiences through poetic language. Indigenous izibongo, therefore, represent a returning to, and a re-membering or embodiment of the archetypal African warrior and the ancestral world.

This re-membering also represents a loud battle cry. Liz Gunner (2002, 213) observes that "a poem [izibongo] [is ...] a verbal artefact of both defence and attack".

Additionally, Gunner (2004, 2) asserts that "[o]rality ... in the African context [is...] the means by which societies of varying complexity regulated themselves, organized their present and their pasts". It also represents how these societies "constantly refashioned" themselves and their psychological and physical spaces (2004, 2). It is a repository of memory that provides a link between the living and the ancestors (2004, 5-6). Therefore, the oral poetry provided the oppressed with an outlet for catharsis and renewal.

The findings of these scholars have created epistemological entry points into studying and teaching poetry that is characterised by metaphors and metonyms of loss and the powerful outpouring of emotions. Indigenous poetry or izibongo lends itself to this diffraction of meaning as text is not only writing and voice, but also the act of bodily performance. The nonverbal performance quality (body language, setting and atmosphere) of these poems is as important as the words that are spoken and written (Opland 1992; 2009). The Bodily in the indigenous context encompasses both the verbal and nonverbal expression of meaning. Furthermore, the indigenous knowledge systems, of which the izibongo form part, also include the diffraction and intertwining of knowledges or theories and ways of knowing. This weaving of various knowledges creates a methodological framework with which to analyse, experience and re-embody poetry, especially when it exhibits marked traces of loss.

 

Mqhayi's Mendi: Monsters and Heroes

Mqhayi's 1917 izibongo on the Mendi is an embodied and haunted space where the ancestors are called upon to help combat racial oppression and the German enemy. His izibongo manifest traces of anti-colonial and Fanonian "muscular demonstrations" (Fanon 2001, 44), which refer to the act of war and reaction to colonial oppression:

And as our bride down her last flood

The Mendi takes the service of our blood. (i, 7-8)

Say it was not for just a bribe

Or for meat you left the hunger of your tribe;

Not in the hope of piling up rewards

Or for wealth counted by the stars.

To you who died for Africa, who sailed down

Over the sea to meet the German, we make it known:

It was not for the King by any loyal tie,

It was not for Britain you went to die. (ii)

Black men of our blood, we said this thing-

"On that far-off field you are our offering." (iii, 23-24)

With what victim do we make atonement?

For home and family what offering is sent?

Do we not sacrifice the bull-calves of the kraal,

Single out those most loved of all?

[...]

Was not Abel's death the whole world's price?

Was not the Saviour heaven's sacrifice? (iv, 25-28, 31-32)

Then be comforted, orphans of our nation-

From one death rises new creation;

One man must serve that others may live on. (v, 33-35)

Ah, those dead stood in the foremost rank

Of Africa-great the ship's burden when she sank.

Brave of the brave they were, men who bring

With their blood greetings to the King of Kings.

Death has its wage-to live again.

Gladly I would stand with them, new-risen men,

And shine like one whose work is well done

In the great brightness of that Day's dawn.

So then, let it be. (vi)

(Mqhayi, "The Sinking of the Mendi", 1917 in Cope and Krige 1968, 278-280)

Mqhayi's monsters and heroes are re-membered within a specific historical or Outer Bodily context. The SS Mendi was transporting members of the South African Native Labour Contingent (SANLC) from England to Europe when it was rammed by the transport ship, the SS Darro, near the Isle of Wight on 21 February 1917. It quickly sank and hundreds of African soldiers drowned. Many of the African elite were hopeful that loyal service in the war would lead to more political rights for blacks in the "white" Union of South Africa. When the Union was established in 1910, which was the result of the amalgamation of two British colonies and two Boer/Afrikaner republics, the blacks of South Africa were excluded from all political processes. Subsequently, the Mendi tragedy has become a potent symbol for South African poets, writers and politicians alike (Grundlingh 2011, 20-37). Subsequently, the embodiment of the Mendi has cascaded across different historical epochs or Outer Bodily contexts. The historical and literary memory of the Mendi has been ensconced within the Inner Bodily of South African collective consciousness of this event through poetry that spans the period 1917 to the present (Genis 2018, 165-84). Consequently, the Bodily has served as a conduit for the Inner Bodily through various historical contexts.

In terms of the Inner Bodily, the African warriors in this poem are new creations who have been fashioned through mixing the archetypal heroic warrior's blood with that of the "flood" of the Mendi "bride": "The Mendi takes the service of our blood .../ Black men of our blood, we said this thing- / "On that far-off field you are our offering"... / Do we not sacrifice the bull-calves of the kraal ... / Death has its wage-to live again. / . new-risen me". The soldiers metamorphose into bull calves who are sacrificed to regain black self-affirmation and more political rights in the country of their birth. The metaphors of the divinely conceived and sacrificed bull calves (the Bodily) embody or re-member the heroic tradition of warriors in the collective consciousness (the Inner Bodily) within a specific historical context (the Outer Bodily). Cattle played and still play a crucial role in the lives of indigenous South Africans. Their importance weaves together the economic (food and clothes), the religious (as sacrifices to placate the ancestors), the political (wealth and status) and the social (marriage gifts). Additionally, in the poem, these warriors become bleeding Christs on the cross of sacrifice. Many early twentieth-century black South African poets, including Mqhayi, were products of mission schools and they were subsequently also influenced by Christian symbolism (Opland 2004). The soldier as a suffering Christ on the cross is a common theme in Great War poetry (Winter 2000, 217).

Mqhayi's bull calves become re-embodied as "new-risen men" or sanctified ancestors who will continue their just battle against the German and colonial oppressor in the mirror-reality that is the ancestral world. The reference to horned bull calves in Mqhayi's war izibongo, including "The Black Army: A Call to Arms" (1916), is a metaphor for the heroic impi who fights in the tradition of the warrior-king Shaka Zulu, whose horned bull's head battlefield-encircling strategy was devastatingly successful during the first half of the nineteenth century and helped establish the Zulu kingdom (Allen 2014, 16-18). Significantly, these bull calves fight for Africa in order to show their heroism to the oppressive colonisers and convince them that they are worthy to be accepted as the equals of white soldiers: "Ah, those dead stood in the foremost rank / Of Africa-great the ship's burden when she sank. / Brave of the brave they were". They fight, notwithstanding the poverty and suffering that were caused by colonial laws such as the devastating 1913 Natives Land Act (Saunders and Southey 2001, 102), which is alluded to in the poem ("the hunger of your tribe").

Mqhayi's poem uses Bodily metaphors and metonyms that refer not only to the sanctified Inner Bodily, but also to the profanity of re-membering. For instance, Mqhayi claims the righteous Abel as a metonym for the bull calves' sacrifice, which is accepted by God. In contrast, Cain's sacrifice is not accepted. Mqhayi appropriates Cain as a metonym for the oppressive white settlers who commit acts of violence against the indigenous black inhabitants. Cain is physically marked by God to roam the earth. In the war izibongo, "After the Battle" (ca. 1915), Mqhayi conceives of the monster Gilikankqo (Butler and Opland 1989, 50). The monster symbolises the "people who traffic in lightning" (1989, 51), the white "demonic race" (Nyamende 2011, 13). The white devils who emerged from the sea off Table Mountain in 1652 have corrupted chromosomes that are marked by the Beast. Significantly, Edward, Prince of Wales, who visited South Africa in 1925, becomes the "calf of the beast", the monster Gilikankqo, in the poem "The Prince of Britain" (Chapman 2002, 65-67). This is a clever reversal by Mqhayi of the imagery of Adamastor, the Titan of the Cape, who was appropriated by white settlers as an image for the barbaric African Caliban who lived as a genetic oddity within a "heart of darkness". This image of Adamastor was a potent metaphor in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poetry written by white South African poets (Van Wyk Smith 1998).

The almost seditious tone in "The Sinking of the Mendi", "After the Battle" and "The Prince of Britain" is repeated in "The Black Army" (Cope and Krige 1968, 276-78). Here, Mqhayi mentions sarcastically that the heroes of the black nation managed to defeat the British and Boers in pitched battles during the nineteenth century. Mqhayi even fraternises with the German enemy by inviting them to listen to stories of African military successes against the colonial occupiers: "Let the Kaiser come and talk with us, / We'll tell him how the Zulus won at Sandlwana, / Of Thaba Ntsu where the Boers were baffled" ("The Black Army", v, in Cope and Krige 1968, 277). Mqhayi is able to do this since oral poems create a safe and sanctioned space in traditional societies in which to vent frustration (Gunner 1979, 241; 2004, 7-9). Most probably, the colonial authorities would not have been cognisant of this poem as it was originally composed in IsiXhosa, which is one of the indigenous languages of South Africa.

Significantly, Mqhayi's 1917 "The Sinking of the Mendi" creates an embodied and haunted space in which the heroic bull calves, Christ, and the ancestors are called upon to re-member and remember the black body that is oppressed. The bull calves become divinely sanctioned warriors who are transformed into ancestors when they die. Language is used to affirm the blood bond and sacrifice of black bodies (the Bodily) in a war environment (the Outer Bodily) and to re-insert the black body into the historical narrative and memory (the Inner Bodily).

In Mqhayi's Mendi izibongo, the subject is the bull calves. The traditional izibongo consists of units of meaning that are subjects (royalty, warriors, commoners, objects and/or animals) with concomitant adjectival praise-attachments (Opland 1992; 2009, 78). The izibongo is a word-helix that wraps itself around the metaphors and metonyms that contain traces of intergenerational trauma and remembrance. Mqhayi consciously built on the tradition of black heroes of the nineteenth century who resisted colonial oppression, including Cetshwayo and Moshesh, in order to reclaim black self-affirmation. Significantly, Mqhayi acts as the imbongi for a new Great War hero; Mqhayi re-animates the poetic body of Isaac Williams Wauchope (1852-1917), who is credited for leading a heroic dance of death while the Mendi was sinking.

 

Mqhayi's Wauchope and the Death Dance

"He was a man of great bearing, and piety; he was also chiefly in bearing, and indeed by birth": this is how the poet Jacob Bam describes Wauchope (in Nyamende 2011, 14). This sentiment is shared by Abner Nyamende, Wauchope's modern-day imbongi. Wauchope was a noble Ndlambe-born warrior (2011, 6, 8). Significantly, the Ndlambe line of the Rharhabe Xhosa remained defiant against British colonial encroachments during the early nineteenth century. Additionally, Wauchope is also the inheritor of the Christ-like and noble genes of the early nineteenth-century Gcaleka-Xhosa Chief Hintsa, who was "easily the most impressive figure in the whole history" of the Xhosa people, according to Jeffrey Peires (1981, 62). In his praise poem, Hintsa is described as "a better mote [grain or particle] than others" (in Opland 1992, 221). Wauchope's blood was mixed with that of heroes. The Inner Body of the indigenous narrative is re-affirmed through the Bodily re-membering of heroic language within the specific Outer Bodily historical context of the early twentieth century.

Wauchope was an interpreter and, according to Mqhayi, a chaplain as well, in the South African Native Labour Contingent (SANLC), who sailed for Europe on the SS Mendi. What took place on the ship that bleak winter morning in 1917 is the stuff of legend:

Those who were there say the hero from Ngqika's land descended from heroes was standing aside now as the ship was sinking! As a chaplain he was free to board a boat and save himself, but he didn't! He kept on appealing to the leaderless soldiers urging them to stay calm, and die like heroes on their way to war. We hear that he said:

Now then stay calm my countrymen!

Calmly face your death!

This is what you came to do!

This is why you left your homes!

Peace, our own brave warriors!

Peace, you sons of heroes,

This is your final day today,

Prepare for the ultimate ford!

(Mqhayi, "The Late Rev. Isaac William Wauchope", The Bantu World, 19 January 1935, 6; quoted in Opland 2007, 106, tr. Xhosa)

In this 1935 izibongo, these "sons of heroes" had to face their archetypal daemons on the high seas: "the ultimate ford". The Mkiza, the unknown lands that lay beyond the mysterious watery mass, led to superstition among many of the black recruits during the Great War (Willan 1978, 70). The sea was not only the place that brought the white colonisers during the seventeenth century, but it was also a mystical unknown space (Peires 1979, 54, 56; Zarwan 1976, 532). It was an environment of both death (Butler and Opland 1989, 84) and regeneration (Peires 1987, 54-55). Significantly, most volunteers for the SANLC came from the landlocked northern parts of South Africa (Grundlingh 2011, 22). It is very probable that most of them were not proficient swimmers and had never set eyes on the sea before boarding the Mendi. Importantly, the bull calves faced and conquered the watery daemon by volunteering to sail across the seas.

Mqhayi is at pains to state in his izibongo that Wauchope was "the hero from Ngqika's land" (Opland 2007, 106). Ngqika was the early nineteenth-century Xhosa chief who was allied to the British. Mqhayi is reaffirming that the African can be trusted, as Ngqika could be trusted, to be loyal to Britain. Mqhayi also cleverly indicates that Wauchope has redeemed the treachery of Chief Ngqika, who is also described as a dastardly "scavenger" in the izibongo and "a drunken plaything of the whites" by his people (Opland 1992, 217-18). Wauchope's "genetic" pedigree or poetic body was both loyal to just causes and heroic in times of crisis.

In 1936, a little more than a year later, another version of the Mendi death-drill was published. Jacob Bam's version illustrates a more inclusive African nationalism, similar to Mqhayi's 1917 Mendi poem:

Be quiet and calm my countrymen, for what is taking place now is exactly what you came to do. You are going to die, but that is what you came to do. Brothers we are drilling the drill of death. I, a Xhosa, say you are all my brothers. Zulus, Swazis, Pondos, Basutos,⁵ we die like brothers. We are the sons of Africa. Raise your cries, brothers, for though they made us leave our weapons at our homes, our voices are left with our bodies. (in Nyamende 2011, 14)

As stated earlier, these izibongo are mutating traces of memory. Bam has taken stock phrases or Bodily markers from Mqhayi's Mendi poem and added new ones. For instance, Bam calls on all African communities in South Africa, and not only on the Xhosa (as Mqhayi does), to remember and re-member the triumphant dance that took place while the Mendi was sinking; he coins the phrase "the drill of death". Bam also alludes to the fact that black soldiers could not carry arms to protect themselves (Grundlingh 1981, 194-95). These are all new observations that are not included in Mqhayi's 1935 version of Wauchope's heroism. Black Consciousness has developed, in the short span of a year, by inculcating more communalities of Africanness and abuses by white authorities. Bam creates new subjects or traces for praise. "Brothers", "Zulus, Swazis, Pondos, Basothos" are added to Mqhayi's "Xhosa" and "my countrymen"; the inclusive pronouns "we" and "our" (similar to Mqhayi's 1917 Mendi poem), and numerous novel adjectival praises are attached to these subjects: "we are drilling the drill of death", "we die like brothers", "We are the sons of Africa". Crucially, Mqhayi and Bam give a voice to the abjected black body during a time when African protest politics in South Africa were disorganised and ineffectual (Saunders and Southey 2001, 2, 195). By stringing together these word traces of heroism, Mqhayi and Bam wanted to re-member black self-worth and dignity.

It is also revealing that this re-affirmation of African dignity in traditional izibongo was accompanied by a dance: the death-drill.⁶ Gunner (2004, 1, 7, 10) affirms that dance is part of the performance quality of African oral poetry. The hallucinatory performance of Mqhayi that former South African President Nelson Mandela witnessed during the 1940s is an apt example:

When he spoke this last word [of poetry], he dropped his head to his chest. We rose to our feet, clapping and cheering. I did not want ever to stop applauding. I felt such intense pride at that point, not as an African, but as a Xhosa; I felt like one of the chosen people. (Opland 2009, 9)

Language (the Bodily), environment (the Outer Bodily) and memory (the Inner Bodily) all interact to create or re-member a spiritual happening or primordial becoming that is characterised by deep word-meditations: a universal "introcosm" of re-membering (Lewis-Williams 2004; Van der Post 1961, 165-66, 227/ Crucially, the izibongo is a prayer that ensures communion with God and the ancestors, and it engenders the subsequent protection of progeny (Opland 1992, 26-27). Mqhayi was a "boiler" or word-conjurer of note and he offered powerful prayers to the ancestors: "With these words the Nation's Poet boils our blood and enflames our ears so we cannot hear" (in Opland 2009, 526). Mqhayi continues with his Bodily re-animation of Wauchope's memory:

With the sinking of this ship, the Xhosa people lost their reliable sons; but when the name of this chaplain was mentioned among the dead, the nation was dealt a grievous blow. Clearly Xhosa himself suffered a severe wound, a massive loss, at the setting of this brilliant star of his.

Ow!!!

Nojoli's cry was heard,

the keening cry of Rharhabe's wife,

daughter of Nomagwayi of eMbo,

bewailing the beauty swept out to sea,

saying death hadn't claimed them, they were growing in strength!

Peace, Phalo's people,

Ngconde's, Butsolobentonga's.

At times like these a nation despairs.

Chizama's star has set,

the Xhosa nation's back is broken!

The best of stars we took such pride in,

the animal cub died while talking,

died giving heart, securing his testament!

Someone said what an unseemly death,

suddenly coming in alien territory,

in a strait between two bulls ...

(The Bantu World, 26 January 1935, 4; in Opland 2007, 107)

This section of Mqhayi's 1935 poem illustrates the loss or dis-embodiment that the Xhosa experienced, both in 1917 and in 1935. In 1935, the African was still viewed, similar to 1917, as a socio-political miscreant and racial degenerate in the country of his birth. This psychological "wound" is mirrored by a physical one, which was inflicted by the colonial wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth century:

Go, prince of Chizama's place!

You'll be eating porridge with God.

We Xhosa people never die,

We're judged when the dead arise,

death to us is profit and gain,

for there we get our strength,

for there we get our speed.

Go, Chizama, we grant you leave.

Never forget us there in the highest.

I'm finished!

I'm finished!!

I'm finished!!!

(The Bantu World, 26 January 1935, 4; in Opland 2007, 107)

The line "We're judged when the dead arise" is both pathetic and highly ironic. The Xhosa prophet Nongqawuse's mid-nineteenth-century vision that the dead ancestors would arise to help re-establish Xhosa independence never materialised. The slaughtering of cattle and destruction of crops to appease the ancestors during the Xhosa cattle-killing of 1856-1857 only led to the starvation of tens of thousands of Xhosa and a split in the Xhosa psyche (Mda 2000). Similarly, during the mid-1930s blacks were politically ostracised in South Africa.

In the izibongo to Wauchope, Mqhayi endeavours to reclaim the Inner Bodily memory and dignity of the black body, which has been objectified and infected with loss, through Bodily metaphors of wholeness. Wauchope becomes the archetypal hero, who is resurrected in the izibongo to save Africans from suffering and self-doubt. In his izibongo, Wauchope and the bull calves are the great hunters whose hearts or souls have turned into stars in the sky, according to traditional spiritual belief (Van der Post 1961): "Chizama's star has set ... / The best of stars we took such pride in, / the animal cub died while talking, / died giving heart, securing his testament!" However, the ghosts or spirits have fallen into the uncanny sea, where "[t]heir souls [or ghosts] are not sitting well in the English Channel" (Kennedy 2007). This is embodied in the izibongo as "suddenly [their death is] coming in alien territory". In the African tradition, the ancestors need to be buried in familial graves, which must be tended by their progeny. The scattering of the bull calves in the cold English Channel represents a double loss: the ancestral spirits and the ostracising of the living black socio-political body.

Perhaps Mqhayi envisaged that the God of the Bible represented a loophole or a portal through which the spirits of the bull calves lost at sea could be returned to the familial world of the ancestors. Like so many Xhosa intellectuals of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Mqhayi was influenced by missionary Christianity and he also drew on European literature and the English Bible in his texts (Opland 2009, 14, 15, 22). The triple "mantra" at the end of the 1935 izibongo to Wauchope-"I'm finished! / I'm finished!! / I'm finished!!!"-reveals the communal intergenerational psychological loss of the Xhosa and African people of the first half of the twentieth century.

 

Re-membering Poetic Bodies in the Classroom

The concept of poetic bodies can also serve as a methodology and pedagogy for teaching and learning indigenous poetry and poetry with marked traces of loss in the school and university classroom. The three-tiered, or rather three-aspect approach of the Bodily, Inner Bodily and Outer Bodily can be consciously applied to assist learners, students, teachers and lecturers to analyse, experience and re-embody poetic texts in the classroom (Genis 2019).

The case study of Mqhayi's poetry indicates how poetic bodies may be analysed through the framework. Closely linked with a Bodily, Inner Bodily and Outer Bodily analysis is the multimodal experience of poetry. Indigenous poems cannot be fully understood and appreciated without incorporating their multimodal and performance qualities in the classroom. For instance, poetic bodies cannot be wholly embodied as linguistic and written semiotic constructs. These poems were created to be performed, and the oral, gestural, visual and spatial modalities become as important as the written in analysing and understanding the poem. Analysis and experience can not be separated (Genis 2019). The Mendi death-drill that accompanied Wauchope's izibongo is a case in point: the dramatic or theatrical meaning of the poem is lost if it is only read and analysed as a written text. Performing Wauchope's death dance encourages learners to revisit the context of the poem not only intellectually, but also physically and emotionally. Listening, speaking, reading and writing activities are woven together, and this caters for different learning styles. Oral and kinaesthetic learners perform the izibongo, and the linguistic and visual learners write or draw/illustrate their understanding of the performance.

Importantly, the Bodily, Inner Bodily and Outer Bodily are pedagogical acts of remembering the poetic text as a multimodal genre. The language, emotive responses and contextualisation of the poem become a process of the cyclical and recursive embodiment of analysis and experience, as opposed to a mechanistic lecture or lesson. Traditional poetry lessons usually consist of an introduction to the life of the poet, reading the poem and answering myriad questions on the text: this linear approach fractures the unitary meaning and experience of the poem (Kearney 2008, 266-67).

The poetic bodies approach encourages the re-membering of the poem as a body of meaning through the weavings of poetic language, memory and emotive experiencing, as well as social and historical contextualisation. This weaving of bodies also refers to connecting the learners' or students' lifeworlds with that of the prescribed text, as propagated by New Literacy Studies (Pahl and Rowsell 2013). Learners can write their own poems on important events in their communities' and families' histories, and share these stories with their peers and teachers. This will encourage a more empathic and communal embodiment of learning.

 

Conclusion

Mqhayi's poetry on the sinking of the Mendi represents a re-membering of the ancestors in an effort to reclaim their sacrifices for African history and pride. This process of conjuring the ancestors through language leads to a re-animation or re-membering of the black physical and psychological body during the performance of the poetry in the present. The Bodily (language), Inner Bodily (memory) and Outer Bodily (context) all work together to bring about a new poetic body. This newly reconstituted body contains the poetic traces or markers of the past in the present: the cultural-specific archetypes, metaphors, metonyms and symbols of loss and regeneration. Realising that poems are living, breathing bodies will encourage teachers and learners to link the analysis and understanding of poetry with the experiences of the poet and the learners' personal lifeworlds.

 

Acknowledgements

My deepest appreciation goes to the South African Poetry Project (ZAPP) family that made the conceptualisation and publication of this article possible. I am especially indebted to Denise Newfield (Director of ZAPP) and Deirdre Byrne (Senior Investigator of ZAPP) for their unwavering encouragement and commitment in making South African classrooms poetry-friendly spaces. Furthermore, the two critical readers provided constructive feedback that has made this article a sounder academic text.

 

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Opland, J. 2004. "Nineteenth-Century Xhosa Literature". Kronos Southern African Histories 30: 22-46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41056514.         [ Links ]

Opland, J. 2007. "The First Novel in Xhosa". Research in African Literatures 38 (4): 87-110. https://doi.org/10.2979/RAL.2007.38.4.87.         [ Links ]

Opland, J., ed. 2009. Abantu Besizwe: Historical and Biographical Writings 1902-1944 S.E.K. Mqhayi. Translated by J. Opland. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

Pahl, K., and J. Rowsell. 2013. Literacy and Education: Understanding the New Literacy Studies in the Classroom. 2nd ed. London: Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473915237.         [ Links ]

Peires, J. 1979. "Nxele, Ntsikana and the Origins of the Xhosa Religious Reaction". Journal of African History 20 (1): 51-61. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700016716.         [ Links ]

Peires, J. 1981. The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa in the Days of Their Independence. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.         [ Links ]

Peires, J. 1987. "The Central Beliefs of the Xhosa Cattle-Killing". The Journal of African History 28 (1): 43-63. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700029418.         [ Links ]

Saks, P.S. 2008. "Words Are Never Enough: The Processing of Traumatic Experience and the Creation of Narratives-the War Poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen". PhD diss., Adelphi University.         [ Links ]

Saunders, C., and N. Southey. 2001. A Dictionary of South African History. 2nd ed. Cape Town: David Philip.         [ Links ]

UN (United Nations). 2016. Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly on 19 December 2016: 71/178 Rights of Indigenous Peoples. A/RES/71/178. Accessed December 13, 2020. https://undocs.org/en/A/RES/71/178.

Van der Post, L. 1961. The Heart of the Hunter. London: Hogarth Press.         [ Links ]

Van Wyk Smith, M. (1988) 1998. Shades of Adamastor: Africa and the Portuguese Connection: An Anthology of Poetry. Pretoria: Unisa Press.         [ Links ]

Willan, B. P. 1978. "The South African Native Labour Contingent 1916-1918". Journal of African History 19 (1): 61-86. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700015954.         [ Links ]

Winter, J. 2000. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.         [ Links ]

Zarwan, J. 1976. "The Xhosa Cattle-Killings". Cahiers d'etudes africaines 16 (63-64): 51939. https://doi.org/10.3406/cea.1976.2513.         [ Links ]

 

 

1 The poems that are quoted in this article were translated from the original IsiXhosa. The translators include Jack Cope, C.M. Mcanyangwa, Jeff Opland and Abner Nyamende. For a discussion of the effect of translations on literary and historical interpretation, see Genis (2018, 154-55).
2 Sesotho, Sepedi, Setswana, IsiNdebele, SiSwati, IsiXhosa, IsiZulu, Xitsonga and Tshivenda.
3 See the special issue of Textual Practice "Beyond the Gene: Epigenetic Science in 21st Century Culture", edited by Mandy Bloomfield and Clare Hanson (2015b).
4 Although the War of 1914-1918 came to be known after 1945 as "the First World War", it was known to those who experienced it, more simply, as "the Great War", being the greatest war that had been experienced up to then.
5 Black soldiers on the Mendi were drawn from all sections of the African community. However, ironically, the Sotho, Tsonga and Venda contributions from the then Northern Transvaal weighed the heaviest by far, although they are not mentioned in Bam's version (see Grundlingh 1987, 75-79.) Surprisingly, the "warlike" Zulu "formed a distinct minority" in the SANLC (Grundlingh 1987, 6566).
6 For a discussion of the historical veracity of the death-drill, see Genis (2018, 158).

^rND^sBloomfield^nM.^rND^nC.^sHanson^rED^sBloomfield^nM.^rND^nC.^sHanson^rND^sCampbell^nJ.^rND^sConnolly^nA.^rND^sGenis^nG.^rND^sGrundlingh^nA.^rND^sGunner^nL.^rND^sGunner^nL.^rND^sGunner^nL.^rND^sGunner^nL.^rND^sKearney^nJ. A.^rND^sKellermann^nN. P. F.^rND^sLessenich^nR. P.^rND^sLiyong^nT. L.^rND^sNeill^nA.^rND^sNewfield^nD.^rND^nR.^sd'Abdon^rND^sNewfield^nD.^rND^nR.^sMaungedzo^rND^sNyamende^nA.^rND^sOpland^nJ.^rND^sOpland^nJ.^rND^sPeires^nJ.^rND^sPeires^nJ.^rND^sWillan^nB. P.^rND^sZarwan^nJ.^rND^nBrian^sWalter^rND^nBrian^sWalter^rND^nBrian^sWalter

POETRY

 

The Nineteen Eighties

 

 

Brian Walter

brian@seaberg.co.za

 

 

I recall that I touched in kindness

his shoulder: and he winced

. . . and then he lifted up his shirt

to show sjambok cuts repeated

across his back, in red-blue welts

that patterned his brown skin

-university was never like this,

but then, I was classified as white.

My student was softly telling me

why his work was late:

they all ran, he said, and security

found him in the dark, and laid in.

"It happens," he shrugged, and flinched,

"but it's been difficult to write."

^rND^1A01^nLouis^sBotha^rND^1A02^nRobert^sMaungedzo^rND^1A03^nPhillippa Yaa de^sVilliers^rND^1A01^nLouis^sBotha^rND^1A02^nRobert^sMaungedzo^rND^1A03^nPhillippa Yaa de^sVilliers^rND^1A01^nLouis^sBotha^rND^1A02^nRobert^sMaungedzo^rND^1A03^nPhillippa Yaa de^sVilliers

THEMED SECTION 2
ARTICLE

 

Research That Is Real and Utopian: Indigenous Knowledge as a Resource to Revitalise High School Poetry

 

 

Louis Botha^I; Robert Maungedzo^II; Phillippa Yaa de Villiers^III

^IUniversity of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Louis.Botha@wits.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6321-7950
^IIAnchor Comprehensive High School and University of Pretoria, South Africa. robertmaungedzo@yahoo.com; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8941-9999
^IIIUniversity of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Phillippa.deVilliers@wits.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8899-899X

 

 

---

ABSTRACT

This article presents the reflections of a research team from the ZAPP-IKS project. ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project) undertook a three-year NRF-funded research project titled "Reconceptualising Poetry Education for South African Classrooms through Infusing Indigenous Poetry Texts and Practices". The research on which we report here was undertaken as part of that project. The team consists of an English teacher, a poet and an academic. Together, they attempted a research intervention at a Johannesburg secondary school. The article presents their reflections on the challenges, successes and potentials of the attempted research intervention, which was intended to energise and inspire the teaching of English poetry by drawing from and developing indigenous knowledges and principles. Presented as a play, a praise poem and a conventional academic analysis by the school-based teacher, the university-based poet, and the university-based academic, respectively, the article offers diverse analyses as an illustration of how research relationships may be understood, experienced and represented in various ways. These analyses draw implicitly and explicitly on conceptualisations of indigeneity and indigenous knowledges, as well as decoloniality, with the conventional academic analysis making use of Erik Olin Wright's concept of real utopias to frame its understanding of the project and the other two perspectives on it. Together they invite readers to challenge and transform the conventions that govern educational practices, research and representation, but caution against naïve idealism when doing so.

Keywords: real utopias; South African Poetry Project (ZAPP); decolonising education; indigenous poetry; isiXhosa practices

---

 

 

Background

An academic, a high school teacher and a poet walked into a First Additional Language classroom in 2017, and, with the intention of improving teaching and learning of poetry, staged an intervention. Their aim was utopian: to infuse the curriculum with so much thrilling and relevant poetry that the learners' entire education, and therefore their lives, would be transformed. They quickly discovered that their ideals would have to change in order to engage and thrive in the unpoetic, functional space of the high school. Although their experiment did not manage to create the utopia of equality they had hoped for, it yielded a number of insights that illuminated their assumptions, which helped them to understand how inequality and discrimination continue to marginalise indigenous knowledge systems, and that this is something stakeholders can change.

This article will present three forms of analysis of a research project that broadly aimed at indigenising poetry teaching at a secondary school in a township on the outskirts of Johannesburg, hereafter referred to as Ukuzimela High School. The research team comprised a school-based teacher, a university-based poet/researcher and a university-based academic/researcher, and their respective reflections take the form of a play, a praise poem and a conventional academic analysis. We invite readers to participate in the further analysis of the project by considering each of the presented narratives independently and then drawing their own connections and conclusions as what Western academics may refer to as a "post-qualitative approach" in which engagement, rather than knowledge for its own sake, is central (Le Grange 2018). Semali and Kincheloe express that from an indigenous Andean perspective "[t]he point of the conversation is not the gaining of knowledge, it is to nurture and regenerate the world of which the individual is a part".

The research that forms the basis of this article and the focus of the three analyses is made up of insights gleaned from a multifaceted research collaboration between schools and universities, focusing on poetry in schools. An environmental scan sketched the material details of the school and its personnel, and more data were collected through participant observation of lessons, document analysis, questionnaires and interviews. This information will not, however, be the primary focus of this article: rather, we are concerned with reflecting upon the research processes and how these were perceived by the participants.

The aims of the research project were to interrogate the First Additional Language poetry curriculum and attempt to introduce indigenous poetry and practices to the exclusively English content and style. It took as its point of departure that Newfield and Maungedzo's claim still rings true, namely that "poetry is a defunct genre in most South African second language classrooms" (2006, 71). Indeed, some of the teachers participating in the study confirmed that the language, themes and images of the English poems appear alien to many of the learners and teachers who have to answer the Gauteng Department of Education (GDE) questions in order to pass the school-leaving examinations. Despite the intentions of the ZAPP researchers to attempt to search for solutions to these challenges, they were met with resistance and limited success.

The article is structured as follows. First, we situate the research project at Ukuzimela High School within its broader, mother project of the South African Poetry Project (ZAPP). Then we frame it within conceptualisations of indigenous knowledge, research and decoloniality that we consider relevant to the project. Thereafter the three reflections are presented, namely, the teacher's evaluation of the research project in the form of a play titled The Prince and the Damsel in Distress; this is followed by a praise poem and reflections that constitute the poet's insights from the project. These two perspectives should be considered independently of, as well as in conjunction with, the third analysis, which uses the concept of "real utopias" to evaluate the project.

 

The South African Poetry Project (ZAPP) and the Quest for Relevance

Broadly speaking, in terms of its aims and methodology, the ZAPP project brings together teachers, poets and academics within education to contribute to energising the teaching and learning of poetry in high schools. The 2017 Annual Report of the ZAPP project states:

The overall thrust of this research project is to contribute to knowledge about the transformation of education in this country, specifically the project of decolonisation of curricula and pedagogy. Rather than theorising this question, which has been thrust centre stage through the Fallist movement, through official calls at a range of educational institutions and through countless conferences and symposia over the past few years, this project attempts to implement decolonising pedagogic endeavours, to interrogate core issues, and to assess the impact, value and challenges of such endeavours. (Newfield 2017)

After several years of working without funding, in 2017 the National Research Foundation awarded ZAPP a three-year research grant to conduct research on Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Led by senior academics from two institutions, the University of South Africa (Unisa), the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and with members from a range of South African universities and schools, the project is loosely structured around various interventions that

hope to contribute to the healing of apartheid-induced teacher and student wounds, and to recognise their indigenous knowledge and cultural practices, rather than continuing to ape European poetry education while paying no more than lip service to indigenous South African poetry. (Newfield 2017)

ZAPP framed its research by means of questions that, among others, asked how indigenous South African poetry could be reconceptualised as a resource to enhance poetry learning and teaching, and how, therefore, this reconceptualisation of poetry as an indigenous, multimodal and evolving genre could impact upon the teaching and learning of poetry and on poetry canons in schools, as well as on transformation in language, literacy and literature classrooms. ZAPP's research philosophy is aligned with the dreams articulated in the Basic Education Policy, which espouses the values enshrined in the South African Constitution (Republic of South Africa 1996).¹ These documents argue and demand the restoration of dignity and equality to African languages, cultures and people.²

Vally and Spreen argue that languages and culture have come to be marginalised in favour of a curriculum that is geared towards more "globally competitive" subjects such as mathematics and science (2014). The ideals of the Freedom Charter and the Constitution have become utopian in the current context where "education is being moulded toward fulfilling economic goals in order to produce skilled workers to bolster the competitive edge of South Africa within a globalized economy" (Vally and Spreen 2014, 268). In this climate of globalisation and pragmatism, English is seen as sophisticated and aspirational, and therefore dominates.

In a bid to challenge this domination, and in light of critique from colleagues at the 2017 Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation Conference, the three-member research team responsible for this article decided to engage with ZAPP's attempt to conceptualise contemporary local poetry written in English and other Englishes, as well as rap, reggae and other poetic forms that emerge from the African diaspora, as indigenous poetry.

"Everyone has the right to receive education in the official language or languages of their choice in public educational institutions where that education is reasonably practicable. In order to ensure the effective access to, and implementation of, this right, the state must consider all reasonable educational alternatives, including single medium institutions, taking into account: a. equity b. practicability c. the need to redress the results of past racially discriminatory laws and practices. " (RSA 1996, 12)

Our research team decided in principle to recreate itself, with the understanding that, to become indigenous, English would have to imagine itself beyond the simple idea of a language, to a spiritual and intellectual system that was in contact with other language systems in our vicinity. We decided to incorporate the spiritual and relational aspects of indigenous epistemological and axiological principles into our methodology. In order to understand this, it is necessary first to offer some thoughts about indigenous knowledges.

 

Indigenous Knowledges and Coloniality

As is common in most attempts at identifying what indigenous knowledges and knowledge-making may entail, we begin by pointing out that defining what is indigenous is complex and subject to multiple interpretations. Consequently, we will suggest a few interpretations that may align with the perceptions of the teacher, the poet and the academic and their respective intentions.

Some definitions of indigeneity emphasise elements of identity. Thus, Reynar suggests that indigenous knowledge is indigenous precisely "because it is incorporated in a way of life-part experience, part custom, religion, tribal law and the attitude of people toward their own lives and those other living things" (1999, 290; italics in original). Clearly this conceptualisation of the indigenous is concerned with the ways in which indigenous knowledges are tied to cultural knowledge and practices, although it points this out in order to warn against extractivist and essentialising perceptions. Such an interpretation may well resonate with the understanding of indigeneity that is articulated in the teacher' s play.

A second conceptualisation of indigenous knowledges is implied in Jacob, Cheng and Porter's discussion of indigenous education. They propose that

Indigenous education is a spiritual as well as a physical or mental learning process-it embodies and transcends both the world of the present as well as the spiritual or metaphysical world that includes life before birth and life after death of the mortal body. In this way, the indigenous education process is better understood as an eternal reciprocal, interactive, and symbiotic learning process. (2015, 3)

This definition invokes the transcendental, intuitive and relational understandings of indigenous ways of knowing and sharing knowledge, which may be seen as central to the poet's expression of her experience with indigenous forms of poetry.

The third concept relating to indigeneity, which informs particularly the academic's analysis, is that of indigenous peoples as offered by Linda Tuhiwai Smith:

"Indigenous peoples" is a relatively recent term which emerged in the 1970s out of the struggles primarily of the American Indian Movement (AIM), and the Canadian Indian Brotherhood ... . [T]he term enables the collective voices of colonized people to be expressed strategically in the international arena ... . [T]he world's indigenous population belong to a network of peoples. They share experiences as peoples who have been subjected to the colonization of their lands and cultures, and the denial of their sovereignty, by a colonizing society that has come to dominate and determine the shape and quality of their lives, even after it has formally pulled out. (1999, 7)

Tuhiwai Smith understands the indigenous as an identity employed in relation to anticolonial struggles and the search for ways of knowing and being that offer an alternative to the dominating culture promoted by European imperialism. Elements of these conceptualisations, as well as the ideas of decoloniality that they express, overlap in the ways in which they inform school-based and university-based perspectives.

Kaya and Seleti argue that "educational structures inherited from colonialism are based on cultural values different from those existing in most of the African societies" (2014, 32), and furthermore "education, especially higher education, in Africa has not been relevant to the needs and concerns of African societies" (2014, 32). In a chapter reviewing a number of theorists working on the Africanisation of the curriculum, Msila argues that the "African University exists at a precarious position" (2016, 57) as long it fails to nurture theory and practice that are not closely informed by indigenous knowledge. It is in this context that ZAPP proposed its research project, which aspired to "contribute to knowledge about the transformation of education in this country, specifically the project of decolonisation of curricula and pedagogy" (Newfield 2017). In broad agreement with Kaya and Seleti's analysis of South African education, the project aspires to contribute to "relevant" debates, policies and interventions, whose relevance is based in the fact that they "invest in the development of indigenous African theory building and interpretation of society ... and [contribute] to addressing the needs of the African people" (Kaya and Seleti 2014, 32).

Furthermore, to researchers who have "lived the colonial difference" (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 9), the intentions and insights of the global field of decoloniality have relevance and resonance: "When your life experience is touched and formed in and by the Third World, geopolitics matter" (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 5). The notions of decoloniality as articulated by Mignolo and Walsh have proven helpful in aligning ZAPP's project with the broad aim of "addressing the needs of the African people" in direct reference to the research interventions planned at the Ukuzimela High School, and the insights gleaned from the enactment/failure of these interventions. Mignolo and Walsh assert that "[c]oloniality . deals with and confronts issues and problems common to all former colonies of Western Europe in the Third World" (2018, 10). The ZAPP project focuses on the problem of enabling indigenous knowledges in the teaching and learning of poetry in high schools. It is argued that the pedagogical strategies used in teaching and learning poetry at the school, and how these strategies function to enhance or marginalise indigenous knowledges, serve to contextualise our findings.

We argue that the racialisation of education places a higher value on English as a mode of teaching and thinking, which casts indigenous languages and their attendant knowledge systems as "other" and irrelevant when it comes to teaching and learning, the praxis of sharing and developing the skill of thinking. Decoloniality offers a critique of the

logic of racialization that emerged in the sixteenth century, [that] has two dimensions (ontological and epistemic) and one single purpose: to rank as inferior all languages beyond Greek and Latin and the six modern European languages from the domain of sustainable knowledge and to maintain the enunciative privilege of the Renaissance and Enlightenment institutions, men and categories of thought. Languages that were not apt for rational thinking (either theological or secular) were considered languages that revealed the inferiority of the human beings speaking them. (Mignolo 2011, 275)

Indigenous African languages are the mother tongues of all learners and educators at Ukuzimela High School, who are committed to processing the English curriculum in order to perpetuate the success of the school in the matriculation results (the school has attained pass rates of 97% and 100% since 2012).

Our research experience suggests that delinking from dependency on English as a primary tool of understanding and articulating has proven to be the most productive mode in the classrooms at Ukuzimela High School: "[T]he decolonial opens up a way of thinking that delinks from the chronologies of new epistemes or new paradigms ... so that they are not the point of reference and of epistemic legitimacy" (Mignolo 2011, 274). Delinking is a core process of decolonial thinking, both in theory and praxis, which are understood as "necessarily interrelated":

[T]o begin with the doing-thinking, with the people, collectives, and communities that enact decoloniality as a way, option, standpoint, analytic, project, practice and praxis; that is, with the activity of thinking and theorizing from praxis ... . It is in this movement that decoloniality is enacted and, at the same time, rendered possible. (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 7-9)

For example, at Ukuzimela High School, the praxis of teaching a poem in the English classroom, as well as teaching a poem in the isiXhosa classroom, draws on the cultural capital of indigenous knowledge accessed via the mother tongues of both learners and educators. The language itself-including grammatical rules and the "funds of knowledge" embedded in the idiomatic rigour of the language-informs and develops the praxis, and vice versa, illustrating the decolonial alternative.

In articulating pedagogic strategies informed by indigenous knowledge accessed by virtue of isiXhosa (or any other indigenous language), we purposely delink from any activist notion of claiming these strategies' right to exist, for this would "[reaffirm] the imperiality of Western modernity disguised as universal modernity" (Mignolo 2011, 279). Through the lens of decoloniality, we offer these reflections as a contribution to existing discussions about the role of indigenous knowledges in the teaching and learning of poetry, and celebrate the resilience and resourcefulness of the teachers and learners at Ukuzimela High. Decoloniality's interrogation of the mechanisms of geopolitics can also expose and problematise the ongoing challenge of relevance of educational theory and praxis. It can assist stakeholders continually to assess whether or not their praxis is addressing the intellectual and research needs of African people, or simply perpetuating the vast imbalance of value, on economic and ideological fronts, between the West and the Third World.

 

How "Indigenous" Became a Vexed Term That Excluded Its Referents

This section of the article is a creative representation of the English teacher's experience of the research project. A play written by Robert alludes to some of the obstacles that teachers face in delivering classes based on the existing set works, in the context of the high expectations placed on schools for a 100% pass rate in the school leaving examinations, as well as a vexing concept of "indigenous knowledge systems". Many of the teachers we interviewed believed that the concept of "indigenous knowledge systems" is a construct created for the benefit of language users who are unfamiliar with African languages and that it places the very indigenous language speakers and writers outside its frame, objectifying them. The fact that the global knowledge economy has, for some years, been focused on mining indigenous knowledge systems in order to make existing educational institutions more relevant and inclusive, has not revealed itself in the education policy.

The Prince and the Damsel in Distress

by Robert Maungedzo

Characters:

Prince

Ntombazana (the horse)

Dragon

Lady/Damsel

Various junglians

Narrator: Scene 1: Once upon a time, in the land of Smoke and Mirrors, there was a Prince. This world reflected his alter ego and made him feel like he knew Everything.

Prince: I had a dream and this is not a will-o'- the-wisp dream; it is philanthropic dream. I am going to leave my Smoke and Mirrors world and visit the people of the Jungle World. They have forgotten who they are. I will plant the seeds of Junglianism and then my mission would be accomplished. Now, shall I travel in my German sedan or I should use my horse? Hmm ... I guess the terrain there is rough, rugged and tough, so I'll take the horse. Ntombazana! Ntombazana! Come!! We are leaving for the Jungle World.

Narrator: Scene 2: The Jungle World.

Prince: Here we are Ntombazana. Let's take a look at it. Let's take some rounds and have a good look at it. ... These people are really suffering! They don't have resources, they're not meeting targets like in the real Smoke and Mirrors world. It's a mess! And they've lost touch with their Junglianism. There's a lot of work to be done!

Narrator: Scene 3: After the Junglians meet the Prince, they discuss his visit among themselves.

Junglian 1: Hey guys. These are some clever people from the Smoke and Mirrors world. They are here to save us from ourselves.

Junglian 2: What do you mean by that?

Junglian 3: They say they are here to indigenise us so that we can become Junglians again.

Junglian 4: Yhoooo! I am confused!!!

Junglian 5: They are here to teach poetry. I am happy. That English poetry is so hard to teach, I'm really glad they will do it for me.

Narrator: Scene 4: On his mission of rejunglisation, the Prince ventured deep into the jungle.

Prince: Hey, Ntombazana, do you see what I see?

Ntombazana: No, what's the problem?

Prince: Come here. Look down there. What do you see?

Ntombazana (admiringly and lusciously): Hmmmmm! I see a beautiful lady, who, unlike me, seems to be enjoying life to the fullest. She's busy as a bee, with her business roasting meat for the Junglians.

Prince (irritated): Is that the only thing you can see? Do you not see the flames and that ugly-looking, thick-skinned beast?

Ntombazana: Yes, but this is a different world. You are used to the Smoke and Mirrors world .

Prince: Whatever! The beast's flame seems to be engulfing her. Look at her! She is trying to set herself free. I can smell roasted flesh. The lady is in distress. We need to hurry up, Ntombazana!!! Look at those Junglians!! They seem not to care; they're not scared of the dragon! Not worried about the lady! Someone's got to do something!

Ntombazana (sceptical): Alright, here we go (sprints to the scene).

Narrator: Scene 5: The Prince arrives at the classroom-chesenyama. The place is full of Junglians, the dragon and the lady are toe to toe with each other. The lady and the dragon are the centre of the Jungle Universe.

Prince: Stand back, I've got this! I'm drawing my sword ...

Narrator: The Lady, focused on serving her hungry customers, suddenly hears the thundering hooves and sees the eye-gorging light reflected by the shimmering silver of the Prince's armour and his blood-thirsty sword! She raises her arms!

Damsel: No, you foolish man. Stop what you are doing. Who the hell do you think you are?!! Hold it there!

Prince (shouting): Lady, move away from that monster!

Ntombazana: I think she wants you to stop.

Prince: But she's waving her arms. She needs to be rescued.

Damsel: Yes I'm waving my arms-I'm trying to stop you!

Prince: I shall strike this dragon . Die, monstrous abuser! Now you have met your match!!!!

Narrator: He stabs the sword into the dragon's paw. The dragon screams in agony!

Damsel (sobbing): You think you are a hero? The main man? You think you have made life easier for me? You have literally cut my life into pieces.

Prince: I saved your life, lady. Now you can lead your normal Junglian life.

Damsel: The dragon that you have just wounded is a vegetarian and in this place we don't have electricity. I feed these young Junglians on chicken that I singe on the dragon's fire! I don't have a gas stove or electricity .

Prince: I'm sorry, let me hold you ...

Damsel (pushing him away): Don't patronise me! You assumed that I needed help because I am a woman, always readily available for you to rescue!

Prince: I'm so sorry ...

Damsel: In this world-the Jungle world-I am the law. I make the rules and ensure that there is justice. The Jungle justice. You have crossed the line.

Prince: Askies .

Damsel (boldly): I run a business here and for me to survive and for all of these Junglians to eat, we need to singe and sell as many pieces of chicken as possible. It doesn't matter as to what type of energy or fuel you use to achieve the end. No dragon, no business! The clients will desert me and there will be no profit.

Prince (softly): Yes, your majesty ...

Damsel (aloud and slowly, as if she is dictating each and every word she utters): Now here is justice! From today onwards until the Dragon returns, you will be my singe boy. You must ensure that there is always a constant supply of fire for my business. How you do it is none of my business. And remember!! We do not use firewood in this world; you had better increase production.

Prince (shocked and surprised): But I am only here for a short period ...

Damsel (authoritatively): When you are in the Jungle, you become a Junglian, and in this Jungle, it is the survival of the fittest. You are now part of the system. More fire, more profit .

Narrator: And thus it was that each player found their role. Tune in for the next episode of The Damsel and the Dragon.

 

The Indigenous as the Point of "Epistemic Legitimacy"

Recalling the research question that directed ZAPP's intended research intervention- Can infusing contemporary South African poetry into the curriculum revitalise the teaching and learning of poetry?-this section will describe how the team's focus moved from the English classroom to the isiXhosa classroom, replacing the broad sweep of "contemporary South African poetry" with the indigenous isiXhosa, to focus on isiXhosa as a point of reference and "epistemic legitimacy" (Mignolo 2011, 279).

Initial visits to Ukuzimela High School revealed the school to be well-run and, despite its material challenges, able to achieve a 97-100% pass rate in the matric examinations, a considerable achievement. Teachers eagerly welcomed the project, in the hope and expectation that research members would assist them to deliver the curriculum. Notes from a meeting with teachers on 8 September 2017 reflect a request from teachers to assist with resources to help teach figures of speech, sonnets and "Shakespeare".

In the search of solutions to the problem of teaching English poetry at Ukuzimela High School, an interview with a teacher revealed a rich seam of knowledge in the isiXhosa poetry classroom. The isiXhosa poetry tradition is an oral tradition, which allows for greater self-expression than written poetry; in addition, it prioritises word-play, emotive power, conceptual and thematic rigour that is judged by the collective group of listeners who are steeped in the canon of isiXhosa poetry.

An interview with the isiXhosa educator is presented as a prose poem, a praise poem outlining the principles, values and purpose of poetry as she teaches them in her classroom. Introducing A.C. Jordan's seminal investigation of isiXhosa poetry and storytelling, Tales of Southern Africa, Z. Pallo Jordan writes:

[T]he ethos of traditional society was enshrined in an oral legal, religious and literary tradition through which the community transmitted, from generation to generation, its customs, values and norms. The poet and the storyteller stood at the centre of this tradition, as the community's chroniclers, entertainers and conscience. (1973, xi)

For amaXhosa, the humanistic expression and sharing of poetry is oral and heard, understood and responded to spontaneously. This aesthetic value is key to understanding its relevance. The poet may bring in lines of well-known songs or poems, make reference to personal or communal history, exhort the listeners to take action, and celebrate or denigrate powerful individuals, land, celestial bodies, rivers, mountains or the sea. The broad definition of these poems, usually delivered extempore, is izimbongi. The following poem, describing the research team's encounter with the isiXhosa teacher at Ukuzimela High School, is loosely modelled on izimbongi: the poem uses rhythm, repetition and narration to celebrate a conversation and an individual.

The First Language

by Phillippa Yaa de Villiers

Ah, language!

After a long drive past factories and clinics and shattered camps, we entered the township with its crooked roads, small houses and dilapidated shacks; we left the trimmed lawns and neat fences of English and walked into isiXhosa, chatting and gossiping with its close relatives isiZulu, seNdebele, also seSotho, Setswana and vhaVenda, the languages in which these high school learners eat their breakfast and scold their siblings, the languages in which they complain about teachers, exams, having enough to eat or something pretty to wear, the languages in which they fight and reconcile, fight and reconcile. And borrow money. The crowded languages in which they love, grieve and legislate. We smelt the burnt pap of a language left unattended, the petrol smell of language only valued for how much money it can make for the boss. In the township we smelt again the sudden perfume of a rose cultivated in a place of discarded things. We felt the abandon of language to poetry in the ordinary words said by women, taxi drivers and policemen.

Ah, language!

The isiXhosa teacher told about the time when she was studying a poem by Mqhayi at Fort Hare University; a classmate stood up and spontaneously created a poem, and the lecturer said this person is gifted, let's sit and listen. And in that moment the student became the teacher, and all listened as her words rang in the air alongside Mqhayi's, vibrated in the imagination of each listener alongside the vision of each of their individual lives. Together. And after the poet had finished, the teacher proceeded with the lesson, and the lesson was questions. How do we keep old poems alive? If a poet is present, can they illuminate a poem by creating another? Is this gift present in each of us? The poem transforms a teacher to a student, a student to a teacher transforms the poem. The isiXhosa oral tradition tells us who we are, what we were, and what we can become.

Ah, language!

All poetry in every language began as oral literature, a sacred flame passed from poet to listener, seeding poets to come. In the isiXhosa class there was a poet who was spreading love for this thing called a poem. There were no groans because each time the learners learnt a new poem, she would create her response, and everyone would see themselves framed in this new poem, that they could hear and be heard by, in a language that became theirs as she gave it away. For example, recently they were learning a poem about parents, and the poet stood up and recited a poem about how important the mother is to the girl child, and several learners began to cry. The teacher asked why they were crying, and slowly she discovered that many of their parents had died. The school had never asked learners what was happening at home. Poetry reveals feelings, and feelings can show us that the everyday things we thought we knew, are somehow more.

Ah language!

The isiXhosa teacher said we learn to listen from oral literature, to reason, to interpret, how an idiom works on a Sunday afternoon, or a winter moon, and how when something is ungrammatical it sounds wrong. When I, a poet from another culture and language, listened to the isiXhosa teacher's story, I felt language stir in me, older than this educational system and the political system that imposed the educational system, ancient as an isiXhosa baobab that showered me with the haunting beauty of its scented golden flowers, and I felt transformed. English disappeared, and poetry reminded me what it is to be a human, connected, no more other than others who were speaking a language that was not mine. A poet' s purpose is to create and share their sanctuary of words, sparks of a fire, a fire that keeps igniting, enlivening and enlightening, language beyond grammar, stammering into song, time without beginning, time without end: the poem!

ZAPP intended to contribute to the positive learning and teaching of poetry in high schools. The research at Ukuzimela High School involved discovering what resources are available and how they could be deployed to achieve this. To practise isiXhosa aesthetics (orality, word play, rhythm, group participation as a creative act in response to canonical texts) when teaching English poetry may make learners more receptive to the curriculum and could be a way of reframing poetry teaching and learning in an African context, which could enable a more equal distribution of the value of poetry among all languages. Indeed, the Head of the English Department confirmed that he routinely draws on the rich linguistic resources in the classroom to illuminate English poems, although without the dense cultural context and historical relevance that the isiXhosa teacher was able to bring into play.

These aspects of poetry teaching may revitalise the mechanics of understanding "what a poem means" or identifying the figures of speech in a poem and the understanding of subjects beyond poetry itself. Furthermore, if the reader of the poem identifies with the poem to the extent that they see their experience reflected, the "universality" of the poem acquires a visceral and present meaning. In our exploration of indigenous ways of knowing, "the important thing is also to not waste time in some rather byzantine discussion on which African cultural values are specific or non-specific to Africa but to envisage these values as a conquest by a parcel of humanity for the common heritage of man, achieved in one or several stages of his evolution" (Cabral 1973, 16). While recognising the advantages and qualities of this culturally specific set of practices, we do not want to fetishise our Africanness, but rather draw on its particular aesthetic particularities for the benefit of learners and humanity as a whole, and particularly in classrooms where the dominant language of the teachers and learners is an African language.

 

A "Real Utopian" Perspective

Phillippa's account of the research experience seems to indicate that it was indeed the productive, respectful and inspiring knowledge exchange that the project intended. Her poem and reflections indicate that the project's aims and ideals for a democratic, dialogical co-construction of the project focus and processes, the building of cooperative relationships and sharing ways of learning, teaching and appreciating poetry, were, to some extent, realised. By contrast, the criticism put forth by Robert in his play about the Prince, the damsel and the dragon indicates that teachers' experience of the project was a far cry from its intended effect. The play suggests that the teachers experienced the research initiative as an uninvited and misguided crusade of indigenisation ("rejunglisation") conceptualised in a foreign context and indiscriminately imposed. One way in which one could understand this dissonance between the research aims and ideals and the teachers' account of them, on the one hand, and the poet's inspirational experience, on the other, is to frame these within what Erik Olin Wright refers to as "real utopias" (2007). For Wright, a "real utopia" is an empirical or theoretical model that realises the ideals of our visions and dreams within the context of a real situation (Wright 2007). That is, it is an example of how solutions based upon idealistic aspirations can exist in reality because they take into account actual circumstances as well as possible negative unintended consequences. Thus, Wright proposes the idea of "real utopias" as a way of drawing on utopian visions to "develop strategies that enable us to make empirically and theoretically sound arguments about emancipatory possibilities" (2011, 37). At the same time, he is adamant that a "real utopian holds on to emancipatory ideals without embarrassment or cynicism but remains fully cognizant of the deep complexities and contradictions of realizing those ideals" (2013, 8).

In the third analysis of the overall failures and successes of the Ukuzimela High School research project, we realise that the attempt at pursuing a collaborative research intervention at the school took a utopian rather than a real utopian approach. That is, while the research may have been utopian in its aims, the "real" in real utopia means deliberately and practically accounting for problems and trade-offs that may occur (Wright 2013).

In taking this analysis further, we will simply be adapting and applying Wright's arguments and concepts to the Ukuzimela High School project in a straightforward manner. We will outline the four tasks involved in the exploration of real utopias, pointing towards the route along which such an agenda would lead us.

First Task-Identify Moral Principles

According to Wright, in order to develop the emancipatory projects entailed by real utopia, we have to carry out four basic tasks. The first of these is: "Specify the moral principles for judging social institutions" (Wright 2013, 9). Our initial task is to identify the moral principles to which we aspire as a research project, and how these pertain to prioritising indigenous epistemological principles in our research processes and practices. Wright suggests the three principles of equality, democracy and sustainability, so we will follow his lead.

He defines the equality principle as follows: "In a socially just society, all people would have broadly equal access to the social and material conditions necessary for living a flourishing life" (Wright 2013, 10). Applied to our concerns with education, indigenous knowledges and research, this principle compels us to consider the ways in which knowledge and knowledge-making can be made available to all in ways that would contribute to their flourishing at a material, social and spiritual level. To do this, we need to go beyond the conventional human rights discourses and instruments offered by the global North as the universal rights that form the basis of the pursuit of social goods, including education. This is because the conventional human rights basis of equality simply refuses to acknowledge alternative concepts of rights, such as those proposed by non-Western groups, including indigenous peoples. As Santos puts it:

Conventional human rights thinking lacks the theoretical and analytical tools to position itself in relation to such movements; even worse, it does not understand the importance of doing so. It applies the same abstract recipe across the board, hoping that thereby the nature of alternative ideologies or symbolic universes will be reduced to local specificities with no impact on the universal canon of human rights. (de Sousa Santos 2014, 21-22)

For indigenous peoples and other marginalised groups, applying the equality principle to research also entails the near-impossible venture of breaking free of the paradigm since, as Mika et al. (2018) point out, such knowledge is evaluated according to existing dominant criteria. In such conventional research projects, data collection, analyses and the application of findings tend to proceed through the use of "Western-tinted indigenous frameworks" (Mika et al. 2018), particularly if the researchers wish to address the constraints imposed by dominant systems upon the flourishing of their communities. The equality principle for research and education requires a re-evaluation of the ontological and epistemological bases upon which knowledge is constructed, shared and applied. This requires the recognition of spirituality as integral to the ontological foundations of knowledge-making (cf. Chilisa 2019; Dei 2002; Kovach 2010) and the epistemological and axiological implications this engenders.

A second moral principle for judging the research project would be democracy. Taking a societal perspective, Wright defines it as follows: "In a fully democratic society, all people would have broadly equal access to the necessary means to participate meaningfully in decisions about things that affect their lives" (2013, 11). As Wright points out, this principle concerns the ability to make decisions about one's individual well-being and about public issues. At the meso- and micro-sociological levels of the education system and our research at the school, this translates to actors' ability to participate in and determine the content and processes of these domains, such as what curriculum or research design looks like, how these features come to take the forms that they do, whose values and ideas are included, and so forth. And given our concern with indigenising teaching, learning and researching, being democratic would entail adopting a relational orientation towards participation in these knowledge-making and knowledge-sharing processes. Noting the significance that traditional (indigenous) education places on "interpersonal relationships and reciprocal obligations", Mawere argues that "the task of education as a force that promotes interpersonal relationships remains crucial" (2015, 66). We get a good sense of what "relationship" means from an indigenous perspective from Harris and Wasilewski (in Romm) who explains it as being

in the profound sense that we human beings are related not only to each other, but to all things, animals, plants, rocks-in fact, to the very stuff the stars are made of. This relationship is a kinship relationship. (in Romm 2017, 25)

It is through such connections that we as teachers, poets and researchers intended to develop an alternative approach to researching, teaching and learning poetry at the school. Such intentions are contrary to those of conventional educational and research practices, which tend to be extractive and concerned with the immediate outcomes. Rather, they point to the third principle of sustainability, which Wright describes as follows: "Future generations should have access to the social and material conditions to live flourishing lives at least at the same level as the present generation" (2013, 11). The sustainability principle extends the social justice imperatives of the equality and democracy principles so that they not only apply to present conditions, but are also future-oriented.

Second Task-Critique Utopian Project

This brings us to the second task, namely, using the above moral principles, or any others that may be deemed applicable, as the standards for diagnosing and critiquing the utopian project. In order to do this, we draw upon two key documents relating to the research project, namely, a project overview that was drawn up and shared among the participants, and the research team's first annual narrative progress report. These documents will be examined for evidence of the extent to which the moral principles of equality, democracy and sustainability are present or absent within the project. The project will be further evaluated by using the principles to interpret the teachers' critique, represented by the play, The Prince and the Damsel in Distress, and the poet's perspective as expressed in her praise poem and reflections.

Considering the project overview, for instance, under the heading of "Research Methods and Ethics", it states:

Researchers will partner with educators, poets and education officials to conduct this research and implement the interventions. The aim is to prioritise, amongst others, the valuing of relationships, a respect for the interconnectedness of all things living and nonliving, an awareness and deliberate addressing of power relations. (Newfield 2017)

This statement seems to indicate a foregrounding of relationality and an awareness of power imbalances that point to the principles of equality and democracy as outlined earlier. That is, the statement reflects a conceptualisation and pursuit of connectedness that is more in line with indigenous interpretations.

The desire to establish respectful and democratic relationships and processes could also be identified from the project's progress reports. These record several meetings where the primary purpose was to establish the scope of the school's relationship with the research project. The first of these was held on 31 July 2017, when the research team met with the school principal and the school's Head of English Department to introduce themselves and the research project. At this meeting "[i]t was agreed that the school liaison person [Robert Maungedzo, the teacher in our team] would brief the HOD about the project, and that the researchers will draw up a document which outlines the team's hopes, intentions and processes for the project" (Newfield 2017). At a second meeting on 7 September 2017 the research team again met with the principal for an interview, which primarily sought to understand her views on the priorities and ethos at the school. The team also engaged in some initial discussions with Heads of Department for English and Home Languages, a few teachers, and a group of students who were interested in poetry. After several more attempts at meeting, a proposed programme for research at the school was circulated among the research team, eliciting information on the team members' availability and possible contributions to activities with the school. The progress report also records the following:

On Wednesday, 1 November 2017 [the research team] met with the English department at the school. At the meeting the project team outlined the main aims and research approach of the project, including methodological issues and proposed interventions. The teaching staff in turn pointed out what challenges they faced with regard to English teaching, as well as what their hopes and expectations were for the collaboration with the ZAPP researchers. The two teams also developed a preliminary timetable for research activities at the school. (Newfield 2017)

This extract and the references to the meetings between the school and the research team all point to efforts at establishing collaborative processes and relationships, through which the research partners could understand and negotiate their aspirations for the project in a manner that was equitable and allowed all parties to "participate meaningfully". From this point of view, it would seem that the project, to a significant extent, observed the moral principles of equality and democracy as ideals that inform this utopian endeavour.

The teachers' critique of the project, as represented in the play The Prince and the Damsel in Distress, however, documents a different interpretation: it is clear that the relationships pertaining to the research project and those participating in it are unequal in several respects. First, the play notes the material inequalities between the Prince's world and that of the Junglians, whom we can assume to be those of the university-based participants, or researchers, and the school-based participants, or teachers:

Prince: ...these people are really suffering! They don't have resources, they're not meeting targets like in the real Smoke and Mirrors world. It's a mess!

The play also implies that inequalities that may typically exist between university-based research participants and school-based research participants were not addressed by the project. In the following extract it is clear that the Junglians feel that the project, with its aims of indigenisation, is being imposed upon them by "some clever people from the Smoke and Mirrors world":

Narrator: After the Junglians meet the Prince.

Junglian 1: Hey guys. There are some clever people from the Smoke and Mirrors world. They are here to save us from ourselves.

Junglian 2: What do you mean by that?

Junglian 3: They say they are here to indigenise us and so we can become Junglians again.

Junglian 4: Yooooh! I am confused!!!

Junglian 5: They are here to teach poetry. I am happy. That English poetry is so hard to teach, I'm really glad they will do it for me.

The Prince, as the embodiment of the Smoke and Mirrors world of the university-based researchers, acts unilaterally, without taking any time to consider alternative perspectives to his own. Ignoring the advice of his horse, Ntombazana, he acts forcefully upon his understanding of the situation, disrupting what seems to be a productive relationship between the Junglians, the Damsel and the dragon.

It is clear, then, that the teachers did not experience the project as an attempt to build the kind of egalitarian and democratic relationships envisaged by the research team. In terms of the utopian principles of equality and democracy, understood from an alternative perspective of indigenous worldviews and values, especially, the project seems to have failed miserably.

What about the poet's perspective, though? One could argue that, through language and poetry, she managed to find a relationship characterised by equality and democratic exchange. In the isiXhosa poetry lessons she identifies and is inspired by traditions that break down hierarchies of knowing by encouraging participation and the sharing of language as a collective resource. Also, in line with our interpretations of equality and democracy, the knowledge exchanges that occur through teaching, learning and researching about poetry are characterised by a sense of political and spiritual purpose that is directed towards the flourishing of the community, as a community of practice, and also towards challenging and informing the dominant paradigm. It would seem that the poet has gone some way towards the project's vision of creating a connection between the indigenous knowledges that are available to home language speakers at the school, the knowledge holders from the university and the school, as well as bridging predominantly Westernised knowledge traditions and indigenous ones, which are informed by indigenous principles of relationality.

Third Task-Consider Alternatives

Based on our assessment of the extent to which the values of the project were realised, the third task is to consider alternative structures or processes upon which to build the project, based on their desirability, viability and achievability. These three criteria, Wright contends, "are nested in a kind of hierarchy: Not all desirable alternatives are viable, and not all viable alternatives are achievable" (2007, 28). The criterion of desirability is the purely utopian element that may identify the moral and philosophical ideals of the project, but does not offer actual implementable structures for realising these ideals, because it does not engage with the evidence-the pedagogical practices in use at the school (represented by the dragon in the play). The difference between a utopian and a real utopian approach is, therefore, the consideration of issues of viability and achievability. When it comes to these two criteria, Wright suggests that our search for alternatives should prioritise the viability problem (2013). The viability problem puts aside whether a project could be realised under the given circumstances and instead is concerned with possible consequences and the sustainability of the project, should it be carried out. In other words:

The exploration of viability brackets the question of the political achievability of the proposed alternative under existing historical conditions, focusing instead on the likely dynamics and unintended consequences of the proposal if it were to be implemented. (Wright 2007, 28)

The achievability problem, on the other hand, when faced with a desirable and viable alternative, asks what it would take to make it happen. This problem, Wright suggests, is very often too difficult, given the high level of uncertainty associated with trying to anticipate possible future outcomes based on existing conditions and configurations. By paying attention to viability, however, we may positively influence the achievability of a proposed project, since it is more likely that people would work to achieve a desirable project once they are convinced of its viability (cf. Wright 2013). We will offer a brief illustration of how the viability of the project could be considered by turning back to the perspectives of the teacher and the poet, starting with the poet.

In terms of the viability of infusing indigenous knowledges and principles into the researching, teaching and learning of poetry at Ukuzimela High School, one possible kind of result could be that demonstrated by the poet's encounter with isiXhosa poetry. This demonstrates the possibility of teachers and researchers sharing a knowledge connection that is infused with the spiritual, political and intuitive elements that characterise the indigenous relationality sought by the project. This outcome indicates that it is indeed possible to cultivate the indigenised knowledge relationships to which the project aspires, thereby inviting the participants to explore how this has been, and could be achieved.

By contrast, as suggested by the teachers' critique, for various reasons, none of the parties represented by the prince, the Junglians, the damsel and the dragon may undertake the conceptual journey needed for this collaborative project to succeed. This answer to the viability question suggests that the project is unsustainable, thereby thwarting any further attempts at achieving it.

Fourth Task-Theorising Alternatives

The fourth task involved in exploring a real utopian solution is theorising ways in which to get from the current reality to the idealised alternative. For our project, this undertaking requires that we develop conceptual tools that will take us from how the project was carried out to how we would have liked to enact it. Taking its research, teaching and learning components together, we propose the networked relational concept of learning as a possible framework for advancing the real utopian project of transforming poetry teaching, learning and research.

As with the other tasks, here we will only mention potential approaches and concepts for the purpose of illustration. The first of these is a further theorisation of decoloniality to address the broader processes of validation and subjugation that structure the inequalities between and within societies, communities, knowledges, and ways of doing and being. Bearing in mind that the oppressive dehumanising, discriminatory and extractivist enterprise of colonisation continues its perverse modernising project through globalisation and hegemonic Westernisation, we will follow Maldonado-Torres in defining decoloniality as referring to

efforts at rehumanizing the world, to breaking hierarchies of difference that dehumanize subjects and communities and that destroy nature, and to the production of counter-discourses, counter-knowledges, counter-creative acts, and counter-practices that seek to dismantle coloniality and to open up multiple other forms of being in the world. (2016, 6)

ZAPP's overall project is implicated in this counterhegemonic effort through its intention of repositioning indigenous knowledges as a valuable source for deconstructing and then reconstructing the seemingly inevitable future set out by what Maldonado-Torres refers to as "modernity /coloniality" (2016). This is in line with Dei, who alerts us that anti-colonial education is concerned with "macrosocial processes, as well as the economic, political and psychological realms of domination" (2016, 6) and becomes a site for resistance as well as for "a search for new futures of mutual coexistence" (Dei 2016, 6). Clearly, then, decolonisation is a significant component of our fourth task of developing a theoretical framework for realising our real utopian project.

A second theoretical approach would be cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). This approach is considered appropriate for the real utopian project because it is concerned with analysng development in the form of learning and change within an activity system of individual, communal and societal relationships that are historically developing and mediated by tools, rules and the division of labour (Daniels et al. 2013).

With regard to the fourth task of theorising transformation, we wish to also mention Sannino's concepts of conflict and transitions, which examine why an initially successful collaborative project between a university and a local elementary school was not sustained (Sannino 2008). Using cultural-historical activity theory, Sannino begins by explaining that a leading or dominant activity is one that governs development and gives rise to and shapes other developmental activities. A dominant activity can be replaced or displaced by another dominant activity through transitions. However, Sannino suggests that developmental transitions may not correspond with institutionally available structures or individuals' needs. She therefore proposes "the notion of transitional actions which typically move sideways across boundaries between dominant and non-dominant activities, with potentially long-term sustaining significance" (2008, 332). In the context of a research intervention, participants may resort to transitional actions when faced with conflicts: "inner doubts that paralyze the individual who faces contradictory motives" (Sannino 2008, 332). Applying these ideas to our utopian research project, we realise that the demands of the leading activity of assessment-driven learning, as well as the institutional structure and available resources, constrain teachers' perceptions of what can be achieved with the non-dominant innovation. However, like the isiXhosa teacher and the poet, they may nevertheless make sideways initiatives. These "may indeed be attempts to continue the newly introduced non-leading activity . [and] may be oriented at enriching or changing the dominant activity from inside in small steps" (Sannino 2008, 337).

 

Concluding Remarks

The analyses in this article are not intended to be extensive, but, rather, illustrative of some of the basic elements entailed in using a real utopian approach to analyse an educational intervention. We believe, with Crain Soudien, that the education community is not asking the tough questions about "the continued viability of global lifestyles normatively calibrated around excess" (2013, 839), which our education systems support, often at the expense of marginal groups or communities. The intervention also highlights that the concept of marginalisation is itself problematic: South Africa's majority population group is African and they are the holders of the indigenous knowledges that come with their home languages. Their marginalisation is conceptual rather than actual: the problem is one of value.

In presenting the reflections of Robert and Phillippa Yaa as a play and poem, we have purposely engaged the imagination and sought to delink from formal Western protocols of scholarship. Our intention is to provoke, challenge and invite readers to apply the totality of their consciousness to the issue of indigenous knowledge in a context that is strongly influenced by Western mores. However, these devices are not entirely for the purposes of entertainment: we aspire to stimulate debate. Educational transformation is a high stakes game that should be neither optional nor indiscriminate for educationalists seeking social justice.

 

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1 For example: "Recognising the historically diminished use and status of the indigenous languages of our people, the state must take practical and positive measures to elevate the status and advance the use of these languages" (Republic of South Africa [RSA] 1996, 4).
2 The relevant clause states:

^rND^sCabral^nAmilcar^rND^sDei^nGeorge J^rND^sKaya^nHassan O.^rND^nYonah^sN. Seleti^rND^sLe Grange^nLesley^rND^sMawere^nMunyaradzi^rND^sMignolo^nWalter D^rND^sMika^nCarl^rND^nGeorgina^sStewart^rND^nKa'imi^sWatson^rND^nKeola^sSilva^rND^nBrian^sMartin^rND^nJacoba^sMatapo^rND^nAkata^sGaluvao^rND^sNewfield^nDenise^rND^nRobert^sMaungedzo^rND^sSannino^nAnnalisa^rND^sSannino^nAnnalisa^rND^sSoudien^nCrain^rND^sSouza^nMarcela Fernanda da Paz de^rND^sWright^nErik Olin^rND^sWright^nErik Olin^rND^sWright^nErik Olin^rND^1A01^nKatharine^sNaidu^rND^1A02^nDenise^sNewfield^rND^1A01^nKatharine^sNaidu^rND^1A02^nDenise^sNewfield^rND^1A01^nKatharine^sNaidu^rND^1A02^nDenise^sNewfield

THEMED SECTION 2
ARTICLE

 

"Moments That Glow": WhatsApp as a Decolonising Tool in EFAL Poetry Teaching and Learning

 

 

Katharine Naidu^I; Denise Newfield^II

^IUniversity of South Africa, South Africa. naiduk1@unisa.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5932-3520
^IIUniversity of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. newfield@iafrica.com; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7248-6025

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This article, based on a research project with learners in a township school in South Africa, seeks to discuss whether WhatsApp was able to transform the space of the poetry classroom in positive and productive ways. The project was designed in response to research in EFAL (English First Additional Language) classrooms that revealed the marginalisation of poetry as a component in the English classroom, a lack of enthusiasm for it on the part of teachers, and a lack of engagement and energy on the part of learners-all of whom seemed to find poetry remote, irrelevant, unengaging and difficult. The shift to a WhatsApp chatroom, after school hours and outside the classroom, revealed encouraging results. The article seeks to explore the transformative effects of that move, how the chatroom gave learners a creative space in which to express themselves, to speak with their own voice, in their own tongue and to take control of their learning-which seem to us to be decolonising effects. We use Maggie MacLure's idea of selecting "moments that glow" from the text message conversations and the subsequent focus group discussions and questionnaires to show moments of pedagogic decolonisation.

Keywords: moments that glow; EFAL teaching and learning; pedagogy; poetry; agency; decolonising pedagogy; WhatsApp

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it was easier to type than to say it with my mouth

(chatroom participant)

 

Contextualisation

This article is based on a four-week pedagogic project that forms part of a larger empirical research study undertaken by Katharine Naidu into the teaching and learning of poetry in secondary school EFAL (English First Additional Language) classrooms. She set up and conducted a WhatsApp poetry project in one of her research schools in order to determine whether WhatsApp could be a viable option for poetry teaching and learning. The project was undertaken with the consent of the teacher, the Head of the English Department, the Principal, the School Governing Body and participating learners and their parents/guardians; institutional ethical clearance was sought and granted. Denise Newfield's role is that of co-author of the article. The research school followed the EFAL curriculum: that is, the English curriculum for speakers taking English as a first additional language,¹ not as a first language or mother tongue; English was their second or in some cases their third, fourth, of fifth language. Twenty-six years into South Africa's democracy, and despite a series of committed attempts at educational reform through policy and curricular revisions, the legacies of Bantu Education have not been entirely erased. The previous structural inequalities in training, staffing, material resources and the infrastructure of apartheid education, a separatist educational system that discriminated against black children, have not yet been rectified.

This article was written during COVID-19 lockdown, when schools around the world were closed, and privileged children in South Africa, as elsewhere, were getting their lessons online, by means of expertly produced videos or classes on Zoom led by their teachers. However, ongoing inequalities have created a situation where the majority of schools in South Africa have not been able to shift to online learning because of inadequate computer devices and connectivity to the internet (Fataar 2020; Van der Berg and Spaull 2020). The classroom research on which this article is based took place in the years just prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, when many schools had not contemplated moving to digital forms of teaching and learning. Poetry lessons in the research school took place in classrooms, and the emphasis tended to be on line-by-line explanation of the poem by the teacher. Some South African schools still have no electricity, although the government is trying to remedy this. Poetry, formerly a compulsory component of subject "English", has become optional in secondary school EFAL classrooms in post-1994 curricula. It is considered difficult, problematic and alienating. There are anxieties about its difficult language as well as its cultural remoteness (Andrews 1991; Leshaoi 1982; Newfield and Maungedzo 2006). Furthermore, paradoxically, another reason could be its imaginative evocativeness and openness to differing interpretations for teachers who seek a single answer; or, perhaps, because it seems out of step with today's fast and action-packed versions of popular culture; and, finally, perhaps because of inappropriate pedagogy and forms of assessment.

Although poetry was taught at the research school, it was not studied with great enthusiasm, as Katharine observed in lessons on the set poems. Poems were "translated" line by line, with the meanings of unfamiliar words glossed; tests focused on poetic techniques and figures of speech, which learners found difficult. Although Grade 10 teachers in some South African secondary schools would choose the poems to study- if they chose to include poetry-this school provided a set list of poems to its English teachers. The list included a poem by British colonial poet, Stephen Spender, about his genteel childhood in England, "My Parents Kept Me from Children Who Were Rough" (Spender 1955). However, Spender, a bookish child who had been sent by his parents to elite primary and secondary schools and then to Oxford University, came to support the rights of all human beings to live decently, earn what their labour deserved, in a society free of prejudice, as can be seen in the narrator's response to his parents' views. The poem may be said to express two conflicting attitudes towards social class, the snobbish, class-based views of the parents who wished to keep their son from "children who were rough" and the son's empathy for, and indeed envy of, those children. It is difficult to decide whether the poem's theme is appropriate or inappropriate to a decolonising effort. However, the issue we primarily seek to discuss in this article concerns the decolonisation of pedagogy rather than of text selection. Can a WhatsApp chatroom provide conditions conducive to the decolonising of poetry teaching and learning, even where the prescribed poem is culturally remote and belongs to the colonial tradition of English poetry?

 

From Classroom to Chatroom: Disrupting the Norm

Our article describes what happened when Spender's poem was studied in a WhatsApp chatroom. The idea of using WhatsApp as a tool for teaching the poem was inspired by a focus group discussion that was conducted with learners to understand their experiences and challenges with poetry lessons in the English classroom. In response to a question concerning the use of the English language in the learners' everyday lives, these non-mother-tongue English speakers said that the only time they used English exclusively to communicate with each other was when they texted. In all other forms of communication, they used the vernacular. Learners said that they found it easier to write in English and speak in the vernacular. In response to a question concerning mobile phone usage, learners expressed interest and excitement. This discussion gave birth to the idea of using mobile phones for teaching the poem. Since mobile phones were not used in classrooms because they were considered unfit for proper teaching and learning, using WhatsApp would need to be done extra-curricularly and after school hours. Arrangements had to be made: the researcher needed to ensure that mobile phones and data would be available to all participants. The group needed to settle upon a time suitable for the poetry WhatsApp chat, considering learners' cleaning, cooking and homework responsibilities. One of the classes chose the 7:00 to 8:30 pm slot while the other class chose the 8:30 to 10:00 pm slot. It was agreed that each class would meet between three and four times per week for the four weeks' duration of the project.

The reluctance of teachers to use cell phones for English teaching was tied, among other reasons, to cell phones' specific form of textual discourse: an abbreviated, colloquial, slang, often ungrammatical form of Americanese that combines numbers and letters in non-standard ways, suited to speed and to being written while standing up, travelling on a taxi, walking along the road, or lying in bed. A key goal of subject "English" remains the acquisition and use of correct standard written English, as teachers across the globe still generally agree. John Quagie, writing in Ghana, says: "One cannot deny the fact that there is the need for teachers to teach and insist that students use the Standard form of English". He stresses that "the many Englishes which students speak and write these days should not be allowed to invade the formal spaces of education" (Kwagie 2009, 9), a view that is shared by many South African English teachers. In answer to the question, "Do EFAL teachers subtract marks for learners' spelling and grammar mistakes in tests and exams?", a well-known Gauteng Head of Department recently answered: "Marks are subtracted in Paper 3, Creative Writing, based on the rubric we use. In Paper 1, we do not award a mark when the spelling is incorrect. In Paper 2, Literature, there are no marks deducted for spelling" (personal communication to researchers, 18 June 2020).

The WhatsApp texts of our research group are rife with examples of non-standard forms such as "ola", "I", "wanna", "pple", "bcs", "it will depend on hw mny I gv u", as well as the use of the ubiquitous emojis. However, since Katharine was concerned with engagement and communication rather than the grammatical correctness or use of standard English, she did not stop to correct errors or interrupt learners when they used instances of "SMS discourse".² At no time did she wish to constrain their writing. She wanted the chatroom to be a comfortable space for learners, where they would not be afraid to give the wrong answer but, in contrast, would feel free to express themselves without embarrassment. This is not to suggest that she would not teach standard English usage, were she a teacher at the school; on the contrary, she would encourage learners to be proficient in a repertoire of different registers, and to understand their appropriateness to different contexts, such as formal education, work, family and recreation.

Some teachers consider WhatsApp to inhibit careful thought and grammatically correct sentences, and therefore to be unfit for education. However, Katharine was interested in how the affordances of WhatsApp might play out in the teaching of the poem. "Affordances" (Kress 2010, 186-88) refer to the potentials for communication, representation and expression of devices and their applications. WhatsApp encourages quick thinking, brief, rapid articulations and responses; a WhatsApp chatroom enables group interaction. For these reasons, Katharine made a conscious decision to allow learners to lead the discussion as much as possible.

 

The Question of Pedagogic Decolonisation

We now turn to the question of decolonisation. Decolonisation is a hotly debated topic, campaigned for by South African university students,³ acceded to in principle by educational hierarchies in secondary as well as tertiary institutions.⁴ In a recent book on decolonisation and curriculum (Jansen 2019), Sayed, de Kock and Motala advocate the inclusion of schooling and teacher education in the decolonial project, but lament that there is "a remarkable silence about pedagogy and the practice of teaching" (2019, 165). This silence indicates that the decolonisation of pedagogy is not easily achievable; rather, it is a complex and ongoing challenge, a "process of becoming" that can only proceed "step by step", as Freire notes ([1970] 1987, 72). In order to define key aspects of what might constitute pedagogic decolonisation, we draw primarily on the work of three iconic scholars, two foundational and one of current importance. They have made an impact in, and continue to be relevant to, the field of educational decolonisation in South Africa. They are South African black consciousness advocate Steven Bantu Biko, Latin American educator Paolo Freire, and Cameroonian-born philosopher Achille Mbembe, who has made his home in South Africa. Mbembe has written about the complexities of the postcolony (2015) and continues to concern himself with the residues of colonial violence in the twenty-first century (Mbembe 2017; 2019). These scholars provide not only a critical commentary on the impact of colonialism on the colonised, but also inspiration for escaping its shackles.

As is well known, Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1987) critiqued the "banking system" of education in favour of one that would provide men and women with epistemological tools for asserting themselves as agents of their own histories and would transform society as well as education (Freire and Macedo 1998, 37). His goal was emancipation, and his educational strategies were based on dialogue and critique of the world through the word (Freire 1987, 75-77; Freire and Macedo 1998, 8). Biko's I Write What I Like (1978) concerned the need for black South Africans to liberate themselves from the "spiritual poverty" engendered by 400 years of colonialism through developing a "black consciousness" that would "make a black man [sic] tick ... pump life back into his empty shell" (28-29). For Mbembe, "[w]e must escape the status of victimhood" and "break with the denial of responsibility" (2017, 178), although present forms of inequality undermine the capacity of many to be masters (sic) of their own lives. He says that teaching and learning, including "the old teacher-learner relationship", should be recalibrated in relation to the new digital environments (2019, 241-3). He considers artistic production to be part of decolonisation, since it can be used as a "defence against dehumanisation", as a means of maintaining hope, and as a liberation of "forgotten energies" (2019, 173). These three writers emphasise the collective over Western individualism. As Biko put it, "[t]he oneness of community ... is at the heart of our culture" (1979, 30). Pedagogic decolonisation is political, stemming from colonial histories of subjugation and demanding emancipation from educational forms of prescription, discrimination, imposition and subjection. Decolonising pedagogies cannot be equated with learner-centred or "progressive" pedagogies, in spite of some overlap in pedagogic goals, such as the promotion of student agency and voice. Putting the learner, rather than the teacher, centre stage may be based on a neoliberal promotion of individualism rather than on empowerment of the collective.

Pedagogic transformation was the conscious aim of Katharine's project. Taking into account apartheid and post-liberation South African educational and socioeconomic inequalities, we shall explore whether decolonising aspects exist in the data, and if so, where, by "diffracting"⁵ the data through the ideas of these scholars, both past and present. In this way, we hope to contribute to the discussion of decolonisation as a pedagogic practice, even in a small way, and to highlight pedagogic aspects that could be useful to teachers and practitioners who wish to take a decolonising orientation in their work.

 

Methodology: The Wonder of Data and Moments That Glow

A popular method of data analysis in qualitative research is thematic content analysis. As researchers, if we applied a thematic content analysis to our WhatsApp data on teaching the poem, "My Parents Kept Me from Children Who Were Rough", we would have looked for recurring themes. Some of these recurring themes might have focused on the learner's interpretation of the poem, the ways in which learners engaged with figurative language, and how the teacher scaffolded the poem for the learners. This approach privileges sameness in the data so that it can be coded as a theme; however, it may fail to notice the unusual elements, which the researcher may not even have imagined. In contrast to thematic content analysis, Maggie MacLure's approach to data analysis focuses on "moments that glow" (MacLure 2013a; 2013b; 2013c). These are moments of "wonder": a quality that resides in and radiates from the data as a result of "the entangled relation of data-and-researcher" (MacLure 2013a, 228). They are moments of affect and intensity that make an impression on the researcher: "We are no longer autonomous agents, choosing and disposing. Rather, we are obliged to acknowledge that data have their ways of making themselves intelligible to us". "On those occasions" it feels "as if we have chosen something that has chosen us" (MacLure 2013b, 661).

According to MacLure, researchers should be open to what is in the data, so that they can "recognise" (Archer and Newfield 2014; Taylor 1992) signs of interest and significance, whether of positive or negative import, and especially if provocative, puzzling or problematic, points that would not have emerged in a traditional thematic analysis. According to MacLure, these moments have an "untapped potential in qualitative research" (MacLure 2013a). We decided to experiment with this approach to data analysis using the data set from the WhatsApp conversations, focus group discussions and questionnaires. The moments illuminate for us what happened in the chatroom (the classic ethnographic question): how learners acted in that space, how they reacted to and interpreted the poem, and what arose from their encounter with WhatsApp for learning purposes. We now present and comment on a selection of moments that glowed in the sequence that they occurred.

 

Moments That Glow

Moment 1: "Eish just try being proffesionals"

A few hours before the time set for the first chat, in the afternoon, learners began texting one another. They could not wait to fill the empty WhatsApp slots in front of them; the empty slots called to them. The notion of machinic agency and of human-machinic interfaces has been asserted by a range of scholars, including media theorist, Marshall McLuhan (1964) and feminist scholar and historian of technology, Donna Haraway (1985). Although the poetry chatroom had not yet officially opened, some learners could not resist typing letters, numbers, and symbols into it, their thumbs nimbly tapping on the machine, which they held easily without stress, like an "extension" of their bodies (McLuhan 1964, 156-57). They greeted one another with enthusiasm and anticipation to make their presence felt in the chatroom. However, knowing that the evening was the allocated time for the chat, and not the afternoon, a few learners took it upon themselves to remind the others of this.

Learner 30 expressed her irritation by texting in upper case to learners who disrespected the pre-negotiated time of the chat, and she was supported by other learners. This immediate display of responsibility and respect in relation to the purpose of the chatroom and the available data was echoed by other learners, for example, Learner 6:

When Learner 16 sent an audio message on the chat, Learner 7 scolded:

By consensus, learners themselves, rather than the teacher, began to establish a chatroom culture from the start; this included respect for the task at hand and a modus operandi that included sociality, decorum and warmth.

The learners were building a poetry chatroom community. They greeted one another with politeness and affection at the beginning and end of every lesson, as the fragment below shows.

At the end of the term when the chatroom project was to end, Learner 12 responded with one word and eight emojis showing a crying face, and Learner 1 responded with 18 sad, crying face emojis and one broken heart, indicating their regret at the end of the chatroom as a community.

Moment 2: "You might end up doing flabbergasted things that can also affect you in future"

As mentioned previously, the prescribed poem for Grade 10 learners that was to be discussed in the WhatsApp chatroom was "My Parents Kept Me from Children Who Were Rough", written by English poet Stephen Spender nearly a century ago, about a world that is very different from the learners' context. The next fragment gives an idea of the way learners engaged with the poem. They did not do a line-by-line analysis, but rather were interested in connecting the poem to their own lives. In answer to the teacher's question, "Do you think that your parents should protect you from the 'rough' children that the poet talks about? Tell me why?", the learners answered:

The learners identified with the protective, middle-class values of Spender's parents. They agreed that their parents should protect them from "rough" children, those who might engage in dangerous behaviour on the streets. A sense of future aspiration inheres in this moment where the learners see the behaviour of the rough boys of the poem as delinquent behaviour-"doing drugs" and ending up in "serious crimes"-from which they distance themselves.

Learner 5's "Yes, because you might end up doing flabbergasted things that can also affect you in future" is not simply a moment that glows, but one that ignites, where grammar gives way to poetic creativity. The transfer of the epithet "flabbergasted" from the human feeling of exasperation, of being stunned, dumbfounded, thunderstruck by an unexpected statement or incident, to teenage behaviour that evokes such feelings and negatively impacts on the teenager's future, is a powerful example of linguistic inventiveness, entirely apt in a poetry lesson. It is a sign of learners engaging with the poem in terms of their own lives, making it their own by translating both its content and language into their own environment.

Moment 3: "They said i will duplicate my life like a nuclear bomb that has fallen at Dubai"

During one poetry chatroom discussion, learners were asked by the teacher to write their own four-line poem based on their understanding of the Spender poem, and beginning with the words: My parents kept me from children who were ... . Although they were asked to plan and draft it, most of the learners submitted their poems without any planning, probably because WhatsApp affords and encourages spontaneity. These were some of their responses:

As South Africa's late Poet Laureate, Keorapetse Kgositsile, says, "lived experience" is the bedrock of his poetry:

In writing, I let my imagination reach into the depths of my feeling to bring out what I am most responsive to at the moment of playing my solo with language through the texture of lived experience. (Kgositsile 2018, 15)

These short verses come directly from learners' lived experiences or their hopes and aspirations. The parents of Learner 25 kept her from "children who bullied other children/ who took other children's lunchboxes/ money/ and hit them", while Learner 28 was kept from those "who smoke weed/ and do silly things". Learner 4's parents voiced their fears for contamination of their child by ill-disciplined others in unforgettably vivid township lingo: "They said I will duplicate my life like a nuclear bomb/ that has fallen at Dubai/ They said I will be walking in a very dark black cloud". Here is another moment that ignites, that explodes in its discordant meaning and rhythm. As poet Toni Stuart says, poetry has the "ability to draw out voices that have been silenced" (2020, 132). "Duplicate my life" is a terse phrase conveying a sense of rapid and dangerous copying. When metaphorised as "a nuclear bomb/that has fallen on Dubai" the line shocks. No nuclear bomb has ever fallen on Dubai, as far as we are aware, but Dubai stands today for a thriving, wealthy city, where rich South Africans travel to do their shopping. The line's cadence concludes with a jolt at "Dubai", a phrase written "with "the musicality of [the learner's] own flesh" (Mbembe 2017, xiii). It seems that Learner 4 did not heed the warning that if not careful, he would be walking in the "very dark black cloud" of nuclear fallout, because he says that now his "life is turning its back" on him. The final line of Learner 4's poem reads like a cry from the heart, "only if I could turn days around".

Moment 4: "Do you also forgive people who provoke or bully you and why do you do that?"

The next fragment spotlights learner confidence and agency. Katharine's classroom observation had revealed that learners rarely asked their teachers a question, even when they seemed to be concentrating on the lesson. Learner 5's question related to the paradoxical final stanza of the poem, where the narrator of the poem, recalling his boyhood feelings, says, "They threw mud/ And I looked the other way, pretending to smile,/ I longed to forgive them". "Guys," asked Learner 5, "Do you also forgive people who provoke or bully you and why do you do that?" His classmates responded enthusiastically:

Although the term "bullying" was not used in the poem, the learner found it himself and used it as a gloss for one of the themes of the poem. Bullying is a common phenomenon in many schools today (Pijoos 2020). Learners are particularly sensitive about it, and the class responded enthusiastically. Most of them were willing to forgive bullies provided that they did not engage in repeated bullying. The phrasing of the responses of Learners 2, 7 and 8 evokes the sense of "forgiveness" embedded in the Christian faith of many of the learners, which probably informed their interpretation of Spender's final line, "I longed to forgive them, yet they never smiled."

The poem does not explicitly state why the speaker wanted to forgive the "rough" children who treated him so badly. Learners used clues from the poem as well as their experience of bullying to interpret this:

Moment 5: TAG (The Amazing Group) and boyz n bucks

The final glowing moment in the chatroom occurred when it was time to say goodbye and leave the group. Learners were adamant that they did not want to leave. When asked why, one learner said: "It's fun and we get to express our feelings and we get to be us". Learners decided to keep the chatroom group going as they "needed each other". They negotiated a new name for it: TAG (The Amazing Group); they used the image below (Figure 1) as their group profile picture and continued communicating about other school-related matters until the academic year was over. A year later, the learners formed a new group for the discussion of social and teenage issues. They called it "boyz n bucks".

 

 

Moment 6: "it was easier to type than to say it with my mouth"

In the questionnaire, one learner took on the role of policymaker: "If I was in charge of basic education every child in Southern Africa would be taught via WhatsApp". WhatsApp, the class said, was "practical", as one can text from "anywhere" at "anytime". It gave them a sense of control over their own learning. Learners also pointed to the power of the device: simply holding the phone made them feel good; touching it and typing words on it that would be read and "heard" by all their classmates was exhilarating. The chatroom space, bringing together learners, their cell phones, the poem and the teacher in a specific "entanglement" and set of "intra-actions"⁶ (Barad 2007, 33, 170, 175-76, 206-7), became a new force for learning and empowerment.

Many of the learners felt that the chat space was "safe": "In a classroom your classmates laugh at you or your comments but on the chat, you feel free commenting." Because they do not speak English as their home language, they mispronounce words and their classmates laugh at them. They also enjoyed the invisibility of the chat: "Learners couldn't see me so if I answered a question badly or funnily and they laughed, I would not see them so my heart would not be broken." The chat was not anonymous because learners' names appeared above their message, but they were not visible, which afforded them a sense of protection. The final point made by learners was about literacy itself rather than psychological or emotional wellbeing. It took us by surprise in relation to the view commonly held by teachers and scholars that the major literacy problem concerns writing, that learners can express themselves orally but fail to do so effectively in writing (Kress 1982; Tonfoni 1994):

Considering how painlessly children learn to talk, the difficulties they face in learning to write are quite pronounced. Indeed, some children never learn to write at all, and many fall far short of full proficiency in the skills of writing. (Kress 1982, ix)

Stein asserts that her student's move from telling a story to writing about it involved "a profound loss" (Stein 2008, 62). Turning these views upside down, Learner 40 put forward a powerfully visceral claim about the difficulty of forming foreign sounds with the tongue and lips, and which points to an affordance of WhatsApp: "I enjoyed the WhatsApp poetry lesson because it was easier to type than to say it with my mouth". This viewpoint may hold implications for learning to write and for writing development in a future of blended, online or WhatsApp learning.

 

Discussion: WhatsApp as a Decolonising Tool

What role did WhatsApp play? Although not easy to set up for reasons of technology and difficulties of access, once this was accomplished, learners worked with and benefitted from the affordances of WhatsApp: its potential for instantaneous messaging through brief, rapid responses in colloquial SMS registers and emojis. The affordance of the chatroom for multiple members to be part of a group and to interact easily, taking turns, also played a central role. Learners were able to think together, to be privy to one another's thoughts and opinions. WhatsApp enabled collaborative learning. However, since a range of entangled phenomena are involved in any teaching and learning situation, other factors must be acknowledged as having played a role too. One of these is the element of novelty and the excitement that can accompany novelty, since learners had never before used WhatsApp for school-related activities. WhatsApp functioned as a kind of "activation device" (Springgay and Truman 2018, 135), altering familiar procedures, and unlocking and mobilising affective, creative and cognitive intensities.

We now turn to the question of decolonisation. In what ways, if any, do these moments point to elements of pedagogic decolonisation? Learners established a chatroom culture based on respect and care for one another, adherence to chatroom etiquette, accountability to the educational purpose of the chatroom and to responsible use of data. The space of the chatroom became one of community and belonging. Power relations shifted; learners and the teacher shared the space equally in a dynamic dialogue that probed the poem's meaning and related it to local circumstances. The chatroom became a lively space of negotiation, of "intra-action". Learners grew in confidence; they initiated discussions and asked meaningful questions. Learner 5 initiated an in-depth discussion while another learner took on the role of policymaker for his group of classmates-a generation having to confront the complexities and changes of a rapidly digitising world-by proposing new methods based on the affordances of WhatsApp as a pedagogic tool.

"Agency" is a key concept in educational and theoretical approaches (Archer and Newfield 2014; Barad 2007; Francis and le Roux 2012; Jansen 2019), as well as in the decolonising approaches of Freire, Biko and Mbembe, although these scholars do not use the term centrally in their theorising. Agency is a power to act, to think and to feel, a "doing" (Barad 2007; Jansen 2019, 115-80). From a perspective of decolonising pedagogy, the action would be against the strictures of oppressive systems and in relation to personal and group liberation and cognitive development, standing up and walking with their own feet, as Mbembe writes (2017, 162).

Learners spoke in their own voice, not in a generalised way, but as a localised engagement (Appadurai 2004, 66) with the issues of the poem in relation to their own lives. They were agentive in their use of the English language, creatively and innovatively manipulating it in the colloquial ways afforded by WhatsApp. "Forgotten energies" (Mbembe 2019, 173) were awakened as the learners captured their experience in poetic lines. This opened up possibilities towards becoming "makers of culture" (Freire and Macedo 1998, 7; emphasis added) rather than mere receivers of culture, artistic creation and knowledge.

A sense of futurity permeated the chatroom discussions: dangers, temptations and hopes for the future were prompted by engagement with the poem. The learners' dialogues, conversations and actions were infused with "hope" and with "aspirations" (Appadurai 2004, 59-84) for "the transformation of reality" (Freire 1987, 81), as was seen in the final glowing moment.

 

Conclusion

We have used this story of moments that glow to show how the move from classroom to chatroom temporarily shifted the negative attitudes to poetry that had been manifest before. MacLure's analytical methodology highlighted for us the way the chatroom facilitated learner agency in knowledge construction and imaginative language usage. The study of a poem was enlivened; learners shifted from apathy to enthusiastic engagement; they built the chatroom community responsibly and with respect, and participated actively in their poetry learning from their own perspectives. But there is a cautionary note. It would not be wise to regard WhatsApp as a panacea. We are not suggesting that this single instance-a limited case study-can be generalised to all others, but rather offering it as a potential alternative or supplement to more traditional face-to-face classroom teaching. We are suggesting that this story of moments that glow can be seen as a small step on the long road towards the decolonisation of pedagogy.

 

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the teachers and learners of the school for allowing us to conduct this research, and the editors of Education as Change and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We also acknowledge the generous support of the National Research Foundation, Grant No. 105159.

 

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1 In South Africa, English language studies at secondary school level are divided into Home Language (HL), First Additional Language (FAL) and Second Additional Language (SAL).
2 SMS discourse came into existence because SMS (the Short Messaging System) only allowed 40 characters.
3 In 2015 and 2016 the #FeesMustFall protests in various universities in South Africa demanded free education, decolonisation of the education system, transformation of universities and the insourcing of general workers.
4 The Deputy Minister of Higher Education and Training in South Africa, Buti Manemela, stated, "[i]n the context of South African higher education, decolonisation is the comprehensive transformation or change of the curriculum and institutional cultures to primarily reflect and promote African context" (2018).
5 We use the term "diffraction" in a Baradian sense. For Karen Barad (2007), a diffractive analysis refers to reading one's data in and through theory in an affirmative way that leads to new insights. In this article we diffract the glowing moments through decolonial and pedagogic theory.
6 Barad's neologism "intra-action" is distinguished from "interaction" by the emphasis on the inseparable relationality of the participants (human and non-human) in the encounter. "Intra-action" affects participants in dynamic ontological ways.

^rND^sHaraway^nD.^rND^sMacLure^nM.^rND^sMacLure^nM.^rND^sNewfield^nD.^rND^nR.^sMaungedzo^rND^1A01^nKirsten^sDeane^rND^1A01^nKirsten^sDeane^rND^1A01^nKirsten^sDeane

THEMED SECTION 2
POETRY

 

Poems about Us

 

 

Kirsten Deane

University of the Western Cape, South Africa. kirstendeane14@gmail.com

 

 

There are poems about the colour of our skin,

about the sun that sets

on us a little longer

than everybody else.

They talk about the dirt that crept into our pores,

making us a little

darker but growing

oak trees and lemons.

I'm writing poems about our flesh and its different

shades of nature,

our ladybugs and

spiders and beetles

that crawl with us,

fearlessly through

the poems that

thought they defined us.

We've got a hold of the pen and the poem

no longer traps us

but holds our hands

on our way back

to ourselves.

^rND^1A01^nHeidi^svan Rooyen^rND^1A02^nRaphael^sd'Abdon^rND^1A01^nHeidi^svan Rooyen^rND^1A02^nRaphael^sd'Abdon^rND^1A01^nHeidi^svan Rooyen^rND^1A02^nRaphael^sd'Abdon

THEMED SECTION 2
ARTICLE

 

Transforming Data into Poems: Poetic Inquiry Practices for Social and Human Sciences

 

 

Heidi van Rooyen^I; Raphael d'Abdon^II

^IHuman Sciences Research Council, South Africa. hvanrooyen@hsrc.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6502-6098
^IIHuman Sciences Research Council, South Africa. RDabdon@hsrc.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6972-3245

 

 

---

ABSTRACT

This article argues that poetry is an act of meditation, improvisation and exploration, and urgency is what guides the writer into (and through) the poetic journey. In the light of this, this article illustrates the features of a workshop that was designed to guide social and human scientists in the delicate process of turning raw data into poems. One of the chief objectives of the decolonial project is to bridge the gap between Westernised academia ("The Ivory Tower") and communities where research is conducted, and this article aims to show how poetic inquiry is a fitting research methodology that can serve this purpose. Through a description of the workshop process and specific poems that emerged from it, it suggests that poetic inquiry is an innovative and effective research methodology for social and human scientists engaged in the transformation of conventional knowledge production.

Keywords: poetic inquiry; found poems; social sciences; human sciences; poetry; academic writing; decoloniality

---

 

 

Introduction

Arts-based research blends the arts and humanities with scientific inquiry to craft more embodied ways of understanding the social and physical world (McNiff 2017). This approach has gained traction in the past two decades in response to concerns about truth and representation and the ways in which voices of participants were too often appropriated, overpowered, fragmented, over-summarised or even silenced in qualitative research in the social and human sciences (Denzin and Lincoln 1994). Traditional qualitative methods, such as in-depth interviews or ethnographic reports, often produce narratives that are impersonal or dense, which leave readers overwhelmed or unmoved (Furman, Lietz, and Langer 2006). Arts-based approaches call for new methods of qualitative enquiry that can articulate the rich contextual and affective realities of participants' lives in meaningful, emotive and creative ways (Glesne 1997; Richardson 2002) and facilitate dissemination of research in much more easily consumable formats (Furman et al. 2006).

Poetic inquiry, or the use of poetry in research, is an arts-based approach that emerged in response to the above critiques of much traditional qualitative research (Furman et al. 2006; Glesne 1997; Prendergast 2004; Richardson 2002). Research poems creatively combine the basic premise of qualitative research with the craft of poetry (Leavy 2015). Poetic inquiry uses poetry "as a method of data reduction that re-represents data for the purposes of research" and poems are created "less for expressive and literary means, and more for the purposes of generating or presenting data" (Furman et al. 2006, 3). Literary and research poems differ in one important respect: whereas research poems might borrow methods from literary poems, they are written with the primary purpose of remaining faithful to the essence of the text, experience, or phenomena being represented (Furman et al. 2006). Literary poems have greater freedom to incorporate alternative perspectives such as fantasy and to alter the original experience in fundamental ways.

Research poems honour the lived experience of the research participant, and this is similar to other qualitative methods. However, engaging with poetic inquiry encourages scholars to embrace the craft of poetry and incorporate rhythm, form, metaphor and other poetic techniques to enhance their teaching, education and research (Cahnmann-Taylor 2003). These ways of working with traditional data forms challenge Western epistemic traditions that claim the knower is detached from the known and can be objective. In this way, poetic inquiry suggests a way to decolonise knowledge production (Mbembe 2015). As researchers draw from poetic qualities of being, metaphorical wondering, and pay a different kind of attention to the data, not only is the knowledge that emerges transformed (Butler-Kisber 2010; Butler-Kisber and Stewart 2009), but there is every possibility that the researcher/poet is transformed too. By producing meaningful, emotive and creative texts, research poetry is able to engage wider and more varied audiences than those typically reached by conventional academic outputs.

The aim of this article is to describe the features of a workshop that was designed to guide human and social scientists in the process of turning raw data into poems. By bridging the gap between creative and formal academic writing, this article discusses how poetic inquiry can decolonise and transform traditional research spaces, which are often hostile to more arts-based ways of knowing and being, such as poetry. Analysing observations recorded during three workshops conducted in 2019, this article probes poetic inquiry as both a medium for representing data and for attending to lived experiences. As qualitative researchers continue to grapple with the complexities of representation, poetic inquiry advances an increasingly holistic way of knowing and being in the world, one that does not exclusively privilege cerebral understanding, allowing for the visceral stirrings that comprise human phenomena.

 

Background

About three years ago, Heidi van Rooyen stumbled across the emerging field of poetic inquiry. During this period, she used poetic inquiry to explore the lives of transwomen in Namibia (van Rooyen et al. 2020) and the issues of "race" and identity in South Africa (van Rooyen 2019).

Two factors prompted Heidi's enthusiasm for poetic inquiry: the first stemmed from a place of weariness with the ways that traditional qualitative data had become overly summarised and seemed to have lost the essence of the people whose stories we were trying to tell through research. The second was the realisation that much of her writing had become impersonal and dense, and subsequently left both her readers and herself bored and unmoved. Poetry, with its ability to synthesise experience with musicality, rhythm, and poignancy, stirred something. It breathed new life into her scholarship and brought the person and scholar into closer communion. Heidi introduced Raphael to poetic inquiry. As a spoken-word poetry scholar, a published poet and a member of the ZAPP¹ research group engaged in a project titled "Reconceptualising Poetry Education for South African Classrooms through Infusing Indigenous Poetry Texts and Practices", he was looking for innovative ways of utilising poetry in research and education. His encounter with poetic inquiry, in which the rigour of research and the creativity of poetry operate symbiotically, took place in 2017, when he attended a seminar in which Heidi was discussing the methods, process and outcomes of her work. The authors came together through a joint appreciation and use of poetic inquiry in their respective fields. Raphael later became a research associate in the research programme Heidi was leading at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), and the idea to take poetic inquiry into the organisation was born.

Poetic inquiry workshops took place from April to July 2019 at the HSRC offices in Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town. The following section describes the workshop process and offers a template for scholars who may be interested in exploring poetic inquiry in other contexts. All participants voluntarily participated in the workshop and were informed that working with data and turning these into poems can be an emotional process, and that they may choose to withdraw at any stage of the process for this or any other reason. While the workshop was largely for their own creative enrichment, permission was requested for the use of the workshop process and poems for academic dissemination purposes such as conferences, articles or book chapters. All participants verbally consented to this.

 

The Invitation and Participants

Through an open call, staff at each of the HSRC offices were invited to attend the workshop. Those who stood to gain the most from the workshop were social and human scientists who had research data to work from-interviews, draft articles or chapters, fieldnotes, and so on-which they were eager to improve, and/or they were looking for a new approach to look at data that had lain dormant for a while. Two additional requests were made to the participants. First, any research data that was being used for the workshop had to have received consent from participants for the data to be used for academic purposes; and second, the original study had to have been subject to formal ethical review. Because poetry is often seen as obscure and detached from the conventional academic practices of social and human scientists, participants were asked in advance to attend the workshop with an open mind and a willingness to surprise themselves.

Thirty social sciences and humanities researchers, including Master's trainees, research directors, project managers and a spoken-word poet working in finance in the organisation attended the workshops. The participants' disciplines included demography, sociology, psychology, education, public health and social work, and they were conducting research on genders and sexualities, gentrification, migration, colonisation and youth. The groups were mixed with respect to gender, "race" and age.

 

The Poetic Inquiry Workshops

In each centre, the authors offered two-day workshops titled "Transforming Data into Poems-a Poetic Inquiry Workshop". The aim was to introduce the poetic inquiry methodology to researchers in the HSRC. This included an overview of poetic inquiry, poetry, various perspectives on the reading, writing and revision process, and strategies for redrafting data and works-in-progress into poems.

On the first day, to break the ice and create an environment that would be conducive to conversations on poetry, the workshop started with a round of poetry readings. The participants were given 5-10 minutes to read from a selection of South African and international poetry anthologies and journals provided by Heidi and Raphael, and then invited to read the poem(s) they had chosen. This opening session established a community of poetry readers, and aimed at "training" unfamiliar ears to the rhythm, sounds and musicality of poetry. It opened people up to the felt sense of speaking and reading poetry.

After reading the poems, the workshop moved into the operational phase, in which Heidi and Raphael gave an initial introduction to poetry and the creative process. A list of definitions of the term "poetry" was provided. Participants were asked to choose one to three definitions from the list and discuss their choice with the group. Keeping in mind that most participants have hardly engaged with poetry in their adult life, this exercise invited participants' own inquiry into poetry and allowed them to reflect on how different it might be from other research methods they have used. It led to questions about what they might like to compose in the workshop and conversation about the possibilities that poetry could offer their research. This exercise was done at an early stage in the workshop to stimulate interest in the genre and to create an emotional connection between the new methodology and the participants' conventional modus operandi.

After discussing poetry in general, Heidi and Raphael offered an overview of the concept of poetic inquiry: how it started as a discipline; the areas in which it is used; the leading experts in the field, their observations and theory; the pros and cons of this research methodology; academic journals that focus on qualitative analysis and delve into poetic inquiry; and the various forms it can take (found poems, poems by researchers, participant poems and generated poems). The focus of the workshop was on research or found poems, which use transcripts, field notes, journal entries, or reflective/creative/autobiographical/auto-ethnographical writing as data sources. While the focus in this workshop was on found poems, participants were free to choose other forms. As an example, Makhosazana Xaba's found poems, drawn from Mohale Mashigo's novel, The Yearning (Mashigo 2016), and published in The Johannesburg Review of Books (Xaba 2018), were discussed. These poems are illuminating for the participants, because the author-an award-winning South African poet-offers a step-by-step illustration of the writing process that allowed her to create poems out of preexisting written material (in this case, a novel).

Developing Found Poems

The next step in the process was the writing session, where participants were guided into the destabilising process of shifting their conventional academic texts (articles, conference papers, interviews, raw data and so on) into poems. Following Butler-Kisber (2010), Glesne (1997) and Richardson (1993), the process of creating research poems began. The authors started by engaging in traditional thematic analysis, where they were encouraged to immerse themselves in reading and reviewing the data transcripts individually and noting common themes. Once these themes and codes were identified, the participants found key passages within the text that represented each theme. In reading each theme they were encouraged to highlight striking excerpts, words, phrases and expressions.

The next step involved working through each theme section by section, focusing on the technical arrangement and flow of the lines, and creating the poems (Johnson et al. 2017). Minimal changes were made to the original data to preserve the original speakers' meaning, unique rhythm, pauses, emphasis, syntax, and diction (Öhlen 2003). Although no words were altered, "poetic license" (Butler-Kisber 2010, 87) was used to rearrange the words in a different order from the original text, and in some cases, poetic devices such as repetition, pauses, line length and spacing were used to evoke and intensify the meaning of the original data (Öhlen 2003). During this phase, Heidi and Raphael supervised the composition-in-progress of the found poems. Through impromptu conversations with the participants that involved reading the poems, arranging excerpts into verses, considering line endings, and working on the flow and rhythm of the poems, the facilitators helped the writers to transition data into poetry. The first day closed with a group reflection on the exciting aspects and the challenges related to poetry writing for research purposes.

The second day started in the same way as the first day: with the participants reading poems, followed by a feedback and review conversation on the outcomes of the previous day's activities. These warm-up sessions were followed by a presentation about the importance of editing in poetry. Predictably, the editing session occupied a central place in the workshop, which had been designed to create poems out of large amounts of data. After a brief introduction to the main principles of editing, the scope, practicalities and technicalities of the editing process applied to poetry were illustrated via a video showing poet and scholar Yusef Komunyakaa (2011), and also through two examples of applied editing. The first was the editing of one of Raphael's poems by poet Safia Elhillo; the second was South African poet Jim Pascual Agustin's rearrangement of the "unpoetic" poems featured in the bestselling collection, Milk and Honey, by Rupi Kaur (Agustin 2018). These documents clarified the objective of the session, and paved the way for the next phase of the workshop.

Participants were encouraged to edit and polish their poems so that the data they had collected could take shape and be translated into poems that would simultaneously be solid accounts of academic research and imaginative literary pieces (Prendergast 2004). The facilitators worked with individuals and their emerging poems closely in this stage. The editing session can be as long as necessary, and ends when the participants are satisfied with their work. After this session, the workshop ended with a round of readings of the poems that were produced and with a final reflection on the two-day workshop.

 

The Data Poems

The workshop was an opportunity for learning and building the capacity of participants in the methods of poetic inquiry, in other words how to turn their research data into poems. This two-day process resulted in all participants producing poems at various stages of completion. Five complete poems from the workshops are shared here. Each poem starts with the author's name/s and a description of the research or project that provided the data source from which the poems emerged.

Zonke Gumede and Monde Makiwane

The poem "Home" emerged from data in a circular migration project in the Eastern Cape. The project emphasises the translocality of people in the Eastern Cape who may have migrated to other places for work but who still consider the Eastern Cape to be their home. Most of them, upon retirement, return to the rural areas for their final rest.

Home

Hopelessly overcrowded

Overworked,

Drought-stricken labour reserve,

Eroded Soil,

to live off the land

is impossible

Conditions worse

Middle Ages Serfs,

I oscillate back to the reserve,

Farm City

City

Farm

Oscillating.

Hope bright lights

glittering prizes,

low income and high cost of living.

No welcome, no chance

Keep on oscillating

Living the double life

Distances without my children

"Swing low sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home"

Life is short

Soon I'll be no more,

City Farm,

Farm Heaven,

HOME.

Molemo Ramphalile

Molemo crafted a found poem using the words from Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, which is a parable of early colonialism and its legacy. In writing the poem, the author wrestled with the representation of Sycorax (a witch mother from Africa): he focused on the words that appear in the parts of the play where Sycorax is the topic of discussion between the characters, and also where she is mentioned in the appendix as one of the dramatis personae.

I Arrived and Heard

Speak; tell me!

For mischiefs manifold; and sorceries terrible

forces of Nature, earthy and abhorred commands

unmitigable rage

not to be stopped by appeals

not controlled by the spirit of man

not honoured with a human shape

is not this true?

Who with age and envy was grown into a hoop?

An enchantress who turned men into wild beasts, playing on sensual desires

that could control the moon?

brought with child, her litter-demi-devil, (my) slave?

banished: for one thing she did

imprisoned: within which space she dies

her name: which has been found nowhere else

and one so strong?

Damned witch?

Was she so?

Damned, which?

Speak; tell me!

Mudzunga Neluheni

This found poem is based on two interview transcripts from the author's Master's thesis. The study focused on the impacts of gentrification-related displacement on existing and displaced working-class residents in Maboneng (meaning "place of light") Precinct, a regenerated parcel of Jeppestown, Johannesburg.

A Place of Light

Eighty-five rands for a vegetarian plate

clean up time

Fourteen years I have been living here with my mother

Red Ants are coming

The neighbourhood was dirty

Crime was high

that's the problem

A place of light

not familiar to me

Fubah Alubafi

This poem emerged from project data provoked by the #RhodesMustFall Movement that started at the University of Cape Town in March 2015. The poem centres on the challenges faced by present-day youth.

Disenfranchised African Youth

African youth search for

Enfranchisement in disenfranchisement

It is perpetual

It takes them to the abyss

Youth are disillusioned

Society has rejected them through boundaries

They are impenetrable

Yet, they include and exclude

Youth have remained

At the margin of the society they call theirs

I know of African youth, who

Pushed by the unsavoury waves of the local rivers

Have been swallowed by the ocean

Of impossibilities

as they search for dignity

Finn Reygan

This found poem emerges from a study that explored the lives, experiences and challenges of older lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people in the Western Cape and Gauteng provinces.

(In)visible

'You're expired'

Painful when I'm told to

SHUT UP

I vowed to be visible

I'm Black

Disabled

Woman

Lesbian

Just horrible

Guys

turned on her

like beasts Smashed her face in

we

drag

queens

like gangsters

Have done

shit

and do not feel

(in)visible

These five poems emerged through the two-day writing workshops conducted in three locations across the country. While all of these participants had not written poetry before and are beginners in artistic concentration and the poetic craft (Faulkner 2017), the poems demonstrate that it is possible for novices to learn how to transform research data into poetry. The poet-researchers were able to use poetic language and form to evoke embodied experience, effectively communicate emotional aspects of social life, and raise critical consciousness by cultivating empathy, compassion and understanding for the situations of marginalised populations depicted in these poems (Leavy 2015; 2017).

 

Discussion

In order to obtain feedback from researchers unaccustomed to poetic inquiry, group feedback was elicited at various points. The aim was twofold: on one hand, they contributed to highlight possible weaknesses and inconsistencies while the workshop was still in progress, thus giving the facilitators the opportunity to intervene and slightly modify the programme where necessary; on the other, they established the participants' thoughts and ideas about the use of poetry as a research methodology.

Participants' reflections mirrored challenges others have found in introducing poetic inquiry into academic environments. Our participants observed how poetic inquiry challenged well-established Western epistemic traditions that favour objectivity, divisions between mind and world and research methods that support these ways of knowing. They mentioned that they found it difficult to view poetry as a reliable testimony of their long-term efforts and fieldwork activity; they resisted accepting that poetry can effectively reflect the full extent of their research; they shared the impression that a large part of their research data seems to be left unused when a fully developed research paper is "shrunk" into a poem. Fernandez-Gimeneza et al. (2019) in introducing poetic inquiry to their natural science students in the United States (US) encountered similar resistances to our social science and humanities colleagues in South Africa. Their students also felt that poetry was not research and were concerned that poetic inquiry would sacrifice scientific rigour and validity.

Our colleagues also appreciated the possibilities that poetic inquiry could offer them, and their work. Participants unanimously enjoyed engaging in an unfamiliar activity, and were surprised to discover that they could write (or at least, draft) poetic texts out of arid research data. They noted that creating poems out of data allowed them to overcome the inertia and frustration of sitting on data they found hard to develop and structure into a research paper. Our participants agreed that, instead of suppressing the researcher's voice, the poetic text actually had the power to magnify it by shedding light on the central argument of their research in ways that are often not achieved through other forms of qualitative analysis. Like the students in the US, our participants observed that using poetic craft heightens rather than threatens validity; poetic analysis can express the multiple meanings, complexity, and fullness of the lived experience more effectively than participant quotations lifted from an interview transcript (Fernandez-Gimeneza et al. 2019). In the telling of these stories using this format, they got to see and experience these lived realities in a different way. In other words, poetry's succinctness and emphasis on the economy of language allowed the researcher to produce highly focused poems that challenged the verbosity and obscurity that characterises conventional academic jargon. Many of our participants concluded that they will consider using poetic inquiry as a research methodology in the future, if the opportunity arises.

An overwhelming benefit for our participants was that poetic inquiry opened them up in surprising ways. It allowed them to explore their data from a new angle that invited imagination and focused on emotion, expression, and meaning in the lives of their research participants (Fernandez-Gimeneza et al. 2019). Poetry fostered social and emotional learning: being able to write a well-crafted verse in a poem can help researchers see participant experience in entirely new ways. They can gain insight that may have evaded them about participant realities; this can give them new understanding and be invigorating for their work. The academy is a place of too much "brain only", and poetic inquiry surfaces other ways of being, other embodied modes of writing, doing research and learning. Poetry, perhaps more than any other approach or discipline, gets to the essence of qualitative methodology. Poems employed as catalysts provoke insightful responses, allowing for a more in-depth and holistic understanding of the human experience (McCulliss 2013).

Poetic inquiry is not about analysing poetry or asking others to analyse it, deconstruct it or try to make meaning of it. It is used in writing sessions to learn about where researchers come from and where they are headed, to find voice and representation, and to build community. Shared in this way, poetry motivates reluctant researchers (or most writers, for that matter), and has space for social and human scientists. Poetic inquiry works with rather than against the complexities of experience, which researchers are always mining for understanding that is not easily extrapolated. As such, poetic inquiry is a way of dwelling in nuance and intricacy.

Butler-Kisber (1998) commented on how poetic representations can provide the researcher with a different lens through which they can come to understand not only the data, but also themselves, in different and more complex ways. This observation points to an important critique of social science research. Increasingly framed through positivistic paradigms, qualitative research had started to mimic conventional science. Through the endless research summaries and data extracts they produced, qualitative researchers worked hard to remove themselves from the analysis, to be objective, to let the data "speak for themselves" (Rapport and Hartill 2012). More constructivist approaches challenged these notions, and arts-based approaches such as poetic inquiry provided researchers with a way to emerge from behind endless summarised lived realities on the qualitative page. As McCullis (2013) points out, by putting words together into new configurations through poems, the relations created through echo repetition and rhythm let us see and hear our participants and ourselves in new ways. Poetry is a practical and powerful means for reconstitution of worlds.

Increasingly researchers are challenging the voice of the omniscient academic observer and are exploring creative forms of representation that reflect richness and complexity of data, and invite new and embodied levels of engagement (Brearley 2000). Poetic inquiry may foster deeper reflection on the researcher's experience in the research process, her relationship with participants and colleagues, and issues of power in scholarly production (Fernandez-Gimeneza et al. 2019). Poetic inquiry makes an important contribution to the expanding field of arts-based research, situating both researcher and participant in fluid, dynamic, and relational terms. By challenging voice and representation, in centring the contributions of lived realities of participants, poetic inquiry decolonises traditional knowledge production that privileges the academic voice as the sole, authoritative creators of knowledge and challenges the limitations of hegemonic notions that, as academics, we can know a world without necessarily being part of that world, and that it is possible to produce knowledge that is universal and independent of context (Mbembe 2015). Poetic inquiry reminds us that subjectivities are real, and that participant voice matters: these knowledges are central to a decolonial academic project.

Poetry and poetic inquiry offer a way to humanise and transform the researcher. The scientist is engaged as a whole person and challenged to defy the implicit dualisms between scientist and artist, objective scientific process and subjective lived experience and emotion (McCullis 2013). Butler-Kisber (1998) in incorporating creative expression and representation in her teaching felt it would enable her graduate students to become stronger researchers, specifically through the practice of introspection and different ways of thinking while conducting qualitative studies. She proposes that "pedagogical discussions should include [a] 'pedagogy of proximity', one that builds the kinds of relationships that will illuminate issues of knowledge, difference, and power in educational contexts" (Butler-Kisber 1998, 13).

 

Poetic Inquiry and Decoloniality

Poetic inquiry articulates a decolonial perspective in that it delinks from conformist methodologies of knowledge production and reconfigures the relations of power that shape conventional research by invigorating the (often suppressed) voice of the colonised. It is a decolonising strategy in that it encourages greater collaboration and coexistence between researchers and research subjects, in which the former have an opportunity to escape the prison of academic jargon, and the latter are allowed to speak for themselves in new, empowering ways. With poetic inquiry, poetry becomes a communal language, and the poetic text is the space in which this dialogue inter pares unfolds.

In the Indigenous Knowledge Systems of Africa poetry represents one of the highest forms of knowledge, embedded in African philosophical thinking: it is the living embodiment of an in-depth engagement with history, science, religion and language that has evolved over thousands of years. In other words,poetry is scholarship and, as such, is located at the very centre of the ceremonial cultures of the indigenous people of Africa, of their rituals, and cultural, educational and social practices (Brown 1999; Finnegan 2012; Furniss and Gunner 1995; Gunner 2001; Hofmeyer 1993; Johnson 1996; Kaschula 1993; Ricard and Veit-Wild 2005).

Poetic inquiry can be viewed as an epistemic response to the decolonial project, and this article argues that a decolonised education in Africa should put poetry back at the centre of its research, teaching and learning practices. Following Tuhiwai Smith, it maintains that "the methodologies and methods of research, the theories that inform them, the questions which they generate and the writing styles they employ ... need to be considered carefully and critically before being applied. In other words, they need to be ' decolonized'" (1999, 39). Poetic inquiry as method challenges hegemonic knowledge production and provides epistemic diversity by foregrounding practices and interpretive frames that are still permeated by coloniality.

Radical imagining is critical to any decolonising discourse, and poetic inquiry is a response to Tuhiwai Smith's imperative, since it reimagines knowledge production by using poetry for decolonised academic research. It is a mode of address that "speak[s] both to reason and to affect" (Mbembe 2015), and allows for generative engagements by presenting the findings of research and disseminating them back to the community in a culturally appropriate and accessible way. This nuanced and embodied methodology presents a concrete possibility of scientific expression that decentres hegemonic normativity and provides a platform for decolonial educational alternatives.

 

Conclusion

German Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis said that "poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason". This article offered an outlook on the process and outcomes of a workshop designed to help social and human scientists overcoming recurrent challenges of research writing such as, among others, lack of inspiration, lack of direction, lack of method and lack of incisiveness of one's findings. The authors argue that poetic inquiry is a methodology that, paraphrasing Novalis, can help bridge the gap between the "brainy" rigour of conventional academic writing and the "healing" power of poetry, with positive results in terms of increased self and interpersonal awareness, increased sense of validation in voicing one's truth, and enhanced capacity to capture and reframe significant life stories. Poetic inquiry is therefore a recommended research methodology to social and human scientists engaged in the decolonisation of research and education, who are keen to explore new, imaginative approaches to academic writing.

 

References

Agustín, Jim Pascual. 2018. "Words Are Not Personal Possessions-Reimagining What Rupi Kaur Stitched Together". May 9. Accessed July 19, 2020. https://matangmanok.wordpress.com/2018/05/09/words-are-not-personal-possessions-reimagining-what-rupi-kaur-stitched-together/.

Brearley, Laura. 2000. "Exploring the Creative Voice in an Academic Context". The Qualitative Report 5 (3): 1-23. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2000.1945.         [ Links ]

Brown, Duncan, ed. 1999. Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa. Cape Town: David Philip.         [ Links ]

Butler-Kisber, Lynn. 1998. "Representing Qualitative Data in Poetic Form". Unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, California.

Butler-Kisber, Lynn. 2010. Qualitative Inquiry: Thematic, Narrative and Arts-Informed Perspectives. London: Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526435408.         [ Links ]

Butler-Kisber, Lynn, and Mary Stewart. 2009. "The Use of Poetry Clusters in Poetic Inquiry". In Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences, edited by Monica Prendergast, Carl Leggo, and Pauline Sameshima, 3-12. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Cahnmann-Taylor, Melisa. 2003. "The Craft, Practice, and Possibility of Poetry in Educational Research". Educational Researcher 32 (3): 29-36. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X032003029.         [ Links ]

Denzin, Norman K., and Yvonna S. Lincoln. 1994. Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.         [ Links ]

Faulkner, Sandra L. 2017. "Poetic Inquiry: Poetry as/in/for Social Research". In The Handbook of Arts-Based Research, edited by Patricia Leavy, 208-230. New York, NY: The Guildford Press.

Fernández-Giménez, María E., L. Louise B. Jennings, and Hailey Wilmer. 2019. "Poetic Inquiry as a Research and Engagement Method". Natural Resource Science, Society and Natural Resources 32 (10): 1080-91. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2018.1486493.         [ Links ]

Finnegan, Ruth. 2012. Oral Literature in Africa. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0025.         [ Links ]

Furman, Rich, Carol L. Langer, C. S. Davis, H. P. Gallardo, and S. Kulkarni. 2007. "Expressive, Research and Reflective Poetry as Qualitative Inquiry: A Study of Adolescent Identity". Qualitative Research 7 (3): 301-15.         [ Links ]

Furman, Rich, Cynthia A. Lietz, and Carol L. Langer. "The Research Poem in International Social Work: Innovations in Qualitative Methodology". International Journal of Qualitative Methods 5 (3): 24-34. https://doi.org/10.1177/160940690600500305.

Furniss, Graham, and Liz Gunner, eds. 1995. Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511521164.         [ Links ]

Glesne, Corrine. 1997. "That Rare Feeling: Re-presenting Research through Poetic Transcription". Qualitative Inquiry 3 (2): 202-21. https://doi.org/10.1177/107780049700300204.         [ Links ]

Gunner, Liz, ed. Politics and Performance. Theatre, Poetry and Song in Southern Africa. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.         [ Links ]

Hofmeyr, Isabel. 1993. "We Spend Our Years as a Tale That Is Told": Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.         [ Links ]

Johnson, Helen, Emily Carson-Apstein, Simon Banderob, and Xander Macaulay-Rettino. 2017. "'You Kind of Have to Listen to Me': Researching Discrimination through Poetry". Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research 18 (3): Art 6.         [ Links ]

Johnson, William. 1996. "Heeloy": Modern Poetry and Songs of the Somali. London: HAAL Publishing.         [ Links ]

Kaschula, Russel, ed. 2001. Foundations in Southern African Oral Literature. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand.         [ Links ]

Komunyakaa, Yusef. 2011. "Fearless Laughter: Yusef Komunyakaa's Advice to Young Poets". YouTube video, 3:56. Accessed July 19, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DZ-Xukd9-o.

Leavy, Patricia. 2015. Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice. 2nd ed. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.         [ Links ]

Leavy, Patricia. 2017. Handbook of Arts-Based Research. New York, NY: The Guildford Press.         [ Links ]

Mashigo, Mohale. 2016. The Yearning. Johannesburg: Picador Africa.         [ Links ]

McCulliss, Debbie. 2013. "Poetic Inquiry and Multidisciplinary Qualitative Research". Journal of Poetry Therapy 26 (2): 83-114. https://doi.org/10.1080/08893675.2013.794536.         [ Links ]

McNiff, Shaun. 2017. "Philosophical and Practical Foundations of Artistic Inquiry: Creating Paradigms, Methods, and Presentations Based in Art". In Handbook of Arts-Based Research, edited by Patricia Leavy, 22-36. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Mbembe, Achille. 2015. "Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive". Africa Is a Country. Accessed July, 19 2020. https://worldpece.org/content/mbembe-achille-2015-%E2%80%9Cdecolonizing-knowledge-and-question-archive%E2%80%9D-africa-country.

Öhlen, Joakim. 2003. "Evocation of Meaning through Poetic Condensation of Narratives in Empirical Phenomenological Inquiry into Human Suffering". Qualitative Health Research 13 (4): 557-66. https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732302250694.         [ Links ]

Prendergast, Monica. 2004. "Shaped Like a Question Mark: Found Poetry from Herbert Blau's The Audience". Research in Drama Education 9 (1): 73-92. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356978042000185920.         [ Links ]

Rapport, Frances, and Graham Hartill. 2012 "Crossing Disciplines with Ethnographic Poetic Representation". Creative Approaches to Research 5 (2): 11-25.         [ Links ]

Ricard, Alain, and Veit-Wild, Flora, eds. 2005. Interfaces Between the Oral and the Written, Interfaces entre l'écrit et l'oral. Amsterdam: Rodopi.         [ Links ]

Richardson, Laurel. 1993. "Poetics, Dramatics, and Transgressive Validity: The Case of the Skipped Line". The Sociological Quarterly 34 (4): 695-710. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1993.tb00113.x.         [ Links ]

Richardson, Laurel. 2002. "Poetic Representation of Interviews". In Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method, edited by Jaber Gubrium and James A. Holstein, 877-92. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.         [ Links ]

van Rooyen, Heidi. 2019. "Race and Identity in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Making Colouredness Visible through Poetic Inquiry". In Poetic Inquiry as Social Justice and Political Response, edited by Sandra L. Faulkner and Abigail Cloud, 87-97. Wilmington: Vernon Press.

van Rooyen, Heidi, Zaynab Essack, Alude Mahali, Candice Groenewald, and Abigail Solomons. 2020. "'The Power of the Poem': Using Poetic Inquiry to Explore Trans-Identities in Namibia". Arts and Health. https://doi.org/10.1080/17533015.2020.1805634.

Xaba, M. 2018. "Found Poems by Makhosazana Xaba, from Mohale Mashigo's Novel The Yearning". The Johannesburg Review of Books, January 15. Accessed July 19, 2020. https://johannesburgreviewofbooks.com/2018/01/15/conversation-issue-found-poems-by-makhosazana-xaba-from-mohale-mashigos-novel-the-yearning/.

 

 

1 ZAPP stands for the South African Poetry Project.

^rND^sBrearley^nLaura^rND^sCahnmann-Taylor^nMelisa^rND^sFernández-Giménez^rND^sMaría E.^nL.^rND^nLouise^sB. Jennings^rND^nHailey^sWilmer^rND^sFurman^nRich^rND^nCarol^sL. Langer^rND^nC. S.^sDavis^rND^nH. P.^sGallardo^rND^nS.^sKulkarni^rND^sGlesne^nCorrine^rND^sJohnson^nHelen^rND^nEmily^sCarson-Apstein^rND^nSimon^sBanderob^rND^nXander^sMacaulay-Rettino^rND^sMcCulliss^nDebbie^rND^sÖhlen^nJoakim^rND^sPrendergast^nMonica^rND^sRapport^nFrances^rND^nGraham^sHartill^rND^sRichardson^nLaurel^rND^1A01^nZuleika Bibi^sSheik^rND^1A01^nZuleika Bibi^sSheik^rND^1A01^nZuleika Bibi^sSheik

THEMED SECTION 2
REFLECTIVE PIECE

 

From Decolonising the Self to Coming to Voice

 

 

Zuleika Bibi Sheik

International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. sheik@iss.nl; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8761-6937

 

 

Of the myriad calls for decolonising-the university, the museum, the curriculum, the mind, and so on-few have given attention to decolonising the self.¹ In my/our process of decolonising the self, poetry² has been pivotal in giving name to the nameless, which is dreamed but not yet realised (Lorde 2007, 73). As a black woman/woman of colour, following the pen strokes of Audre Lorde (2007) and Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), who put flesh back into words, poetry is a necessity in decolonising and reconstituting the self. In what follows, I hope to walk with the reader on this path of realising my colonised self, decolonising it through the emergence of the plural self, and the eventual reconstituting of self as a coming to voice (Lorde 2007, 79-86).

For those of us seeking higher education as former colonised beings, we enter the academy as both the researcher and the researched. There is a pressure to present ourselves either as a traditional representative of an entire region or ethnicity, or as an assimilated "modern" researcher, with the dichotomy never being questioned. Yet this fragmenting of the self points directly to the limitation of the individual subjective "I". In The Universal Machine, Fred Moten (2018, ix) challenges us to contemplate the exhaustion of phenomenology due to its clinginess and servitude to the individual, an inherent assumption within phenomenology that "renders no-thingness unavailable and unavowable" (2018, ix). What Moten alludes to here is the absence of space within phenomenology for us to claim our humanity. In other words, a self that seeks individuality through subjective representation remains colonised and any "decolonising" aims are cancelled out by the individual's obedience to modernity/coloniality (cf. Quijano 2007).

Decolonising the self, then, requires grappling with what is left after we strip away the years, accolades and achievements bestowed upon us by indoctrinated formal schooling and learning how to speak from and beyond the colonial wound as an act of collective healing and what it means to live-think-be and do decolonial feminist work. It asks us to reimagine ourselves in relation, invoking within us the connection to ourselves, our ancestors, the land, our bodies and others, so that the knowledge that is inherent and deep within us may be cultivated. It asks, when we peel away the layers of scar tissue necrotised at the colonial wound through "epistemological deep listening" and heal all that has been erased, denied, shamed, negated and exiled, what emerges?

IqhawekaziRani

I am not a daughter of this soil

It is my adopted home

A home that cradles my orphaned soul

You say, I am not African

I am African

I am African in my heartbeat

I am African in my compassion

I am African in my generosity

I am African in my determination

It is the only reality I know

You say, I am not Indian

I am Indian

I am Indian in my breath

I am Indian in my kindness

I am Indian in my courageousness

I am Indian in my resilience

It is the only existence I know

I am a daughter of two Mothers

I cried for Umama waseNdiya,³as I was held by Am'ma ãppirikkã⁴

Do not ask me to choose!

Both have raised me

one breast feeding my fire

one breast feeding my spirit

My feet move to the rhythm of your drums

one foot following the tabla

one foot following the isigubhu

It hurts Am'ma ãppirikkã

It hurts Umama waseNdiya

My tears fall at your feet

You catch me as they fall

My child, your heart beats with the rhythm of Am'ma ãppirikkã

My child, your breath moves with the harmony of Umama waseNdiya

My child, your body is Indian

My child, your being is African

Moving in perfect synchronicity

Rise Qhawekazi⁵

Rise Rani ⁶

Rise, so you can raise others

In my/our process of decolonising the self, echoing Fred Moten's (2018) dictum, I consent not to be a single being. In foregrounding the privilege inherent in the choice of positioning ourselves as black women or women of colour, I/we acknowledge the "scales in the intensity of colonial wounds" (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 125). As a third-generation South African woman of Indian ancestry, whose caste oppression was dropped to the depths of the kala pani (black waters), only to be picked up as hoes and machetes in the sugar plantations of British Natal, followed by white domination, brutality and dehumanisation known as apartheid, I/we consent not to be a single being. As the first generation to attend university, first in KwaZulu-Natal and currently at a northern-European institution, and the first woman from a lineage largely erased to be in the privileged position of being able to write ourselves into history, I/we consent not to be a single being, because our fates are inextricably tied. My dear black women and women of colour mothers, sisters and daughters, don't you see, to not be in solidarity is to "sit on the same throne we have been forced to kneel before ... [to] meet the crooked standards of excellence of the [baas, master, sahib, memsahib] conquistadores and slave holders ... still in the grip of imperial thinking ... [which] always sacrifices someone to imperial dreams" (Morales Levins 1998, 39).

Voice

Who are we when we are not spoken for

spoken of

spoken over

when we are not given a voice

not given a platform to amplify our voice

not given the volume control of our voice

Who are we when we find ourselves hypervisibilized

invisibilized

represented

erased

What sounds have been muted in the depths of our colonial wound

A cacophony of visceral screams

filling our mouths

swallowed

stuck in our throats

swallowed

wrenching our guts

carried

womb to womb

grandmother to mother

mother to daughter

Our scream

is the sound of birth

of life itself

of thunder rolling

of wind howling

of waves crashing

of night turning into day

of sun rising

of clouds moving

of flowers blooming

of leaves falling

of day turning to night

of stars shining

of moon waxing and waning

This is the sound of our voice.

 

References

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.         [ Links ]

Lorde, Audre. 2007. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkley, CA: Crossing Press.         [ Links ]

Mignolo, Walter, and Catherine Walsh. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822371779.         [ Links ]

Morales Levins, Aurora. 1998. Medicine Stories: History, Culture, and the Politics of Integrity. Boston, MA: South End Press.         [ Links ]

Moten, Fred. 2018. The Universal Machine. Vol. 3. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822371977.         [ Links ]

Ngügi wa Thiong'o. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey.         [ Links ]

Quijano, Aníbal. 2007. "Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality". Cultural Studies 21 (2-3): 168-78. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353.         [ Links ]

 

 

1 This project is inspired by Ngügi wa Thiongo's iconic project of "decolonising the mind" (Ngügi 1986).
2 The poetry referred to here is the "revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean-in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight" (Lorde 2007, 73).
3 Umama WaseNdiya-Mother India in isiZulu.
4 Am'ma ãppirikkã-Mama Africa in Tamil.
5 Qhawekazi in isiZulu refers to a queen and heroine who fights for her being and her people.
6 Rani-Queen in Tamil.
Biography
Zuleika Bibi Sheik is a poet, writer, yogi, activist, teacher and PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), Erasmus University Rotterdam. As a third-generation South African woman of Indian descent, through the British colonial system of indentured labour, and the first generation to attend university, she has, through her work, questioned the legitimacy and claim of the university as the sole producer of knowledge. Her poetry, short stories and academic writing are positioned in the liminal space where decolonial thought meets Black/Dalit/Chicana feminisms. In her PhD research she refuses the "masters' tools", which have been complicit in her/our own dehumanisation, opting to collectively cultivate epistemic non-violent methods with other women of colour in the Netherlands instead. Through her work she attempts to transcend identity politics by focusing on onto-epistemological justice and collective resistance and liberation.

^rND^sQuijano^nAníbal^rND^1A01^nBasudhara^sRoy^rND^1A01^nBasudhara^sRoy^rND^1A01^nBasudhara^sRoy

THEMED SECTION 2
BOOK REVIEW

 

Eastern Muse: Poems from the East and North-East India, edited by Malsawmi Jacob and Jaydeep Sarangi

 

 

Basudhara Roy

Department of English, Karim City College, India. basudhara.roy@gmail.com; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6887-9048

 

 

Authorspress. 2019. pp. 268.

ISBN: 9389110211, 978-9389110210

Within the staggering diversity of literary and cultural forms, what makes way for the particular power of poetry is, perhaps, its apparent innocuity. Minor, fluid and unassuming, poetry can gently but steadily make its way into, through and across structures of power and authority, seep into their fault lines and relentlessly make room for questions. On account of its generic marginality, the transgressive potential of poetry is less obvious and less acknowledged, though history remains witness to the fact that the clarion call for its most important revolutions were first articulated in poetry. Poetry, for Matthew Arnold, was a criticism of life and one realises that every worthy poem is a statement about the world, a worldview that advances a distinct ideological position from which to understand and interrogate it. A good anthology of poems, by that logic, would constitute a pluriverse of voices unweaving the world's tapestry in a rich riot of perspectives and offering collectively a unique window upon life and our particular place in it. Eastern Muse: Poems from the East and North-East India, edited by Malsawmi Jacob and Jaydeep Sarangi, is an anthology that does just that.

Divided into two sections, "Poems from East India" and "Poems from North-East India", this pioneering collection offers a careful selection of more than 150 poems by 27 talented poets across almost 11 Indian states and their diaspora. While "Poems from East India" brings together selected poets from Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and the diaspora of these states, "Poems from North-East India" showcases a selection of poems from the eight states of North-Eastern India, namely Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura. Within the pages of this book, illustrious and well-known names in Indian English Poetry such as Jayanta Mahapatra, Tabish Khair, Mamang Dai, Sanjukta Dasgupta, Bibhu Padhi, Bashabi Frazer, Shanta Acharya, Easterine Kire and Robin S. Ngangom are found alongside equally powerful but lesser documented poetic voices, rendering the collection a valued possession for readers who desire to be acquainted with the writings of a wide spectrum of Indian poets, both mainstream and not. One confronts here an astounding range of forms, themes, moods, styles and linguistic registers. Geography, history, economy, politics, society, culture, ecology: every sphere of human experience undergoes in these pages an intensely personal poetic interrogation that leads the reader to the essential question of both national and human identity. What, in fact, may be undeniably concluded from a close reading of Eastern Muse is its strong investment in a decolonial poetics of identity.

Identity, one realises, is an extremely tricky notion that both affiliates and separates. On the one hand, identity establishes a pattern or an equation of belonging to a group, whether family, clan, caste, class, profession, language, gender, sexuality or nation. On the other hand, establishing a pattern of belonging or affiliation with any one group would imply marking a distinctness or separation from other/s. How then should identity be negotiated so as to affirm one stance without negating another, to vouch allegiance for a particular group without othering someone else, while, at the same time, fostering a sense of community? The poets featured in this collection seem to find a way out in a decolonial articulation of identity whereby identity becomes a subjective narrative fleshed out through personal history, local geography, cultural memory and indigenous linguistic epistemologies rather than through overarching identifications with grand, Eurocentric theoretical models. For every poet in this anthology, the evils of colonisation are not just alive but have been compounded by the seductive narratives of neoliberalism in the postcolonial spaces that they inhabit. They see the transnational logic of free market capitalism as an inherently neocolonial strategy whereby postcolonial elites collaborate with Western authoritative structures to perpetuate control and domination. It is through such a decolonial awareness of contemporary cultural politics that the satire of this volume is inspired and sharpened. The irrationalities, hypocrisies, inequalities and injustices of their everyday world become for these poets significant points of transgressive poetic entry to explore questions of capitalist hegemony and the illegitimacy of the neocolonial episteme.

In Bashabi Frazer's "Barbed Wire", for instance, the barbed wire that stands for powerful, impenetrable national borders and is "born of the vision of nationalist assertion" ends up becoming a detestable symbol of Man's "well-deserved prison state" (32). Similarly, in Tabish Khair's "Immigrant", which bases itself on Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, the poet-speaker sceptically wonders if in trading his voice for a new pair of legs, the bargain struck has been fair enough. Sharmila Ray, in "I've Forgotten How to Write a Love Poem ...", laments the impossibility of intimate communication in a world riddled by uncertainties and violence. Jaydeep Sarangi's "Alienation", in construing alienation as a "disease", very subtly conjures the subalternity of Dalits in the Indian culturescape. In "The Unbearable Tyranny of Not Knowing", Guru T. Ladakhi poignantly documents the alarming rate of suicide in Sikkim, crafting out of the sombre reality of unexplained deaths a powerful poem that "melt[s] us all into islands" and urges us, in both resignation and protest, "to burn all your broken things/ burn them without a word" (138). "A Tale of a Sleeping Village", by Sanjukta Dasgupta, embodies a trenchant criticism of the rise of militant insurgency in India's rural pockets and the victimisation of deep-seated innocence by ruthless power. Dasgupta writes:

Simple villagers grew guns that year

Learnt to press fingers on triggers

While the ploughs gathered dust (77)

In her poem, "Consumed", the Shakespearean sentiment "All the world's a stage" undergoes a bitter capitalist rewriting as "All the world's a shopping mall/ All men and women big shoppers" (80). Rabindra K. Swain's "The Prime Minister" presents through scalding satire the apathy of those in power and their voluntary blindness to "the woes of his toes walking miles/ on the piles of dry blades of paddy" (58). Saroj K. Padhi, in his poem, "Elusive Monsoon", compares the monsoon's betrayal of the promise of rain to the deception of "self-proclaimed God-Gurus/ who outraged million maidens in the name of a religion" (88). Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih's poem, "Jalebi", brilliantly satirises the roundabout neoliberal jargon in saying,

don't we think, twisting round and round;

don't we speak, twisting round and round;

don't we act, twisting round and round,

like jalebi? (146)

A large number of poems here draw the reader's attention to the issue of gender inequality that inheres in the Indian socio-cultural fabric. Shanta Acharya's "Loose Talk", for instance, offers a powerful revisionist-feminist take on history. The poet writes, "With tongues of fire I speak / for grandmothers and mothers in silent revolt,/ for daughters and sisters striving to be heard/ lending my voice, sharing our story" (92). In Lalnunsanga Ralte's "Optional", the poet laments the "curse" his government has given him by obliging him to put his futile father's name on all valuable documents, while the name of the mother who raised him to be what he prides himself on, becomes optional, "superfluous, apologetic" (154). Mamang Dai's "The Sorrow of Women" describes the insecurities and tragedies that are the particular lot of women in a world where concerns "about escape,/ about liberty, men and guns./ Ah! The urgency for survival" (179) rule. In Tashi Chophel's "The Construct", "The women/ screaming for better sense/ Are slapped into silence/and latched behind doors" (223). Tiamerenla Monalisa Changkija's "Take This Name" draws its theme from the Ao custom dictating that a married woman's name must be returned to her family, clan and village after her death, and the poet crafts out of it a piece as profound as it is satirical:

Take this name,

take it.

Like all women,

with nothing left to give,

that's the only possession/that can be returned. (248)

While poems such as those of Eastern Kire, Tapati Baruah Kashyap and Malsawmi Jacobs evoke human experiences from a deep ecological standpoint, several other poems such as Robin S. Ngangom's "The Quest as Beginning" and Mamang Dai's "Man and Brother" use local myths and legends to interpret the relationship between nature and the human world and to chart a way for the future vis-à-vis the traditions and wisdom of the past. Again, there are poems such as Mona Zote's "Anti-lovepoem" and "An Impression of Being Alive" that brilliantly evoke the barrenness of the present by positing it against a horizon of possibilities that never happen: "We have learned/nothing. You wisely add:/ Really,/ there was nothing to/ learn" (201).

"But words have lost their wings" (264), writes Malsawmi Jacobs in her poem, "The Forgotten", while Sarangi believes, as he writes in "The Trusted Army", that "[p]oets shake hands with green grammars of the land" (115). In all, one realises the monumental editorial efforts that must have gone into shaping an anthology as deep, inspiring and powerful as Eastern Muse and which will go a long way towards making words winged again and towards laying down a denser poetic grammar for the world to engage in.

 

 

Biography
Basudhara Roy teaches poetry, women's writing and postmodern criticism in the Department of English at Karim City College, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India. She has been an alumnus of Banaras Hindu University and holds a PhD in diaspora women's writing. As an academic, reviewer and poet, her work has been widely published. She is the author of two books, a monograph, Migrations of Hope: A Study of the Short Fiction of Three Indian American Writers (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2019) and a collection of poems, Moon in My Teacup (Kolkata: Writer's Workshop, 2019).

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THEMED SECTION 2
BOOK REVIEW

 

GAU-Trained: Poems and Stories, by Flow Wellington

 

 

Unathi Nopece

Pearson Institute of Higher Education, South Africa. nopeceun@gmail.com

 

 

Poetree Publications. 2018. pp. 60.

ISBN: 9780994695024

Johannesburg has been written about extensively, offering either a bird's eye view, a street-level view or a combination of both (Samin 2009, para 1). The city has been described as expansive, daunting, overwhelming, complex, illusive, vibrant and by the author as holding "so much of everything for everyone" (Wellington 2018, xii). Known as the City of Gold after the gold rush of 1886, and the subsequent forced migration to the city, Johannesburg is viewed as a place of opportunity and success. It is home to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and is the financial capital of South Africa. This colonial narrative is not new. It has been portrayed in books such as Journey to Jo 'burg (1985) by Beverly Naidoo and films such as Jim Comes to Joburg (1949) in which a naïve person from the countryside/rural area moves to the city to earn a living, learns about it the hard way and eventually understands its ways. It is also still present in contemporary writing, as is seen in GAU-Trained: Poems and Stories.

Is it possible then to change this long-held narrative and perception of the city? Can one decolonise and reshape this narrative? Hungwe and Divala (2019, 225) define decolonisation as a process where one must "learn, unlearn, deconstruct and reconstruct values, norms, beliefs and thought systems that were disseminated during colonialism". Decolonisation includes becoming conscious of these values, norms, beliefs, thoughts and perceptions in order to unlearn and deconstruct them. How does one deconstruct and unlearn the perceptions of a city? GAU-Trained attempts this by deconstructing its iconic city skyline (and the external shiny perceptions that come with it) to show us the "cracks in the concrete reality of Egoli" (Kruger 2001, 232). The author uses a participant observation lens to educate and shed light on life in Johannesburg. Wellington takes the reader through the maze that is the Johannesburg city centre.

The title of the book, GAU-Trained, alludes to the public transport service, as seen on the cover. However, the title can also be interpreted as "trained by the Gau"-being trained by Gauteng, specifically Johannesburg, or as "I took the Gautrain to get a bearing of the city". The book uses the metaphor of a train ride to guide the reader. It traces the journey from arriving in Johannesburg, experiencing what the city is really like, to finally being settled. Wellington (2018, xii) explains this as follows:

As much as this book is a retrospective journey of my own life ... it is also anyone's journey: from arriving in Johannesburg (The Platform), to the pushing and pulling that the city inadvertently does on you (Derailed and Crossroads), to the realisation that there is always hope and light when you reach out and push beyond your limits (Full Steam Ahead).

The book is a self-published, mostly autobiographical collection about life in Johannesburg over a six-year period from 2011, as observed, experienced and learned by author Flow Wellington. The author shares stories about the everyday grit of Johannesburg's Central Business District (CBD) and the lives not shown on tourist brochures. She reflects: "Living in the heart of the Jozi CBD showed me how sugar-coated our tourism campaigns are" (Wellington 2018, xi). While her book continues the "Journey to Joburg" narrative to a degree, it also removes the rose-tinted glasses created by tourism, marketing and advertising to let the reader see the city in its entirety. Johannesburg can be where dreams come true or where they come to die. As Wellington (2018, xii) states: "There was going to be no romanticising of anything in these pages".

Poetry in South Africa has long been used as a revolutionary tool and has played a significant role in documenting our history. Godsell (2019, 3) uses poetry as a way to decolonise the teaching of history. This is done by recentring history in learning spaces to include the less dominant or lesser known perspectives and voices. Wellington also does this with her poetry. In her words:

I highlight what some would call the filth of Joburg. I felt more than anything ... to give ... people who battle through the worst living conditions in the CBD a voice, in some way. (Wellington 2018, xi)

Stories such as "Escape" (16) and "Jeppe" (37) and poems such as "Vimba!" (28) and "Last Straw" (40) make these voices visible. "Last Straw" describes what can be assumed to be recurring domestic violence that ends with the arrival of the police, while "Escape" is about a woman's attempt to leave her husband and "Jeppe" narrates Onah's, the protagonist's, day at a clinic.

As already stated, the book is divided into sections: "The Platform", "Derailed", "Crossroads" and "Full Steam Ahead". Wellington is deliberate in organising her poems and section titles, ensuring that they keep in line with the train ride metaphor. "The Platform" is about arriving in Johannesburg as a foreigner. The first poem, "The City", is a befitting introduction. Describing the hustle and bustle of Johannesburg CBD, it feels as if you are walking through the city, observing and taking it in, realising that Johannesburg is dangerous and alluring at the same time. The city "sleeps with one eye open; spying blatantly on night crawlers"; here, "nothing is free, not even your will". It "holds no sentiments", it "leaves you clinging to memories: the beauty and the malice" (Wellington 2018, 2).

"Derailed" deals with the reality of the city-a far cry from the dreams that it sells. While poems such as "Driving Miss Crazy" and "Sex and the City Pt 1 and 2" make reference to movies, they also describe some harsh truths. "Driving Miss Crazy", a play on the film title Driving Miss Daisy, is about someone attempting to overcome sadness and maintain sanity, while having faith that circumstances will get better. Another indirect reference to the film is the plot, where Daisy, the main protagonist, crashes her car, and ends up with a chauffeur. Thus, the poem, like the film, deals with how to rebuild one's life after it "goes off the rails".

The "Sex and the City" poems, which can be interpreted as dramatic monologues, illustrate the intergenerational cycle of sex work. In Part 1, the narrator grows up looking forward to being like her mother, wearing new clothes, smelling nice and counting money into piles (Wellington 2018, 27). In Part 2, the narrator from Part 1 has assumed the role of her mother, and her younger sister is the narrator in this poem. Moreover, the younger sister is being groomed to be a sex worker when she is older (Wellington 2018, 32). This is in stark contrast to the "Sex and the City" romantic comedy films and series franchise.¹ These two poems are connected not only in title, but in form as well. Part 2 builds on lines from Part 1. This technique connects the poems and continues the narrative.

The "Derailed" section opens with "Where I'm from", a nostalgic poem about growing up in Port Elizabeth. It is about dealing with life's left turns, being stuck between dreams and present circumstances. "Crossroads" is a more personal section of the book. "Terugkeering" ("Returning Home"), "Mixed Enough" and "Afrika Kind" ("African Child") are autobiographical and about the author's identity, specifically about returning home and feeling like a stranger, embracing one's eclectic identity and a call to stop hiding from oneself. "Terugkeering" describes the return home, finding everything the same, but feeling different. Upon arrival,

Die branders klap nog ewe hard teen die rotse.

Die taxi bestuurders staan die ewe trots

En die strate lyk nog dieselfde:

Ou bure skinder nog lekker

(The waves still crash as hard against the rocks

The taxi drivers stand as proud

And the streets still look the same

Old neighbours still gossip)

(Wellington 2018, 30)

Although familiar, being home reminds the author that she has become more of a stranger. The poem ends as follows:

Ek's nou meer vreemdeling

As huiskind, en dis hoe mens terugkeer

(I am now more of a stranger

Than a child of the house, and this is how people return)

(Wellington 2018, 30)

In "Afrika Kind", the author asks:

Afrika-kind, hoekom steek jy so weg

Agter die wêreld se make-up en relaxers,

Elke seisoen se next-best-trend

Waarom vlug jy van jou geboorte reg;

Hoekom is jou erfenis so sondelik,

So bitter op jou tong?

(African child, why do you hide

Behind the world's make-up and relaxers

Every season's next best trend

Why do you flee from your birthright;

Why is your heritage so sinful,

So bitter on your tongue?)

(Wellington 2018, 34)

The poem continues to urge Africans to embrace their heritage, their bushy hair, dark eyes, sun-kissed skin and to stop hiding from themselves. "Terugkeering" and "Afrika Kind" are written in Afrikaans, presumably the author's home language, reflecting her identity and serving as a reminder that Afrikaans is not spoken only by white people. McKaiser (2016) touches on this in his article titled "It's Time to Decolonise Afrikaans". In his view, the "white Afrikaans hegemony" needs to be dismantled and reconstructed to include the diversity of Coloured communities.

The book ends with "Full Steam Ahead", alluding to moving forward with positivity, speed, energy and determination. The last poem, "Lesedi", is a short poem about a shooting star, symbolic of a light at the end of the tunnel, an end to hard times.

Wellington's writing style is straightforward, making the book easy to read and understand. Although emphasis is mainly placed on content and meaning, the author makes use of a variety of literary techniques. Poems such as "Master Chef and "Journey" experiment with form. "West Rand" is a four-stanza poem, each stanza containing four lines of two or three words each.

Red sand

Quiet streets

Midnight walk

Hip hop beats

High walls

Racist fears

Student lives

Drugs and beers ...

(Wellington 2018, 19)

The abcb rhyme scheme appears only in the first two stanzas.

Alliteration can be seen in "The City", the opening poem of the book, as well as in "Knowing". In "The City", the effect of alliteration is to draw the reader to the words used to describe the Johannesburg CBD, namely "rowdy roads", "fabricated fulfillment" and "majestic madness" (Wellington 2018, 2). "Borders", "Instructions For Chaos" and "Impepho" make use of parallelism. On occasion, the reader is addressed through "Ignorance Is Bliss" and "Derailed". It would be interesting to see more writing from Wellington in Afrikaans. Her Afrikaans poems are just as easy to understand as her English ones.

There are a few visuals included, which the book is better without. They are of low resolution and although they are meant to complement the text, they are not needed as the text adequately conveys the content.

As a new resident to Johannesburg myself, and living in the CBD, I was hoping to be able to see my own experiences reflected. I was not disappointed. The book reaffirmed my experiences. Overall, we learn that things are never as they seem, that life has many lessons to teach us and education is most certainly not limited to the classroom.

 

References

Godsell, Sarah. 2019. "Poetry as Method in the History Classroom: Decolonising Possibilities". Yesterday and Today 167 (21): 1-28. https://doi.org/10.17159/2223-0386/2019/n21a1.         [ Links ]

Hungwe, Joseph Pardon, and Joseph Jinja Karlos Divala. 2019. "The Conundrum of Decolonisation and Afrophobia: A Case for Higher Education". In Education for Decoloniality and Decolonisation in Africa, edited by Chikumbutso Herbert Manthalu and Yusuf Waghid, 225-240. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kruger, Loren. 2001. "Theatre, Crime and the Edgy City in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg". Theatre Journal 53 (2): 223-52. https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2001.0050.         [ Links ]

Mbembe, Achille. 2015. "Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive". Accessed July 27, 2020. https://wiser.wits.ac.za/system/files/Achille%20Mbembe%20-%20Decolonizing%20Knowledge%20and%20the%20Question%20of%20the%20Archive.pdf.

McKaiser, Eusebius. 2016. "It's Time to Decolonise Afrikaans". IOL News, June 13. Accessed September 3, 2020. https://www.iol.co.za/news/its-time-to-decolonise-afrikaans-2033764.

Samin, Richard. 2009. "Writing Johannesburg: Between the Labyrinth and the Map". Accessed September 3, 2020. https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/1483.

Wellington, Flow. 2018. GAU-Trained: Poems and Stories. Johannesburg: Poetree Publications.         [ Links ]

 

 

1 Sex and the City is an American series that centres on the lives of four women living in New York. The series premiered in 1998 and ran for six seasons. Two movies were created based on the series.

^rND^sGodsell^nSarah^rND^sKruger^nLoren^rND^1A01^nHlumela^sMpiti^rND^1A01^nHlumela^sMpiti^rND^1A01^nHlumela^sMpiti

THEMED SECTION 2
BOOK REVIEW

 

Collective Amnesia, by Koleka Putuma

 

 

Hlumela Mpiti

University Currently Known as Rhodes, South Africa. nokutula27@gmail.com

 

 

uHlanga Press. 2017. pp. 110. ISBN: 978-0-620-73508-7

Koleka Putuma's debut poetry collection, Collective Amnesia, speaks of a collective sense of forgetting. We see from the highly performative cover page-where a black girl, masked in black clothing, sits in the darkness carrying a white doll and is only in slight contact with the light that shines from behind her-that this collection is layered and speaks to multiple themes. Because ideas of "unlearning" are so prevalent in the collection, readers can further interpret this cover as an allusion to Collective Amnesia bringing us closer to the light.

Throughout the collection, Putuma writes of her personal, and often resonating observations of the collective wounds that the colonial legacy has inflicted on South Africans as well as other colonised peoples. The collection depicts historical injustices such as racial discrimination, homophobia, femicide and epistemic violence. It not only criticises the oppressions that we, as colonised people, have faced, but also our silence towards and complicity in them. According to Sassen (2019), Putuma's work stands out as a centrepiece, tackles uncomfortable conversations and has a certain tone attached to it that cannot be shrugged off. Putuma challenges and highlights hierarchical structures of "race", gender, heteropatriarchy and classism that continue to dominate how we navigate life, knowledge systems and spirituality (Sassen 2019). She is able to do this through exploring issues of blackness, womxnhood, history, memory, belonging and many others.

Through poems such as "Storytelling", Putuma reminds us that we-colonised black people-remember, archive and inherit the world through told and heard stories. This is a reminder not to take for granted the value of navigating the world on our terms, based on our knowledges. Pieterse (2018) explains this process of "delinking" as an understanding of our experiences from our own perspective. In studies of our history, we foreground our own voices when we authentically engage with our individual experiences and share them with the world. We create sites of cultural production and dissemination for new or alternative forms of knowledge that might not be accommodated by mainstream literature (Pieterse 2018). Collective Amnesia is one such site.

The collection is divided into three segments centred on memory: "Inherited Memory", "Buried Memory" and "Post Memory". In these, Putuma explores the nuances and complexities of memory. Some of her common reflections include the ways in which what we know and remember are passed down, how the successive generations remember and bear the collective trauma of the generations before them, and how some parts of memory are better off hidden or simply not spoken about. Putuma reminds us of our happy childhood memories, but also highlights how our stories of pain and protest are seemingly the only ones that are interesting enough to occupy history books. Poems such as "Hand-me-downs" and "Black Joy" (both of which are in the section "Inherited Memory") explicitly explore experiences of happiness for many black children growing up in South Africa. In "Black Joy", Putuma (2017, 12-13) writes:

But

isn't it funny?

That when they ask about black childhood,

all they are interested in is our pain,

as if the joy-parts were accidental.

Collective Amnesia demonstrates the multiple ways in which black, African histories and knowledges have been misrepresented and how these misrepresentations have been memorialised, deliberately passed down and even embodied by black Africans themselves. This continuing colonisation of knowledge, erasure of black histories and forgetting by black people can be seen in poems such as "In the Classroom". In the poem, Putuma writes: "The student wants to know:/ why there are more blacks in shebeens and churches/ than there are in museums or commemoration sites?" (86). This poem, like many others, not only interrogates those on the privileged side of colonisation but also forces colonised people to acknowledge their complicity in perpetuating colonial and oppressive systems.

Since Putuma is confronting weighty topics, it is fitting that the style of writing she uses to address these issues is so courageous. She is able to discuss personal and political issues of memory, lived experiences, identity and belonging with great boldness. Much of the boldness exists in statements that hold a multiplicity of meaning. Moreover, her courage is noticeable in the structure of her poems: they have an experimental nature that challenges conventional poetic forms. For example, her poem, "Lifeline", can initially be read as a mere list of names of black womxn. However, in this list lies the names of people who are just as committed as she to the work of black justice. The poem is a list of people who inspire Putuma to continue living and working. Poems such as this one do not read like poems at all. Putuma acknowledges and deliberately plays on this. Close to the end of "Lifeline" she writes: "you will say that this is not a poem/ and I will say that you are right:/ it is not./ it is a lifeline" (2017, 85). The reader realises that the work the poems do is more important than subscribing to any poetic conventions. She does not adhere to any specific line length or stanza format. The poem "Apartheid" consists entirely of the footnote, "A genocide that can be still be found in the township" (2017, 109). This taut political statement reflects how the impact of many apartheid policies such as the Group Areas Act (1950) remains largely unchanged in contemporary South Africa; a sentiment and a reality that resonate with most township dwellers.

Putuma's defiance is evident both in her use of language and in the spine-chillingly beautiful content of her work. Although she speaks of her own experiences-this is seen by her use of personal pronouns throughout the collection-the black South African reader is still able to find resonance because she writes of typical black South African experiences. For instance, in "Graduation", she notes: "You and your cousins will do the things your aunties used to do/ Your baby cousins who are not babies anymore/ Will sit and drink ciders with you/ Talking sense finally" (2017, 36). The poem depicts experiences of growing up, how we, as black South Africans, inherit more responsibilities, and how we get to sit-in on family discussions and understand the dynamics of family a bit more once we take on those responsibilities.

The poem "No Easter Sunday for Queers" interrogates religious dogmatism as well as sexuality that defies heteronormativity. One of her most touching and moving poems, it has recently been turned into a play with the same title. The play, directed by Mwenya Kabwe, who worked alongside the talented MoMo Matsunyane, Tshego Khutsoane and Lunga Radebe as the main cast members, débuted at the Market Theatre in August 2019. Mwenya Kabwe and Momo Matsunyane are listed in her poem, "Lifelines". Thus, it is extremely fitting that Putuma chose to work with these womxn.¹

In both the play and the poem, Putuma writes about existing between and trying to navigate different, and often contradicting, worlds-the "North"/ "Northern Suburbs" and the "South"/ "Southern Suburbs" (2017, 25-33) as well as the church and home. Reading "No Easter Sunday for Queers" is difficult because of Putuma stuttering between "Us/them", "the South/ "the North", and "my/ our". In the poem, she does not know where she belongs. The complexities and tensions are reflected in her not being able to situate herself, as is evident in her use of pronouns: she frequently writes "They/We" or strikes out "we" to replace it with "they" in the same line. With regard to structure, as soon as the reader begins understanding life in "the South", there is a sudden shift to life in "the North". In both the poem and play text, Putuma goes back and forth in this way, creating a jarring reading experience. The form of the poem and play text, with interspersed italics, capital letters, strikethroughs and very long lines, prevents a comfortable reading experience. The unsettling experience translates into an unsettling form of writing, which in turn unsettles the reader. The reader is often left not knowing how to read. Her unconventional, experimental style has a performative nature, reflecting her rich background in theatre.

In "No Easter Sunday for Queers", Putuma critiques homophobia and different forms of intolerance, violence and fear experienced by queer people-particularly black queer womxn-in different spaces (ideological and geographical) in South Africa. She rewrites biblical stories to include queer love. In "Water" (2017, 98-99) she boldly writes:

For all we know,

the disciplines could have been queer,

the Holy Trinity some weird, twisted love triangle,

And the Holy Ghost transgender.

This début poetry collection has been an international success: it has sold over 5 000 copies, it has had 17 launches across South Africa, and it has been translated into German, Spanish, Italian and Danish. Putuma has performed it across three continents. Her truth and words resonate in the short poem, "Memoirs of a Slave and Queer Person", which reads: "I don't want to die with my hands up or my legs open". This is one of Putuma's most repeated lines of protest and is currently used when people mobilise in marches and on social media against sexual assault.

Duduzile Mabaso (2018) describes the volume as follows:

Koleka Putuma's Collective Amnesia is shifting borders. It is a collection of work that is needed and necessary-now more than ever. It is a manual for black bodies. An ode to the spaces we occupy. A hymnal for the weary. A celebration of self. A great collection if you ask me.

This is one of the many positive reviews that point towards the riveting content that Putuma delivers with courage; it acknowledges how she shamelessly speaks her truth and does not make it prettier for anyone by altering her language or hiding in the shadows.

 

References

Sassen, R. 2019. "Blemished Church, Broken Lesbians". My View: The Arts At Large by Robyn Sassen and Other Writers (blog), August 22. Accessed on May 4, 2020. Accessed December 19, 2020. https://robynsassenmyview.com/2019/08/22/blemished-church-broken-lesbians/.

Mabaso, Duduzile Zamantungwa. 2018. Review of Collective Amnesia by Koleka Putuma. Poetry Potion, April 24. Accessed August 2, 2020. Retrieved from: https://www.poetrypotion.com/book-review-collective-amnesia-by-koleka-putuma/.

Pieterse, A. 2018. "Knowledge and Unlearning in the Poetry of Koleka Putuma and Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese". Scrutiny2 23 (1): 35-46. https://doi.org/10.1080/18125441.2018.1505937.         [ Links ]

 

 

1 The play, No Easter Sunday for Queers, was published in 2020 by Junkets Publishers.

^rND^sPieterse^nA^rND^1A01^nGeorgina^sHorrell^rND^1A01^nGeorgina^sHorrell^rND^1A01^nGeorgina^sHorrell

THEMED SECTION 2
BOOK REVIEW

 

Caribbean Writers on Teaching Literature, edited by Lorna Down and Thelma Baker

 

 

Georgina Horrell

Cambridge University, United Kingdom. gah27@homerton.cam.ac.uk; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3041-2404

 

 

The University of the West Indies Press. 2020. pp. 240. ISBN: 976640738X, 978-9766407384

... teaching literature is an art. (Down and Baker 2020, viii)

In 1986, in her introduction to The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, Paula Burnett describes the English-speaking Caribbean as situated at the "meeting-point between three continents-Europe, Africa and America-and between three poetic traditions-the British, the West African and the North American". In this sense, Caribbean literature is, she suggests, "a unique cultural hybrid" (Burnett 1986, 1-2). Her anthology traces the history of poetry in and from the Caribbean, marking in particular, the shift in the "last fifty years" "from a more traditional European orientation, with the emphasis on form and a highly wrought surface, to a mode which is closer to the vernacular, influenced by the oral traditions of Africa and the dominance of modernism in the American tradition".

In the 30 years since Burnett wrote her introduction, a number of anthologies of Caribbean poetry have been published¹ and there has been further, sustained growth in a rich and varied spectrum of work from Caribbean writers, spread-as Burnett suggests-across the globe.

Caribbean literary pieces have, as editors of Caribbean Writers on Teaching Literature, Lorna Down and Thelma Baker suggest, been acknowledged widely and have contributed much to world literature (Down and Baker 2020, 3), as have Caribbean works of criticism and theory (Kamau Brathwaite's theories on orality and the community seem particularly apt here²). This book tracks something of that establishment and growth within the academy-in this case most particularly contextualised, as all the "teacher-writers" live(d) and work(ed) in the Caribbean. A number of interviewees are also poets: Edward Baugh, Mark McWatt, Mervyn Morris, Velma Pollard and David Williams-but the text is restrained in its literariness, focusing on the vernacular, the conversation, the pedagogical.

Burdett describes a history of Caribbean literature as enacting an interplay of the oral and the literary. Caribbean Writers on Teaching Literature in many ways precisely engages with the impact of that particular literary development. The editors write that they sought to create a "living text" that acknowledged and performed the oral tradition of the Caribbean (as much as the demands of an ever-burgeoning sense of orality via social media) in its approach and appeal (Down and Baker 2020, 2). Thus, while the book engages directly with the-postcolonial-context of teaching in the Caribbean, it also explicates and offers a refreshing pedagogical methodology in its approach: the suggestion of open conversations and reflections, of intergenerational engagement (teacher to student, teacher to former teacher-indeed, interviewer as former student); the tracing of a literary pedagogical history across approximately 60 years. Each of the 18 interviewees reflects upon their experiences as a teacher, re-enacting the "literary experience in the lecture room and in the classroom", suggesting what the editors call "a pedagogy of connectivity" (8; italics in original). Collectively, the interviewees represent three generations of "teacher-writers" and the text offers a pedagogical journey from a "widening student-centred vision" through a focus on "people, place and culture" to the "millennials" who offer perspectives on the "global" and "new technology" in teaching.

In her foreword, Marcia Stewart makes the point that this book is situated within the "library of books on the teaching of literature especially with respect to teaching Caribbean literature" (ix). Indeed, the interviewer uses as basis for part of the interview a reference to Elaine Showalter's Teaching Literature (2002)-and the anxieties related to the practice of teaching. In this sense, the text reads as a further web of conversations: between pedagogical practices and methodologies as much as between art and pedagogy. So too, the text functions as a companion piece to Teaching Caribbean Poetry (Bryan and Styles 2013), to which some of the writers here contributed (Lorna Down, Aisha Spencer, Sharon Phillips, Sandra Robinson, Sam Soyer)-in this case firmly setting aside both theory and criticism, however, and allowing both teachers' and students' voices to predominate.

What is clear through this collection of conversations is the development over the last 60 years of a distinctively Caribbean voice, not only in the literature but in the teaching thereof. Edward Baugh (poet, critic, theorist and lecturer) describes the transformation of the syllabus in the Department of English at the University of the West Indies (UWI) from the literature of England to a broader offering suggested by the renaming of the Department: Literatures in English (Down and Baker 2020, 25). Carolyn Cooper (teacher, lecturer, literary critic, newspaper columnist) speaks of the notion of the canon itself being contested and the significance of the "oral text, the popular text and popular literature"-explicated in the description of her course "Reggae Poetry" (85). Sandra Robinson (lecturer, teacher, literary critic and academic in Education), in her interview, talks about the challenge of fully interactive teaching, drawing on a wide range of experiential examples and international sources (literary and theoretical) for reference. As much as the earlier writers interviewed are (particularly) concerned with developing a passion for literature itself-often referencing English Literature-later interviewees seem to focus more on Caribbean writing and innovative, distinctively glocal approaches to teaching.

The editors and writers (notably, Down) mention ecocritical approaches and stress the notion that attention to sustainability and the environment is critical in any teaching of literature-not least in a part of the world for whom any rise in ocean level would be cataclysmic. Somewhat disappointingly, there is little substance related in terms of practice in this respect, although Down speaks tantalisingly of a course she developed: "Literature and Education for Sustainable Development" (109). Nonetheless, given that the creation and decolonisation of canon/s and the development of curricula are performed in the academy, this insight provided by Caribbean educators offers an optimistic perspective.

"Teaching literature matters", the editors conclude. How to teach literature effectively is the matter of this text. Community and connectedness-both on the local and global scales-seem to be pivotal to this how.

 

References

Brathwaite, Kamau. 1984. History of the Voice: Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon Books.         [ Links ]

Brown, Stewart, and Mark McWatt. 2009. The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.         [ Links ]

Bryan, Beverley, and Morag Styles, eds. 2013. Teaching Caribbean Poetry. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203082720.         [ Links ]

Burnett, Paula. 1986. The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English. London: Penguin Books.         [ Links ]

Down, Lorna, and Thelma Baker, eds. 2020. Caribbean Writers on Teaching Literature. Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press.         [ Links ]

McDonald, Ian, and Stewart Brown. 1992. The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry. London: Heinemann.         [ Links ]

Miller, Kai. 2007. New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology. Manchester.

Showalter, Elaine. 2002. Teaching Literature. New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell.         [ Links ]

 

 

1 A small sample: Ian McDonald and Stewart Brown's The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (1992), Stewart Brown and Mark McWatt's The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2009), and Kai Miller's New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology (2007).
2 See Brathwaite's History of the Voice: Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (1984).
Biography
Georgie Horrell is a Fellow (teaching, research and admissions) at Homerton College, University of Cambridge. She has been involved in poetry research projects, working with teachers, poets and academics in the Caribbean and in South Africa. Her research interests continue to include poetry performance by young people as well as postcolonial and ecocritical approaches to children's literature. Her publications include a co-edited anthology of Caribbean poetry for young people, Give the Ball to the Poet (Georgie Horrell, Aisha Spencer and Morag Styles, Third Millennium Publishing, 2014) and articles on South African and Caribbean literature (among which is "Poetry of Oppression, Resistance and Liberation" in Teaching Caribbean Poetry, 2014).

^rND^1A01^nFrancine de^sClercq^rND^1A01^nFrancine de^sClercq^rND^1A01^nFrancine de^sClercq

ARTICLE

 

The Persistence of South African Educational Inequalities: The Need for Understanding and Relying on Analytical Frameworks

 

 

Francine de Clercq

University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. francinedeclercq18@gmail.com; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9209-059X

 

 

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ABSTRACT

It is acknowledged that educational inequalities persist in South Africa 25 years after the advent of democracy in 1994, but the debate about the causes and solutions to poor education performance continues. Could the education system be fundamentally improved and mitigate somewhat the socio-economic inequalities from one generation to another? This article argues that the debate will benefit from the use of theoretical frameworks about the role of education in society, especially since many analyses do not engage explicitly with theories. This article summarises the theoretical debates to remind scholars about the need to compare and explore the arguments of different theoretical paradigms on the role of education and assist sociology of education teaching. It concludes with analytical examples, which argue that the best explanatory power comes from the post-structuralist theoretical position.

Keywords: South African debates; theories of education; educational inequalities; post-structuralist analysis

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Introduction

Many scholars have argued and demonstrated that 25 years after the 1994 transition to democracy, the relationship between inequality of educational outcomes and poverty in South Africa remains strong. South Africa is known for its low gross domestic product per capita, as a large share of its population lives in poverty, high unemployment levels (27% is the formal rate, but it is more likely to be around 40%), and high levels of inequality (with a Gini coefficient of 0.66, which has remained consistent). In a similar manner, the education system is known for its bimodality, with many noting that around 80% of schools perform badly compared with the functional 20% of schools, and 80% of the maths matric distinctions come from the top 200 (out of 6,600) secondary schools. Many quantitative researchers reveal strong inequalities in educational outcomes: of 100 children who started Grade 1 in 2007, only 51 made it to matric, 40 of the 2018 matric cohort passed and 17 received bachelor's passes. Only 40% of those who began Grade 1 passed matric. In no-fee (quintiles 1, 2 and 3) schools, less than one in five Grade 9 learners reached the low international benchmark in Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2015 in maths and science, whereas in quintile 4 and 5 schools the proportions were about 60%, and in independent schools around 80% (Van der Berg and Gustafsson 2019).

Quantitative research on South African education has been very useful in documenting different school variables and their association with educational outcomes. It shows that there has been some improvement. Van der Berg and Gustafsson (2019) note that cognitive school performance has improved significantly in the past 45 years. Whereas, in 1970, 45% of the 21- to 25-year-olds completed their primary schooling and 10% obtained matric, 95% completed primary schooling and 52% obtained matric in 2016. Furthermore, the national matric pass rate has also improved from the low 53.4% in 1995 to 81.3% in 2019. The government would argue that this shows there has been reasonable, if not satisfactory, progress in education since 1994, but the educational inequalities inherited as a result of years of discrimination during apartheid are hard to counter and cannot be undone overnight.

These figures and assessments point towards a central question underpinning this article: Could the education system mitigate somewhat the socio-economic inequalities passed down from one generation to the next? Put another way, has the performance and unequal nature of the education system improved much in the past 25 years and how could it improve its effectiveness and efficiency? Why did the many significant education reforms not transform the education system and its performance? Education policy analysts explain the impact of our education reforms in different ways. Some point to the symbolism of these policies, which is not considered implementable (Jansen 2002); others note that they were too often borrowed from overseas to keep up with the global competition without sufficiently understanding how to adapt them to suit the conditions and realities on the ground (Spreen 2001). A few others explain that they were often pro-middle class and intended to be so by the emergent middle class among government and department officials.

This article contends that many writings, including the recent book edited by Spaull and Jansen (2019) on the enigma of educational inequalities, focus their analysis on the nature and form of educational inequalities in different areas of the system since 1994. But they rarely engage explicitly with educational theories, which are needed to explain better the causes of these persistent inequalities and poor efficiencies in the education system. It is against this background that this article proposes to examine the debate on the causes of the education system's poor performance since 1994 and to identify solutions to improve its performance and persistent educational inequalities. This article aims to clarify the underlying reasons behind scholars' analyses of the different causes and suggested solutions to improve our education system, and concludes that there is a better explanatory analytical framework, which identifies the causes and offers solutions for our education system.

What follows is of course not new but is written to remind scholars of the importance of comparing and engaging with the arguments of different theoretical paradigms around the role of education and to assist sociology of education teaching.

 

The Need for Analytical Frameworks

Various arguments and positions have been developed by scholars to interpret the persistent educational inequalities and this article posits that it is important to unpack the different arguments by referring to three distinct schools of thought. These analytical frameworks will reveal why scholars identify different reasons or enabling or inhibiting factors and conditions to explain the poor educational performance and significant educational inequalities. This article distinguishes three "ideal-type" analytical frameworks for clarity purposes, but this does not imply that South African policy analysts are rigidly using one or the other; often they are eclectic and use a combination, though one can always detect in their analysis a dominant theoretical framework.

The article will show how and why each "ideal-type" analytical framework focuses on different factors or conditions to explain educational inequalities and will explain why the third analytical framework is considered most useful. This is because this framework takes into account the influence of both structures and agencies on the nature and evolution of the education system and explains that the power play was not sufficiently directed at challenging seriously the educational inequalities in favour of the disadvantaged.

 

The Liberal Functionalist Framework

The liberal functionalist position argues, after Parsons, that countries need an effective education system that functions to produce a competent and well-differentiated labour force through a meritocratic education system to meet labour market demands.

Adherents argue that education is neutral and contributes to reduce socio-economic inequalities and, in that respect, it is important to identify the school-based factors that work against that goal to allow individuals from all socio-economic backgrounds to work hard and succeed through the education system. This position would explain the inequalities perpetuated by Bantu education as an irrational, amoral and inefficient education system.

Van der Berg and his research team of economists of education from Stellenbosch were also interested to understand the binding constraints of our poorly performing education system since 1994. Their research focused on the inefficiencies of the system and the impact of specific school-based factors on the poor education outcomes of the majority (Van der Berg et al. 2016). Their research identified the main problems at different levels of the education system that need to be addressed. This is not to say that they do not acknowledge the negative influence of societal factors and socio-economic inequalities such as home poverty, home language, parents' low levels of education, unconducive family settlement and structure. However, their analysis (as well as the 2018 World Bank report) assumes that the education system could improve by addressing the various systemic inefficiencies in order to rupture the reproduction of inequality and broaden educational opportunities for all, which will hopefully reduce the socio-economic inequalities for the next generation.

At departmental level, the poor provincial capacity to plan and administer as well as the weak district monitoring and support of schools have been acknowledged. Gustafsson and Taylor (2013) noted other institutional inefficiencies. Through value-added school production functions and fixed-effects models, they show the need for more efficient use of non-personnel funds by the authorities, with a special focus on educational materials, as these represent serious obstacles to a well-functioning system.

Other analysts focus on the school-level factors to show how school development has not been properly addressed since 1994. They note in particular the weak district support system for poorly educated/qualified principals as well as the poor and sometimes dysfunctional school leadership and its inability to ensure time-on-task in the classroom with teachers arriving and teaching on time and at their right level (Van der Berg et al. 2016). This issue is what causes some of these scholars to privilege the other side of the "change coin", the serious lack of school and teacher accountability (Taylor 2002).

At the classroom level, many scholars show the differentiated access to teaching and learning resources in schools, which hinder or enable a more conducive instructional environment. They also identify the poor professional knowledge of teachers (CDE 2013; Shalem and de Clercq 2019; Taylor 2019; Taylor and Vinjevold 1999) and their weak pedagogical instruction regime (Fleisch 2018). Another major inhibiting classroom factor is the unrealistic and overambitious outcomes-based education (OBE) curriculum policy and the difficulty of implementing it in poorly performing schools with teachers who struggled to understand and implement it (Jansen and Christie 2000).

This is because many teachers in disadvantaged schools are not fully qualified and could not cope with a change of curriculum framework with little content and a different pedagogical method. This was overambitious and inappropriate to the majority of teachers and their classroom realities and conditions.

Many school-based policies had a differentiated effect on various classrooms and teachers but, overall, disadvantaged teachers struggled the most. The exceptions here, according to Gustafsson (2005), are the technical efficiencies achieved through the reduction of learner repetition, facilitated by the policy prohibiting more than one repetition per schooling phase.

The language of learning and teaching (LoLT) policy was identified as problematic in that it stipulates that schools and their school governing bodies (SGBs) should preferably adopt as a language of instruction the local mother tongue of learners in the Foundation Phase. A period of three years with English or Afrikaans as First Additional Language is acknowledged internationally to be far too little to achieve academic fluency in the future LoLT from Grade 4 onwards (Roberts and Schollar 2011). This was seen as a serious obstacle, especially because statistics showed that many Grade 3 or Grade 6 learners could not read properly for meaning for that level/grade (Pretorius and Spaull 2016), a fundamental shortcoming for further learning.

Finally, these liberal functionalist scholars of the "ideal" type look at one political dimension that, they acknowledge, exists outside the education system and impacts negatively on educational performance. The weak social compact or cohesion between stakeholders, such as teacher unions, schools and communities (Gustafsson and Taylor 2013; Roberts and Schollar 2011) is seen as a serious obstacle. Their analyses often blame the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU), which they show interferes with and organises their disadvantaged teacher members to boycott supervision and compulsory hours of teacher development (Van der Berg et al. 2016).

In brief, liberal functionalist scholars choose to focus on and analyse various departmental or school-based factors that hinder the efficiency of the system. These factors are conceived of in a technical manner and are believed to need better policy or programme redress strategies.

The research of these scholars who rely mostly on the liberal functionalist theoretical perspective is very similar and falls under School Effectiveness Research (SER), which became popular internationally in the 1980s and 1990s in drawing attention to various school-based factors that were correlated with education outcomes. Such SER scholars and human capital analysts in South Africa (Van der Berg and his team) who argue that enhanced levels of education raise people's and countries' productivity, stimulating economic growth and eradicating poverty (Psacharopoulos 1994), believe that their research can assist policy makers and educationists in identifying the important system-or school-based factors that need addressing. Their analyses, as Allais, Shalem, and Cooper (2019, 113) argue, position schools "as a factor independent of other social determinants, and treated as an independent policy variable which can be used to bring about the required social changes". Over the past three decades, SER has interacted with School Improvement Research (SIR), which focuses on the improvement paths and priorities of different schools, and both have evolved and improved each other over the last few decades. However, they have remained firmly located within the liberal functional paradigm, which assumes that education is and should be neutral to contribute best to the socio-economic and labour system and to upward social mobility on the grounds that education enables individuals to benefit from the improvement of school-based factors that maximise opportunities for all (Thrupp 2001).

An interesting weakness of the mainly quantitative research located in the liberal functionalist analytical perspective is that it can only establish correlations between certain variables and educational outcomes but cannot explain exactly how these school-based variables impact on educational outcomes. This is problematic because they recommend programmes targeting these quantitative variables to improve educational outcomes but cannot be sure how these improved variables work on educational outcomes.

 

The Marxist Functionalist Framework

The second school of thought is the Marxist theoretical perspective. Scholars who adopt this perspective argue that education is not neutral but functions rather as a political and ideological instrument to reproduce socio-economic inequalities through unequal educational opportunities provided to the differentiated population. Their studies focus on broader structural issues and reveal how differentiated socio-economic and education structures and factors reproduce inequalities in the next generation. In other words, their analysis does not focus on school-based factors (like the liberal position), but rather on all the unequal structures in society and in education. As early as the 1970s, Bowles (1972) produced large-scale evidence to show that the Unites States' class-differentiated population accessed and completed their education in such a way as to ensure class-based inequalities are transferred to the next generation (Bourdieu 1979; Bowles 1972; Moore 2004). Scholars who adhere to this theoretical framework, illustrated by the work of Van der Berg et al. (2011a) and Van der Berg and Gustafsson (2019), would explain the bimodal distribution of quality schooling in South Africa as a mirror of the harsh and unequal economic reality in South Africa.

In South Africa, such scholars argue that the post-1994 state did not seriously attempt a true reorganisation of the socio-economic structure to assist with the reduction of inequalities (Fine 2016). After 1994, a more political than economic transfer of power occurred, and the economic growth and investment strategy and policies did not target or subvert sufficiently the dominant monopolies (Hirsch 2005). The neo-liberal form of the economic growth paths adopted since 1996, when the Reconstruction and Development Programme was abandoned, in line with the global economic world and its increased socio-economic polarisation, did not promote economic growth for redistribution or an economic development strategy that created jobs for the poorly skilled and kept low the unemployment figures.

Allais, Shalem, and Cooper (2019) note that, as a result, "the socio-economic conditions that structure learners' lives in South Africa today, as well as those of their families and communities, reproduce [strongly unequal] social and economic relations" in ways that make it unlikely that the education system can improve equality of learning and educational outcomes. For them, widespread poverty and socio-economic realities are the most substantial factors that explain inequality of educational outcomes. Allais, Shalem, and Cooper (2019) argue that in South Africa the relationships between education, poverty, and inequality are dominated by the fact that educational inequality is driven by poverty. Poverty structures learning and teaching in poor schools, in three ways:

1) learners are not well-prepared for schooling and their homes do not function as a second site of acquisition; 2) very poor schools do not have a reservoir of material and cognitive resources by any comparative measure to what rich schools have; and 3) school management in poor schools does not mediate the bureaucratic demands on teacher time to cover the curriculum in time frames which are very hard to achieve. (Allais, Shalem, and Cooper 2019, 113-14)

These scholars locate the major causes of inequalities mainly within the political economy of the country rather than within the education system. The logic of this position is that the reduction of educational inequalities will not happen without some major restructuring in the unequal socio-economic structures.

The argument of Marxist education scholars in South Africa (Chisholm, Motala, and Vally 2003; Christie and Collins 1982; Jansen 2003; Kallaway et al. 1984; Shalem and Hoadley 2009) is that equal opportunities for all do not fundamentally exist because of the way unequal power relations and socio-economic inequalities are structured. They also argue that the education system is fundamentally biased against the poor and the working class in the way it is structured, accessed and completed. Their assumption is that the education system is never truly meritocratic as it functions above all to reproduce socio-economic inequalities through educational inequalities, making these inequalities more legitimate. The differentiated education system and structures ensure that unequal educational opportunities are provided differentially to reproduce the socio-economic inequalities. This occurs through various means, such as unequally distributed educational resources, the uneven quality of different principals and teachers, socially biased knowledge in the curriculum, among others, all of which contribute to low educational outcomes for the poor majority.

Thus, they show how the current bimodal school system is reproduced through the lack of support and targeted strategy to counter the poor quality of many teachers in disadvantaged schools, the poor culture of teaching and learning in many black schools and the insufficient money and resources provided to poor schools. With poor state resources, a lack of qualified and competent teachers and schools that are overstretched by the influx of learners of poor socio-economic status, socio-economic inequalities continue to translate into differentiated school performance and inequalities (Van der Berg et al. 2011b). This position foregrounds the socio-economic factors of learners' backgrounds as an obstacle to the reduction of educational inequalities.

They also argue that many education reforms work against the majority of the teacher and learner population. The OBE curriculum could only benefit competent and well-qualified teachers with resourceful classrooms. The aim of the 1996 Schools Act of keeping some of the middle-class learner population in the public school sector did not help much in minimising the polarisation between the public (and private) middle-class schools with a reasonable quality performance and high school fees and the majority of public schools. The capacity of schools to raise and fix high fees was often used by middle-class schools to maintain quality by hiring additional teachers and resources to allow the sons and daughters of the growing African middle class to access them (Motala and Carel 2019). In fact, the physical expansion of middle-class public schools came about mainly because of the initiative of the middle class rather than the government's funding (CDE 2013). Other analysts identify the problem in the minor budgetary redistribution to disadvantaged schools confined to non-personnel expenditures (Motala and Carel 2019) as an indication of a class-based financial strategy. Other examples will include the poor and inappropriate district support to improve teacher quality among disadvantaged schools (Shalem and De Clercq 2019).

Thus, these scholars who rely mostly on the Marxist theoretical perspective emphasise the unequal structures in the economy and education as main obstacles to the significant reduction of educational inequalities. They also criticise the SER and SIR findings for ignoring the importance of unequal non-school structures in influencing unequal educational outcomes as well as how non-school factors influence and interact with school factors in ensuring differentiated educational opportunities. The advantage of their analysis is that they attempt to show how non-school and school variables or factors discriminate against the poor majority and how this results in the persistence of educational inequalities.

 

The Post-Structuralist Framework¹

According to the third school of thought, post-structuralism, the analysis of inequalities should not be examined only through the unequal socio-economic and educational structures because structures cannot explain or determine fully what individual people can do and achieve. Proponents of this framework agree, in the case of South Africa, that the unequal socio-economic structure remained broadly untouched after 1994, inhibiting the reduction of socio-economic as well as educational inequalities. However, their argument is that individual and collective agencies are possible and can act to work within or to undermine the power of these unequal structures. Some will argue that the post-structuralists combine elements of the analysis of the liberal functionalists and Marxists. It is more accurate to say that the post-structuralists recognise individual or collective agencies within the constraining unequal structures and the state (which can be pressurised to represent the interests of various organisations) and that structures cannot fully determine outcomes because individual or collective agencies can work and contest to strengthen or undermine these structures.

How can the Marxist position explain, for example, the 1994 change of government? A Marxist analysis would show that there was a change of structures, which was the result of the various anti-apartheid struggles both inside and outside the country. However, a post-structuralist would show that the proponents of economic restructuring were not strong enough, especially since the unions were unable to develop significant challenging strategies or opposition to the neo-liberal forms of economic growth, which continued to accentuate and reproduce structural inequalities (Fine 2016).

Another example, which the Marxist position would struggle to explain, is the Soweto 1976 uprisings and the anti-apartheid struggles of the 1980s in education that forced the government to initiate some changes in the educational arena. Regarding the post-1994 unequal educational structures, one has to explain to what extent these were challenged and opposed by collective agencies or organs of civil society including school stakeholders (De Clercq 2010). Without the strong exercise of power by collective agencies, the post-1994 education system could not improve its inputs, processes and/or outputs in a more socially just manner.

This is why the post-structuralist position on the reasons for the poor education performance of the majority of schools, 25 years after 1994, is located both inside and outside the education system, in school- and non-school-based factors, especially with the constraints existing within the unchanged political economy of the post-1994 era. In comparison with the Marxist analysis, the post-structuralist analysis goes beyond the reproduction of socio-economic and educational structural inequalities and examines the contestations, struggles and collective agencies within the various arenas of education to understand how and why some structures were strengthened or undermined by different sustained struggles.

Although the government claimed the education reforms promote equality and quality for all, the situation on the ground is different as the education system continues to function as a dual system, with 20% of the schools providing quality schooling and the remaining 80% consist of mostly poorly performing schools (see next section for further analysis). By looking at the level of opposition or resistance that school stakeholders and their organisations mustered to attain more socially just school factors or conditions, these analysts (Sayed and Motala 2012) argue that it was not enough to force the government to promote more meaningful education redress and quality for all.

This is not to deny the few successes that have been attained such as the improvement of the physical infrastructure of some schools, no-fee status for 60% of schools and funding redistribution subsidies for disadvantaged schools. Teachers' working conditions also improved, mainly due to union militancy, and in particular their salary increases were, on the whole, in line with public servants' salaries, higher than the annual inflation. All these improvements show that the government felt under pressure to make some changes towards quality education in favour of the majority. However, these redress measures were not very substantial because, as the article will show in the next section, many reforms and initiatives in different areas of education did not sufficiently benefit disadvantaged schools, teachers and learners, but they did strengthen middle-class schools. This will be explained by examining how the unequal power relations in society became reflected in the education arena as well as how the strength of collective agencies was often not there to undermine the unequal structural educational inequalities.

 

Analysing Existing Educational Inequalities: The Advantage of the Post-Structuralist Position

This section will show how the post-structuralist analysis explains, in the author's view, more satisfactorily the impact of education reforms on the poor and persistent education inequalities, compared with the liberal and Marxist positions. As mentioned above, the scholars who rely mostly on the post-structuralist perspective argue that the post-1994 education reforms need to be analysed as a reflection of the shifting power relations and the power play (or contestation) that developed in this era (De Clercq 2010). There were strong power dynamics in the education sector after 1994 as well as contestations and struggles of different magnitudes in various areas of the education system. Let us first note some elements in the post-1994 political context. The strong collective agencies from organs of civil society that had mobilised in the pre-1994 era were demobilised and surrendered their power to a developmental state, which they thought would represent their interests. By the time education reforms were designed and introduced by the department to effect redress and move towards quality education for all (as the government claimed), many analysts warned that most education reforms were biased against the majority of disadvantaged schools and teachers (De Clercq 2010).

At the level of collective organisations such as SADTU or civic associations, one must mention that these all suffered from the flight of many people in their leadership positions to government, and their new leadership did not appear to manage to develop sufficient sophisticated strategies to mobilise their members to continue demanding and mobilising for pro-poor education policies.

Let us now look at the unequal structures and contestations or agencies in some of the major changing aspects of the post-1994 education system.

At the level of the school, one of the first policies formulated, the 1996 Schools Act (RSA 1996), was, inter alia, about democratising schools and school governance. This was mainly in response to the many pre-1994 struggles against the bureaucratic oppressive school system, but there were also some compromises towards middle-class schools in the finalisation of the Act (Sayed 2002). The school governing bodies, constituted by a majority of parents, were said to be designed to make schools and their principals accountable managerially. School governing bodies were expected to act as overseers of the school budget and manage relations between different school stakeholders (Woolman and Fleisch 2009). However, the post-structuralist position would show that SGBs became a new site of power relations where various school stakeholders conflict and struggle for their interests as opposed to the interest of the school as a whole. As it emerged, according to the Department of Education Ministerial Report (DoE 2003) on SGBs, many disadvantaged schools were unable to develop democratic governance that could assist with school development. The report mentions that many schools with poor governance arrangements and operational efficiency had parents who did not manage to play their budgetary monitoring role or principals and chairpersons of SGBs who colluded to rule and govern as they wished. Another more serious report finding from the Volminck 2016 Ministerial Report (DBE 2016) was the abuse of power by the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU), whose members sat on school appointment committees, as it ensured through its members that the SGBs allocate promotions and other senior positions first to their members, sometimes asking these new appointees to pay for their new jobs.

In contrast, the SGBs of many middle-class schools were assisted because their members had worked in parent-teacher associations (PTAs) in the pre-1994 era. For many of them, parents were there to bring more financial resources as well as competences and networks to assist with the schools' financial, governing or development needs, even if it is true that black parents did struggle to be recognised as equal participants in some of these schools (Woolman and Fleisch 2009). In contrast, the liberal functionalist position would argue that the Schools Act was appropriate for all schools but that more effort was needed to support and capacitate the SGBs of the poor schools and their boundaries (Heystek 2011). The Marxist position would argue that the unequal power relations and structures in education and in these schools were reflected in the relations between the school stakeholders. In contrast, the post-structuralist analysis better illustrates what happened in poor and middle-class schools through its focus on structures, power relations and agencies. One could argue in this light that democratic school governance should not have been introduced as a priority in the post-1994 era, mainly because the conditions on the ground and the unequal power relations in many poor schools were not conducive for the strengthening of school democracy, accountability and the relationships between different stakeholders.

Another school-based policy that was introduced was the 2001 White Paper 6 on Inclusive Education, which, in line with the international human rights discourse, was supposed to assist broader equal opportunities of access to all. It divided schools into schools for special needs, schools with learners with average learning barriers that were given additional posts for education specialists, and "ordinary" schools with learners with minor barriers. As Engelbrecht et al. (2016) and Makoelle (2012) note, "ordinary" disadvantaged schools lacked the resources, efficient administrative systems and suitable educators to ensure that the schools with learners with minor learning barriers could fulfil their role. In addition, the training of educators to deal with learners with learning barriers was rather inadequate, and the school-based support teams did not have much support from the district-based support teams.

This situation renders the implementation of this policy biased against the majority of poor schools. Only the middle-class public and private schools could recommend to parents of learners with minor learning barriers to consult with and benefit from the assistance of an education psychologist whom they could pay (Walton et al. 2009).

In this instance, the post-structuralist analysis notes that the policy was borrowed from overseas but did not suit the conditions on the ground, which were worse in poor schools, because it was conceptualised and implemented in a class-based manner that was not in favour of disadvantaged schools compared with middle-class schools. This position is in contrast with the liberal position, which would foreground the importance of continuing building the institutional capacity of districts and schools (Heystek 2011), while the Marxist position would emphasise the unequal structures militating against the implementation of this inclusion policy that appears rather liberal and desirable for all (Carrim 2011).

At the level of the classroom, teacher development and accountability, which are seen in the international literature as important change tools (Fullan 1982), did not improve sufficiently to ensure all teachers' improvement. Yes, the National Policy Framework for Teacher Education and Development (DoE 2006), the Integrated Quality Management System (ELRC 2003) and the Integrated Strategic Planning Framework for Teacher Education and Development in South Africa (DHET 2011) were passed to privilege teacher development for redress before teacher accountability could come into effect. These policies appear in line with the demand of teachers' unions, and SADTU in particular, which worked hard for the adoption of the 1998 Development Appraisal System, according to which teachers had to be developed and supported before they could be made accountable. This argument is in line with Elmore's (2005, 297) request for reciprocal accountability, which he defines as "every unit of increased performance that the system demands carries with it an equal and reciprocal obligation on the part of the system to provide access to an additional unit of individual or organizational capacity, in the form of additional knowledge and skill".

However, these development-oriented policies required a lot more human and financial resources to enact adequate and meaningful development for disadvantaged teachers, and these were not mobilised and provided by the state. Many teachers complained of the lack of departmental capacity for meaningful teacher support as well as the department's greater interest in enforcing principals' and teachers' accountability, especially in poorly performing schools. This lack of departmental capacity to support in particular poor schools explains why the culture of teaching and learning of many disadvantaged schools and the professionalism of many of their teachers did not improve much after 1994. Beyond these problematic policies, Taylor (2007) concludes in his research that most school improvement initiatives and programmes initiated by NGOs (at times with some provincial departments) in the first 20 years of democracy did not impact positively on school performance. This lack of meaningful teacher development was a major problem for the disadvantaged schools. As Taylor explains, most teachers' knowledge and competences in poor schools remained inadequate and often well below the grade that they were supposed to teach (Taylor 2007; 2019). Fleisch (2006) and Taylor (2002) attributed the problem first to the lack of teacher accountability in these schools. This was a problematic position for struggling schools and teachers who needed more initial support. Fortunately, Taylor later changed his position and recognised the need for better teacher support given the poor pre- or inservice professional development programmes and the lack of departmental or university training capacity.

In terms of this issue, the post-structuralist analysis would show how the state, which declares itself pro-poor schools, set itself up for failure. In fact, for a long time, NGOs, which work mainly with poor schools and teachers, made similar mistakes in their conceptualisation and implementation of programmes. The post-structuralist position would blame the poor leadership of the state and NGOs, which did not sufficiently take into account the poor conditions and realities of teachers in designing appropriate development programmes for these schools (De Clercq 2013). One could also argue that the government made the situation worse by developing ambitious and inappropriate school-based policies that stretched departments beyond their capacity to support such changes. The leadership of the unions, in contrast, appeared to prefer to blame the department or NGOs rather than actively participate in the reconceptualisation of more appropriate development programmes.

This analysis contrasts with the liberal analysis, which would have foregrounded the importance of continuing building the institutional capacity of the departments and schools (Van der Berg et al. 2011a). The Marxist position, on the other hand, would have emphasised the unequal structures and policies that militated against appropriate pro-poor teacher development policies and programmes. The question that the post-structuralist analysis needs to answer is, why did the unions, and SADTU in particular, which started well with their membership mobilisation for the 1998 Development Appraisal System, not continue to fight for appropriate forms of teacher development and accountability? Could it be that the union leadership did not manage to challenge the departmental policies to ensure that teacher development programmes are appropriate and meaningful for the challenges faced by disadvantaged teachers?

Another important and related school-based reform, which was motivated by the pre-1994 struggles against the nature and form of Bantu education, is found in the curriculum arena. The 1998 OBE curriculum, revised in the 2002 Revised National Curriculum Statement, was borrowed mainly from Australia and was not appropriately adapted by the team of researchers in charge who did not comprehend sufficiently the teachers' realities to ensure that such curriculum could be implemented with the conditions on the ground (Spreen 2001). This OBE curriculum was said by curriculum analysts (Jansen and Christie 2000) to be much too ambitious in that it changed radically both the way teachers had to teach content and develop pedagogy. While middle-class schools and their teachers were sufficiently qualified to use and benefit from this new curriculum to improve their teaching and learning, most teachers from disadvantaged schools struggled to comprehend let alone implement this curriculum in their classrooms. In addition, these teachers were not inducted or supported appropriately to understand how to implement this complex curriculum. It is interesting to note here that the teams of curriculum designers allocated for each phase and subject appear not to have taken into account the conditions in the classrooms nor the fact that such content-less curriculum frameworks were not appropriate to assist poorly qualified teachers to work out an appropriate sequence and pacing for their subjects. These designers may have been pushed by senior officials in the Department of Education responsible for curriculum to design specific frameworks and their outcomes to align the South African curriculum with the international trend that favoured outcomes-based curricula to respond to the needs of the 21st-century economy and society. There may have been a few SADTU representatives on these curriculum design teams, but the curriculum experts appointed by the department dominated and would have overruled any SADTU fundamental opposition.

This means either that SADTU could have fought harder to ensure that the new curriculum was developed in such a way that disadvantaged teachers could understand and implement it realistically and appropriately in their classrooms (Rogan and Grayson 2003) or that it was unable to develop campaigns and mobilise its members against this unrealistic curriculum. It never managed to organise against the challenges the new curriculum raised for the majority of its members and instead waited for the implementation stage to ensure that its members boycotted classroom supervision and any form of accountability because of inadequate district support.

By 2010, the then Minister of Education was bold enough to admit that the curriculum policy was too ambitious and problematic and that it needed to change. A Commission of Enquiry was commissioned, which recommended a template for the new curriculum policy. This resulted in the introduction of the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS) in 2012 with much more explicit content and assessment to be covered each week, abandoning once and for all the idea of a content-less curriculum.

This was a significant advance, even if teachers in disadvantaged schools still found CAPS too ambitious and problematic in its pacing and learner-centred pedagogical approach. Criticisms about the pacing and sequencing (Christie and Monyokolo 2018; Schollar 2018) and the complaints of many disadvantaged teachers led more recently to the introduction of large-scale interventions for poorly performing primary schools to assist with the implementation of CAPS. Indeed, under pressure because of the now better measured poor learners' outcomes (especially in Grade 3 and 6 as revealed in the Annual National Assessment results), a few provincial departments, in partnership with education NGOs, decided to assist with the pedagogical and assessment routines of CAPS. They provided poorly performing primary schools with scripted lesson plans, better readers and teaching resources as well as coaching of teachers (Fleisch 2018). These large-scale pedagogical or instructional interventions, according to recent quantitative evaluations (Fleisch 2018), appear more meaningful and appropriate to what these struggling poor schools and their teachers need to improve their understanding and teaching of CAPS, especially at the Foundation Phase because of the persistent poor reading ability of learners of disadvantaged schools (Pretorius and Spaull 2016).

The government presented the OBE curriculum as assisting with the competitive demands of the global labour market and enabling learners to be at the centre of teaching and learning and learn at their individual pace. This is what the liberal position would agree with, but it would have recommended better and more meaningful support and development to improve future implementation (Pudi 2006). The Marxist position would emphasise that such a globally aligned OBE curriculum was biased against the poor disadvantaged schools and teachers (Spreen 2001). It was designed to impress the global world by showing that South Africa was determined to improve and modernise its education system-at least for the minority of the learner population who would be well-educated to fill the highly skilled positions of the formal global economy. In contrast, the post-structuralist position would foreground the same arguments as the Marxist position with the addition that curriculum was not an arena or site where power play or contestations by the leadership of disadvantaged teachers and their organisations did not occur. It would emphasise the top-down way in which the government planned and introduced these curriculum policies (there was no serious pilot over a few years) and how this excluded the possibility of legitimate contestation by unions and researchers who had tracked and illustrated the difficult and inadequate curriculum implementation in poor schools (Jansen and Christie 2000).

The fact that the Minister of Education acknowledged the disastrous curriculum implementation in the majority of schools shows a certain courage by the leadership (compared with previous ministers) that dared to appear critical of the previous OBE curriculum frameworks. The Department of Education acknowledged in 2010 that the earlier curriculum policies were likely to undermine the teaching force (mainly in disadvantaged schools) and the school graduates who would not be well-prepared for the need to demonstrate independent, critical and problem-solving skills in the labour market.

What were the consequences for educational outcomes of all these problematic and class-based policies and programmes? As mentioned earlier, the matric pass rate improvement has occurred mainly as a result of pressures on Grade 12 teachers (and subsequent support programmes for teachers and learners) given the public visibility of the yearly matric results. And it should not be forgotten that there are many different ways to read and analyse the improved matric pass rate. Some researchers and educationists argue that the improved matric pass rate should be questioned and not trusted at face value as there are many ways in which schools could retain learners in the Further Education and Training (FET) phase so as not to tarnish their Grade 12 results. Other researchers looked at the decreasing number of registered maths and science matric candidates and graduates, especially in poorly performing schools, while others pointed to the rather low level (30%) of pass at matric level.

The liberal position would foreground the improvements in general, praising (as the Department of Basic Education would) the efforts of individual schools, teachers and learners, without delving deep into their bimodal pattern and how educational outcome inequalities have remained strong over the years. The Marxist position would go beyond the national average pass rates and detail the discrepancies over the years between the rich middle-class public and private schools and the public schools of quintiles 1 to 3 (Motala and Carel 2019). Their explanation would emphasise the structural inequalities and the fact that there had not been adequate pro-poor support programmes. The post-structuralist position would also foreground the persistent inequalities between middle-class and poor schools, but they would additionally point to the need for civil society to pressure the Department of Basic Education to develop more pro-poor redistributive policies (Sayed and Motala 2012), and the existence of specific schools that show leadership and agency to improve their matric results despite the odds and offer an analysis of their strategies and processes (Christie 2001). A recommendation could have been for the leadership to develop programmes that could empower poor schools, their teachers and learners to benefit from more conducive policies and programmes targeting specifically the conditions in these schools (such as the recent large-scale instructional improvement programmes in poor primary schools).

Finally, let us mention the poverty gap: learners from poor socio-economic backgrounds are likely to encounter many serious obstacles in attending, following and benefiting from their primary schooling. Drawing from the work of researchers in psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, economics, the health sciences, and mathematics education, Fleisch (2008) documents the depth and scope of the challenges facing primary education, both outside as well as inside schools. He showed how poverty, poor health, poor resources and language of teaching were factors influencing the academic achievement of poor learners in reading, writing and mathematics. In short, the poverty gap is about the vicious cycle of the poor socio-economic status of learners and their parents, which is compounded by the poor quality of their schooling, and explains the poor chances for these learners to benefit from schooling.

The liberal position recognises the poverty trap (Van der Berg et al. 2011a). They understand it to be the result of societal inequalities which, they believe, can be minimised by more appropriate and efficient educational strategies or support programmes that enhance the efficiency of the system and its people. The Marxist position mainly emphasises the inescapable influence of societal inequalities, which are reinforced and compounded by structural educational inequalities. For example, Shalem and Hoadley (2009) show, on the basis of an analysis of data sets on inequalities-at the societal level, at the level of the homes and communities of the children that attend school, at the level of the schooling system and at the level of teachers-that there is an intractable pattern of accumulation of educational disparity among teachers. The post-structuralist position, while accepting the compounding impact of societal and educational inequalities on the poverty trap, also examines how the state is or can be pressurised by organs of civil society into adopting and implementing more pro-poor support programmes to compensate for the situation of disadvantaged learners (Equal Education 2018).

 

Conclusion

To sum up, this article has shown how the post-structuralist analysis, which takes into account the influence of unequal socio-economic and educational structures and agencies on the nature and evolution of the education system, enables us to understand better why socio-economic and education reforms were not sufficiently directed at challenging seriously these inequalities. What it identifies are the reasons behind the broad maintenance of class-based socio-economic and educational inequalities (with some minor exceptions). It recognises the absence of significant socio-economic restructuring, but also examines the level of sustained organised opposition and leadership in certain contestable arenas of the education system to warn that the state needs to be substantially challenged and pressurised to revert the impact of its class-biased educational reforms and programmes.

This is not to say that no positive change has occurred or that the leadership committed to more socially just education did not achieve much. Rather it is recognised that there were pre-1994 anti-apartheid struggles that fought fiercely to ensure that the post-1994 government would improve the education system by effecting some financial redistribution and improving poor schools' physical infrastructure and resources. However, these redress measures were in no way sufficient to improve the quality of the education system for all, and in particular disadvantaged schools. In this sense, the state did not continue to be pressurised by the education sector to ensure that its education reforms and programmes of redistribution and support benefitted the disadvantaged majority.

 

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Van der Berg, S., and M. Gustafsson. 2019. "Educational Outcomes in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Signs of Progress Despite Great Inequality". In South African Schooling: The Enigma of Inequality: A Study of the Present Situation and Future Possibilities, edited by J. Jansen and N. Spaull, 25-45. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18811-5_2.

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1 There are some varieties within the post-structuralist position, and this article will limit itself to its main characteristics in relation to the other two frameworks for clarity.

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ARTICLE

 

School Governance and Social Justice in South Africa: A Review of Research from 1996 to 2016

 

 

Pontso Moorosi^I; Itumeleng Molale^II; Bongani Bantwini^III; Nolutho Diko^IV

^IUniversity of Warwick, United Kingdom, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. p.c.moorosi@warwick.ac.uk; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4447-4684
^IINorth-West University, South Africa. Itumeleng.Molale@nwu.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3596-7425
^IIIWalter Sisulu University, South Africa. bongani.bantwini@gmail.com; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4053-3453
^IVWalter Sisulu University, South Africa. nndiko@gmail.com; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3105-8630

 

 

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ABSTRACT

In this article, we conduct a systematic review of school governance literature in order to examine the influence of the social justice agenda in South Africa between 1996 and 2016. The review explores the nature and scope of school governance research, the methodologies used as well as the theoretical constructs underpinning the research in the identified period. We used search words related to school governance to identify electronically published academic material. By way of analysis, we employed a combination of descriptive quantitative and qualitative forms of systematic review. The findings reveal a relatively small body of research spread across local and international journals that mostly investigates issues around democratic participation and representation. Although redressing the education system was viewed as one of the major catalysts in restoring the values necessary for a socially just and democratic society, school governance research is not underpinned by the analysis of social justice. We conclude by reflecting on limitations and making suggestions for future research.

Keywords: school; governance; research; governing bodies; social justice

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Introduction

We¹ provide a systematic review of literature on school governance examining the extent to which this literature has been influenced by the social justice framework from 1996 to 2016. Traditionally, school governance operates as a subtopic within the broader field of educational management, administration, leadership (and governance) literature. Consequently, a great deal of school governance research goes unnoticed, hidden under the banner of the broader field, while the work of school governing bodies is overlooked (Balarin et al. 2008). In South Africa, school governance research gained researchers' significant attention after the establishment of post-apartheid legislation, the South African Schools Act (SASA), Act No. 84 of 1996, which mandated democratic participation of stakeholder groups in local decision-making (RSA 1996a). However, the extent of this research and the degree to which it has been influenced by social justice are not known. A concerted effort to consolidate knowledge in school governance research was deemed a necessity, so that research can address existing theoretical gaps.

Our conceptualisation of school governance is informed by existing research that includes school governing bodies and the work they do as school governors as mandated by school governance policy (SASA) in the South African context. Kooiman (2003) argues that conceptual clarity between "governance" and "governing" should be provided. He defined governing as a "totality of interactions in which public as well as private actors participate, aimed at solving societal problems or creating societal opportunities" (RSA 1996a, 4), while governance is the "totality of theoretical conceptions of governing". Influenced by Kooiman (2003), it perhaps follows that James, Brammer, and Fertig (2011) made a distinction between school governing and school governance, arguing that "school governance" is a broader concept involving several non-government actors who have "shared interests in public policymaking and implementation" (2011, 394) within the education system. In this conceptualisation, school governing is but one component of school governance, which is usually performed by "first order"² school governors, whose "responsibility is to deal with the day-to-day affairs of school governance" (James, Brammer, and Fertig 2011, 394). We understand school governing as a subset of school governance, and we use school governance to accommodate all aspects that concern governors and governing within the schooling system.

This review is framed within the first two decades of democratic rule that saw the unification of the South African education sector under one system. Prior to this, the apartheid dispensation had divided education along racial, ethnic and regional lines (Motala and Pampallis 2005) and into different departments whose unequal funding left lasting inequalities between blacks and whites. In its response to address the inequalities created by the apartheid system, the democratic government ushered in a series of policies that were focused primarily on "redress, equity, quality and democratic participation" (Motala and Pampallis 2005, 23). Of direct significance and relevance to this review, the South African Schools Act of 1996 (RSA 1996a) provided for democratic governance of schools and targeted redress to bridge the inequalities. The Act of 1996 was intended to provide a "uniform system for the organisation, governance and funding of schools; to amend and repeal certain laws relating to schools; and to provide for matters connected therewith" (RSA 1996a, 1). In view of the inundation of policies brought about by the new dispensation and the ensuing influx of research on educational policy since 1994, we assumed that there would be a significant corpus of research on school governance that would be ready for review (Hallinger 2018). We wanted to examine the kinds of issues that have been pursued in school governance research, how they have been pursued and the extent to which this research is informed by the social justice agenda.

To guide our investigation and develop a systematic discussion, we drew from previous reviews (e.g. Bush and Glover 2016; Hallinger 2014; 2018; Hallinger and Chen 2015) and identified a set of questions. We found Hallinger's (2014) framework for conducting reviews, which suggests a set of questions to guide the review, particularly useful. Our overarching question was: "What is the nature and scope of school governance research published between 1996 and 2016 in South Africa and to what extent is this body of research influenced by the social justice agenda?" To develop a discussion for this review, we identified the following specific questions that guided our analysis:

• What are the volume and distribution of published school governance research?

• What key topics and theoretical constructs underpinned this research?

• What methodological preferences influenced this research?

• To what extent is this body of research influenced by the social justice agenda?

This analysis is expected to make contributions to the literature in three ways: first, by bringing to the fore some key issues that have received research attention and those that have not, we would be highlighting areas in which more knowledge is needed for the benefit of further research. Hallinger (2014) posits that research reviews are critical in providing an understanding of theoretical advances within a particular field while laying a foundation for future knowledge production. Research reviews, thus, "map trends in theory development, methodological applications, and substantive findings to identify productive directions for future research" (Hallinger 2014, 540). Second, we believe that by investigating predominantly used methodologies and theoretical topics covered in school governance research thus far, thereby indirectly exposing the neglected areas, we are facilitating future empirical research. In this regard, we borrow and draw support from Hallinger and Chen (2015) who state that research reviews "provide a signpost on the path of intellectual development" (2015, 6). Third, by using a framework for school governance research underpinned by principles of social justice, we are advocating a research agenda that provides a useful lens to analysing research in school governance, thereby highlighting the social and structural forces perpetuating inequality in social systems and in social relationships. Collectively, these three ways contribute to the use of different frameworks and methods for analyses in school governance research and in the broader field.

This introduction is followed by a historical overview of school governance in South Africa, after which we outline the methodology adopted in this review. We then present and discuss the findings of the review, its limitations and offer a conclusion.

 

The History of School Governance Policy and Research in South Africa

In this section we provide an overview of school governance policy and research in South Africa. We map and contextualise this within the international landscape, highlighting the different historical moments of school governance policy in other contexts as they influenced trends in school governance research globally.

In terms of the UNESCO (2009) agenda of school governance reform, the South African model has been heralded as one of the most radically reformed (Crouch and Winkler 2008). An extensive account of the history of school governance policy in South Africa is provided in detail in the research of, for example, Motala and Pampallis (2005), Dieltiens (2005) and Sayed and Ahmed (2008), and will not be fully reproduced here. However, it is essential in setting the scene for this review to note that since 1994 in South Africa, school governance has been central to the broader education agenda of open access, equity, democracy and redress, and particularly the transformation of the education system (Motala and Pampallis 2005). As a school governance reform initiative, and of particular relevance to this review, the SASA of 1996 makes provision for the devolution of power from the central to the local (school) level, giving school governing bodies (SGBs) considerable powers on local policy oversight in improving the quality of education. In particular, the SASA promulgates the establishment of school governing bodies whose role includes budgeting, maintenance, application of policy and power over employment of teaching and non-teaching staff. It is in addressing these aspects of school governing that the first governing bodies were elected in 1997, with subsequent elections held every three years since.

It is well known that school governance policy as a reform initiative in South Africa has been driven by the SASA of 1996, under the broader political agenda of transformation and redress driven by the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996b). In this context, the political motive for democratic governance of schools was initiated by the need to provide broad-based participation at the local level, which was deemed essential for the process of transformation (Dieltiens 2005). This broad-based participation was in line with the UNESCO agenda of school governance reform. Naidoo (2005) argues that the post-apartheid legislation envisioned particular notions of participation and democratisation to inform processes of decentralisation and local school governance. In this sense, decentralisation was associated with greater participation of stakeholders (parents, teachers, school-based staff and learners) in local governance in schools that would promote greater democracy, citizenship, equity and quality in education (Motala and Pampallis 2005; Naidoo 2005). While giving people a voice in the democratic structures might suggest empowerment, we are quite aware that policy does not mandate what matters most, because what happens in schools is less related to the intentions of policy makers than to the knowledge, beliefs, resources, leadership and motivations that operate in local contexts (Darling-Hammond 1998). This implies that the democratisation of the school system does not necessarily correlate with the effectiveness of a policy or programme. As Naidoo (2005) argues, such policy ideals are often sabotaged by, among others, contextual realities, as schools are distinctive and are placed in different geographical locations faced with a barrage of different challenges and characteristics. Hence, implementation rarely happens as planned. Indeed, as Naidoo (2005) further points out, although the common driving agenda for school governance policy was transformation, the apartheid legacy of racial inequality was bound to have a significant influence on the implementation of policy, in view of its inherent inequalities. Hence, the necessity for a socially just reform.

Since the SASA's inception, and the election of the first school governing bodies in 1997, studies have been conducted on the roles, functions and effectiveness of these (Bayat, Louw, and Rena 2014; Clase, Kok, and Van Der Merwe 2007; Mncube and Naicker 2011; Nwosu and Chukwuere 2017). A decade after the inception of the SASA, Motala and Pampallis's (2005) review of literature on aspects of governance including democratic governance and equity suggested a paucity of school governance research. Most recently, a review of the literature on educational leadership and management was conducted to commemorate the 20-year anniversary of the democratic dispensation (Bush and Glover 2016), and to assess the nature of research on school leadership and management. Notably, Bush and Glover's (2016) review of research on school leadership and management addresses school governance as an aspect of school leadership and management, and reveals a trend in the uneasy relationships between school governing bodies and school principals. Perhaps the uneasy relationship is caused by the knowledge gap between the two organs, the management of resources at school level and the fact that the most radical school governance reform policy has been placed in the hands of school governing bodies "as an important part of grassroots democracy" (Bush and Glover 2016, 217). However, in appreciating the importance of grassroots democracy it is critical to note that democracy cannot be easily nurtured and developed without relevant and appropriate education.

A gap exists in the knowledge generated by school governance research. In a recent review of leadership and management literature in Africa, Hallinger (2018) found that school governance research accounted for only 11% of the overall published literature of more than 500 articles. Encouragingly, Hallinger identified changes in school governance as an area ripe enough to warrant a systematic review. In a previous review, Hallinger and Chen (2015) found that school governance research accounted for 36% of the leadership and management literature in Asia. Hence, we believed that reviewing a body of research on school governance in South Africa would help illuminate theoretical gaps that might provide useful knowledge for the improvement of policy and practice.

 

School Governance and Social Justice

In view of the injustices of the apartheid past and the continuing inequalities in South African education, a social justice lens was necessary in conducting this review. We acknowledge that social justice may not have a universally accepted definition due to its complexity (Connell 2012). Our understanding of social justice is informed by works of Cochran-Smith (2004) and Carlisle, Jackson, and George (2006) whose framing of social justice suggests a process of understanding how social forces, structures and institutions support equity across different social identity groups. This includes how policy, practice and research can be used to liberate and provide equity-informed solutions and how social forces promote equal social relationships (Carlisle, Jackson, and George 2006; Cochran-Smith 2004). Social justice is a preferred framework for understanding the South African context because of its broad sense in dealing with injustices. Cochran-Smith's (2004) work is based on teacher education for social justice, but it helps us in understanding the significance of community-wide inquiry that facilitates the unlearning of problematic discourses of racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice.

Carlisle, Jackson and George (2006) identified principles that we found useful in making sense of the social justice agenda in school governance research in South Africa. These principles include equity and inclusion, relationships to wider community as well as efforts to provide high quality education for students of all backgrounds. These principles are broad and are seen in line with the framework that drives transformation and redress in post-apartheid South Africa. They align with the broader distributional and relational dimensions of social justice, as Connell (2012) confirmed that social justice in education concerns equality in the distribution of educational services as well as the nature of the service itself "and its consequences for society through time" (681). Central to the distribution of educational services is the role of school governance with its responsibility for democratic participation and representation. Nandy (2012) suggests that a socially just education system recognises "that what happens outside the classroom matters as much as what happens in it" (2012, 678).

The SASA gives school managers and governors a direct mandate on the provision of quality education, and a fair and just education system that ensures equity and inclusion for all children from different backgrounds. This makes social justice particularly complex in the South African context, given the old race-based forms of inequity of the apartheid era that are being perpetuated through the new class-based forms of inequity of the post-apartheid dispensation. Indeed, Connell (2012) acknowledges that the mechanisms of inequality change over time, which explains why racial exclusions of the colonial era have been replaced by class privileges and inequalities of the post-colonial regime. The dimension of social justice relevant in this analysis is a holistic one that takes into consideration all forms of inequality and recognises principles of democratic participation, representation, inclusion and equity. These principles are espoused in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa and inform school governance policy. Indeed, Griffiths (2012) contends that if schools are to be "good places to live" (2012, 233), social justice is not a choice those in education can afford not to make, whether they describe what they do in terms of social justice or not. We were interested in examining the extent to which school governance research has thus far been used to challenge the patterns of social exclusion and oppression, and how it encourages a dialogue that nurtures a socially just education system.

 

Methodology

The article employs a systematic review of existing academic literature on school governance in South Africa published in the country and internationally between 1996 and 2016. Hallinger (2014) argues that there is no single correct approach to determining the suitability of the period of review. However, for us, the chosen period has political significance in that it signalled 20 years of democratic rule and 20 years of school governance policy (RSA 1996a), providing a legitimate rationale for this review. Our search procedure was "bounded" within the identified time frame as well as by other delimitations that are explicitly identified in this review. Hallinger (2014) identifies three types of search procedure: "selective", "bounded" and "exhaustive" (546). We could not possibly claim an exhaustive search due to our delimitation criteria that focused on electronically available material, while the same criteria and the effort put into the search ruled out a selective search. Our search fits the description of a bounded review as it "answers a defined research question by collecting and summarising all empirical evidence that fits pre-specified eligibility criteria" (Hallinger 2014, 546), thereby making our criteria explicit and defensible. Hallinger (2014, 542) outlines at least three ways in which a systematic review differs from a traditional literature review:

• it uses explicit and transparent methods

• it follows a standard set of stages and these are

• accountable, replicable and updateable

Accordingly, we limited the research to articles in peer-reviewed academic journals published after the establishment of the South African Schools Act of 1996 (RSA 1996a). We explicitly identified electronic material to be analysed using an initial search through Google Scholar and the library database. As part of our delimitation criteria, we wanted to focus on material that has been subjected to the scrutiny of peer-review that could be accessed electronically. We excluded theses and dissertations, books and book chapters, as well as government and other research reports not published in peer-reviewed journals. Search words and phrases such as school governance, school governing bodies, governors, educator governors, learner representative councils, democratisation in schools, representation and participation were used. Narrowing the search down to just school governance literature published in peer-reviewed academic journals from 1996 to 2016 gave us a total of 56 articles. We were disappointed with the outcome, as we had expected more. However, it is worth mentioning that some South African journals were not yet available electronically at the time. Although we were disappointed by this outcome, previous reviews (e.g. Hallinger 2014; Leithwood and Jantzi 2005; Leithwood and Sun 2012) suggest that this was a reasonable number of articles for a systematic review. Hallinger (2014) reviewed 38 exemplary review articles; Leithwood and Sun (2012) conducted a meta-analysis of 79 unpublished studies while Leithwood and Jantzi (2005) reviewed 32 articles on transformational leadership. All these reviews, and many more, constitute exemplary reviews that were all published in reputable journals and have been cited repeatedly.

Data Analysis

By way of data analysis, we scanned and extracted from each of the 56 articles specific data on the authors, year of publication, journal, the title and focus of the article, methods employed, main findings and summary of conclusions. In performing this data extraction, we were informed by previous research reviews and, in particular, Hallinger and Chen (2015) and Hallinger (2014) who explain clear processes of data extraction and analysis for systematic research reviews. A clear data extraction and data treatment procedure is a hallmark of a systematic review (Hallinger 2014). We then entered these data into an Excel spreadsheet from which we further generated tables and graphs that we used to represent data quantitatively. Descriptive statistical analysis was used to analyse the data quantitatively to determine frequencies and distribution of publications. The results were represented using tables and graphs that illustrate trends and foci over time.

 

Results

In this section we present the results of our analysis. We do this around the broad questions guiding this review, using them as subheadings and tackling each question in turn. We follow Hallinger (2014) in treating the questions guiding this analysis as part of the conceptual framework around which the key ideas or findings are organised.

What Are the Volume and Distribution of School Governance Research?

In answering the broader question on the nature and extent of publications, we started by examining the rate as well as pattern of publications on school governance. By rate of research, we mean the volume of articles published within the identified period and how this changed over the years. Patterns of publication revealed where the articles were published, whether in local or international journals as well as which journals published the biggest volume of school governance articles. Hallinger (2014) suggests that reviews of research are always undertaken in response to a perceived problem. In our case, our analysis was based on the assumption that there was a huge body of research on school governance that needed acknowledging and examining so that gaps could be identified for further and more informed research. This section presents findings on the rate and patterns of publication of research on school governance.

Publications by Journals

As already suggested, our analysis was limited to academic articles published in peer-reviewed journals. We found 56 journal articles that fit our selection criteria published between 2000 and 2016, which we regarded as a very small number of articles in school governance research. Although the review itself aimed to find articles published from 1996, we found no publications (within our selection criteria) between 1996 and 2000, except for some research reports, dissertations and theses, which did not form part of the analysis. We found that 46 (83%) of the articles were published in national journals and 10 (17%) were published internationally. The diagram below (Figure 1) illustrates the distribution of articles across the journals. Of the 46 locally published articles, 21 (45.6%) of them were published in one journal-the South African Journal of Education (SAJE). The rest of the articles were spread across the different journals, which published between one and four articles in the case of Acta Academia.

 

 

Publications by Year

We were also keen to examine the growth pattern of publications by year. Table 1 below illustrates the number of publications by year group. We note that there was a steady increase of publications in the SAJE between 2003 and 2010 and a decline after that, with only one publication in 2011, one in 2012 and one in 2016. This is an interesting pattern given that there was a general increase of publications (in other journals) after 2011, with the period between 2011 to 2016 having the highest number of publications. The period between 2011 and 2016 saw the highest volume of publications: 22 publications and a total of nine in 2011 alone and seven in 2013. However, the other years saw fewer publications, with one publication in 2012, 2014 and 2016 and three in 2015. A breakdown between the two decades shows the highest volume of publications was in the second decade, with a total of 43 between 2006 and 2016.

 

 

Publications by Province

We were also interested in knowing how research was spread across the provinces and there were some interesting patterns of knowledge production by province, as shown in Figure 2 below. Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces had the highest number of publications at 27.2% and 22.7% respectively, collectively accounting for 50% of all empirical publications. They were followed by the Eastern Cape at 11%, with the Free State and Western Cape sharing fourth place at 9.09%. Given that there are more universities, and therefore more researchers, in Gauteng than in any other province, we were not surprised by the Gauteng province accounting for most of the publications based on empirical research. We also noticed that two of the biggest provinces in terms of number of schools and learners (KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape) were in the top group of provinces accounting for a higher concentration of publications, which could suggest more research activity in these provinces. The Northern Cape had the least number of publications, which could also be attributable to the absence of a university in the province until 2014; it is also the smallest province by population. However, it was a sign of encouragement that there was some scale of knowledge production on school governance in all provinces, albeit to varying degrees.

 

 

Although in the same category as the Northern Cape in terms of universities, Mpumalanga had a higher volume of publications, which could be attributable to the association of the provincial Department of Basic Education with a few Gauteng-based universities. While this analysis gave an indication of provinces where school governance research is being conducted, it inadvertently revealed universities that have more research capacity in the school governance area. It also became apparent that the most productive provinces were associated with more traditional universities, rather than the new universities of technology. This unevenness across the provinces suggests knowledge is being produced in some provinces while very little is produced in others, which could lead to different policy foci or less well-informed foci between provinces.

Distribution of Authorship

Another notable pattern was that authorship emerged to be located in the hands of the same scholars. Provinces that have a higher concentration of publications appear to be dominated by the same authors. For example, in KwaZulu-Natal, the majority of the publications are between two authors, Mncube (5) and Duma (3). Gauteng had a much more diverse group of contributors, but knowledge still appeared concentrated in the hands of a few authors who had more than one article spread over the years (e.g. Heystek 5; Mestry 3) as opposed to once-off publications. Again, given the nature of academic work, we did not find it surprising that the "locus of authorship" (Hallinger 2014, 563) was concentrated in a few authors based within traditional universities. We evidenced a reasonable degree of co-authorship among established and emerging scholars and less between two or more established scholars (e.g. Bush and Heystek). Although we did not analyse this in detail to examine who the authors were and how far they were in their academic careers, we deemed it was a positive indicator of a possible mentoring relationship emerging between established scholars and their research students or younger colleagues. This could suggest the continuance of school governance research beyond the current "gurus", but clearly we would need more data to ascertain the claim. There was also, albeit on a smaller scale, an observable pattern of collaboration between local and international researchers, resulting in some international publications. In his review of research reviews in educational leadership and management, Hallinger (2014) also found a small set of scholars engaging in co-authorship. Thus, although not as widespread as we had anticipated, we found it encouraging that the majority of knowledge producers were researchers based in local South African universities. Collaborations and co-authorships, particularly between established and emerging researchers, ensure that important problems receive sustained focus over a period of time.

What Topics and Theoretical Constructs Underpinned This Research?

We were also interested in exploring general trends of topics covered in school governance research. We asked this question to understand aspects of school governance that attract research interest and what knowledge trends emerge from them. Leithwood and Menzies (1998a) have analysed trends in topic coverage in reviewing the literature on the implementation of site-based management at different times within the evolution of the field. Other reviews on the broader subject of leadership and management have also conducted an analysis of topics studied. Interestingly, school governance has been a topic in some of these previous reviews (e.g. Bush and Glover 2016; Hallinger and Chen 2015), yet we could only identify two reviews that were dedicated to aspects of school governance. Our analysis in this review showed that research has been underpinned by several features that explain the governing body's role, functions and behaviours (such as financial accountability, policy making and legal framework) as well as those that have been influenced by principles of social justice (democratic participation, decentralisation and equity). We grouped different topics into broad classifications whose frequency is illustrated in Table 2 below. The subsections that follow unpack the key themes addressing the above question. It is to be noted that some topics overlap, with some articles addressing several issues that cut across more than one grouping. Hence, the total number of articles does not add up to the total of 56.

 

 

Democratic Participation

The table above shows that democratic participation was the most common topic with the highest number of articles (35), making up 62.5% of all articles. In our classification, we used democratic participation as a broader term encompassing democratic participation, representation, decentralisation and devolution. Unpacking this broader classification revealed that many articles tended to address these concepts together and used a combination of these concepts, hence this classification. We used democratic participation as we felt it represents both the policy standpoint as well as the practical implementation. There is an observable pattern in the earlier articles published between 2001 and 2005 exploring the notion of learner representative councils and the extent of their actual participation in governing bodies. This is perhaps unsurprising given that the SASA (1996) was the first piece of legislation mandating learners' participation in the governance of schools and would have caught researchers' attention. The second pattern we observed in this regard concerns the extent of parental participation given low levels of literacy amongst parents, particularly in rural, informal and some township communities. We noted, however, that the notion of learner and parent participation and/or representation was present in the articles throughout the period of review, with research raising similar issues around the lack of meaningful participation driven mostly by a lack of capacity and illiteracy. However, these analyses hardly moved beyond surface issues and into deeper social justice analysis, suggesting a lack of progress in this area of research.

We observed that issues around decentralisation as a concept were addressed through conceptual studies published mostly in the first decade of the research period that problematised participation and attempted to provide a theoretical explanation. Beckman (2002) and Lewis and Naidoo (2004; 2006) produced conceptual articles providing a critical engagement with decentralisation and devolution of power. It is noticeable that the use of decentralisation as a concept is not as frequent in this body of research, which is surprising given its implications for local decision-making and its dominance in international school governance literature. However, we discern that this is probably indicative of the nature of the problems South Africa is dealing with in school governance. The SASA outlines the roles and functions of school governing bodies underpinned by principles of democratic participation and decentralisation. Yet, research focuses more on participation and/or representation that is harmed by a lack of clear understanding of the governance role and parents' illiteracy, particularly in rural areas (see Bantwini, Moorosi, and Diko 2017). The dominance of school principals in the governing bodies and the illiteracy of parents (mostly in rural areas) prevent the latter's full participation, leading to tensions between governors and principals (Bush and Glover 2016). This issue has had permanent presence in the articles both conceptually and empirically, arguably due to contextual challenges that individual schools, and to some extent districts and provinces, are facing. We engage this aspect a little further in the discussion below.

Equity, Exclusion and Social Justice

The findings from Table 2 above show that there were five articles that directly addressed issues related to social justice, making up only 8.9% of the overall sample. These articles were published between 2008 and 2015. There was at least one article addressing gender and two addressing social justice directly and noticeably written by one person (Mncube 2008; Mncube, Harber, and Du Plessis 2011). Although at least one article made specific reference to black parents, it was a form of categorisation and not a race issue. None of the articles addressed racial issues explicitly or even under the banner of diversity. We found this surprising given the racial tension in many of the schools, particularly the relative under-representation of African parents in former model C schools and in some cases former Indian and Coloured schools. This observation is particularly striking as black parents are highly under-represented in some of the former model C schools, despite the reports that suggest that the African learner population has increased. Two other articles in this category were about inclusion and equity. We revisit this issue again in one of the sections below.

Financial Accountability

Financial accountability is another topic that received significant attention during this period, and this topic was addressed in 8.9% of publications. Mestry (2004; 2006) explores the role of the governing body in managing the school's finances and shows how the school principals end up taking charge, perhaps due to lack of clarity of policy and parents' inability to understand finances. Indeed, one of the significant challenges experienced by governing bodies revolves around financial management, which ironically brings the issue of representation and participation back through the back door. Fundraising is a key function of the SGB stipulated by the SASA, which in the reality of most contexts suggests parents' inability to carry out such functions. Several other studies were conducted on aspects of governance, including the assessment of the implementation of the SASA, which we see largely through conceptual papers that were part of this review. Bush and Glover's (2016) review found an uneasy relationship between principals and governing bodies as one of the features of research on educational leadership and management in South Africa. Although school governance was not their exclusive focus, their finding is important as it characterises school governance research thus far.

Legal Framework and Policy Making

We combine legal framework and policy making as we find them related. Collectively, articles under this category represent a total of 28.5%. Many of the legal framework articles raise important questions about the application and interpretation of legislation that have implications for the implementation of policy on the local school level. This is a significant part of the literature that examines policy reviews and analyses (e.g. Serfontein 2010; Squelch 2001) as well as some legal implications. For example, Serfontein (2010) and Beckman and Prinsloo (2009) analyse cases where the governing bodies were taken to court because of the misapplication of the law. We found these findings particularly interesting given the foundation of the South African Constitution that underpins most legal frameworks including the SASA.

What Methodological Preferences Have Influenced the Research on School Governance?

In asking this question, we were interested in methodological patterns of published school governance research over the years. Our analysis revealed a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, with the scale tilting in favour of qualitative case studies. From the 56 articles analysed, 29 of them used qualitative methods while nine employed quantitative methods and a total of 16 were conceptual studies not based on primary data. Only two of these studies used mixed methods, which we found surprising given the surge in the use of mixed methods in recent years. The following diagram (Figure 3) illustrates this representation in percentages:

 

 

A preference for qualitative methods was also identified by Hallinger and Chen (2015) and Hallinger (2018) in their reviews of literature on educational leadership and management in Asia and Africa, respectively. We found that within the qualitative articles, there was considerable reliance on snapshot case studies using interviews and observations. We recognise the value of such studies as they are based on real life settings and offer a direct understanding of issues that affect the quality of learning. For example, studies by Lewis and Naidoo (2006), Heystek and Nyambi (2007) and Mncube, Harber, and Du Plessis (2011) are qualitative case studies that help illuminate the power relations inherent in the functioning of school governing bodies. While most of these studies lack generalisability, studies that report primarily on qualitative case studies are helpful as they tend to report on a wider range of school conditions. We acknowledge their worth and value in research, but we also note the absence of longitudinal studies that would perhaps provide a deeper understanding of the governing body functioning over a full three-year term.

With regard to the quantitative studies, we found that despite being quantitative in nature, these studies usually had quite a small sample base. The largest quantitative survey had a sample of just over 1000 participants and involved several groups of participants. Although this was large enough to enable some level of generalisability, it was an anomaly in our review sample as the average sample comprised 200 participants. Moreover, these surveys also usually focused on perceptions of educators on some issues concerning the governing bodies and hardly on observation of governance or governing. Perhaps this should not be surprising given that educators can be accessed in higher numbers than the governing body members within any one school. In terms of analysis of data, we found that statistical analysis was mostly limited to descriptive statistics and there was no higher level of analysis that enabled correlations and or other forms of comparative analysis.

Conceptual articles comprised policy analyses, literature reviews and other non-empirical analyses. Out of a total of 16 articles in this category, at least one article was based on a review of literature on school governance (Joubert 2009) and the majority were policy analyses. We also note that Joubert's review was a commissioned response as part of a larger scale project and so more of a comprehensive literature review than systematic review of research. Within the policy analysis articles there was an observable focus on the legal framework and analysis of the law and its implications for the functioning of school governing bodies. We were not surprised by the overwhelming focus on policy analysis given the policy emphasis in South Africa since the beginning of the new dispensation and its policy change. We were surprised, however, by the high proportion of conceptual articles, albeit at a lower frequency than empirically based articles, which is consistent with Hallinger's (2014) and Hallinger and Chen's (2015) observation.

Overall, while it was encouraging to find more studies based on empirical primary data, case studies and small-scale quantitative studies do not always provide a good basis for policy implications. Hallinger (2018) argues that a "continued reliance on relatively 'weak quantitative methods' will inhibit the development of a robust African knowledge base" (2018, 78). Notably, there were no studies conducted on a longitudinal basis, which could suggest trends within, for example, a three-year term of an elected governing body. Hallinger (2014) also argues that the density and scope of empirical research literature in any case must reach a critical mass before it can be ready for systematic review. Perhaps this explains the presence of only one research review paper in the identified period, and that even on a global scale we could identify no more than two reviews of literature on the school governance aspect alone, both by the same authors (Leithwood and Menzies 1998a; 1998b). However, it is notable that one of the reviews based on the South African literature (Bush and Glover 2016) addressed school governance as a subtopic and a more recent review by Hallinger (2018), on the African continent, marked school governance as an area developed enough to warrant a systematic review.

To What Extent Does the Social Justice Agenda Influence School Governance Research?

The direct classification of equity, exclusion and social justice received the least attention (8.9%). However, if we take the broader social justice definition in the South African context collectively to include equity, democratic participation and representation, 71.4% of the reviewed material on the surface appears to be addressing some elements of social justice. However, the explicit engagement with social justice as a framework including mention of the social justice construct was evident in only two of the reviewed articles, notably by the same author. Thus, we observe a gap in the use of social justice analysis in school governance research despite the overwhelming focus on democratic participation. This is evidently a gap that needs attention from researchers in this area and we want to take this opportunity to call for more research that asks high impact questions on social justice. In view of the inherent inequalities in South Africa, research that is underpinned by social justice principles should challenge oppressive assumptions, attitudes and behaviours rather than just explain the cause of problems. Carlisle, Jackson, and George (2006, 57) contend that "schools promote equity and inclusion within the schools and the larger community by addressing all forms of social oppression". In the South African context, Mncube (2008) and Heystek (2011) help us acknowledge that by focusing on democratic participation and representation school governance is already underpinned by principles of social justice. However, if we are to argue for quality education that caters for the needs of the diverse South African society, we need to look beyond democratic representation and ask more directed questions into the different ways in which inequalities and inequities are reproduced within the education system. We argue that school governance is one such area where post-colonial and post-apartheid power imbalances reside, exerting control through hegemonic cultures and class privileged forms of governing. What we need is direct application of social justice theory in conducting school governance research so that we can begin to ask important questions that interrupt rather than maintain the social order. As Connell (2012) suggests, we all need to take responsibility in creating a socially just education system.

It should be borne in mind that the review focused only on the topics and abstracts and not the details of content. Thus, the extent to which school governance research promotes equity either within governance structures themselves or in the provision of education in general would be worth exploring in greater depth in existing research and through new empirical research. Previous international research has problematised the participation and representation of governors on the governing bodies (Brehony 1992; Deem, Brehony, and Heath 1995), with Brehony (1992) highlighting the material and cultural inequalities that prevent equal decision-making in schools. Deem, Brehony, and Heath (1995) argue that the centrality of power relations in school governing body practices make it impossible for governors to act as "critical citizens". These issues are relevant to the South African context and resonate with some of the local literature in existence. This makes school governance a fertile space for social justice work, which should be carried out more explicitly.

Our analysis reveals a significant presence of school governance research, even though we had expected more. It also reveals a gap with regard to longitudinal research that could offer informed insights on the operations of school governing bodies. Heystek (2011) argues that while the three-year term of a school governing body does not give the elected body enough time to master their roles, it does send a "strong representative and democratic message" (2011, 465). We would like to reiterate the call for more nuanced engagement with school governance research that not only helps us understand the functioning of the school governance system, as Motala and Pampallis (2005) suggest, but also helps us improve the field and make it more equity driven and socially just.

 

Limitations

In the context of the broad findings presented above, we wish to revisit and highlight a few important limitations inherent in our approach to this review. The first limitation concerns the nature of the database we used in the review and the underwhelming volume of reviewed articles compared with the possible existing corpus. We used one main database, Google Scholar, and relied only on material that is electronically available. Methodologically, this is adequate as it indicates a scientific approach to data collection. However, while this may have worked for the purposes we wanted to achieve, we do realise that a whole range of relevant literature available in print journals, research reports, books and book chapters as well as theses and dissertations has been left out of this review. We have reason to believe that, while inclusion of such material would have increased the volume (scope) of review material, it may not have added a different dimension to the patterns in the nature of research published on school governance. Notwithstanding, this review serves as an important starting point for the identification of gaps.

Second, a further delimitation involved the use of search words and phrases. The search phrase was limited to articles containing "school governance" or "school governing bodies in South Africa" or other descriptors that suggested the functioning, role, behaviour or school governors such as "educator governors", "learner representative councils", and "democratisation in schools" within the title. This facilitated a systematic search of electronic educational journals in South Africa and every other journal where at least one article on school governance in South Africa was found, finally leading to a systematic identification of the articles that constituted a corpus for this review. We acknowledge that our search criteria, and particularly the use of certain phrases and exclusive focus on digitised and electronically available material, omitted other potentially relevant publications; it was, however, the most efficient way to ensure consistency, systematicity and manageability of the review material.

Third, we recognise that school governance is hardly a standalone field, but a subfield or an aspect of the broader leadership and management literature. A significant body of knowledge on school governance could be embedded in the broader literature, since we did not conduct a thorough search of all educational journals in South Africa and all educational leadership and management journals globally. Our search led us to 24 journals out of a much wider range of journals to which South African researchers have access for publication. A search by findings, rather than certain words and phrases in the title as we did, could have possibly elicited more available research material. We would encourage future researchers and reviewers to consider more carefully the findings reported in the studies as some knowledge on school governance may be implicit within the broader field.

Lastly, we limited our search to articles published in the English language. South Africa has 11 official languages and, while it is improbable that material could be published in all of them, there were articles published in Afrikaans that we deliberately excluded from the review for consistency. We acknowledge that this review examined only a portion of a possible corpus of existing research and would like to encourage further reviews to take that body of knowledge into consideration.

 

Conclusion

All the above notwithstanding, the review was a necessary and useful exercise in identifying patterns of local knowledge on school governance. Although we assumed that the body of research would be large, contrary to what we found, we wanted to synthesise the results that could help examine the nature and extent of published school governance research. Taking stock of published research on school governance seemed appropriate and timely; we want to encourage more reviews and sustained conversations on important aspects of school governance, conversations that are informed by evidence that is collected in methods befitting the twenty-first century.

 

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1 Dr Itumeleng Molale passed away on 9 August 2020 while this manuscript was in review.
2 Kooiman (2003) provided first order, second order and third order locations of actors in governance, which Kooiman and Jentoft (2009) further elaborated on.

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ARTICLE

 

Tackling Xenophobia through Dialogue: A Freirean Approach

 

 

Vaughn Mitchell John

University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. johnv@ukzn.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4117-7120

 

 

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ABSTRACT

The deadly violence associated with xenophobia has become a concern in South Africa, a country with historically high levels of violence. This article explores the role that peace education can play in mitigating such conflict. Using Paulo Freire's theorisation of dialogue in education, it discusses a peace education intervention that developed participatory workshops to foster dialogue between South Africans and their neighbours of foreign origin soon after the second wave of violence in South Africa in 2015. The article discusses the curriculum and pedagogical intent of the workshops through a theoretical framing of dialogue, how participants and facilitators responded to such plans and what learning and action were generated from these workshops. The experiences of participants and facilitators reveal a preliminary stage of deepening understandings in terms of reviewing rigid us/them dichotomies and identities, and reviewing stereotypical understandings of causes of conflict. The final section offers some critical reflections on the workshop design and the role of such interventions in relation to goals of broader social change. Some recommendations for future workshops in light of the need for psychosocial support generated by the workshop process are offered.

Keywords: dialogue; participatory pedagogy; xenophobia; peace education; South Africa; Paulo Freire

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Introduction

South Africa has exceptionally high levels of violence. The country has some of the highest rates of murder and gender-based violence recorded anywhere in the world. Violence is also a regular part of life in educational institutions, such as schools and universities (John 2016). In the past decade, violence associated with xenophobia has been added to the country's notoriety. Globally, political and economic instability is giving rise to larger populations of refugees and migrants, matched by rising tensions between local and foreign nationals, as well as rising xenophobia. What role can peace education play in mitigating such conflict (Bekerman and Zembylas 2010; John 2016)? This article reports on a peace education intervention that developed participatory workshops to foster dialogue between South Africans and their neighbours of foreign origin soon after the violence that occurred in 2015.

Media coverage of xenophobia gains prominence in periods of extremely violent outbreaks, such as those of 2008 and 2015, when attacks on foreign nationals left many dead and even more displaced. Research on such violence, while growing, tends to provide expert perspectives or victim/survivor-only perspectives. There is no published research to date that has attempted to bring foreign nationals and South Africans into conversation with one another about the experiences of both groups living together in South Africa and about the conflicts experienced and reported as xenophobia. This article reports on an intervention that brought foreign nationals and South Africans, living in the same community space or in close proximity to each other, into workshops designed to generate dialogue between the two groups about their lives, livelihoods and the challenges they face. The workshops employed participatory pedagogy to develop a safe, trusting environment, which could foster critical reflections and honest dialogue. It sought to conscientise and lay foundations for discussing solutions and actions to address the challenges identified by both groups.

After setting out the context of violence and xenophobia in South Africa and reviewing related literature, the article introduces a Freirean lens on dialogue for a later discussion of the design, implementation and revisions made to a set of workshops developed in an action-research project on xenophobia. The focus in this article is on the curriculum and pedagogical intent of the workshops, how participants and facilitators responded to such plans and what learning and action were generated from these workshops for both project partners and participants. These experiences will be discussed as two themes related to deepening understandings in terms of reviewing rigid us/them dichotomies and identities and stereotypical understandings of causes of conflict. This workshop process, however, generates memories of trauma for participants and the need for psychosocial support. In light of this third theme, the final section offers some critical reflections on the workshop design and makes recommendations for future workshops. This article offers insights into the challenging but important task of designing a participatory educational intervention that allows for safe yet critical dialogue in exploring the multiple and contested perspectives on xenophobia. These insights have implications for educational programmes that seek to build social cohesion, peace and social justice.

 

Violence and Xenophobia in South Africa

South Africa is known for high levels of interpersonal, political and structural violence. Much of this is a legacy of the brutal colonial and apartheid eras. Since 2008, mass violence against foreign nationals was added to this country's repertoire of violence in the post-apartheid period. While standard definitions of xenophobia refer to "the fear and hatred of foreigners" (Solomon and Kosaka 2013), in South Africa the very term xenophobia is contested and often denied. Antagonism towards and discrimination against foreign nationals from Africa had been reported for a number of years prior to the deadly attacks (Human Rights Watch 1998). Such antagonism manifested in attacks in May 2008. This first wave of mass violence began in the townships of Johannesburg, but quickly spread to other parts of the country. Approximately 60 foreign nationals were killed, and many more were injured and displaced. A second outbreak of attacks in 2015 began in KwaZulu-Natal, and is reported to have resulted in seven deaths, much fear, destruction and displacement. A third of those killed in 2008 and three of the seven people killed in 2015 were South Africans who were attacked because of their physical resemblances to and association with foreign nationals. The 2015 violence prompted the creation of a partnership of concerned organisations in Pietermaritzburg that developed the intervention discussed in this article.

There have been several studies of xenophobia and its violent manifestations in South Africa. A substantial part of this literature attempts to explain the causes of the violence (Amusan and Mchunu 2017; Human Rights Watch 1998; Matsinhe 2011; Mutanda 2017; Neocosmos 2010; Reddy 2012; Steenkamp 2009). A specific focus within explanatory accounts probes the relationship between xenophobia and racism (Fernando 1993; Langa and Kiguwa 2016; Tafira 2011; Wimmer 1997). This literature is particularly pertinent to the South African context given the country's history of racialised oppression and the fact that black Africans from neighbouring countries have almost exclusively been targeted in attacks. Some studies have explored the effects of xenophobia on economic development, human rights and social cohesion (Chen 2015; Crush and Ramachandran 2010; Steenkamp 2009). Another focus of studies has been on the media's role in both promoting xenophobia and how it has reported on the attacks (Els 2013; Smith 2011).

Education has been explored in different ways in relation to xenophobia, in terms of how education in general may be a preventative force (Hjerm 2001), how xenophobia plays out in educational contexts such as schools and higher education institutions (Hale, Kransdorf, and Hamer 2011; Jasson 2016; Kang' ethe and Wotshela 2015; Murara 2011; Pithouse-Morgan et al. 2012), and how education may be used in response to xenophobia as part of interventions such as the one explored in this article (Mati 2011). This last section of the literature on educational interventions in response to xenophobia is underdeveloped, raising the potential contribution of the current article to future intervention-oriented studies in South Africa and elsewhere.

The studies by Neocosmos (2010) and Chigeza et al. (2013) are noteworthy in that they engage directly with the experiences of African migrants in South Africa. Likewise, Mati (2011) reports on how the Umoja wa Afrika Human Rights Peer Education Programme with young people in Cape Town contributed to participants' critical awareness of their rights as well as the rights of others. Participants found the diverse composition of the group, the workshop design and participatory pedagogy enabling factors of critical awareness of xenophobia. Mati explains that

participatory learning methodologies including learning through diversity and group dynamics; learning through storytelling and personal testimonies; learning through activities and reflection; and learning through an accompanying facilitation style [drawn from the values of liberation theology] were identified as important in fostering such learning. (Mati 2011, 60)

The present article also discusses the composition of workshop participants, workshop design and participatory pedagogy that included storytelling, dialogue and critical reflection. This article thus contributes to the ongoing work on understanding xenophobia and the neglected work on developing interventions in response. Furthermore, this intervention explored how local and foreign nationals understand the conflict and what they propose could be done to avoid further conflict.

 

Exploring Educational Interventions on Xenophobia through a Freirean Lens on Dialogue

The work of the radical Brazilian theorist, Paulo Freire, provides an ideal lens for examining an educational intervention on xenophobia. Freire's educational theory, best expressed in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), proceeded from concerns about oppression and injustice. Freire believed that education, employing critical pedagogy, could serve as a counter to the alienation and dehumanisation of oppressive political and educational systems. Some key concepts of Freirean critical pedagogy are critical reflection and dialogue, which when combined with action or struggle generate what Freire called praxis. Gadotti (1996, xi) elaborates on this kind of dialogue:

For Paulo Freire, dialogue is not just the encounter of two subjects who look for the meaning of things-knowledge-but an encounter which takes place in praxis-in action and reflection-in political engagement, in the pledge for social transformation.

Rule (2004) echoes the linking of dialogue to an "explicit political agenda of liberation from oppression" (324). Xenophobia in South Africa constitutes such oppression. Freire (1970) identified several essential conditions for such dialogue to occur, which include profound love, humility, faith, hope, courage and critical thinking. It is important to examine which of these conditions were evident in the workshops discussed in this article.

Freire's critical pedagogy in general and the concept of dialogue in particular have had a strong influence in the fields of radical, alternative and popular education (Rule 2004), as well as peace education (Bekerman and Zembylas 2010; John 2016). Rule (2004) has traced the genealogy of the concept of dialogue across seminal theorists such as Plato, Buber, Bakhtin, Habermas, and Freire, and proposed the concept of dialogic space for theorising popular education projects in apartheid South Africa. This notion of dialogic space is adopted in this article to discuss the workshops we designed. In subsequent writing, Rule (2011) identifies dialogue as having ontological and ethical import, in that "dialogue is something that characterizes authentic human beings and their relationships as they strive to become, as they engage in their ontological vocation of being human" (930). Given that xenophobia often involves the dehumanisation of the Other, authentic dialogue could be seen as an important process of recognising the Other as human and fulfilling one's own vocation of becoming more human. The concept of alienation is relevant to this discussion. Freire saw the denial or suppression of the fundamentally human qualities of love, humility, faith, hope, courage and critical thinking as causing alienation. In South Africa, where many foreign nationals are officially designated alien, xenophobia strips away the essential basis of being human and leads to alienation. We thus have a context of dual alienation, politically and socially.

Dialogue has been harnessed in peace education to help build better relationships between groups in conflict. Drawing on the work of Freire, Bekerman and Zembylas (2010) employed dialogue in workshops with Israeli and Palestinian teachers to transform perpetrator-victim narratives. They report some value from this process when workshop participants are sensitised to the suffering of others. They further note the importance of critical thinking, highlighting that "criticality may be used in the context of facilitated dialogues ... to expand opportunities for reflection, change, and identity work among conflicting groups" (590). These findings on exposure to suffering and criticality have relevance for analysing the use of dialogue in the intervention we developed.

 

An Intervention to Explore Xenophobia towards Action

In 2015, just after the second wave of xenophobic violence, a partnership between staff of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and two non-governmental organisations, namely the Pietermaritzburg Agency for Community Action (PACSA) and Sinomlando, was formed to explore ways of monitoring the violence and contributing to its end. Initial discussions led to a funding proposal being developed. By the time the funds for a project were raised in 2016, the violence had abated, and we explored how we could redesign a project that could still make a positive contribution.

We decided that in-depth engagement with both local nationals and foreign nationals in workshops over several days, rather than the more limited engagements allowed by typical interviews and focus groups, would give us the best chance of understanding the complexity and contestations around xenophobia and identifying solutions. Such a process was also seen as necessary for creating a trusting environment, which would allow for any psychosocial support that needs to be addressed. A key influence shaping this process was the intent of the partners for the study to be located in the critical paradigm, which allows for power dynamics to be critically interrogated, for the research team and partners to be fully involved in the process and for goals of conscientisation and improvement to be realised. Typical of critical paradigm research, we wanted to deepen our understanding of the phenomenon but to do so in a manner that would also deepen the understanding of the participants and foster dialogue about how relationships could be improved. The Freirean concepts of dialogue and conscientisation are noteworthy in the project objectives.

Important objectives/outcomes for the project included:

• Creating a space for dialogue between local nationals and foreign nationals

• Developing a better understanding of "xenophobia" and how it was variably perceived

• Conscientising participants towards a deeper understanding of the causes of violence

• Providing psychosocial support to workshop participants as the need arose

• Ensuring that decision makers (government, media, churches, NGOs) become aware of different perspectives that may inform future policy.

(From UKZN Ethical Clearance Application, 2 April 2016)

A division of responsibilities was agreed to among the partners regarding an ethical clearance application, project and financial management, negotiating with gatekeepers and recruiting participants, preparing for workshop facilitation and providing psychosocial support to participants. The adult education team took overall responsibility for developing the workshops, associated resources and preparing the team of three facilitators to run the workshops.

 

Workshop Design

We decided to work with two communities, an inner-city community and a peri-urban community. We saw it as important that for each community we would have roughly equal numbers of South Africans and foreign nationals and that there would be three workshops for each community (a total of 6 workshops). The first two workshops would be with each group on their own, within a residential setting. The third workshop brought both groups together for a single day. The workshop structure for the inner-city community included two days with foreign nationals only, two days with South Africans only, and one day where there was a combination of foreign nationals and South Africans. This workshop had a total of 19 participants (11 foreign nationals, 8 South Africans; 8 men and 11 women). The foreign nationals included citizens of Malawi (2), Democratic Republic of Congo (4), Burundi (3), Rwanda (1) and Tanzania (1).

Our reflections on the first round of workshops with the inner-city group alerted us to the need for more time for dialogue between the groups and the added benefits of having both groups interacting in residence overnight. Accordingly, the revised workshop structure for the peri-urban community included one day with foreign nationals only, one day with South Africans only, and three days with a combination of foreign nationals and South Africans. This workshop had a total of 16 participants (8 foreign nationals, 8 South Africans; 9 women and 7 men). The foreign nationals included citizens of Malawi (6) and Swaziland (2).

It is important to understand this change when considering the workshop design, the main focus of this article. Ideas for the workshop design were generated collaboratively at a meeting of the partners and then mapped out in a detailed workshop guide. We aimed for a guide that would provide the different facilitators with step-by-step directions on the workshop process, but which would also help them to facilitate dialogue and participation.

 

Key Workshop Design Features and Pedagogy

It is not possible to present and discuss all the aspects of the workshop design in an article such as this. However, because of goals of contributing to social justice and peace, I am willing to share the full workshop guide with anyone who contacts me at johnv@ukzn.ac.za. For the purposes of this article, I will identify some key features of the workshop design and participatory pedagogy and thereafter discuss participant and facilitator experiences of these workshops.

In light of the context, contested perspectives on causes of the violence and how to name it, and the outcomes of conscientisation, deepening understanding and action presented earlier, our workshop design aimed to provide the following:

• A safe space to get to know one another, tell one's story and express one's views free of embarrassment and recriminations

• Opportunities to listen to and engage with the stories and views of others

• Opportunities to deepen understandings of issues through dialogue

• Space to challenge and revise understandings

• Prospects to build common understandings and shared identity as appropriate

• Prospects for exploring and planning creative solutions.

While these goals resonate with the Freirean approach discussed earlier, they also align strongly with those identified by Lum (2013, 218) when she observes that the pedagogies and goals of peace educators often seek to "inspire creativity, reflective thinking, criticality, perspective taking, diversity, holistic problem-solving . attentive listening, cooperation, [and] communicative dialogue".

A fair amount of time was spent at the start of the workshop introducing the partners, funding arrangements, the purpose and programme of the workshop, gaining consent, establishing ground rules, and dealing with translation. Apart from this workshop setup and administration and some games and social activities discussed later, five main activities formed the core of the workshop. These five participatory and small group activities were deemed to give us the best chance of giving effect to the above-mentioned goals.

 

Activity 1: Peoples' Compass and Introductions of Participants

Two initial activities allowed participants to get to know one another and demonstrated journeys of migration.

For the Peoples' Compass, an imaginary map of Africa was identified on the floor. The position of north was then identified and all participants were asked to walk to the position on this map that represents where they originally came from. This generated a buzz of discussion as people discussed where they had come from and how to position themselves. Once at their position of origin, each person was asked to walk their journey to their current location in South Africa, explaining the route they took. For foreign nationals, this journey involved movement and stops across a few countries in Africa. For South Africans, this also involved movement across provinces in South Africa. In the revised workshop design this activity was done in the combined workshop and was very helpful in revealing a common identity of being a migrant of some sort for all participants, foreign nationals and South Africans alike.

The next step of this activity required each person to find someone that they did not know from another position on the map, to interview them and then introduce their partner to the wider group. This was important to start the process of sharing and listening and getting to know one another. It also ensured that everyone spoke.

 

Activity 2: River of Life

This participatory activity gets participants to reflect on their lives and to draw their life story as a river on a large sheet of newsprint paper using coloured pens. The facilitators showed participants an example and then asked them to creatively portray their lives as a river. They were able to represent both positive and negative life events through turns, rapids, confluences, and blockages etcetera in the river. Participants were free to choose what aspects of their lives they wanted to share.

Each person then presented their River of Life to the group unhindered.

In a subsequent step, after a break, there was a discussion on "How I feel about what I see in the Rivers of Life". This session allowed for feelings to be aired and processed and moved into a group analysis of significant and common events in the lives of participants. This analysis was deepened when facilitators asked participants to identify the underlying causes of life events, allowing for critical analysis of factors such as oppression, structural violence, culture, and patriarchy. With good facilitation, such a session allowed for probing of events that are absent in the Rivers of Life and why this may be so.

 

Activity 3: Community Enablers and Disablers

This activity involved each group, local and foreign nationals separately, discussing and identifying community enablers and disablers. They were given pieces of green cardboard on which they wrote about "What builds our community" (community enablers). On pink cards they wrote about "What breaks our community" (community disablers). Each set of green and pink cards was then thematically grouped and stuck on the wall. Each group had to identify the most common or serious community enablers and disablers.

In smaller groups participants then discussed: "What is behind the common themes?"

Each group then selected one key disabler for further analysis, identifying its causes and consequences. In plenary a list of all the underlying causes of community disablers was constructed. In this session participants were encouraged to move beyond stereotypes, to look for complexity, to explore multiple perspectives and a range of causes related to economic, social, political, historical and geographic factors. Participants were also encouraged to work with authentic personal experiences of disablers rather than hearsay or secondary evidence.

To make this exploration concrete, participants then selected one example of a recent conflict related to a key disabler and discussed its features. They were required to identify stages of conflict, its progression and consequences. They also identified parties, stakeholders and their roles in the conflict.

 

Activity 4: What Can We Do Together to Build Community?

This activity also involved group work building on enablers identified in the previous activity. However, here we arranged participants into small groups with a mix of local and foreign nationals and a mix of genders. Groups discussed and identified four key ideas for building community.

Each group then reported back on their discussion and list, leading to plenary discussion.

A final step of this activity, also in mixed small groups, allowed participants to discuss and plan two short-term actions that participants could engage in jointly in the next month and two long-term collaborative actions/projects. Each group's plan was then shared with the whole group.

This activity took place towards the end of the workshop and allowed for more forward-looking, action-oriented and collaborative dialogue to ensue.

 

Games and Social Activities

Interspersed throughout the workshop programme were some games and social activities to allow for lighter, fun interaction and breaks from serious and painful sharing. The revised three-day combined residential workshop allowed for more of this and for informal interactions over meals and in the evenings while in residence together. While games foregrounded the importance of collaboration and teamwork and were briefly unpacked, their primary purpose was to allow joint participation in a fun activity. Additionally, a Cultural Concert was planned for the final evening of the three-day combined workshop as a way of promoting cultural exchange and diversity through song, poetry and dance.

 

Deepening Understanding through Dialogue

The workshops were designed to create a safe space to share one's story and views and to listen to those of others. The primary objective was to create a space for dialogue in order to foster opportunities for critical thinking and deepening of understandings. Our reflections on the workshop process and analysis of the workshop transcripts indicate that the design did establish such a space for dialogue and accompanied critical thinking. These processes also show signs of initial positive shifts in understandings. While such workshop outcomes are welcomed in terms of Freire's promotion of dialogue, the sustainability of new understandings and how they may shape broader social change warrant further discussion. A further workshop outcome, of evoking painful memories, also prompts deeper analysis and recommendations for future workshops. Each of these outcomes is discussed and illustrated below.

Much of the reflections on the workshop from the project partners shared in this section emerged at a day-long review workshop held after all the workshops had been completed and transcripts and reports were available. This workshop was held to draw out key findings and to make recommendations to be shared at the roundtable forum planned as one of the end points of the project. For the roundtable, the press, local NGOs, the city mayor and various government department officials were invited to engage with participants and the project partners on the findings. We decided on a roundtable rather than a seminar as we saw this as part of an action-oriented process that would allow for another level of dialogue between participants and people in positions of power and influence over their lives, as well as other stakeholders. A roundtable suited the critical paradigm and advocacy goals of the project.

 

Reviewing Rigid "Us/Them" Dichotomies and Identities

Much of the popular discourse on the relationships between foreign nationals and local nationals is negative and involves polarised identities and accounts. This is characterised by strong "us versus them" constructions. There is deep and hostile Othering involved in these accounts. Another feature of this narrative is the identification of separate identities of foreigner and local, victim and perpetrator, and "good guys and bad guys". Without opportunities for safe and constructive dialogue this discourse is allowed to spread and become the dominant, polarising narrative. The workshops allowed us to see some shifts from this narrative after a short time and the emergence of what could become a counter-narrative if supported and allowed to grow. This counter-narrative is perhaps best expressed by one of the project partners in his notes on the first day of the workshop when he wrote: "A positive outcome of the first day is the discovery that 'I am not alone'" (Partner 1).

Below are several reflections that capture the softening of hard, polarised characterisations and the recognition of common experiences and identities. Importantly, three different workshop activities are mentioned as triggers of dialogue and deepened understandings.

The initial activity of the People's Compass was helpful in revealing that most people in the workshop had moved from their place of birth at some point in their lives and some had crossed borders. The following statements of two project partners illustrate the common experience of migration and accompanying fluidity of identity this creates:

Migrant and local are not distinct categories. Some locals are migrants and some migrants, like this Malawian, are locals. (Partner 1)

I am thinking of the children [of migrants born in SA]. How can you tell a child that he does not belong in South Africa [when the child says] "I have never been in Tanzania!"? (Partner 5)

The following comments, this time with reference to the River of Life activity, again reveal shared experiences and softening of us/them or victim/perpetrator dichotomies. This re-narrativatisation is discussed later. The final comment by a project partner makes explicit the connection between a safe, dialogic space and authentic sharing.

Both groups shared their struggles in the River of Life exercise:

The phenomenon of fractured families is widespread. It is not a question of good and bad guys. (Partner 1)

We do the big crimes and the foreigners do the petty crimes. It is the same thing with the stories of foreigners who impregnate women. (South African national)

We are not all angels. Not everybody is against us. (Foreign national)

Not all foreigners are innocent, sometimes some of us are perpetrators. ... Even it is important to note that there are differences between foreigners that can trigger the violence and sometimes it is blaming others/forgetting about ourselves. (Foreign national)

Members of both groups are self-reflective and self-critical. Both admit that there [are] criminals among them, whether foreigners and locals. When one creates the right space, people become less defensive. (Partner 1)

There were several indications of challenges to polarised and homogenised conceptions of the Other and acknowledgement of non-conflictual relationships. A third activity (Community Enablers and Disablers) was also identified as helpful and adopted in other work of one of the NGO partners:

The value of enablers and disablers from a methodological point of view. It elicits important information on the relationship between locals and foreigners. This concept was introduced by CAE [Centre for Adult Education] and is now used by Sinomlando. (Partner 5)

Just to come back to what my sister said, we don't need to blame only South Africans, so what we need to understand is the cause of that behaviour and I am sure when we understand, when we sit down together and talk we will come up with something very consistent. (Foreign national)

There is a difference between the fact and the representation of the fact. Hence the need to create a space for dialogue. . The problem is when we essentialise behaviours. The same happened with the genocide in Rwanda. The Tutsi were categorised as clever, arrogant . (Partner 1)

There was even mention that the changed understandings as a result of the workshop were impacting behaviour outside the workshop:

At Cinderella Park when a foreigner was attacked by a local, the locals intervened to stop this abuse as a result of the workshop. Before they said that they would not interfere. I heard it from Adam [pseudonym], the leader, and the mother of one of the participants. That was last week. (Partner 9)

 

Reviewing Stereotypical Understandings of the Causes of Conflict

The previous section discussed shifts in how participants started to view one another. A further significant and related shift we observed was in terms of how participants understood the sources of challenges they faced and causes of conflict. Here we noticed a move from homogeneous and stereotypical understandings to more heterogeneous and complex understandings. The dialogue appeared to open up a space for less defensive and blameful positions to nuance, critical thinking and self-criticism.

There are indications that common stereotypes and simplistic understandings on the sources of conflict were more critically interrogated and yielded acknowledgements of complexity. One of these related to the stereotype that foreigners are responsible for crime in South Africa and the other related to the view that foreigners take away jobs from local citizens. While not possible to undertake in this article, the intersectionality of xenophobia with gender and class warrants further attention. In our workshop a more nuanced understanding on the intersectionality of xenophobia and gender-based discrimination was aired only after some probing by the facilitators, as indicated in the penultimate comment below. The comment on how automation in the Natal Rubber factory has affected jobs and employment opportunities, a central tension in the xenophobia discourse, invites a deeper analysis on the intersection with class.

It [crime] could be a behavioural thing or the result of poverty. (Foreign national)

Another factor is the fact that locals and foreigners combine their skills. Crime is not necessarily the result of poverty. (Partner 9)

We could easily blame the foreigners but let's look at the situation where since the black government took over many companies have shut down. ... At Natal Rubber there are machines which the white owners have brought. Initially it required 15 people to do certain tasks but now with the new machines it needs five people. (South African national)

When Vaughn started to speak about gender, a woman spoke about the pressure she experienced from her husband. She put it in Swahili. Look at Cinderella Park and the relationships between South African girls and male foreigners. It is a bitter-sweet relationship. (Partner 9)

We have a double burden. Women are being divorced and husbands take local women. The SA system doesn't support the foreign women and their children. ... Even in cases of abuse in marriage, women would rather die in the abusive relationship for they can't survive alone. (Foreign national)

The deepening of understandings reported above shows some evidence of critical thinking that the process of dialogue generated. Freire placed much emphasis on critical thinking, but what about the other conditions identified as essential by Freire for authentic dialogue to occur? The project data allows for some engagement with Freire's discussion of profound love, humility and courage. Courage has been written about as the struggles and actions emanating from educational encounters. Our workshop planning saw action as important and created space for joint actions to be planned. However, as a funded project with time-bound workshops, we did not have the capacity and budget to support post-workshop actions. We provided voice within the workshop but beyond the roundtable that we facilitated with political, NGO, media and government stakeholders, we could not also support participants in making their case louder and better heard. In the end, courageous actions would have to be taken forward by the participants themselves, often from vulnerable positions. Freire's promotion of humility has been interpreted as a pedagogical orientation of non-hierarchical, nonarrogant openness to others' perspectives (Freire 1970). Listening respectfully is one way in which Freirean humility can be displayed. We witnessed this form of humility in the dialogue among participants, facilitators and project partners. Our diverse perspectives as project partners also demanded such humility in discussions outside the workshops. I believe this condition of dialogue was present in our intervention.

Freire's conception of profound love is a more difficult condition to identify in the workshops. Freire believed that a deep love for the world and fellow humans was necessary for dialogue to occur. It is noteworthy that a common definition of xenophobia refers to hatred or fear of foreigners, the opposite of love. Our interactions with participants in the relatively brief workshop interactions did not allow us to discern the presence of strong emotions such as hatred or profound love. A project partner did, however, note one reference to hatred:

In the first workshop somebody defined xenophobia as hatred. There were other forces behind. In many instances locals and foreigners live well together. They support the foreigners. (Partner 9)

The emotional climate of the workshops was one of sufficient trust and a willingness to engage respectfully in sharing views and exploring solutions. Workshop-only interactions cannot be expected to generate the deep love that Freire referred to. However, workshops could serve as the start of new understandings that become the foundation for new relationships. If the projects conceptualised in the workshops became viable joint projects of South African and foreign nationals, it would be interesting to track the nature of relationships and emotional connections over time.

 

Generating Painful Memories and the Need for Psychosocial Support

The River of Life activity, in particular, evoked many emotions from both participants and facilitators. A separate article would be needed to discuss in full the multiple and repeated traumatic events and displacements shared by participants, both foreign and local nationals. Two examples are provided below:

I was born in Lubumbashi. After Lubumbashi we moved with my parents to Uvira. After our parents died because of war, I found myself in SA where I am not free. (Foreign national)

My parents were born in Rwanda, after the genocide we moved to Mlembwe, then they moved to Uvira, then we stayed in Burundi after war in Congo in 1986. In Burundi war started so we moved to Malawi and stayed at a refugee camp called Dzaleka, Vilembwe. After that we moved to Mozambique, Maputo for quite some time. Then after that we moved to South Africa in a place called Manguzi and then I suddenly found myself in KwaZulu-Natal where I got married. (Foreign national)

Given that the project arose from a concern about the violence against foreign nationals, we had anticipated that this intervention was likely to generate painful memories. In our planning and for purposes of gaining ethical clearance, we had arranged to have psychosocial support available to deal with memories of historical trauma and possible re-traumatisation during the workshop. Two of the facilitators from Sinomlando were trained in trauma counselling. A third member of Sinomlando was a qualified social worker, and a qualified local psychologist was arranged to be on call if further counselling expertise was needed. Despite these arrangements, we were unprepared for the extent of the pain that surfaced and its effects on participants and facilitators during the final combined workshop. This is an area that requires much careful preparation in such interventions. I offer here a description of what emerged, how we dealt with it and what could be done in future workshops.

At the end of the first day of the combined session some of the participants and the facilitators became overwhelmed by the painful stories shared. Some broke down and cried. The facilitators realised that they could not continue with the planned programme and sent out a message for help. Three project partners, some with counselling skills, responded and ran a debriefing session. The following day, additional psychosocial support was provided and additional group and individual counselling was provided. These measures seemed to provide the care needed. A revised programme resumed, and the workshop ended with an entertaining cultural evening.

Our post-workshop reflections identified this breakdown as a key lesson for us and one needing more careful planning in future workshops. The following comments expose these concerns and some questioning regarding the combined workshop:

Each group has psychosocial issues. Once we trigger something, there are major issues. You have touched this, and I want to talk about it. I wanted to move on, but it comes back. The situation takes me back. (Partner 5)

There are multiple levels of fracturing in families and in communities. (Partner 2)

Foreigners are more emotional about the xenophobic attacks in South Africa than about the initial attacks in their home country. It is not the fact but the representation of the fact which is traumatic. (Partner 1)

Sharing Rivers of Life in front of everyone, that does not work. We need to rethink it. It was very overwhelming. Another concern is how to maintain relationships after the workshops. We have many people who call us, but we do not know what to do. In the planning we need to say what the facilitators will have to do after the workshop. (Partner 6)

As project planners and implementers, we found ourselves grappling with what trauma really means and how we could deal with it in a workshop context. The following comments reveal this:

What we have is endemic trauma and undealt with trauma. ... Re-traumatising is when a memory triggers the memory of the old trauma. We must have a discussion on the difference between multiple trauma or compounded trauma and re-traumatisation. (Partner 2)

We can have both. We have those who were not present during the xenophobic attack but are re-traumatised. (Partner 8)

A key concept in the theory of resilience is meaning. People who can make sense of a situation and articulate it respond better to trauma. (Partner 1)

There are people who feel bad about [having] abandoned their home. They do not see themselves as survivors. (Partner 3)

In addition to wanting to find ways to better deal with trauma as it emerges in workshops, the above comments also clearly show our attempts to deepen our own understandings and theorisation of this important outcome of the workshops we designed.

An additional insight on the River of Life activity is gleaned from the experiences of Bekerman and Zymbylas's (2010) facilitated dialogue workshops in Israel. They found that a storytelling activity sensitised participants to the suffering of others, which provided new pedagogical openings:

[T]he identification of small openings on the basis of common suffering offers a point of departure for going beyond victims and perpetrators and propelling teachers into a process of re-narrativization. (Bekerman and Zymbylas 2010, 588)

The River of Life activity was planned as part of the redesigned combined workshops for participants to share their life stories. We saw this as an important opportunity for participants to be sensitised about the reasons for migration and the challenges involved. This goal is also expressed by one of the foreign nationals who reflected on the activity and said "what we did yesterday with the river of life shall not just stay here, I hope that it will help improve the relationship". This statement points to a similar pedagogical opening reported by Bekerman and Zembylas (2010).

 

Implications for Workshop Design, Pedagogy and Future Interventions

We learnt about what worked and what could be improved through this project. The challenges regarding trauma certainly provide a key lesson. We recommend that similar future workshops provide substantial time at the beginning for participants to be informed of the types of activities and processes of engagement. This should include them being made aware of the likely discomfort and pain that the workshop could trigger when talking about past experiences and trauma. We did mention potential discomfort and the likelihood of painful memories in our introductions to the workshops, but there is a need for greater emphasis of this in preparing participants and letting them know what support is available. Equally important is the need to explore with participants what would be the best way to deal with deeply emotional reactions and painful memories that may be evoked and how they would like the workshop facilitators to deal with this. This could include the right to leave the room for timeout or counselling or a process to deal collectively with the emotions and pain in the room. Having trained trauma counsellors available throughout the workshop is clearly an important part of the plan and needs to be included in planning and budgets. Provision of such psychosocial support needs to also factor in the language profile of the participant group. This latter consideration means that recruitment has to be planned and secured well in advance of the workshops. This was not the case in the present project as recruitment became a challenge and several alternative recruitment strategies had to be implemented just prior to the workshops.

However, the River of Life activity proved to be extremely generative as a participatory educational and research tool. It allowed for personal reflection on participants' life journeys as they drew their River of Life. In sharing the River of Life with the group, participants mostly enjoyed the opportunity to stand up and let others know about themselves and their journeys. Given the contested understandings and stereotypes about foreign nationals, their motives for coming to South Africa, and their impact on the social and economic fabric of the country as discussed earlier, the telling of such stories provided powerful and challenging moments in the workshop. From an educational perspective, this activity was central in generating counter-narratives that could deepen understanding or create the openings for re-narrativisation identified by Bekerman and Zembylas (2010). From a research perspective, the activity triggers rich data and allows for collective analysis within the workshop, in keeping with the participatory ethos of the workshop. It also generates a visual illustration of the narrative, which can be recorded with the permission of the participant. Thus, subsequent content, visual and discourse types of analyses become possible.

The other activities were likewise generative and contributed to deepening participants' understandings by softening dichotomies and stimulating an appreciation of the complexity and challenges of life in South Africa for all. Our reflections identified the People's Compass as a participatory and safe process to get people sharing about themselves and their stories of migration. It also very powerfully illustrated early on in the workshop that most, if not all, are migrants of some sort. The sense of a common identity, albeit not a strong one, in a workshop about the troubles caused by perceived differences was a bonus outcome. The Community Enablers and Disablers activity allowed for a balance of foci on both challenges and assets. The latter could also be creatively harnessed into plans of action to move the workshop from exploration to intervention, meeting the condition of Freirean courage. For this to be authentic and have a chance of making an impact, some planning and budget allocation should be devoted to such post-workshop joint implementation of plans. Our project did not allow for this because the project design and workshop plans were not what was initially envisaged when the proposal and budget were developed. Future interventions of this kind should plan for post-workshop activities and support for participants to explore the potential for workshop-generated ideas and plans to be piloted and to become cycles of dialogue, collaboration and action, generating courage and hope.

Across the workshops, there was a clear sense that the design was successful in creating a safe space, which allowed for participation and dialogue with humility. Some of the activities fostered critical reflection, which helped participants explore alternative perspectives. These pedagogical goals, as espoused by Freire, are central to attempts at deepening understanding, challenging stereotypes and reshaping relationships. Gill and Niens's (2014) review of literature on the role of peace education in post-conflict contexts identified the goal of humanisation, as advocated by Paulo Freire, as a major conceptual framework underpinning many programmes. They noted that "[p]eacebuilding education as humanisation is realised by critical reflection and dialogue in most curricular initiatives reviewed, an approach aimed at overcoming the contextual educational constraints often rooted in societal division and segregation, strained community relations and past traumas" (Gill and Niens 2014, 10). Humanisation, a counter to alienation, is an important goal in anti-xenophobia interventions, as much of the popular discourse involves stereotypes that dehumanise the "Other".

We have learnt a substantial amount about running participatory dialogic workshops with small groups of local and foreign nationals and believe that this was a worthwhile pilot intervention. However, making an impact on xenophobia requires interventions on a larger scale that involve many sectors of society. As the dialogue workshops held by Bekerman and Zembylas (2010, 590) in Israel clearly illustrate, "educational interventions alone-no matter how critical they are-cannot go far without structural changes that support these interventions".

The diversity among learner groups in educational institutions such as schools, post-school colleges and universities allow them to engage in such programmes. These institutions could find ways to include aspects of the workshop, reported here, in their curricula. As noted by Van der Dussen Toukan (2019), such engagements by actors in these institutions in the host country carry the additional benefit of increasing their awareness of how they are implicated in conflict and peacebuilding through relationships formed with refugee and migrant students. Many civil society organisations, such as NGOs and faith-based organisations, run educational programmes with communities and could likewise include anti-xenophobia themes and activities. Ongoing staff development for civil servants, who often project government ideology and policy, should also be included in such training. Only such wider societal participation can foster the kinds of political engagement and social transformation that were earlier identified by Gadotti (1996) and Rule (2004). Sharing the design features of such interventions and the experiences of participants and facilitators, as done in this article, contributes a southern perspective on dialogic, action-oriented peace education to a world faced with increasing migration and displacement of people.

 

Conclusion

This article reports on a small pilot project whose impact on relationships and society is understandably limited. The value of the project, and focus of this paper, is the design of a workshop and participatory pedagogy that shows some indications of encouraging critical thinking and deepened understandings through engaging in dialogue. In terms of the educational aspects, we designed a workshop process and set of activities with related participatory pedagogy that allowed for several objectives to be met. We have also learnt about what can be done differently to improve this process, especially with regard to psychosocial support. Theoretically, Freire's preconditions of profound love, humility, faith, hope, courage and critical thinking for dialogue provide a basis for guiding educational events and for interrogating their outcomes. While dialogic workshops alone cannot bring social change, when they lead to courageous actions, they can become a transformative praxis.

This design and the insights emerging from reflections on this small intervention may be helpful in planning interventions on a larger scale in South Africa and elsewhere where people live in contexts of polarised and conflictual relationships. Increasing displacements and migration as a result of war and economic factors and the tensions these raise require many more interventions of the type discussed in this article. Building an inclusive, cosmopolitan and caring society is a substantial project that requires many more interventions of this nature. Reflections on the project we piloted show how difficult and rewarding this work can be. They also illustrate that key to this is to design safe, dialogic spaces (Rule 2004) with adequate psychosocial support.

Reflecting on this educational intervention in response to xenophobia in South Africa, I am reminded of the calls by both Paulo Freire and Nelson Mandela, both exemplary practitioners of dialogue, for education that builds greater freedoms and humanisation. Education must contribute to increased freedom, physical and psychological, for foreign nationals and South Africans in this country and to building a humanising and inclusive pan-Africanism. The dialogic space created in the workshops discussed in this article could be harnessed towards this important project.

 

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by a grant from the Foundation for Human Rights in South Africa.

 

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ARTICLE

 

Ethical Curriculum Leadership and Alain Badiou's Ethics

 

 

Petro du Preez

North-West University, South Africa. Petro.DuPreez@nwu.ac.za; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9100-6461

 

 

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ABSTRACT

Several curriculum scholars have argued for an ethical turn in the study of curriculum based on concerns about the debunking of ethics in postmodern society. The notion of ethics in curriculum scholarship, with specific emphasis on curriculum leadership, is explored through a narrative of a school principal and contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou's theory of ethics. The data indicated several conditions (which are by no means exhaustive) for ethical curriculum leadership to transpire. These include a truthful aspiration towards curriculum excellence and deep transformation, a loving encounter as a truth procedure underpinning ethical curriculum leadership, a longing for the truth, developing a collective fidelity, and creating a reflexive aptitude. It is argued that ethical curriculum leadership begins with love, that is, the antidote to acting in one's own interest. In addition, it is seen as a dialectic between managing school efficiency, building infrastructure and managing talent to enable optimal curriculum enactment, and a continual process of curriculum leadership. This article reports on one aspect of a larger research project titled "Women Leading in Disadvantaged School Communities".

Keywords: curriculum leadership; ethical turn; ethics; Alain Badiou; love

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Introduction: Ethics and Curriculum Leadership

The conceptions of curriculum from traditionalist, conceptual-empiricist and reconceptualist perspectives have been criticised for their inability to "move on; discover and invent new worlds and new ideas" (Morrison 2004, 487). In addition, an argument has been made for an ethical turn in curriculum studies based on the concern with the debunking of ethics in postmodern society (Cary 2007). Badiou (2002, 2) states that

ethics designates today a principle that governs how we relate to "what is going on", a vague way of regulating our commentary on historical situations (the ethics of human rights), technico-scientific situations (medical ethics, bio-ethics), "social" situations (the ethics of being-together), media situations (the ethics of communication), and so on.

What I am proposing is that if we have saturated the exploration of the ethical turn in the study of curriculum, why have we not been able to transcend the arguments of universalist versus particularist conceptions of ethics underpinning curriculum praxis? Why are we constantly engaged with questions of otherness when engaging in curriculum scholarship? Badiou (2002) would argue that these questions are the result of a confined liberal-humanist take on ethics, as described in the quotation above, and that we ought to think about ethics beyond the philosophical poles created as a result of this ethical ideology. For him, ethics concerns the part of philosophy that organises practical existence around representations of the Good (Badiou 2002). Following the work of Badiou, which is described by one reviewer as an assessment of the validity of the ethical turn (Gillespie 2001), I would suggest that we take a little more time to think about the ethical turn in the study of curriculum and accept Kesson and Henderson's (2010, 75) challenge: "Enacting a philosophically-informed ethical curriculum leadership practice will require us to undertake new ways of knowing, being and acting that embody new professional identities, and to maintain fidelity to strongly held personal values, beliefs and truths. Are we up to the challenge?" Following up on this challenge, I posed the following research question: What sort of being is required for ethical curriculum leadership to transpire? The aim is not to provide a prescriptive, instrumental answer to this question, but to explore what ethical curriculum leadership might encompass.

Perhaps at this point it is important to clarify the place of research in curriculum leadership in the broader context of curriculum scholarship. Curriculum leadership has been defined as "practical explanation, justification, guidance, and demonstration of a disciplined theoretical position on innovative curriculum work" (Henderson 2010, 220). This distinction is based on three principal differences, namely the differences between curriculum leadership and curriculum management, curriculum leadership and instructional leadership, and disciplined and undisciplined curriculum studies (Henderson 2010). The first distinction is concerned with whether school leaders engage in business efficiency or whether they encourage educational innovation (Henderson 2010). The second distinction concerns whether a school leader is merely interested in advancing innovative teaching practices or whether they understand that teaching is only one fundamental of curriculum work, and that questions about curriculum leadership require a more complex, interrelated understanding (Henderson 2010). With reference to the last distinction, Henderson raises the following questions: "Is the innovative idea properly situated in current educational circumstances? ... Has the curriculum scholar(s) carefully considered the relationship between theory and practice? ... Is the theoretical project thoughtfully informed by the history of curriculum studies, or does it attempt to advance a short-term fad?" (2010, 222). Next, I will introduce the research context that informed this article as well as the research process.

 

Research Design: Women Leading in Disadvantaged School Communities

The research reported on here formed part of a larger research project titled "Women Leading in Disadvantaged School Communities" (Perumal and Smit 2009). The project, which was funded by the South African Netherlands Partnership for Alternatives in Development, aimed at investigating how women educational leaders navigate the challenges of leading in disadvantaged school contexts.

The general conceptual tenor of the project was situated in a critical feminist paradigm. Methodologically, a qualitative critical ethnography from an advocacy and developmental perspective (Creswell 2007) was employed. Drawing from the work of Quinlan (2008), Hollingsworth (1992), Ortlipp (2008) and Clandinin (2007), data sources and fieldwork were generated through extended observations using video and photographs, shadowing principals to observe their day-to-day operations with the intention of observing the time they devote to curriculum-related matters, collaborative conversations with participants to service the aims of the research, and participant narratives regarding their conceptions of curriculum leadership. The primary participants comprised women in leadership positions (i.e. principals, deputy principals and school curriculum specialists) in disadvantaged schools in the Gauteng and North West provinces of South Africa. Purposeful sampling using network and snowball strategies was used to select information-rich participants for this inquiry. Discourse analysis was used to make sense of the data.

The case to be explored and discussed in this article is from a rural township area in the North West province's Kenneth Kaunda District. The primary participant was a female principal, Mrs Mbuli, in a secondary school. In line with the research process outlined above, this article focuses on her experiences of leadership more so than on other stakeholders' experiences.

 

Alain Badiou and Mrs Mbuli

For the purpose of this research I decided, for reasons that have been given in the introduction of this article, to explore my data sources with Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2002). Badiou (2002) describes his rendezvous with ethics as

a contradictory state of mind ... I was driven by a genuine fury. The world was deeply plunged in "ethical" delirium. Everyone was busily confusing politics with the hypocrisy of a mindless catechism. The intellectual counter-revolution, in the form of moral terrorism, was imposing the infamies of Western capitalism as the new universal model. The presumed "rights of man" were serving at every point to annihilate any attempt to invent forms of free thought. (2002, liii)

Stated differently, Badiou (2002) describes the current state of ethical affairs as an ethical ideology that is reminiscent of the liberal-humanist take on ethics. This ethical ideology leads to a priori evil (violence and suffering) with the ethics of human rights as riposte. Ethics in this sense is reduced to mere protection from abusive interference. This understanding of ethics intellectually justifies evil and the status quo. Badiou argues that "[w]e must reject the ideological framework of 'ethics' and concede nothing to the negative and victimary definition of man [sic]" (2002, 16). Furthermore, ethics in this conception is confirmed by two philosophical poles: the universalising pole and the differential pole. The former embraces a view of ethics as an abstract universality inscribed in human rights, while the latter conceives of ethics as an abstract respect for otherness (Badiou 2002). Neither of these conceptions is adequate for Badiou, as he argues that both these philosophical positions designate "the incapacity ... to name and strive for a Good" and consequently he suggests an ethic of truths (2002, 30).

To understand Badiou's notion of an ethic of truths, it is necessary to delve a little more deeply into his thoughts on this. For Badiou (2002), human action is divided into two separate but overlapping realms: the ordinary realm of approved knowledges that is structured in accordance with those who dominate and govern and that signals "the state of the situation", and the exceptional realm of singular innovations or truths constituted by a truth procedure that succeeds and evades the domination of the state of a situation. First, it should be noted that in the ordinary realm of approved knowledges a situation is not merely a set, but also consists of the network of relations that sustains a set (Badiou 2002). For example, if we think of poverty as a situation, it is not a one-dimensional set, but is constituted by and constitutes a network of relations such as, for example, HIV/Aids and crime. Second, the realm of the exceptional awakens when subjects instigate and maintain singular innovations (or truths) from within the realm of the ordinary (Badiou 2002). This is referred to as an event. An event is both situated, in that it is related to a specific situation, and supplementary, in that it is detached from all the rules of the situation (Badiou 2002). Such an event ruptures the ordinary realm and sets a truth procedure in motion (Badiou 2002). Badiou (2002) describes this process as follows: "To be faithful to an event is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking ... the situation 'according to' the event. And this ... compels the subject to invent a new way of being and acting in the situation" (2002, 41-42). This process could only be maintained through faithful "subjects who 'bear' its [the event's] trajectory" (Badiou 2002, ix), that is, people who reveal fidelity, perseverance and encouragement through selfless devotion to resist anything that could beset a truth (Badiou 2002). It is exactly this fidelity to the truth and perseverance to maintain the truth of the event that Badiou describes as the ethical, "the single imperative: 'Keep going!'" (2002, xi). This powerful truth is described as "the multiple, internal to the situation, that the fidelity constructs, bit by bit; it is what the fidelity gathers together and produces" (Badiou 2002, 68).

Badiou (2002) calls for the importance of bringing the reflexive "I" back into a thoughtful relation to an event, which perhaps calls for a change in one's being, where one's will plays a significant part. The sort of ethics or truths that Badiou (2002) argues for is one in which the individual "I" pursues a purposeful "good" in a particular event, and hence such a "courageous" stance is in contrast to nihilism. He observes that inevitably the reflexive subject will have to "invent a new way of being" in contrast to the apathetic manner in which consent from public opinion is usually gained, especially if one's presence in an event is to be regarded as "a loving encounter" (Badiou 2002, 42).

For Badiou (2012), love is a truth procedure: an encounter with an event, a desire to endure, and a powerful antidote to pursuing one's own self-interest. He states:

To make a declaration of love is to move on from the event-encounter to embark on a construction of truth. The chance nature of the encounter morphs into the assumption of a beginning. And often what starts there lasts so long, is so charged with novelty and experience of the world that in retrospect it doesn't seem at all random and contingent, as it appeared initially, but almost a necessity. (Badiou 2012, 42)

In an attempt to determine what sort of person/being is required for curriculum leadership to transpire, analytical questions were identified from the theory and used to think through the data sources.

 

The State of the Situation

What is the nature of the ordinary realm and the state of the situation in which the narrative unfolds?

Mrs Mbuli commenced her narrative with a historical overview of how the school started. The story of this school began in February 1994, just after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the abolishment of apartheid. After his release, he requested that all children who had not previously attended school as a result of the struggle return to school. This created an influx of learners from all areas to schools, especially those closer to cities, so that they could be closer to places of employment after schooling. This resulted in the need for a school to be established in the local area because at the time there were only "three or so secondary schools", Mrs Mbuli explained. Because new schools could not be built immediately, some schools commenced with a platoon-model in which one building hosted two schools. The time allocated for teaching in the primary school was 07:00-11:00, and from 12:00-17:00 the building was used as a secondary school. Mrs Mbuli elaborated on the difficulty of "platooning" since they did not have the basic resources to manage the school (such as bank accounts, paper and electronic equipment) and to allow for effective teaching and learning (for example, textbooks, stationery). She also mentioned that much difficulty was experienced with the learners at the time because many of them had been involved in the struggle and as a result had served time in prison, which gave rise to several disciplinary challenges. In addition, they had 709 learners and only six teachers.

From a curriculum point of view, the frequent reviewing and changing of the curriculum since 1997 created further difficulties. Due to all the confusion regarding the curriculum transformations, their matriculation (final school year) pass rate declined from 98% to 61%. According to Mrs Mbuli, this was mainly the result of inadequate guidance and ineffectual professional development workshops from the government on dealing with the changes in the mathematics and accountancy curricula.

 

The Event

What marked the event? What were the innovations that exceeded the ordinary realm? Who were the subjects who primarily bore the trajectory of the event?

Mrs Mbuli explained how she came to meet a director-general who was transferred from England and who was committed to school transformation in South Africa. He set her on the path of applying for a new school building. She explained, "it was hectic, because the only thing that they told me was that 'you are better off platooning, at least you don't teach under a tree' ... . So I had to fight and fight and fight and fight, and ultimately the building was granted." After the tender process for the building, they encountered a series of problems. The first was that the school was to be constructed on a dumping site in the township, and second, informal housing covered part of the proposed construction site. She explained the negotiations that accompanied the relocation of these people in detail. For them, building a school was a luxury given their daily struggle for food, clothes and a dry place to sleep. She commented that "although they lived in a shack [informal housing], it meant a lot to them because it was what they called home". When the people agreed to relocate, the school building was built and occupied by the teachers and learners on 25 August 1997.

The fact that the school premises were built on a dumping site posed problems because Mrs Mbuli and her staff were responsible for cleaning it up themselves. One of the teachers initiated a project in which each class teacher and her learners were responsible for putting all the refuse on the premises in heaps to form terraces. They then planted a lawn and made gardens on the terraces from grass that they had bought and divided into small pieces to form the lawn.

Mrs Mbuli explained how they also had to initiate extra-curricular activities such as sport to offer to the learners. They were not given any subsidy or assistance from the government in this regard. Fortunately, one of the male teachers in the school had a passion for sport and plenty of expertise in coaching soccer. Another female teacher took responsibility for the development of netball in the school. They sought international partnerships with the United Kingdom and Sweden to assist in the process of developing these sporting activities. As a result, the school has won many awards for sport. Through the partnerships, some of the teachers and learners were also given the opportunity to visit some of the partner schools in the United Kingdom.

 

New Ways of Being and Acting

In what ways was the event situated in the ordinary realm? And where was it detached from the rules of the ordinary realm? In particular, how were new ways of being and acting invented?

In a situation such as this, it is easy for schools and principals to remain bogged down by the privations they experience as a result of the ordinary realm. The principal, staff and learners in this school were in fact situated in this ordinary realm, but through the events that resulted from their innovations they were in a position to transcend the rules of the ordinary realm. Mrs Mbuli explained how she (and those who shared her passion) did not "sit down and push back" as a result of their privations. They continued to work around what they did not have by trying to get organisations, the Department of Basic Education, and international partners on board in their quest for advancement.

This disposition has created new ways of being and acting both on the part of the principal and the teachers and learners. In terms of school leadership, Mrs Mbuli explained:

[A] principal should manage and guide ... you should try to convene ... because when you are in front of those people, you'll end up being far ahead of them. You should be at a point where you could look backwards all the time, and see if there are people who ... are moving forward together with you, [otherwise] you might find yourself alone in front. ... There is no school that can belong to a principal. ... [A] school is an organisation. ... You need to get people to be with you all the time, otherwise you'll fail. ... Guiding is really a process. ... It's not an event where you say I've done it. ... [As a principal,] you're supposed to be visible; ... people should feel that you are there.

She explained that a good principal should be aware of the community's needs and truly understand them to bring about change. For example, she described how the government had suggested that the school governing body should manage school finances, but explained that their situation was different because most of the people on the school governing body were functionally illiterate. Therefore, she dealt with all the finances, based on her postgraduate experience in education management and leadership, and then used the school governing body meetings to explain to people how she managed school funds and how she budgeted for the future. In doing this, she transformed her position of power (due to her education and position at the school) into a learning and empowerment opportunity. She also stressed the importance of being visible to learners in classrooms and described how she shared her aspirations for the school with the learners and teachers. She was convinced that without their support no transformation would be possible.

In terms of her role in curriculum transformation, Mrs Mbuli acknowledged that in the existing situation she had no influence on national curriculum-making activities, but she believed that she was responsible for making a situational analysis of the local context and determining what was needed in terms of resources and infrastructure, human resource management, and the needs of the learners to meaningfully enact the curriculum so that learning experiences would be useful to the learners.

 

The Ethic of "Keep Going"

Are there specific examples when loyalty, perseverance, encouragement and selfless devotion (the notions that underscore the ethic of "keep going") were present in the narrative?

Mrs Mbuli's narrative demonstrates many examples of loyalty, perseverance, encouragement and selfless devotion, both from her side and from those who worked with her to realise their innovations and bring about positive change in a situation that could so easily ensnare them in negativity and static acceptance of the ordinary. She explained that it is essential to motivate people to persevere in situations such as theirs by recognising the good they do: "recognition goes a long way in influencing people to work better. ... If they realise that what they do matters to you, then they will do better." Her fidelity and selfless devotion as a school principal are also evident in the following statements:

With me sweetheart it's about nursing a baby really ... with my work. You know I stay at school in the afternoon, people don't understand why ... sometimes I do not understand why, but I spend most of my time here. . I want to retire . but I won't leave the school as it is right now. I want it developed-properly.

To realise this development ideal, she wrote letters to the Independent Development Trust, the local city council and the Department of Basic Education to seek assistance to finance some books for the school library. She optimistically said, "it's worth trying ... try is free".

 

Evil

Badiou (2002, 91) warns that "Evil is possible only through an encounter with the Good". In this sense, any ethic of truths holds the possibility for evil. It is therefore important to detect possibilities for evil and to deal with them openly so that good intentions are not corrupted. The question for this research was thus: Has any form of evil arisen from the good in this situation? This Evil, emanating from the Good, Badiou states, could manifest in three figures. The first of these is referred to as simulacrum and is signified by the confusion of a mere likeness of an event with the real event (Badiou 2002). The second evil, betrayal, occurs when a difficult fidelity is abandoned as a result of temptation or fatigue. The third evil concerns the unnameable-the situation in which the power of a truth is forced or imposed as a result of arrogance and in so doing brings about the objectification and totalisation of truth. Badiou summarises these forms of evil as follows: "the simulacrum (to be the terrorizing follower of a false event); betrayal (to give up on a truth in the name of one's interest); the forcing of the unnameable, or disaster (to believe in the total power of a truth)" (2002, 91). He continues that the ethic of truths with its imperative to "keep going" serves as resources of discernment, courage and moderation (Badiou 2002). Discernment serves to remind a subject not to fall under delusions concerning the event; courage teaches the subject not to give up, and moderation warns the subject not to get caught up in totalitarian extremes.

Based on the above, it is also necessary to pose the following questions: Are there any traces of evil as a result of the good? Are there traces of a terrorising follower or a false event? Are there specific examples when the truth was discerned from the false? Did anyone give up on the truth as a result of their own interest? Or are there specific examples of courage? Are there traces of totalitarianism or is moderation in terms of the truth maintained?

To attend to these questions, it would probably have been better to expand the data sources and include in-depth narratives of other stakeholders in the school to obtain alternative perspectives. However, as mentioned initially in this article, this would fall beyond the scope of this research. In Mrs Mbuli's narrative there were no traces of evil as a result of the good in terms of curriculum leadership. There were no traces of a terrorising follower, of a false event or of someone who gave up on the event due to their own interest. For me, Badiou's theory of ethics and the subsequent understanding of evil do not draw a clear enough line between a healthy fidelity towards the truth versus a contaminated totalitarian agenda. This is probably because he uses very extreme cases, such as clandestine workers in the political situation of contemporary France, the French Revolution that constituted a definite break with classical monarchy, and Nazism as examples to illustrate the various forms of evil (Badiou 2002; Gillespie 2001). These extreme cases of evil are difficult to compare with minor cases and as a result it is difficult to make sense of them. By this I do not suggest that we essentialise the debate, but that we think of moderation in terms of a healthy fidelity towards the truth in the wake of obsession that might contaminate a healthy fidelity. Thinking about this can assist in detecting opaque traces of evil lurking in the good, so that we can deal with these openly and not taint good intentions.

 

Discussion: Lessons Learned from Mrs Mbuli

Based on collaborative innovations and initiatives it is clear that the principal and her staff jointly bore the trajectory of the event and that they sought assistance beyond the boundaries of the situation to sustain their innovations. Mrs Mbuli stressed the importance of a support system when one ventures beyond the realm of the ordinary. These innovations, however small they might seem, contributed substantially to the development of the learners, and assisted in creating a culture of excellence in the school. These innovations also proved to move the school beyond the confines of the situation in which they found themselves. In short then, what is it that Mrs Mbuli was true to? She was true to excellence and continual renewal through collaborative partnerships. To realise what she was true to, she balanced her management and leadership styles efficiently.

Mrs Mbuli's narrative illustrates a process of faithful commitment to the event and in so doing demonstrates the process of rethinking the situation according to the event. Her leadership style enabled her to invent new ways of being and acting in the situation. Throughout her narrative the ethic of truths is evident and revealed through the fidelity that she expressed. No forms of abstract ethics are revealed as such. As a matter of fact, she challenged othering processes when she stated that "we need to make them understand that South Africa is no more about black and white, it is about South Africa. It is for the good of the country."

In terms of dealing with the challenges posed by the curriculum, innovations were undertaken to address the ever-changing curriculum landscape. Mrs Mbuli encouraged her staff to engage and learn to deal with curriculum contents in communities of practice. These communities consisted of teachers from the surrounding schools who could learn from one another to better interpret and enact the curriculum. She also encouraged teachers to take short courses at the local university to better equip them to deal with the curriculum challenges they faced. It also involved a system where the learners from Mrs Mbuli's school would go to good neighbouring schools for winter camp classes where they received additional learning enrichment in an attempt to raise the pass rate through preparing the learners for examinations.

Mrs Mbuli's narrative illustrates how innovative ways of being and acting can inform ethical curriculum leadership practice (cf. Kesson and Henderson 2010). Being and acting in this sense require fidelity, perseverance and encouragement through selfless devotion on the part of the curriculum leader. In addition, her narrative illustrated how a thoughtful engagement with the event can facilitate the ideals of ethical curriculum leadership practice. Such engagement ought to be self-reflexive (a character trait she demonstrates throughout her narrative) and collaborative in nature.

Finally, three more remarks are necessary. One, Mrs Mbuli aspired towards a truth framed by curriculum excellence and deep transformation. Two, her work can, in Badiou's terms, be regarded as a loving encounter as love is a truth procedure in itself. Three, her will to invent a new way of being mobilised those around her to join her in striving for the truth, developing a collective fidelity, and creating a reflexive aptitude.

 

Parting Thoughts on Ethical Curriculum Leadership

Descriptively speaking, an ethical curriculum leadership practice could be seen as a dialectic between managing school efficiency, building infrastructure and managing talent to enable optimal curriculum enactment, and a continual process of curriculum leadership. Curriculum leadership requires a focus on "what is going on" but, more importantly, on "what should be going on". The latter is a visionary enterprise-one that continually seeks alignment of innovative curriculum imaginations and a culture of curriculum excellence.

On a normative level, ethical curriculum leadership begins with love, that is, the antidote to acting in one's own interest. Love is the essence of fidelity that starts with an encounter with an event that is marked by a severe desire to endure in an attempt to remain true to an event.

 

References

Badiou, A. 2002. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London: Verso.         [ Links ]

Badiou, A. 2012. In Praise of Love. New York, NY: The New Press.         [ Links ]

Cary, L. J. 2007. Curriculum Spaces: Discourse, Postmodern Theory and Educational Research. New York, NY: Peter Lang.         [ Links ]

Clandinin, D. 2007. Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452226552.         [ Links ]

Creswell, J. W. 2007. Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing among Five Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.         [ Links ]

Gillespie, S. 2001. "Badiou's Ethics". Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 12: 256-65. Accessed October 15, 2020. https://www.plijournal.com/files/12_15_Gillespie.pdf.

Henderson, J. G. 2010. "Curriculum Leadership". In Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies, Vol. 1, edited by C. Kridel, 220-24. London: Sage Publications.

Hollingsworth, S. 1992. "Learning to Teach through Collaborative Conversation: A Feminist Approach". American Educational Research Journal 29 (2): 373-404. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312029002373.         [ Links ]

Kesson, K. R., and J. G. Henderson. 2010. "Reconceptualizing Professional Development for Curriculum Leadership: Inspired by John Dewey and Informed by Alain Badiou". In Thinking Education Through Alain Badiou, edited by K. Den Heyer, 62-77. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444391527.ch5.

Morrison, K. R. B. 2004. "The Poverty of Curriculum Theory: A Critique of Wraga and Hlebowitsh". Journal of Curriculum Studies 36 (4): 487-94. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022027042000211458.         [ Links ]

Ortlipp, M. 2008. "Keeping and Using Reflective Journal in the Qualitative Research Process". The Qualitative Report 13 (4): 695-705.         [ Links ]

Perumal, J., and B. Smit. 2009. "Women Leading in Disadvantaged School Communities". Research proposal funded by the South African Netherlands Partnership for Alternatives in Development. Unpublished document.

Quinlan, E. 2008. "Conspicuous Invisibility: Shadowing as a Data Collection Strategy". Qualitative Inquiry 14 (8): 1480-499. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800408318318.         [ Links ]

Taylor, M. C. 2004. "What Derrida Really Meant". New York Times, 14 October. Accessed October 16, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/opinion/what-derrida-really-meant.html.

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ERRATUM

 

Article Title: "Ethical Curriculum Leadership and Alain Badiou's Ethics"

 

 

Education as Change 24 (2020), #5633

When this article was originally published, it appeared under the title, "Curriculum Leadership and Alain Badiou's Ethics: A South African Experience".

The preferred title by the author is "Ethical Curriculum Leadership and Alain Badiou's Ethics".

The galley has been updated accordingly in the latest version published on 01/12/2020 (version 2).

^rND^1A01^nFrancine de^sClercq^rND^1A01^nFrancine de^sClercq^rND^1A01^nFrancine de^sClercq

ARTICLE

 

The Persistence of South African Educational Inequalities: The Need for Understanding and Relying on Analytical Frameworks

 

 

Francine de Clercq

University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa francinedeclercq18@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9209-059X

 

 

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ABSTRACT

It is acknowledged that educational inequalities persist in South Africa 25 years after the advent of democracy in 1994, but the debate about the causes and solutions to poor education performance continues. Could the education system be fundamentally improved and mitigate somewhat the socio-economic inequalities from one generation to another? This article argues that the debate will benefit from the use of theoretical frameworks about the role of education in society, especially since many analyses do not engage explicitly with theories. This article summarises the theoretical debates to remind scholars about the need to compare and explore the arguments of different theoretical paradigms on the role of education and assist sociology of education teaching. It concludes with analytical examples, which argue that the best explanatory power comes from the post-structuralist theoretical position.

Keywords: South African debates; theories of education; educational inequalities; post-structuralist analysis

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Introduction

Many scholars have argued and demonstrated that 25 years after the 1994 transition to democracy, the relationship between inequality of educational outcomes and poverty in South Africa remains strong. South Africa is known for its low gross domestic product per capita, as a large share of its population lives in poverty, high unemployment levels (27% is the formal rate, but it is more likely to be around 40%), and high levels of inequality (with a Gini coefficient of 0.66, which has remained consistent). In a similar manner, the education system is known for its bimodality, with many noting that around 80% of schools perform badly compared with the functional 20% of schools, and 80% of the maths matric distinctions come from the top 200 (out of 6,600) secondary schools. Many quantitative researchers reveal strong inequalities in educational outcomes: of 100 children who started Grade 1 in 2007, only 51 made it to matric, 40 of the 2018 matric cohort passed and 17 received bachelor's passes. Only 40% of those who began Grade 1 passed matric. In no-fee (quintiles 1, 2 and 3) schools, less than one in five Grade 9 learners reached the low international benchmark in Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2015 in maths and science, whereas in quintile 4 and 5 schools the proportions were about 60%, and in independent schools around 80% (Van der Berg and Gustafsson 2019).

Quantitative research on South African education has been very useful in documenting different school variables and their association with educational outcomes. It shows that there has been some improvement. Van der Berg and Gustafsson (2019) note that cognitive school performance has improved significantly in the past 45 years. Whereas, in 1970, 45% of the 21- to 25-year-olds completed their primary schooling and 10% obtained matric, 95% completed primary schooling and 52% obtained matric in 2016. Furthermore, the national matric pass rate has also improved from the low 53.4% in 1995 to 81.3% in 2019. The government would argue that this shows there has been reasonable, if not satisfactory, progress in education since 1994, but the educational inequalities inherited as a result of years of discrimination during apartheid are hard to counter and cannot be undone overnight.

These figures and assessments point towards a central question underpinning this article: Could the education system mitigate somewhat the socio-economic inequalities passed down from one generation to the next? Put another way, has the performance and unequal nature of the education system improved much in the past 25 years and how could it improve its effectiveness and efficiency? Why did the many significant education reforms not transform the education system and its performance? Education policy analysts explain the impact of our education reforms in different ways. Some point to the symbolism of these policies, which is not considered implementable (Jansen 2002); others note that they were too often borrowed from overseas to keep up with the global competition without sufficiently understanding how to adapt them to suit the conditions and realities on the ground (Spreen 2001). A few others explain that they were often pro-middle class and intended to be so by the emergent middle class among government and department officials.

This article contends that many writings, including the recent book edited by Spaull and Jansen (2019) on the enigma of educational inequalities, focus their analysis on the nature and form of educational inequalities in different areas of the system since 1994. But they rarely engage explicitly with educational theories, which are needed to explain better the causes of these persistent inequalities and poor efficiencies in the education system. It is against this background that this article proposes to examine the debate on the causes of the education system's poor performance since 1994 and to identify solutions to improve its performance and persistent educational inequalities. This article aims to clarify the underlying reasons behind scholars' analyses of the different causes and suggested solutions to improve our education system, and concludes that there is a better explanatory analytical framework, which identifies the causes and offers solutions for our education system.

What follows is of course not new but is written to remind scholars of the importance of comparing and engaging with the arguments of different theoretical paradigms around the role of education and to assist sociology of education teaching.

 

The Need for Analytical Frameworks

Various arguments and positions have been developed by scholars to interpret the persistent educational inequalities and this article posits that it is important to unpack the different arguments by referring to three distinct schools of thought. These analytical frameworks will reveal why scholars identify different reasons or enabling or inhibiting factors and conditions to explain the poor educational performance and significant educational inequalities. This article distinguishes three "ideal-type" analytical frameworks for clarity purposes, but this does not imply that South African policy analysts are rigidly using one or the other; often they are eclectic and use a combination, though one can always detect in their analysis a dominant theoretical framework.

The article will show how and why each "ideal-type" analytical framework focuses on different factors or conditions to explain educational inequalities and will explain why the third analytical framework is considered most useful. This is because this framework takes into account the influence of both structures and agencies on the nature and evolution of the education system and explains that the power play was not sufficiently directed at challenging seriously the educational inequalities in favour of the disadvantaged.

 

The Liberal Functionalist Framework

The liberal functionalist position argues, after Parsons, that countries need an effective education system that functions to produce a competent and well-differentiated labour force through a meritocratic education system to meet labour market demands.

Adherents argue that education is neutral and contributes to reduce socio-economic inequalities and, in that respect, it is important to identify the school-based factors that work against that goal to allow individuals from all socio-economic backgrounds to work hard and succeed through the education system. This position would explain the inequalities perpetuated by Bantu education as an irrational, amoral and inefficient education system.

Van der Berg and his research team of economists of education from Stellenbosch were also interested to understand the binding constraints of our poorly performing education system since 1994. Their research focused on the inefficiencies of the system and the impact of specific school-based factors on the poor education outcomes of the majority (Van der Berg et al. 2016). Their research identified the main problems at different levels of the education system that need to be addressed. This is not to say that they do not acknowledge the negative influence of societal factors and socio-economic inequalities such as home poverty, home language, parents' low levels of education, unconducive family settlement and structure. However, their analysis (as well as the 2018 World Bank report) assumes that the education system could improve by addressing the various systemic inefficiencies in order to rupture the reproduction of inequality and broaden educational opportunities for all, which will hopefully reduce the socio-economic inequalities for the next generation.

At departmental level, the poor provincial capacity to plan and administer as well as the weak district monitoring and support of schools have been acknowledged. Gustafsson and Taylor (2013) noted other institutional inefficiencies. Through value-added school production functions and fixed-effects models, they show the need for more efficient use of non-personnel funds by the authorities, with a special focus on educational materials, as these represent serious obstacles to a well-functioning system.

Other analysts focus on the school-level factors to show how school development has not been properly addressed since 1994. They note in particular the weak district support system for poorly educated/qualified principals as well as the poor and sometimes dysfunctional school leadership and its inability to ensure time-on-task in the classroom with teachers arriving and teaching on time and at their right level (Van der Berg et al. 2016). This issue is what causes some of these scholars to privilege the other side of the "change coin", the serious lack of school and teacher accountability (Taylor 2002).

At the classroom level, many scholars show the differentiated access to teaching and learning resources in schools, which hinder or enable a more conducive instructional environment. They also identify the poor professional knowledge of teachers (CDE 2013; Shalem and de Clercq 2019; Taylor 2019; Taylor and Vinjevold 1999) and their weak pedagogical instruction regime (Fleisch 2018). Another major inhibiting classroom factor is the unrealistic and overambitious outcomes-based education (OBE) curriculum policy and the difficulty of implementing it in poorly performing schools with teachers who struggled to understand and implement it (Jansen and Christie 2000).

This is because many teachers in disadvantaged schools are not fully qualified and could not cope with a change of curriculum framework with little content and a different pedagogical method. This was overambitious and inappropriate to the majority of teachers and their classroom realities and conditions.

Many school-based policies had a differentiated effect on various classrooms and teachers but, overall, disadvantaged teachers struggled the most. The exceptions here, according to Gustafsson (2005), are the technical efficiencies achieved through the reduction of learner repetition, facilitated by the policy prohibiting more than one repetition per schooling phase.

The language of learning and teaching (LoLT) policy was identified as problematic in that it stipulates that schools and their school governing bodies (SGBs) should preferably adopt as a language of instruction the local mother tongue of learners in the Foundation Phase. A period of three years with English or Afrikaans as First Additional Language is acknowledged internationally to be far too little to achieve academic fluency in the future LoLT from Grade 4 onwards (Roberts and Schollar 2011). This was seen as a serious obstacle, especially because statistics showed that many Grade 3 or Grade 6 learners could not read properly for meaning for that level/grade (Pretorius and Spaull 2016), a fundamental shortcoming for further learning.

Finally, these liberal functionalist scholars of the "ideal" type look at one political dimension that, they acknowledge, exists outside the education system and impacts negatively on educational performance. The weak social compact or cohesion between stakeholders, such as teacher unions, schools and communities (Gustafsson and Taylor 2013; Roberts and Schollar 2011) is seen as a serious obstacle. Their analyses often blame the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU), which they show interferes with and organises their disadvantaged teacher members to boycott supervision and compulsory hours of teacher development (Van der Berg et al. 2016).

In brief, liberal functionalist scholars choose to focus on and analyse various departmental or school-based factors that hinder the efficiency of the system. These factors are conceived of in a technical manner and are believed to need better policy or programme redress strategies.

The research of these scholars who rely mostly on the liberal functionalist theoretical perspective is very similar and falls under School Effectiveness Research (SER), which became popular internationally in the 1980s and 1990s in drawing attention to various school-based factors that were correlated with education outcomes. Such SER scholars and human capital analysts in South Africa (Van der Berg and his team) who argue that enhanced levels of education raise people's and countries' productivity, stimulating economic growth and eradicating poverty (Psacharopoulos 1994), believe that their research can assist policy makers and educationists in identifying the important system-or school-based factors that need addressing. Their analyses, as Allais, Shalem, and Cooper (2019, 113) argue, position schools "as a factor independent of other social determinants, and treated as an independent policy variable which can be used to bring about the required social changes". Over the past three decades, SER has interacted with School Improvement Research (SIR), which focuses on the improvement paths and priorities of different schools, and both have evolved and improved each other over the last few decades. However, they have remained firmly located within the liberal functional paradigm, which assumes that education is and should be neutral to contribute best to the socio-economic and labour system and to upward social mobility on the grounds that education enables individuals to benefit from the improvement of school-based factors that maximise opportunities for all (Thrupp 2001).

An interesting weakness of the mainly quantitative research located in the liberal functionalist analytical perspective is that it can only establish correlations between certain variables and educational outcomes but cannot explain exactly how these school-based variables impact on educational outcomes. This is problematic because they recommend programmes targeting these quantitative variables to improve educational outcomes but cannot be sure how these improved variables work on educational outcomes.

 

The Marxist Functionalist Framework

The second school of thought is the Marxist theoretical perspective. Scholars who adopt this perspective argue that education is not neutral but functions rather as a political and ideological instrument to reproduce socio-economic inequalities through unequal educational opportunities provided to the differentiated population. Their studies focus on broader structural issues and reveal how differentiated socio-economic and education structures and factors reproduce inequalities in the next generation. In other words, their analysis does not focus on school-based factors (like the liberal position), but rather on all the unequal structures in society and in education. As early as the 1970s, Bowles (1972) produced large-scale evidence to show that the Unites States' class-differentiated population accessed and completed their education in such a way as to ensure class-based inequalities are transferred to the next generation (Bourdieu 1979; Bowles 1972; Moore 2004). Scholars who adhere to this theoretical framework, illustrated by the work of Van der Berg et al. (2011a) and Van der Berg and Gustafsson (2019), would explain the bimodal distribution of quality schooling in South Africa as a mirror of the harsh and unequal economic reality in South Africa.

In South Africa, such scholars argue that the post-1994 state did not seriously attempt a true reorganisation of the socio-economic structure to assist with the reduction of inequalities (Fine 2016). After 1994, a more political than economic transfer of power occurred, and the economic growth and investment strategy and policies did not target or subvert sufficiently the dominant monopolies (Hirsch 2005). The neo-liberal form of the economic growth paths adopted since 1996, when the Reconstruction and Development Programme was abandoned, in line with the global economic world and its increased socio-economic polarisation, did not promote economic growth for redistribution or an economic development strategy that created jobs for the poorly skilled and kept low the unemployment figures.

Allais, Shalem, and Cooper (2019) note that, as a result, "the socio-economic conditions that structure learners' lives in South Africa today, as well as those of their families and communities, reproduce [strongly unequal] social and economic relations" in ways that make it unlikely that the education system can improve equality of learning and educational outcomes. For them, widespread poverty and socio-economic realities are the most substantial factors that explain inequality of educational outcomes. Allais, Shalem, and Cooper (2019) argue that in South Africa the relationships between education, poverty, and inequality are dominated by the fact that educational inequality is driven by poverty. Poverty structures learning and teaching in poor schools, in three ways:

1) learners are not well-prepared for schooling and their homes do not function as a second site of acquisition; 2) very poor schools do not have a reservoir of material and cognitive resources by any comparative measure to what rich schools have; and 3) school management in poor schools does not mediate the bureaucratic demands on teacher time to cover the curriculum in time frames which are very hard to achieve. (Allais, Shalem, and Cooper 2019, 113-14)

These scholars locate the major causes of inequalities mainly within the political economy of the country rather than within the education system. The logic of this position is that the reduction of educational inequalities will not happen without some major restructuring in the unequal socio-economic structures.

The argument of Marxist education scholars in South Africa (Chisholm, Motala, and Vally 2003; Christie and Collins 1982; Jansen 2003; Kallaway et al. 1984; Shalem and Hoadley 2009) is that equal opportunities for all do not fundamentally exist because of the way unequal power relations and socio-economic inequalities are structured. They also argue that the education system is fundamentally biased against the poor and the working class in the way it is structured, accessed and completed. Their assumption is that the education system is never truly meritocratic as it functions above all to reproduce socio-economic inequalities through educational inequalities, making these inequalities more legitimate. The differentiated education system and structures ensure that unequal educational opportunities are provided differentially to reproduce the socio-economic inequalities. This occurs through various means, such as unequally distributed educational resources, the uneven quality of different principals and teachers, socially biased knowledge in the curriculum, among others, all of which contribute to low educational outcomes for the poor majority.

Thus, they show how the current bimodal school system is reproduced through the lack of support and targeted strategy to counter the poor quality of many teachers in disadvantaged schools, the poor culture of teaching and learning in many black schools and the insufficient money and resources provided to poor schools. With poor state resources, a lack of qualified and competent teachers and schools that are overstretched by the influx of learners of poor socio-economic status, socio-economic inequalities continue to translate into differentiated school performance and inequalities (Van der Berg et al. 2011b). This position foregrounds the socio-economic factors of learners' backgrounds as an obstacle to the reduction of educational inequalities.

They also argue that many education reforms work against the majority of the teacher and learner population. The OBE curriculum could only benefit competent and well-qualified teachers with resourceful classrooms. The aim of the 1996 Schools Act of keeping some of the middle-class learner population in the public school sector did not help much in minimising the polarisation between the public (and private) middle-class schools with a reasonable quality performance and high school fees and the majority of public schools. The capacity of schools to raise and fix high fees was often used by middle-class schools to maintain quality by hiring additional teachers and resources to allow the sons and daughters of the growing African middle class to access them (Motala and Carel 2019). In fact, the physical expansion of middle-class public schools came about mainly because of the initiative of the middle class rather than the government's funding (CDE 2013). Other analysts identify the problem in the minor budgetary redistribution to disadvantaged schools confined to non-personnel expenditures (Motala and Carel 2019) as an indication of a class-based financial strategy. Other examples will include the poor and inappropriate district support to improve teacher quality among disadvantaged schools (Shalem and De Clercq 2019).

Thus, these scholars who rely mostly on the Marxist theoretical perspective emphasise the unequal structures in the economy and education as main obstacles to the significant reduction of educational inequalities. They also criticise the SER and SIR findings for ignoring the importance of unequal non-school structures in influencing unequal educational outcomes as well as how non-school factors influence and interact with school factors in ensuring differentiated educational opportunities. The advantage of their analysis is that they attempt to show how non-school and school variables or factors discriminate against the poor majority and how this results in the persistence of educational inequalities.

 

The Post-Structuralist Framework¹

According to the third school of thought, post-structuralism, the analysis of inequalities should not be examined only through the unequal socio-economic and educational structures because structures cannot explain or determine fully what individual people can do and achieve. Proponents of this framework agree, in the case of South Africa, that the unequal socio-economic structure remained broadly untouched after 1994, inhibiting the reduction of socio-economic as well as educational inequalities. However, their argument is that individual and collective agencies are possible and can act to work within or to undermine the power of these unequal structures. Some will argue that the post-structuralists combine elements of the analysis of the liberal functionalists and Marxists. It is more accurate to say that the post-structuralists recognise individual or collective agencies within the constraining unequal structures and the state (which can be pressurised to represent the interests of various organisations) and that structures cannot fully determine outcomes because individual or collective agencies can work and contest to strengthen or undermine these structures.

How can the Marxist position explain, for example, the 1994 change of government? A Marxist analysis would show that there was a change of structures, which was the result of the various anti-apartheid struggles both inside and outside the country. However, a post-structuralist would show that the proponents of economic restructuring were not strong enough, especially since the unions were unable to develop significant challenging strategies or opposition to the neo-liberal forms of economic growth, which continued to accentuate and reproduce structural inequalities (Fine 2016).

Another example, which the Marxist position would struggle to explain, is the Soweto 1976 uprisings and the anti-apartheid struggles of the 1980s in education that forced the government to initiate some changes in the educational arena. Regarding the post-1994 unequal educational structures, one has to explain to what extent these were challenged and opposed by collective agencies or organs of civil society including school stakeholders (De Clercq 2010). Without the strong exercise of power by collective agencies, the post-1994 education system could not improve its inputs, processes and/or outputs in a more socially just manner.

This is why the post-structuralist position on the reasons for the poor education performance of the majority of schools, 25 years after 1994, is located both inside and outside the education system, in school- and non-school-based factors, especially with the constraints existing within the unchanged political economy of the post-1994 era. In comparison with the Marxist analysis, the post-structuralist analysis goes beyond the reproduction of socio-economic and educational structural inequalities and examines the contestations, struggles and collective agencies within the various arenas of education to understand how and why some structures were strengthened or undermined by different sustained struggles.

Although the government claimed the education reforms promote equality and quality for all, the situation on the ground is different as the education system continues to function as a dual system, with 20% of the schools providing quality schooling and the remaining 80% consist of mostly poorly performing schools (see next section for further analysis). By looking at the level of opposition or resistance that school stakeholders and their organisations mustered to attain more socially just school factors or conditions, these analysts (Sayed and Motala 2012) argue that it was not enough to force the government to promote more meaningful education redress and quality for all.

This is not to deny the few successes that have been attained such as the improvement of the physical infrastructure of some schools, no-fee status for 60% of schools and funding redistribution subsidies for disadvantaged schools. Teachers' working conditions also improved, mainly due to union militancy, and in particular their salary increases were, on the whole, in line with public servants' salaries, higher than the annual inflation. All these improvements show that the government felt under pressure to make some changes towards quality education in favour of the majority. However, these redress measures were not very substantial because, as the article will show in the next section, many reforms and initiatives in different areas of education did not sufficiently benefit disadvantaged schools, teachers and learners, but they did strengthen middle-class schools. This will be explained by examining how the unequal power relations in society became reflected in the education arena as well as how the strength of collective agencies was often not there to undermine the unequal structural educational inequalities.

 

Analysing Existing Educational Inequalities: The Advantage of the Post-Structuralist Position

This section will show how the post-structuralist analysis explains, in the author's view, more satisfactorily the impact of education reforms on the poor and persistent education inequalities, compared with the liberal and Marxist positions. As mentioned above, the scholars who rely mostly on the post-structuralist perspective argue that the post-1994 education reforms need to be analysed as a reflection of the shifting power relations and the power play (or contestation) that developed in this era (De Clercq 2010). There were strong power dynamics in the education sector after 1994 as well as contestations and struggles of different magnitudes in various areas of the education system. Let us first note some elements in the post-1994 political context. The strong collective agencies from organs of civil society that had mobilised in the pre-1994 era were demobilised and surrendered their power to a developmental state, which they thought would represent their interests. By the time education reforms were designed and introduced by the department to effect redress and move towards quality education for all (as the government claimed), many analysts warned that most education reforms were biased against the majority of disadvantaged schools and teachers (De Clercq 2010).

At the level of collective organisations such as SADTU or civic associations, one must mention that these all suffered from the flight of many people in their leadership positions to government, and their new leadership did not appear to manage to develop sufficient sophisticated strategies to mobilise their members to continue demanding and mobilising for pro-poor education policies.

Let us now look at the unequal structures and contestations or agencies in some of the major changing aspects of the post-1994 education system.

At the level of the school, one of the first policies formulated, the 1996 Schools Act (RSA 1996), was, inter alia, about democratising schools and school governance. This was mainly in response to the many pre-1994 struggles against the bureaucratic oppressive school system, but there were also some compromises towards middle-class schools in the finalisation of the Act (Sayed 2002). The school governing bodies, constituted by a majority of parents, were said to be designed to make schools and their principals accountable managerially. School governing bodies were expected to act as overseers of the school budget and manage relations between different school stakeholders (Woolman and Fleisch 2009). However, the post-structuralist position would show that SGBs became a new site of power relations where various school stakeholders conflict and struggle for their interests as opposed to the interest of the school as a whole. As it emerged, according to the Department of Education Ministerial Report (DoE 2003) on SGBs, many disadvantaged schools were unable to develop democratic governance that could assist with school development. The report mentions that many schools with poor governance arrangements and operational efficiency had parents who did not manage to play their budgetary monitoring role or principals and chairpersons of SGBs who colluded to rule and govern as they wished. Another more serious report finding from the Volminck 2016 Ministerial Report (DBE 2016) was the abuse of power by the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU), whose members sat on school appointment committees, as it ensured through its members that the SGBs allocate promotions and other senior positions first to their members, sometimes asking these new appointees to pay for their new jobs.

In contrast, the SGBs of many middle-class schools were assisted because their members had worked in parent-teacher associations (PTAs) in the pre-1994 era. For many of them, parents were there to bring more financial resources as well as competences and networks to assist with the schools' financial, governing or development needs, even if it is true that black parents did struggle to be recognised as equal participants in some of these schools (Woolman and Fleisch 2009). In contrast, the liberal functionalist position would argue that the Schools Act was appropriate for all schools but that more effort was needed to support and capacitate the SGBs of the poor schools and their boundaries (Heystek 2011). The Marxist position would argue that the unequal power relations and structures in education and in these schools were reflected in the relations between the school stakeholders. In contrast, the post-structuralist analysis better illustrates what happened in poor and middle-class schools through its focus on structures, power relations and agencies. One could argue in this light that democratic school governance should not have been introduced as a priority in the post-1994 era, mainly because the conditions on the ground and the unequal power relations in many poor schools were not conducive for the strengthening of school democracy, accountability and the relationships between different stakeholders.

Another school-based policy that was introduced was the 2001 White Paper 6 on Inclusive Education, which, in line with the international human rights discourse, was supposed to assist broader equal opportunities of access to all. It divided schools into schools for special needs, schools with learners with average learning barriers that were given additional posts for education specialists, and "ordinary" schools with learners with minor barriers. As Engelbrecht et al. (2016) and Makoelle (2012) note, "ordinary" disadvantaged schools lacked the resources, efficient administrative systems and suitable educators to ensure that the schools with learners with minor learning barriers could fulfil their role. In addition, the training of educators to deal with learners with learning barriers was rather inadequate, and the school-based support teams did not have much support from the district-based support teams.

This situation renders the implementation of this policy biased against the majority of poor schools. Only the middle-class public and private schools could recommend to parents of learners with minor learning barriers to consult with and benefit from the assistance of an education psychologist whom they could pay (Walton et al. 2009).

In this instance, the post-structuralist analysis notes that the policy was borrowed from overseas but did not suit the conditions on the ground, which were worse in poor schools, because it was conceptualised and implemented in a class-based manner that was not in favour of disadvantaged schools compared with middle-class schools. This position is in contrast with the liberal position, which would foreground the importance of continuing building the institutional capacity of districts and schools (Heystek 2011), while the Marxist position would emphasise the unequal structures militating against the implementation of this inclusion policy that appears rather liberal and desirable for all (Carrim 2011).

At the level of the classroom, teacher development and accountability, which are seen in the international literature as important change tools (Fullan 1982), did not improve sufficiently to ensure all teachers' improvement. Yes, the National Policy Framework for Teacher Education and Development (DoE 2006), the Integrated Quality Management System (ELRC 2003) and the Integrated Strategic Planning Framework for Teacher Education and Development in South Africa (DHET 2011) were passed to privilege teacher development for redress before teacher accountability could come into effect. These policies appear in line with the demand of teachers' unions, and SADTU in particular, which worked hard for the adoption of the 1998 Development Appraisal System, according to which teachers had to be developed and supported before they could be made accountable. This argument is in line with Elmore's (2005, 297) request for reciprocal accountability, which he defines as "every unit of increased performance that the system demands carries with it an equal and reciprocal obligation on the part of the system to provide access to an additional unit of individual or organizational capacity, in the form of additional knowledge and skill".

However, these development-oriented policies required a lot more human and financial resources to enact adequate and meaningful development for disadvantaged teachers, and these were not mobilised and provided by the state. Many teachers complained of the lack of departmental capacity for meaningful teacher support as well as the department's greater interest in enforcing principals' and teachers' accountability, especially in poorly performing schools. This lack of departmental capacity to support in particular poor schools explains why the culture of teaching and learning of many disadvantaged schools and the professionalism of many of their teachers did not improve much after 1994. Beyond these problematic policies, Taylor (2007) concludes in his research that most school improvement initiatives and programmes initiated by NGOs (at times with some provincial departments) in the first 20 years of democracy did not impact positively on school performance. This lack of meaningful teacher development was a major problem for the disadvantaged schools. As Taylor explains, most teachers' knowledge and competences in poor schools remained inadequate and often well below the grade that they were supposed to teach (Taylor 2007; 2019). Fleisch (2006) and Taylor (2002) attributed the problem first to the lack of teacher accountability in these schools. This was a problematic position for struggling schools and teachers who needed more initial support. Fortunately, Taylor later changed his position and recognised the need for better teacher support given the poor pre- or inservice professional development programmes and the lack of departmental or university training capacity.

In terms of this issue, the post-structuralist analysis would show how the state, which declares itself pro-poor schools, set itself up for failure. In fact, for a long time, NGOs, which work mainly with poor schools and teachers, made similar mistakes in their conceptualisation and implementation of programmes. The post-structuralist position would blame the poor leadership of the state and NGOs, which did not sufficiently take into account the poor conditions and realities of teachers in designing appropriate development programmes for these schools (De Clercq 2013). One could also argue that the government made the situation worse by developing ambitious and inappropriate school-based policies that stretched departments beyond their capacity to support such changes. The leadership of the unions, in contrast, appeared to prefer to blame the department or NGOs rather than actively participate in the reconceptualisation of more appropriate development programmes.

This analysis contrasts with the liberal analysis, which would have foregrounded the importance of continuing building the institutional capacity of the departments and schools (Van der Berg et al. 2011a). The Marxist position, on the other hand, would have emphasised the unequal structures and policies that militated against appropriate pro-poor teacher development policies and programmes. The question that the post-structuralist analysis needs to answer is, why did the unions, and SADTU in particular, which started well with their membership mobilisation for the 1998 Development Appraisal System, not continue to fight for appropriate forms of teacher development and accountability? Could it be that the union leadership did not manage to challenge the departmental policies to ensure that teacher development programmes are appropriate and meaningful for the challenges faced by disadvantaged teachers?

Another important and related school-based reform, which was motivated by the pre-1994 struggles against the nature and form of Bantu education, is found in the curriculum arena. The 1998 OBE curriculum, revised in the 2002 Revised National Curriculum Statement, was borrowed mainly from Australia and was not appropriately adapted by the team of researchers in charge who did not comprehend sufficiently the teachers' realities to ensure that such curriculum could be implemented with the conditions on the ground (Spreen 2001). This OBE curriculum was said by curriculum analysts (Jansen and Christie 2000) to be much too ambitious in that it changed radically both the way teachers had to teach content and develop pedagogy. While middle-class schools and their teachers were sufficiently qualified to use and benefit from this new curriculum to improve their teaching and learning, most teachers from disadvantaged schools struggled to comprehend let alone implement this curriculum in their classrooms. In addition, these teachers were not inducted or supported appropriately to understand how to implement this complex curriculum. It is interesting to note here that the teams of curriculum designers allocated for each phase and subject appear not to have taken into account the conditions in the classrooms nor the fact that such content-less curriculum frameworks were not appropriate to assist poorly qualified teachers to work out an appropriate sequence and pacing for their subjects. These designers may have been pushed by senior officials in the Department of Education responsible for curriculum to design specific frameworks and their outcomes to align the South African curriculum with the international trend that favoured outcomes-based curricula to respond to the needs of the 21st-century economy and society. There may have been a few SADTU representatives on these curriculum design teams, but the curriculum experts appointed by the department dominated and would have overruled any SADTU fundamental opposition.

This means either that SADTU could have fought harder to ensure that the new curriculum was developed in such a way that disadvantaged teachers could understand and implement it realistically and appropriately in their classrooms (Rogan and Grayson 2003) or that it was unable to develop campaigns and mobilise its members against this unrealistic curriculum. It never managed to organise against the challenges the new curriculum raised for the majority of its members and instead waited for the implementation stage to ensure that its members boycotted classroom supervision and any form of accountability because of inadequate district support.

By 2010, the then Minister of Education was bold enough to admit that the curriculum policy was too ambitious and problematic and that it needed to change. A Commission of Enquiry was commissioned, which recommended a template for the new curriculum policy. This resulted in the introduction of the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statements (CAPS) in 2012 with much more explicit content and assessment to be covered each week, abandoning once and for all the idea of a content-less curriculum.

This was a significant advance, even if teachers in disadvantaged schools still found CAPS too ambitious and problematic in its pacing and learner-centred pedagogical approach. Criticisms about the pacing and sequencing (Christie and Monyokolo 2018; Schollar 2018) and the complaints of many disadvantaged teachers led more recently to the introduction of large-scale interventions for poorly performing primary schools to assist with the implementation of CAPS. Indeed, under pressure because of the now better measured poor learners' outcomes (especially in Grade 3 and 6 as revealed in the Annual National Assessment results), a few provincial departments, in partnership with education NGOs, decided to assist with the pedagogical and assessment routines of CAPS. They provided poorly performing primary schools with scripted lesson plans, better readers and teaching resources as well as coaching of teachers (Fleisch 2018). These large-scale pedagogical or instructional interventions, according to recent quantitative evaluations (Fleisch 2018), appear more meaningful and appropriate to what these struggling poor schools and their teachers need to improve their understanding and teaching of CAPS, especially at the Foundation Phase because of the persistent poor reading ability of learners of disadvantaged schools (Pretorius and Spaull 2016).

The government presented the OBE curriculum as assisting with the competitive demands of the global labour market and enabling learners to be at the centre of teaching and learning and learn at their individual pace. This is what the liberal position would agree with, but it would have recommended better and more meaningful support and development to improve future implementation (Pudi 2006). The Marxist position would emphasise that such a globally aligned OBE curriculum was biased against the poor disadvantaged schools and teachers (Spreen 2001). It was designed to impress the global world by showing that South Africa was determined to improve and modernise its education system-at least for the minority of the learner population who would be well-educated to fill the highly skilled positions of the formal global economy. In contrast, the post-structuralist position would foreground the same arguments as the Marxist position with the addition that curriculum was not an arena or site where power play or contestations by the leadership of disadvantaged teachers and their organisations did not occur. It would emphasise the top-down way in which the government planned and introduced these curriculum policies (there was no serious pilot over a few years) and how this excluded the possibility of legitimate contestation by unions and researchers who had tracked and illustrated the difficult and inadequate curriculum implementation in poor schools (Jansen and Christie 2000).

The fact that the Minister of Education acknowledged the disastrous curriculum implementation in the majority of schools shows a certain courage by the leadership (compared with previous ministers) that dared to appear critical of the previous OBE curriculum frameworks. The Department of Education acknowledged in 2010 that the earlier curriculum policies were likely to undermine the teaching force (mainly in disadvantaged schools) and the school graduates who would not be well-prepared for the need to demonstrate independent, critical and problem-solving skills in the labour market.

What were the consequences for educational outcomes of all these problematic and class-based policies and programmes? As mentioned earlier, the matric pass rate improvement has occurred mainly as a result of pressures on Grade 12 teachers (and subsequent support programmes for teachers and learners) given the public visibility of the yearly matric results. And it should not be forgotten that there are many different ways to read and analyse the improved matric pass rate. Some researchers and educationists argue that the improved matric pass rate should be questioned and not trusted at face value as there are many ways in which schools could retain learners in the Further Education and Training (FET) phase so as not to tarnish their Grade 12 results. Other researchers looked at the decreasing number of registered maths and science matric candidates and graduates, especially in poorly performing schools, while others pointed to the rather low level (30%) of pass at matric level.

The liberal position would foreground the improvements in general, praising (as the Department of Basic Education would) the efforts of individual schools, teachers and learners, without delving deep into their bimodal pattern and how educational outcome inequalities have remained strong over the years. The Marxist position would go beyond the national average pass rates and detail the discrepancies over the years between the rich middle-class public and private schools and the public schools of quintiles 1 to 3 (Motala and Carel 2019). Their explanation would emphasise the structural inequalities and the fact that there had not been adequate pro-poor support programmes. The post-structuralist position would also foreground the persistent inequalities between middle-class and poor schools, but they would additionally point to the need for civil society to pressure the Department of Basic Education to develop more pro-poor redistributive policies (Sayed and Motala 2012), and the existence of specific schools that show leadership and agency to improve their matric results despite the odds and offer an analysis of their strategies and processes (Christie 2001). A recommendation could have been for the leadership to develop programmes that could empower poor schools, their teachers and learners to benefit from more conducive policies and programmes targeting specifically the conditions in these schools (such as the recent large-scale instructional improvement programmes in poor primary schools).

Finally, let us mention the poverty gap: learners from poor socio-economic backgrounds are likely to encounter many serious obstacles in attending, following and benefiting from their primary schooling. Drawing from the work of researchers in psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, economics, the health sciences, and mathematics education, Fleisch (2008) documents the depth and scope of the challenges facing primary education, both outside as well as inside schools. He showed how poverty, poor health, poor resources and language of teaching were factors influencing the academic achievement of poor learners in reading, writing and mathematics. In short, the poverty gap is about the vicious cycle of the poor socio-economic status of learners and their parents, which is compounded by the poor quality of their schooling, and explains the poor chances for these learners to benefit from schooling.

The liberal position recognises the poverty trap (Van der Berg et al. 2011a). They understand it to be the result of societal inequalities which, they believe, can be minimised by more appropriate and efficient educational strategies or support programmes that enhance the efficiency of the system and its people. The Marxist position mainly emphasises the inescapable influence of societal inequalities, which are reinforced and compounded by structural educational inequalities. For example, Shalem and Hoadley (2009) show, on the basis of an analysis of data sets on inequalities-at the societal level, at the level of the homes and communities of the children that attend school, at the level of the schooling system and at the level of teachers-that there is an intractable pattern of accumulation of educational disparity among teachers. The post-structuralist position, while accepting the compounding impact of societal and educational inequalities on the poverty trap, also examines how the state is or can be pressurised by organs of civil society into adopting and implementing more pro-poor support programmes to compensate for the situation of disadvantaged learners (Equal Education 2018).

 

Conclusion

To sum up, this article has shown how the post-structuralist analysis, which takes into account the influence of unequal socio-economic and educational structures and agencies on the nature and evolution of the education system, enables us to understand better why socio-economic and education reforms were not sufficiently directed at challenging seriously these inequalities. What it identifies are the reasons behind the broad maintenance of class-based socio-economic and educational inequalities (with some minor exceptions). It recognises the absence of significant socio-economic restructuring, but also examines the level of sustained organised opposition and leadership in certain contestable arenas of the education system to warn that the state needs to be substantially challenged and pressurised to revert the impact of its class-biased educational reforms and programmes.

This is not to say that no positive change has occurred or that the leadership committed to more socially just education did not achieve much. Rather it is recognised that there were pre-1994 anti-apartheid struggles that fought fiercely to ensure that the post-1994 government would improve the education system by effecting some financial redistribution and improving poor schools' physical infrastructure and resources. However, these redress measures were in no way sufficient to improve the quality of the education system for all, and in particular disadvantaged schools. In this sense, the state did not continue to be pressurised by the education sector to ensure that its education reforms and programmes of redistribution and support benefitted the disadvantaged majority.

 

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1 There are some varieties within the post-structuralist position, and this article will limit itself to its main characteristics in relation to the other two frameworks for clarity.

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ARTICLE

 

School Governance and Social Justice in South Africa: A Review of Research from 1996 to 2016

 

 

Pontso Moorosi^I; Bongani Bantwini^II; Itumeleng Molale^III; Nolutho Diko^IV

^IUniversity of Warwick, United Kingdom University of Johannesburg, South Africa p.c.moorosi@warwick.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4447-4684
^IIWalter Sisulu University, South Africa bongani.bantwini@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4053-3453
^IIINorth-West University, South Africa Itumeleng.Molale@nwu.ac.za https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3596-7425
^IVWalter Sisulu University, South Africa nndiko@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3105-8630

 

 

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ABSTRACT

In this article, we conduct a systematic review of school governance literature in order to examine the influence of the social justice agenda in South Africa between 1996 and 2016. The review explores the nature and scope of school governance research, the methodologies used as well as the theoretical constructs underpinning the research in the identified period. We used search words related to school governance to identify electronically published academic material. By way of analysis, we employed a combination of descriptive quantitative and qualitative forms of systematic review. The findings reveal a relatively small body of research spread across local and international journals that mostly investigates issues around democratic participation and representation. Although redressing the education system was viewed as one of the major catalysts in restoring the values necessary for a socially just and democratic society, school governance research is not underpinned by the analysis of social justice. We conclude by reflecting on limitations and making suggestions for future research.

Keywords: school; governance; research; governing bodies; social justice

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Introduction

We¹ provide a systematic review of literature on school governance examining the extent to which this literature has been influenced by the social justice framework from 1996 to 2016. Traditionally, school governance operates as a subtopic within the broader field of educational management, administration, leadership (and governance) literature. Consequently, a great deal of school governance research goes unnoticed, hidden under the banner of the broader field, while the work of school governing bodies is overlooked (Balarin et al. 2008). In South Africa, school governance research gained researchers' significant attention after the establishment of post-apartheid legislation, the South African Schools Act (SASA), Act No. 84 of 1996, which mandated democratic participation of stakeholder groups in local decision-making (RSA 1996a). However, the extent of this research and the degree to which it has been influenced by social justice are not known. A concerted effort to consolidate knowledge in school governance research was deemed a necessity, so that research can address existing theoretical gaps.

Our conceptualisation of school governance is informed by existing research that includes school governing bodies and the work they do as school governors as mandated by school governance policy (SASA) in the South African context. Kooiman (2003) argues that conceptual clarity between "governance" and "governing" should be provided. He defined governing as a "totality of interactions in which public as well as private actors participate, aimed at solving societal problems or creating societal opportunities" (RSA 1996a, 4), while governance is the "totality of theoretical conceptions of governing". Influenced by Kooiman (2003), it perhaps follows that James, Brammer, and Fertig (2011) made a distinction between school governing and school governance, arguing that "school governance" is a broader concept involving several non-government actors who have "shared interests in public policymaking and implementation" (2011, 394) within the education system. In this conceptualisation, school governing is but one component of school governance, which is usually performed by "first order"² school governors, whose "responsibility is to deal with the day-to-day affairs of school governance" (James, Brammer, and Fertig 2011, 394). We understand school governing as a subset of school governance, and we use school governance to accommodate all aspects that concern governors and governing within the schooling system.

This review is framed within the first two decades of democratic rule that saw the unification of the South African education sector under one system. Prior to this, the apartheid dispensation had divided education along racial, ethnic and regional lines (Motala and Pampallis 2005) and into different departments whose unequal funding left lasting inequalities between blacks and whites. In its response to address the inequalities created by the apartheid system, the democratic government ushered in a series of policies that were focused primarily on "redress, equity, quality and democratic participation" (Motala and Pampallis 2005, 23). Of direct significance and relevance to this review, the South African Schools Act of 1996 (RSA 1996a) provided for democratic governance of schools and targeted redress to bridge the inequalities. The Act of 1996 was intended to provide a "uniform system for the organisation, governance and funding of schools; to amend and repeal certain laws relating to schools; and to provide for matters connected therewith" (RSA 1996a, 1). In view of the inundation of policies brought about by the new dispensation and the ensuing influx of research on educational policy since 1994, we assumed that there would be a significant corpus of research on school governance that would be ready for review (Hallinger 2018). We wanted to examine the kinds of issues that have been pursued in school governance research, how they have been pursued and the extent to which this research is informed by the social justice agenda.

To guide our investigation and develop a systematic discussion, we drew from previous reviews (e.g. Bush and Glover 2016; Hallinger 2014; 2018; Hallinger and Chen 2015) and identified a set of questions. We found Hallinger's (2014) framework for conducting reviews, which suggests a set of questions to guide the review, particularly useful. Our overarching question was: "What is the nature and scope of school governance research published between 1996 and 2016 in South Africa and to what extent is this body of research influenced by the social justice agenda?" To develop a discussion for this review, we identified the following specific questions that guided our analysis:

• What are the volume and distribution of published school governance research?

• What key topics and theoretical constructs underpinned this research?

• What methodological preferences influenced this research?

• To what extent is this body of research influenced by the social justice agenda?

This analysis is expected to make contributions to the literature in three ways: first, by bringing to the fore some key issues that have received research attention and those that have not, we would be highlighting areas in which more knowledge is needed for the benefit of further research. Hallinger (2014) posits that research reviews are critical in providing an understanding of theoretical advances within a particular field while laying a foundation for future knowledge production. Research reviews, thus, "map trends in theory development, methodological applications, and substantive findings to identify productive directions for future research" (Hallinger 2014, 540). Second, we believe that by investigating predominantly used methodologies and theoretical topics covered in school governance research thus far, thereby indirectly exposing the neglected areas, we are facilitating future empirical research. In this regard, we borrow and draw support

from Hallinger and Chen (2015) who state that research reviews "provide a signpost on the path of intellectual development" (2015, 6). Third, by using a framework for school governance research underpinned by principles of social justice, we are advocating a research agenda that provides a useful lens to analysing research in school governance, thereby highlighting the social and structural forces perpetuating inequality in social systems and in social relationships. Collectively, these three ways contribute to the use of different frameworks and methods for analyses in school governance research and in the broader field.

This introduction is followed by a historical overview of school governance in South Africa, after which we outline the methodology adopted in this review. We then present and discuss the findings of the review, its limitations and offer a conclusion.

 

The History of School Governance Policy and Research in South Africa

In this section we provide an overview of school governance policy and research in South Africa. We map and contextualise this within the international landscape, highlighting the different historical moments of school governance policy in other contexts as they influenced trends in school governance research globally.

In terms of the UNESCO (2009) agenda of school governance reform, the South African model has been heralded as one of the most radically reformed (Crouch and Winkler 2008). An extensive account of the history of school governance policy in South Africa is provided in detail in the research of, for example, Motala and Pampallis (2005), Dieltiens (2005) and Sayed and Ahmed (2008), and will not be fully reproduced here. However, it is essential in setting the scene for this review to note that since 1994 in South Africa, school governance has been central to the broader education agenda of open access, equity, democracy and redress, and particularly the transformation of the education system (Motala and Pampallis 2005). As a school governance reform initiative, and of particular relevance to this review, the SASA of 1996 makes provision for the devolution of power from the central to the local (school) level, giving school governing bodies (SGBs) considerable powers on local policy oversight in improving the quality of education. In particular, the SASA promulgates the establishment of school governing bodies whose role includes budgeting, maintenance, application of policy and power over employment of teaching and non-teaching staff. It is in addressing these aspects of school governing that the first governing bodies were elected in 1997, with subsequent elections held every three years since.

It is well known that school governance policy as a reform initiative in South Africa has been driven by the SASA of 1996, under the broader political agenda of transformation and redress driven by the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996b). In this context, the political motive for democratic governance of schools was initiated by the need to provide broad-based participation at the local level, which was deemed essential for the process of transformation (Dieltiens 2005). This broad-based participation was in line with the UNESCO agenda of school governance reform. Naidoo (2005) argues

that the post-apartheid legislation envisioned particular notions of participation and democratisation to inform processes of decentralisation and local school governance. In this sense, decentralisation was associated with greater participation of stakeholders (parents, teachers, school-based staff and learners) in local governance in schools that would promote greater democracy, citizenship, equity and quality in education (Motala and Pampallis 2005; Naidoo 2005). While giving people a voice in the democratic structures might suggest empowerment, we are quite aware that policy does not mandate what matters most, because what happens in schools is less related to the intentions of policy makers than to the knowledge, beliefs, resources, leadership and motivations that operate in local contexts (Darling-Hammond 1998). This implies that the democratisation of the school system does not necessarily correlate with the effectiveness of a policy or programme. As Naidoo (2005) argues, such policy ideals are often sabotaged by, among others, contextual realities, as schools are distinctive and are placed in different geographical locations faced with a barrage of different challenges and characteristics. Hence, implementation rarely happens as planned. Indeed, as Naidoo (2005) further points out, although the common driving agenda for school governance policy was transformation, the apartheid legacy of racial inequality was bound to have a significant influence on the implementation of policy, in view of its inherent inequalities. Hence, the necessity for a socially just reform.

Since the SASA's inception, and the election of the first school governing bodies in 1997, studies have been conducted on the roles, functions and effectiveness of these (Bayat, Louw, and Rena 2014; Clase, Kok, and Van Der Merwe 2007; Mncube and Naicker 2011; Nwosu and Chukwuere 2017). A decade after the inception of the SASA, Motala and Pampallis's (2005) review of literature on aspects of governance including democratic governance and equity suggested a paucity of school governance research. Most recently, a review of the literature on educational leadership and management was conducted to commemorate the 20-year anniversary of the democratic dispensation (Bush and Glover 2016), and to assess the nature of research on school leadership and management. Notably, Bush and Glover's (2016) review of research on school leadership and management addresses school governance as an aspect of school leadership and management, and reveals a trend in the uneasy relationships between school governing bodies and school principals. Perhaps the uneasy relationship is caused by the knowledge gap between the two organs, the management of resources at school level and the fact that the most radical school governance reform policy has been placed in the hands of school governing bodies "as an important part of grassroots democracy" (Bush and Glover 2016, 217). However, in appreciating the importance of grassroots democracy it is critical to note that democracy cannot be easily nurtured and developed without relevant and appropriate education.

A gap exists in the knowledge generated by school governance research. In a recent review of leadership and management literature in Africa, Hallinger (2018) found that school governance research accounted for only 11% of the overall published literature of more than 500 articles. Encouragingly, Hallinger identified changes in school

governance as an area ripe enough to warrant a systematic review. In a previous review, Hallinger and Chen (2015) found that school governance research accounted for 36% of the leadership and management literature in Asia. Hence, we believed that reviewing a body of research on school governance in South Africa would help illuminate theoretical gaps that might provide useful knowledge for the improvement of policy and practice.

 

School Governance and Social Justice

In view of the injustices of the apartheid past and the continuing inequalities in South African education, a social justice lens was necessary in conducting this review. We acknowledge that social justice may not have a universally accepted definition due to its complexity (Connell 2012). Our understanding of social justice is informed by works of Cochran-Smith (2004) and Carlisle, Jackson, and George (2006) whose framing of social justice suggests a process of understanding how social forces, structures and institutions support equity across different social identity groups. This includes how policy, practice and research can be used to liberate and provide equity-informed solutions and how social forces promote equal social relationships (Carlisle, Jackson, and George 2006; Cochran-Smith 2004). Social justice is a preferred framework for understanding the South African context because of its broad sense in dealing with injustices. Cochran-Smith's (2004) work is based on teacher education for social justice, but it helps us in understanding the significance of community-wide inquiry that facilitates the unlearning of problematic discourses of racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice.

Carlisle, Jackson and George (2006) identified principles that we found useful in making sense of the social justice agenda in school governance research in South Africa. These principles include equity and inclusion, relationships to wider community as well as efforts to provide high quality education for students of all backgrounds. These principles are broad and are seen in line with the framework that drives transformation and redress in post-apartheid South Africa. They align with the broader distributional and relational dimensions of social justice, as Connell (2012) confirmed that social justice in education concerns equality in the distribution of educational services as well as the nature of the service itself "and its consequences for society through time" (681). Central to the distribution of educational services is the role of school governance with its responsibility for democratic participation and representation. Nandy (2012) suggests that a socially just education system recognises "that what happens outside the classroom matters as much as what happens in it" (2012, 678).

The SASA gives school managers and governors a direct mandate on the provision of quality education, and a fair and just education system that ensures equity and inclusion for all children from different backgrounds. This makes social justice particularly complex in the South African context, given the old race-based forms of inequity of the apartheid era that are being perpetuated through the new class-based forms of inequity of the post-apartheid dispensation. Indeed, Connell (2012) acknowledges that the

mechanisms of inequality change over time, which explains why racial exclusions of the colonial era have been replaced by class privileges and inequalities of the post-colonial regime. The dimension of social justice relevant in this analysis is a holistic one that takes into consideration all forms of inequality and recognises principles of democratic participation, representation, inclusion and equity. These principles are espoused in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa and inform school governance policy. Indeed, Griffiths (2012) contends that if schools are to be "good places to live" (2012, 233), social justice is not a choice those in education can afford not to make, whether they describe what they do in terms of social justice or not. We were interested in examining the extent to which school governance research has thus far been used to challenge the patterns of social exclusion and oppression, and how it encourages a dialogue that nurtures a socially just education system.

 

Methodology

The article employs a systematic review of existing academic literature on school governance in South Africa published in the country and internationally between 1996 and 2016. Hallinger (2014) argues that there is no single correct approach to determining the suitability of the period of review. However, for us, the chosen period has political significance in that it signalled 20 years of democratic rule and 20 years of school governance policy (RSA 1996a), providing a legitimate rationale for this review. Our search procedure was "bounded" within the identified time frame as well as by other delimitations that are explicitly identified in this review. Hallinger (2014) identifies three types of search procedure: "selective", "bounded" and "exhaustive" (546). We could not possibly claim an exhaustive search due to our delimitation criteria that focused on electronically available material, while the same criteria and the effort put into the search ruled out a selective search. Our search fits the description of a bounded review as it "answers a defined research question by collecting and summarising all empirical evidence that fits pre-specified eligibility criteria" (Hallinger 2014, 546), thereby making our criteria explicit and defensible. Hallinger (2014, 542) outlines at least three ways in which a systematic review differs from a traditional literature review:

• it uses explicit and transparent methods

• it follows a standard set of stages and these are

• accountable, replicable and updateable

Accordingly, we limited the research to articles in peer-reviewed academic journals published after the establishment of the South African Schools Act of 1996 (RSA 1996a). We explicitly identified electronic material to be analysed using an initial search through Google Scholar and the library database. As part of our delimitation criteria, we wanted to focus on material that has been subjected to the scrutiny of peer-review that could be accessed electronically. We excluded theses and dissertations, books and book chapters, as well as government and other research reports not published in peer-reviewed journals. Search words and phrases such as school governance, school governing bodies, governors, educator governors, learner representative councils, democratisation in schools, representation and participation were used. Narrowing the search down to just school governance literature published in peer-reviewed academic journals from 1996 to 2016 gave us a total of 56 articles. We were disappointed with the outcome, as we had expected more. However, it is worth mentioning that some South African journals were not yet available electronically at the time. Although we were disappointed by this outcome, previous reviews (e.g. Hallinger 2014; Leithwood and Jantzi 2005; Leithwood and Sun 2012) suggest that this was a reasonable number of articles for a systematic review. Hallinger (2014) reviewed 38 exemplary review articles; Leithwood and Sun (2012) conducted a meta-analysis of 79 unpublished studies while Leithwood and Jantzi (2005) reviewed 32 articles on transformational leadership. All these reviews, and many more, constitute exemplary reviews that were all published in reputable journals and have been cited repeatedly.

Data Analysis

By way of data analysis, we scanned and extracted from each of the 56 articles specific data on the authors, year of publication, journal, the title and focus of the article, methods employed, main findings and summary of conclusions. In performing this data extraction, we were informed by previous research reviews and, in particular, Hallinger and Chen (2015) and Hallinger (2014) who explain clear processes of data extraction and analysis for systematic research reviews. A clear data extraction and data treatment procedure is a hallmark of a systematic review (Hallinger 2014). We then entered these data into an Excel spreadsheet from which we further generated tables and graphs that we used to represent data quantitatively. Descriptive statistical analysis was used to analyse the data quantitatively to determine frequencies and distribution of publications. The results were represented using tables and graphs that illustrate trends and foci over time.

 

Results

In this section we present the results of our analysis. We do this around the broad questions guiding this review, using them as subheadings and tackling each question in turn. We follow Hallinger (2014) in treating the questions guiding this analysis as part of the conceptual framework around which the key ideas or findings are organised.

What Are the Volume and Distribution of School Governance Research?

In answering the broader question on the nature and extent of publications, we started by examining the rate as well as pattern of publications on school governance. By rate of research, we mean the volume of articles published within the identified period and how this changed over the years. Patterns of publication revealed where the articles were published, whether in local or international journals as well as which journals published the biggest volume of school governance articles. Hallinger (2014) suggests that reviews of research are always undertaken in response to a perceived problem. In our case, our analysis was based on the assumption that there was a huge body of research on school governance that needed acknowledging and examining so that gaps could be identified for further and more informed research. This section presents findings on the rate and patterns of publication of research on school governance.

Publications by Journals

As already suggested, our analysis was limited to academic articles published in peer-reviewed journals. We found 56 journal articles that fit our selection criteria published between 2000 and 2016, which we regarded as a very small number of articles in school governance research. Although the review itself aimed to find articles published from 1996, we found no publications (within our selection criteria) between 1996 and 2000, except for some research reports, dissertations and theses, which did not form part of the analysis. We found that 46 (83%) of the articles were published in national journals and 10 (17%) were published internationally. The diagram below (Figure 1) illustrates the distribution of articles across the journals. Of the 46 locally published articles, 21 (45.6%) of them were published in one journal-the South African Journal of Education (SAJE). The rest of the articles were spread across the different journals, which published between one and four articles in the case of Acta Academia.

 

 

Publications by Year

We were also keen to examine the growth pattern of publications by year. Table 1 below illustrates the number of publications by year group. We note that there was a steady increase of publications in the SAJE between 2003 and 2010 and a decline after that, with only one publication in 2011, one in 2012 and one in 2016. This is an interesting pattern given that there was a general increase of publications (in other journals) after 2011, with the period between 2011 to 2016 having the highest number of publications. The period between 2011 and 2016 saw the highest volume of publications: 22 publications and a total of nine in 2011 alone and seven in 2013. However, the other years saw fewer publications, with one publication in 2012, 2014 and 2016 and three in 2015. A breakdown between the two decades shows the highest volume of publications was in the second decade, with a total of 43 between 2006 and 2016.

 

 

Publications by Province

We were also interested in knowing how research was spread across the provinces and there were some interesting patterns of knowledge production by province, as shown in Figure 2 below. Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal provinces had the highest number of publications at 27.2% and 22.7% respectively, collectively accounting for 50% of all empirical publications. They were followed by the Eastern Cape at 11%, with the Free State and Western Cape sharing fourth place at 9.09%. Given that there are more universities, and therefore more researchers, in Gauteng than in any other province, we were not surprised by the Gauteng province accounting for most of the publications based on empirical research. We also noticed that two of the biggest provinces in terms of number of schools and learners (KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape) were in the top group of provinces accounting for a higher concentration of publications, which could suggest more research activity in these provinces. The Northern Cape had the least number of publications, which could also be attributable to the absence of a university in the province until 2014; it is also the smallest province by population. However, it was a sign of encouragement that there was some scale of knowledge production on school governance in all provinces, albeit to varying degrees.

 

 

Although in the same category as the Northern Cape in terms of universities, Mpumalanga had a higher volume of publications, which could be attributable to the association of the provincial Department of Basic Education with a few Gauteng-based universities. While this analysis gave an indication of provinces where school governance research is being conducted, it inadvertently revealed universities that have more research capacity in the school governance area. It also became apparent that the most productive provinces were associated with more traditional universities, rather than the new universities of technology. This unevenness across the provinces suggests knowledge is being produced in some provinces while very little is produced in others, which could lead to different policy foci or less well-informed foci between provinces.

Distribution of Authorship

Another notable pattern was that authorship emerged to be located in the hands of the same scholars. Provinces that have a higher concentration of publications appear to be dominated by the same authors. For example, in KwaZulu-Natal, the majority of the publications are between two authors, Mncube (5) and Duma (3). Gauteng had a much more diverse group of contributors, but knowledge still appeared concentrated in the hands of a few authors who had more than one article spread over the years (e.g. Heystek 5; Mestry 3) as opposed to once-off publications. Again, given the nature of academic work, we did not find it surprising that the "locus of authorship" (Hallinger 2014, 563) was concentrated in a few authors based within traditional universities. We evidenced a reasonable degree of co-authorship among established and emerging scholars and less between two or more established scholars (e.g. Bush and Heystek). Although we did not analyse this in detail to examine who the authors were and how far they were in their academic careers, we deemed it was a positive indicator of a possible mentoring relationship emerging between established scholars and their research students or younger colleagues. This could suggest the continuance of school governance research beyond the current "gurus", but clearly we would need more data to ascertain the claim. There was also, albeit on a smaller scale, an observable pattern of collaboration between local and international researchers, resulting in some international publications. In his review of research reviews in educational leadership and management, Hallinger (2014) also found a small set of scholars engaging in co-authorship. Thus, although not as widespread as we had anticipated, we found it encouraging that the majority of knowledge producers were researchers based in local South African universities. Collaborations and co-authorships, particularly between established and emerging researchers, ensure that important problems receive sustained focus over a period of time.

What Topics and Theoretical Constructs Underpinned This Research?

We were also interested in exploring general trends of topics covered in school governance research. We asked this question to understand aspects of school governance that attract research interest and what knowledge trends emerge from them. Leithwood and Menzies (1998a) have analysed trends in topic coverage in reviewing the literature on the implementation of site-based management at different times within the evolution of the field. Other reviews on the broader subject of leadership and management have also conducted an analysis of topics studied. Interestingly, school governance has been a topic in some of these previous reviews (e.g. Bush and Glover 2016; Hallinger and Chen 2015), yet we could only identify two reviews that were dedicated to aspects of school governance. Our analysis in this review showed that research has been underpinned by several features that explain the governing body's role, functions and behaviours (such as financial accountability, policy making and legal framework) as well as those that have been influenced by principles of social justice (democratic participation, decentralisation and equity). We grouped different topics into broad classifications whose frequency is illustrated in Table 2 below. The subsections that follow unpack the key themes addressing the above question. It is to be noted that some topics overlap, with some articles addressing several issues that cut across more than one grouping. Hence, the total number of articles does not add up to the total of 56.

 

 

Democratic Participation

The table above shows that democratic participation was the most common topic with the highest number of articles (35), making up 62.5% of all articles. In our classification, we used democratic participation as a broader term encompassing democratic participation, representation, decentralisation and devolution. Unpacking this broader classification revealed that many articles tended to address these concepts together and used a combination of these concepts, hence this classification. We used democratic participation as we felt it represents both the policy standpoint as well as the practical implementation. There is an observable pattern in the earlier articles published between 2001 and 2005 exploring the notion of learner representative councils and the extent of their actual participation in governing bodies. This is perhaps unsurprising given that the SASA (1996) was the first piece of legislation mandating learners' participation in the governance of schools and would have caught researchers' attention. The second pattern we observed in this regard concerns the extent of parental participation given low levels of literacy amongst parents, particularly in rural, informal and some township communities. We noted, however, that the notion of learner and parent participation and/or representation was present in the articles throughout the period of review, with research raising similar issues around the lack of meaningful participation driven mostly by a lack of capacity and illiteracy. However, these analyses hardly moved beyond surface issues and into deeper social justice analysis, suggesting a lack of progress in this area of research.

We observed that issues around decentralisation as a concept were addressed through conceptual studies published mostly in the first decade of the research period that problematised participation and attempted to provide a theoretical explanation. Beckman (2002) and Lewis and Naidoo (2004; 2006) produced conceptual articles providing a critical engagement with decentralisation and devolution of power. It is noticeable that the use of decentralisation as a concept is not as frequent in this body of research, which is surprising given its implications for local decision-making and its dominance in international school governance literature. However, we discern that this is probably indicative of the nature of the problems South Africa is dealing with in school governance. The SASA outlines the roles and functions of school governing bodies underpinned by principles of democratic participation and decentralisation. Yet, research focuses more on participation and/or representation that is harmed by a lack of clear understanding of the governance role and parents' illiteracy, particularly in rural areas (see Bantwini, Moorosi, and Diko 2017). The dominance of school principals in the governing bodies and the illiteracy of parents (mostly in rural areas) prevent the latter's full participation, leading to tensions between governors and principals (Bush and Glover 2016). This issue has had permanent presence in the articles both conceptually and empirically, arguably due to contextual challenges that individual schools, and to some extent districts and provinces, are facing. We engage this aspect a little further in the discussion below.

Equity, Exclusion and Social Justice

The findings from Table 2 above show that there were five articles that directly addressed issues related to social justice, making up only 8.9% of the overall sample. These articles were published between 2008 and 2015. There was at least one article addressing gender and two addressing social justice directly and noticeably written by one person (Mncube 2008; Mncube, Harber, and Du Plessis 2011). Although at least one article made specific reference to black parents, it was a form of categorisation and not a race issue. None of the articles addressed racial issues explicitly or even under the banner of diversity. We found this surprising given the racial tension in many of the schools, particularly the relative under-representation of African parents in former model C schools and in some cases former Indian and Coloured schools. This observation is particularly striking as black parents are highly under-represented in some of the former model C schools, despite the reports that suggest that the African learner population has increased. Two other articles in this category were about inclusion and equity. We revisit this issue again in one of the sections below.

Financial Accountability

Financial accountability is another topic that received significant attention during this period, and this topic was addressed in 8.9% of publications. Mestry (2004; 2006) explores the role of the governing body in managing the school's finances and shows how the school principals end up taking charge, perhaps due to lack of clarity of policy and parents' inability to understand finances. Indeed, one of the significant challenges experienced by governing bodies revolves around financial management, which ironically brings the issue of representation and participation back through the back door. Fundraising is a key function of the SGB stipulated by the SASA, which in the reality of most contexts suggests parents' inability to carry out such functions. Several other studies were conducted on aspects of governance, including the assessment of the implementation of the SASA, which we see largely through conceptual papers that were part of this review. Bush and Glover's (2016) review found an uneasy relationship between principals and governing bodies as one of the features of research on educational leadership and management in South Africa. Although school governance was not their exclusive focus, their finding is important as it characterises school governance research thus far.

Legal Framework and Policy Making

We combine legal framework and policy making as we find them related. Collectively, articles under this category represent a total of 28.5%. Many of the legal framework articles raise important questions about the application and interpretation of legislation that have implications for the implementation of policy on the local school level. This is a significant part of the literature that examines policy reviews and analyses (e.g. Serfontein 2010; Squelch 2001) as well as some legal implications. For example, Serfontein (2010) and Beckman and Prinsloo (2009) analyse cases where the governing bodies were taken to court because of the misapplication of the law. We found these findings particularly interesting given the foundation of the South African Constitution that underpins most legal frameworks including the SASA.

What Methodological Preferences Have Influenced the Research on School Governance?

In asking this question, we were interested in methodological patterns of published school governance research over the years. Our analysis revealed a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, with the scale tilting in favour of qualitative case studies. From the 56 articles analysed, 29 of them used qualitative methods while nine employed quantitative methods and a total of 16 were conceptual studies not based on primary data. Only two of these studies used mixed methods, which we found surprising given the surge in the use of mixed methods in recent years. The following diagram (Figure 3) illustrates this representation in percentages:

 

 

A preference for qualitative methods was also identified by Hallinger and Chen (2015) and Hallinger (2018) in their reviews of literature on educational leadership and management in Asia and Africa, respectively. We found that within the qualitative articles, there was considerable reliance on snapshot case studies using interviews and observations. We recognise the value of such studies as they are based on real life settings and offer a direct understanding of issues that affect the quality of learning. For example, studies by Lewis and Naidoo (2006), Heystek and Nyambi (2007) and Mncube, Harber, and Du Plessis (2011) are qualitative case studies that help illuminate the power relations inherent in the functioning of school governing bodies. While most of these studies lack generalisability, studies that report primarily on qualitative case studies are helpful as they tend to report on a wider range of school conditions. We acknowledge their worth and value in research, but we also note the absence of longitudinal studies that would perhaps provide a deeper understanding of the governing body functioning over a full three-year term.

With regard to the quantitative studies, we found that despite being quantitative in nature, these studies usually had quite a small sample base. The largest quantitative survey had a sample of just over 1000 participants and involved several groups of participants. Although this was large enough to enable some level of generalisability, it was an anomaly in our review sample as the average sample comprised 200 participants. Moreover, these surveys also usually focused on perceptions of educators on some issues concerning the governing bodies and hardly on observation of governance or governing. Perhaps this should not be surprising given that educators can be accessed in higher numbers than the governing body members within any one school. In terms of analysis of data, we found that statistical analysis was mostly limited to descriptive statistics and there was no higher level of analysis that enabled correlations and or other forms of comparative analysis.

Conceptual articles comprised policy analyses, literature reviews and other non-empirical analyses. Out of a total of 16 articles in this category, at least one article was based on a review of literature on school governance (Joubert 2009) and the majority were policy analyses. We also note that Joubert's review was a commissioned response as part of a larger scale project and so more of a comprehensive literature review than systematic review of research. Within the policy analysis articles there was an observable focus on the legal framework and analysis of the law and its implications for the functioning of school governing bodies. We were not surprised by the overwhelming focus on policy analysis given the policy emphasis in South Africa since the beginning of the new dispensation and its policy change. We were surprised, however, by the high proportion of conceptual articles, albeit at a lower frequency than empirically based articles, which is consistent with Hallinger's (2014) and Hallinger and Chen's (2015) observation.

Overall, while it was encouraging to find more studies based on empirical primary data, case studies and small-scale quantitative studies do not always provide a good basis for policy implications. Hallinger (2018) argues that a "continued reliance on relatively 'weak quantitative methods' will inhibit the development of a robust African knowledge base" (2018, 78). Notably, there were no studies conducted on a longitudinal basis, which could suggest trends within, for example, a three-year term of an elected governing body. Hallinger (2014) also argues that the density and scope of empirical research literature in any case must reach a critical mass before it can be ready for systematic review. Perhaps this explains the presence of only one research review paper in the identified period, and that even on a global scale we could identify no more than two reviews of literature on the school governance aspect alone, both by the same authors (Leithwood and Menzies 1998a; 1998b). However, it is notable that one of the reviews based on the South African literature (Bush and Glover 2016) addressed school governance as a subtopic and a more recent review by Hallinger (2018), on the African continent, marked school governance as an area developed enough to warrant a systematic review.

To What Extent Does the Social Justice Agenda Influence School Governance Research?

The direct classification of equity, exclusion and social justice received the least attention (8.9%). However, if we take the broader social justice definition in the South African context collectively to include equity, democratic participation and representation, 71.4% of the reviewed material on the surface appears to be addressing some elements of social justice. However, the explicit engagement with social justice as a framework including mention of the social justice construct was evident in only two of the reviewed articles, notably by the same author. Thus, we observe a gap in the use of social justice analysis in school governance research despite the overwhelming focus on democratic participation. This is evidently a gap that needs attention from researchers in this area and we want to take this opportunity to call for more research that asks high impact questions on social justice. In view of the inherent inequalities in South Africa, research that is underpinned by social justice principles should challenge oppressive assumptions, attitudes and behaviours rather than just explain the cause of problems. Carlisle, Jackson, and George (2006, 57) contend that "schools promote equity and inclusion within the schools and the larger community by addressing all forms of social oppression". In the South African context, Mncube (2008) and Heystek (2011) help us acknowledge that by focusing on democratic participation and representation school governance is already underpinned by principles of social justice. However, if we are to argue for quality education that caters for the needs of the diverse South African society, we need to look beyond democratic representation and ask more directed questions into the different ways in which inequalities and inequities are reproduced within the education system. We argue that school governance is one such area where post-colonial and post-apartheid power imbalances reside, exerting control through hegemonic cultures and class privileged forms of governing. What we need is direct application of social justice theory in conducting school governance research so that we can begin to ask important questions that interrupt rather than maintain the social order. As Connell (2012) suggests, we all need to take responsibility in creating a socially just education system.

It should be borne in mind that the review focused only on the topics and abstracts and not the details of content. Thus, the extent to which school governance research promotes equity either within governance structures themselves or in the provision of education in general would be worth exploring in greater depth in existing research and through new empirical research. Previous international research has problematised the participation and representation of governors on the governing bodies (Brehony 1992; Deem, Brehony, and Heath 1995), with Brehony (1992) highlighting the material and cultural inequalities that prevent equal decision-making in schools. Deem, Brehony, and Heath (1995) argue that the centrality of power relations in school governing body practices make it impossible for governors to act as "critical citizens". These issues are relevant to the South African context and resonate with some of the local literature in existence. This makes school governance a fertile space for social justice work, which should be carried out more explicitly.

Our analysis reveals a significant presence of school governance research, even though we had expected more. It also reveals a gap with regard to longitudinal research that could offer informed insights on the operations of school governing bodies. Heystek (2011) argues that while the three-year term of a school governing body does not give the elected body enough time to master their roles, it does send a "strong representative and democratic message" (2011, 465). We would like to reiterate the call for more nuanced engagement with school governance research that not only helps us understand the functioning of the school governance system, as Motala and Pampallis (2005) suggest, but also helps us improve the field and make it more equity driven and socially just.

 

Limitations

In the context of the broad findings presented above, we wish to revisit and highlight a few important limitations inherent in our approach to this review. The first limitation concerns the nature of the database we used in the review and the underwhelming volume of reviewed articles compared with the possible existing corpus. We used one main database, Google Scholar, and relied only on material that is electronically available. Methodologically, this is adequate as it indicates a scientific approach to data collection. However, while this may have worked for the purposes we wanted to achieve, we do realise that a whole range of relevant literature available in print journals, research reports, books and book chapters as well as theses and dissertations has been left out of this review. We have reason to believe that, while inclusion of such material would have increased the volume (scope) of review material, it may not have added a different dimension to the patterns in the nature of research published on school governance. Notwithstanding, this review serves as an important starting point for the identification of gaps.

Second, a further delimitation involved the use of search words and phrases. The search phrase was limited to articles containing "school governance" or "school governing bodies in South Africa" or other descriptors that suggested the functioning, role, behaviour or school governors such as "educator governors", "learner representative councils", and "democratisation in schools" within the title. This facilitated a systematic search of electronic educational journals in South Africa and every other journal where at least one article on school governance in South Africa was found, finally leading to a systematic identification of the articles that constituted a corpus for this review. We acknowledge that our search criteria, and particularly the use of certain phrases and exclusive focus on digitised and electronically available material, omitted other potentially relevant publications; it was, however, the most efficient way to ensure consistency, systematicity and manageability of the review material.

Third, we recognise that school governance is hardly a standalone field, but a subfield or an aspect of the broader leadership and management literature. A significant body of knowledge on school governance could be embedded in the broader literature, since we did not conduct a thorough search of all educational journals in South Africa and all educational leadership and management journals globally. Our search led us to 24 journals out of a much wider range of journals to which South African researchers have access for publication. A search by findings, rather than certain words and phrases in the title as we did, could have possibly elicited more available research material. We would encourage future researchers and reviewers to consider more carefully the findings reported in the studies as some knowledge on school governance may be implicit within the broader field.

Lastly, we limited our search to articles published in the English language. South Africa has 11 official languages and, while it is improbable that material could be published in all of them, there were articles published in Afrikaans that we deliberately excluded from the review for consistency. We acknowledge that this review examined only a portion of a possible corpus of existing research and would like to encourage further reviews to take that body of knowledge into consideration.

 

Conclusion

All the above notwithstanding, the review was a necessary and useful exercise in identifying patterns of local knowledge on school governance. Although we assumed that the body of research would be large, contrary to what we found, we wanted to synthesise the results that could help examine the nature and extent of published school governance research. Taking stock of published research on school governance seemed appropriate and timely; we want to encourage more reviews and sustained conversations on important aspects of school governance, conversations that are informed by evidence that is collected in methods befitting the twenty-first century.

 

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1 Dr Itumeleng Molale passed away on 9 August 2020 while this manuscript was in review.
2 Kooiman (2003) provided first order, second order and third order locations of actors in governance, which Kooiman and Jentoft (2009) further elaborated on.

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ARTICLE

 

Tackling Xenophobia through Dialogue: A Freirean Approach

 

 

Vaughn Mitchell John

University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa johnv@ukzn.ac.za https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4117-7120

 

 

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ABSTRACT

The deadly violence associated with xenophobia has become a concern in South Africa, a country with historically high levels of violence. This article explores the role that peace education can play in mitigating such conflict. Using Paulo Freire's theorisation of dialogue in education, it discusses a peace education intervention that developed participatory workshops to foster dialogue between South Africans and their neighbours of foreign origin soon after the second wave of violence in South Africa in 2015. The article discusses the curriculum and pedagogical intent of the workshops through a theoretical framing of dialogue, how participants and facilitators responded to such plans and what learning and action were generated from these workshops. The experiences of participants and facilitators reveal a preliminary stage of deepening understandings in terms of reviewing rigid us/them dichotomies and identities, and reviewing stereotypical understandings of causes of conflict. The final section offers some critical reflections on the workshop design and the role of such interventions in relation to goals of broader social change. Some recommendations for future workshops in light of the need for psychosocial support generated by the workshop process are offered.

Keywords: dialogue; participatory pedagogy; xenophobia; peace education; South Africa; Paulo Freire

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Introduction

South Africa has exceptionally high levels of violence. The country has some of the highest rates of murder and gender-based violence recorded anywhere in the world. Violence is also a regular part of life in educational institutions, such as schools and universities (John 2016). In the past decade, violence associated with xenophobia has been added to the country's notoriety. Globally, political and economic instability is giving rise to larger populations of refugees and migrants, matched by rising tensions between local and foreign nationals, as well as rising xenophobia. What role can peace education play in mitigating such conflict (Bekerman and Zembylas 2010; John 2016)? This article reports on a peace education intervention that developed participatory workshops to foster dialogue between South Africans and their neighbours of foreign origin soon after the violence that occurred in 2015.

Media coverage of xenophobia gains prominence in periods of extremely violent outbreaks, such as those of 2008 and 2015, when attacks on foreign nationals left many dead and even more displaced. Research on such violence, while growing, tends to provide expert perspectives or victim/survivor-only perspectives. There is no published research to date that has attempted to bring foreign nationals and South Africans into conversation with one another about the experiences of both groups living together in South Africa and about the conflicts experienced and reported as xenophobia. This article reports on an intervention that brought foreign nationals and South Africans, living in the same community space or in close proximity to each other, into workshops designed to generate dialogue between the two groups about their lives, livelihoods and the challenges they face. The workshops employed participatory pedagogy to develop a safe, trusting environment, which could foster critical reflections and honest dialogue. It sought to conscientise and lay foundations for discussing solutions and actions to address the challenges identified by both groups.

After setting out the context of violence and xenophobia in South Africa and reviewing related literature, the article introduces a Freirean lens on dialogue for a later discussion of the design, implementation and revisions made to a set of workshops developed in an action-research project on xenophobia. The focus in this article is on the curriculum and pedagogical intent of the workshops, how participants and facilitators responded to such plans and what learning and action were generated from these workshops for both project partners and participants. These experiences will be discussed as two themes related to deepening understandings in terms of reviewing rigid us/them dichotomies and identities and stereotypical understandings of causes of conflict. This workshop process, however, generates memories of trauma for participants and the need for psychosocial support. In light of this third theme, the final section offers some critical reflections on the workshop design and makes recommendations for future workshops. This article offers insights into the challenging but important task of designing a participatory educational intervention that allows for safe yet critical dialogue in exploring the multiple and contested perspectives on xenophobia. These insights have implications for educational programmes that seek to build social cohesion, peace and social justice.

 

Violence and Xenophobia in South Africa

South Africa is known for high levels of interpersonal, political and structural violence. Much of this is a legacy of the brutal colonial and apartheid eras. Since 2008, mass violence against foreign nationals was added to this country's repertoire of violence in the post-apartheid period. While standard definitions of xenophobia refer to "the fear and hatred of foreigners" (Solomon and Kosaka 2013), in South Africa the very term xenophobia is contested and often denied. Antagonism towards and discrimination against foreign nationals from Africa had been reported for a number of years prior to the deadly attacks (Human Rights Watch 1998). Such antagonism manifested in attacks in May 2008. This first wave of mass violence began in the townships of Johannesburg, but quickly spread to other parts of the country. Approximately 60 foreign nationals were killed, and many more were injured and displaced. A second outbreak of attacks in 2015 began in KwaZulu-Natal, and is reported to have resulted in seven deaths, much fear, destruction and displacement. A third of those killed in 2008 and three of the seven people killed in 2015 were South Africans who were attacked because of their physical resemblances to and association with foreign nationals. The 2015 violence prompted the creation of a partnership of concerned organisations in Pietermaritzburg that developed the intervention discussed in this article.

There have been several studies of xenophobia and its violent manifestations in South Africa. A substantial part of this literature attempts to explain the causes of the violence (Amusan and Mchunu 2017; Human Rights Watch 1998; Matsinhe 2011; Mutanda 2017; Neocosmos 2010; Reddy 2012; Steenkamp 2009). A specific focus within explanatory accounts probes the relationship between xenophobia and racism (Fernando 1993; Langa and Kiguwa 2016; Tafira 2011; Wimmer 1997). This literature is particularly pertinent to the South African context given the country's history of racialised oppression and the fact that black Africans from neighbouring countries have almost exclusively been targeted in attacks. Some studies have explored the effects of xenophobia on economic development, human rights and social cohesion (Chen 2015; Crush and Ramachandran 2010; Steenkamp 2009). Another focus of studies has been on the media's role in both promoting xenophobia and how it has reported on the attacks (Els 2013; Smith 2011).

Education has been explored in different ways in relation to xenophobia, in terms of how education in general may be a preventative force (Hjerm 2001), how xenophobia plays out in educational contexts such as schools and higher education institutions (Hale, Kransdorf, and Hamer 2011; Jasson 2016; Kang' ethe and Wotshela 2015; Murara 2011; Pithouse-Morgan et al. 2012), and how education may be used in response to xenophobia as part of interventions such as the one explored in this article (Mati 2011). This last section of the literature on educational interventions in response to xenophobia is underdeveloped, raising the potential contribution of the current article to future intervention-oriented studies in South Africa and elsewhere.

The studies by Neocosmos (2010) and Chigeza et al. (2013) are noteworthy in that they engage directly with the experiences of African migrants in South Africa. Likewise, Mati (2011) reports on how the Umoja wa Afrika Human Rights Peer Education Programme with young people in Cape Town contributed to participants' critical awareness of their rights as well as the rights of others. Participants found the diverse composition of the group, the workshop design and participatory pedagogy enabling factors of critical awareness of xenophobia. Mati explains that

participatory learning methodologies including learning through diversity and group dynamics; learning through storytelling and personal testimonies; learning through activities and reflection; and learning through an accompanying facilitation style [drawn from the values of liberation theology] were identified as important in fostering such learning. (Mati 2011, 60)

The present article also discusses the composition of workshop participants, workshop design and participatory pedagogy that included storytelling, dialogue and critical reflection. This article thus contributes to the ongoing work on understanding xenophobia and the neglected work on developing interventions in response. Furthermore, this intervention explored how local and foreign nationals understand the conflict and what they propose could be done to avoid further conflict.

Exploring Educational Interventions on Xenophobia through a Freirean Lens on Dialogue

The work of the radical Brazilian theorist, Paulo Freire, provides an ideal lens for examining an educational intervention on xenophobia. Freire's educational theory, best expressed in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), proceeded from concerns about oppression and injustice. Freire believed that education, employing critical pedagogy, could serve as a counter to the alienation and dehumanisation of oppressive political and educational systems. Some key concepts of Freirean critical pedagogy are critical reflection and dialogue, which when combined with action or struggle generate what Freire called praxis. Gadotti (1996, xi) elaborates on this kind of dialogue:

For Paulo Freire, dialogue is not just the encounter of two subjects who look for the meaning of things-knowledge-but an encounter which takes place in praxis-in action and reflection-in political engagement, in the pledge for social transformation.

Rule (2004) echoes the linking of dialogue to an "explicit political agenda of liberation from oppression" (324). Xenophobia in South Africa constitutes such oppression. Freire (1970) identified several essential conditions for such dialogue to occur, which include profound love, humility, faith, hope, courage and critical thinking. It is important to examine which of these conditions were evident in the workshops discussed in this article.

Freire's critical pedagogy in general and the concept of dialogue in particular have had a strong influence in the fields of radical, alternative and popular education (Rule 2004), as well as peace education (Bekerman and Zembylas 2010; John 2016). Rule (2004) has traced the genealogy of the concept of dialogue across seminal theorists such as Plato, Buber, Bakhtin, Habermas, and Freire, and proposed the concept of dialogic space for theorising popular education projects in apartheid South Africa. This notion of dialogic space is adopted in this article to discuss the workshops we designed. In subsequent writing, Rule (2011) identifies dialogue as having ontological and ethical import, in that "dialogue is something that characterizes authentic human beings and their relationships as they strive to become, as they engage in their ontological vocation of being human" (930). Given that xenophobia often involves the dehumanisation of the Other, authentic dialogue could be seen as an important process of recognising the Other as human and fulfilling one's own vocation of becoming more human. The concept of alienation is relevant to this discussion. Freire saw the denial or suppression of the fundamentally human qualities of love, humility, faith, hope, courage and critical thinking as causing alienation. In South Africa, where many foreign nationals are officially designated alien, xenophobia strips away the essential basis of being human and leads to alienation. We thus have a context of dual alienation, politically and socially.

Dialogue has been harnessed in peace education to help build better relationships between groups in conflict. Drawing on the work of Freire, Bekerman and Zembylas (2010) employed dialogue in workshops with Israeli and Palestinian teachers to transform perpetrator-victim narratives. They report some value from this process when workshop participants are sensitised to the suffering of others. They further note the importance of critical thinking, highlighting that "criticality may be used in the context of facilitated dialogues ... to expand opportunities for reflection, change, and identity work among conflicting groups" (590). These findings on exposure to suffering and criticality have relevance for analysing the use of dialogue in the intervention we developed.

 

An Intervention to Explore Xenophobia towards Action

In 2015, just after the second wave of xenophobic violence, a partnership between staff of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and two non-governmental organisations, namely the Pietermaritzburg Agency for Community Action (PACSA) and Sinomlando, was formed to explore ways of monitoring the violence and contributing to its end. Initial discussions led to a funding proposal being developed. By the time the funds for a project were raised in 2016, the violence had abated, and we explored how we could redesign a project that could still make a positive contribution.

We decided that in-depth engagement with both local nationals and foreign nationals in workshops over several days, rather than the more limited engagements allowed by typical interviews and focus groups, would give us the best chance of understanding the complexity and contestations around xenophobia and identifying solutions. Such a process was also seen as necessary for creating a trusting environment, which would allow for any psychosocial support that needs to be addressed. A key influence shaping this process was the intent of the partners for the study to be located in the critical paradigm, which allows for power dynamics to be critically interrogated, for the research team and partners to be fully involved in the process and for goals of conscientisation and improvement to be realised. Typical of critical paradigm research, we wanted to deepen our understanding of the phenomenon but to do so in a manner that would also deepen the understanding of the participants and foster dialogue about how relationships could be improved. The Freirean concepts of dialogue and conscientisation are noteworthy in the project objectives.

Important objectives/outcomes for the project included:

• Creating a space for dialogue between local nationals and foreign nationals

• Developing a better understanding of "xenophobia" and how it was variably perceived

• Conscientising participants towards a deeper understanding of the causes of violence

• Providing psychosocial support to workshop participants as the need arose

• Ensuring that decision makers (government, media, churches, NGOs) become aware of different perspectives that may inform future policy.

(From UKZN Ethical Clearance Application, 2 April 2016)

A division of responsibilities was agreed to among the partners regarding an ethical clearance application, project and financial management, negotiating with gatekeepers and recruiting participants, preparing for workshop facilitation and providing psychosocial support to participants. The adult education team took overall responsibility for developing the workshops, associated resources and preparing the team of three facilitators to run the workshops.

 

Workshop Design

We decided to work with two communities, an inner-city community and a peri-urban community. We saw it as important that for each community we would have roughly equal numbers of South Africans and foreign nationals and that there would be three workshops for each community (a total of 6 workshops). The first two workshops would be with each group on their own, within a residential setting. The third workshop brought both groups together for a single day. The workshop structure for the inner-city community included two days with foreign nationals only, two days with South Africans only, and one day where there was a combination of foreign nationals and South Africans. This workshop had a total of 19 participants (11 foreign nationals, 8 South Africans; 8 men and 11 women). The foreign nationals included citizens of Malawi (2), Democratic Republic of Congo (4), Burundi (3), Rwanda (1) and Tanzania (1).

Our reflections on the first round of workshops with the inner-city group alerted us to the need for more time for dialogue between the groups and the added benefits of having both groups interacting in residence overnight. Accordingly, the revised workshop structure for the peri-urban community included one day with foreign nationals only, one day with South Africans only, and three days with a combination of foreign nationals and South Africans. This workshop had a total of 16 participants (8 foreign nationals, 8 South Africans; 9 women and 7 men). The foreign nationals included citizens of Malawi (6) and Swaziland (2).

It is important to understand this change when considering the workshop design, the main focus of this article. Ideas for the workshop design were generated collaboratively at a meeting of the partners and then mapped out in a detailed workshop guide. We aimed for a guide that would provide the different facilitators with step-by-step directions on the workshop process, but which would also help them to facilitate dialogue and participation.

 

Key Workshop Design Features and Pedagogy

It is not possible to present and discuss all the aspects of the workshop design in an article such as this. However, because of goals of contributing to social justice and peace, I am willing to share the full workshop guide with anyone who contacts me at johnv@ukzn.ac.za. For the purposes of this article, I will identify some key features of the workshop design and participatory pedagogy and thereafter discuss participant and facilitator experiences of these workshops.

In light of the context, contested perspectives on causes of the violence and how to name it, and the outcomes of conscientisation, deepening understanding and action presented earlier, our workshop design aimed to provide the following:

• A safe space to get to know one another, tell one's story and express one's views free of embarrassment and recriminations

• Opportunities to listen to and engage with the stories and views of others

• Opportunities to deepen understandings of issues through dialogue

• Space to challenge and revise understandings

• Prospects to build common understandings and shared identity as appropriate

• Prospects for exploring and planning creative solutions.

While these goals resonate with the Freirean approach discussed earlier, they also align strongly with those identified by Lum (2013, 218) when she observes that the pedagogies and goals of peace educators often seek to "inspire creativity, reflective thinking, criticality, perspective taking, diversity, holistic problem-solving ... attentive listening, cooperation, [and] communicative dialogue".

A fair amount of time was spent at the start of the workshop introducing the partners, funding arrangements, the purpose and programme of the workshop, gaining consent, establishing ground rules, and dealing with translation. Apart from this workshop setup and administration and some games and social activities discussed later, five main activities formed the core of the workshop. These five participatory and small group activities were deemed to give us the best chance of giving effect to the above-mentioned goals.

 

Activity 1: Peoples' Compass and Introductions of Participants

Two initial activities allowed participants to get to know one another and demonstrated journeys of migration.

For the Peoples' Compass, an imaginary map of Africa was identified on the floor. The position of north was then identified and all participants were asked to walk to the position on this map that represents where they originally came from. This generated a buzz of discussion as people discussed where they had come from and how to position themselves. Once at their position of origin, each person was asked to walk their journey to their current location in South Africa, explaining the route they took. For foreign nationals, this journey involved movement and stops across a few countries in Africa. For South Africans, this also involved movement across provinces in South Africa. In the revised workshop design this activity was done in the combined workshop and was very helpful in revealing a common identity of being a migrant of some sort for all participants, foreign nationals and South Africans alike.

The next step of this activity required each person to find someone that they did not know from another position on the map, to interview them and then introduce their partner to the wider group. This was important to start the process of sharing and listening and getting to know one another. It also ensured that everyone spoke.

 

Activity 2: River of Life

This participatory activity gets participants to reflect on their lives and to draw their life story as a river on a large sheet of newsprint paper using coloured pens. The facilitators showed participants an example and then asked them to creatively portray their lives as a river. They were able to represent both positive and negative life events through turns, rapids, confluences, and blockages etcetera in the river. Participants were free to choose what aspects of their lives they wanted to share.

Each person then presented their River of Life to the group unhindered.

In a subsequent step, after a break, there was a discussion on "How I feel about what I see in the Rivers of Life". This session allowed for feelings to be aired and processed and moved into a group analysis of significant and common events in the lives of participants. This analysis was deepened when facilitators asked participants to identify the underlying causes of life events, allowing for critical analysis of factors such as oppression, structural violence, culture, and patriarchy. With good facilitation, such a session allowed for probing of events that are absent in the Rivers of Life and why this may be so.

 

Activity 3: Community Enablers and Disablers

This activity involved each group, local and foreign nationals separately, discussing and identifying community enablers and disablers. They were given pieces of green cardboard on which they wrote about "What builds our community" (community enablers). On pink cards they wrote about "What breaks our community" (community disablers). Each set of green and pink cards was then thematically grouped and stuck on the wall. Each group had to identify the most common or serious community enablers and disablers.

In smaller groups participants then discussed: "What is behind the common themes?"

Each group then selected one key disabler for further analysis, identifying its causes and consequences. In plenary a list of all the underlying causes of community disablers was constructed. In this session participants were encouraged to move beyond stereotypes, to look for complexity, to explore multiple perspectives and a range of causes related to economic, social, political, historical and geographic factors. Participants were also encouraged to work with authentic personal experiences of disablers rather than hearsay or secondary evidence.

To make this exploration concrete, participants then selected one example of a recent conflict related to a key disabler and discussed its features. They were required to identify stages of conflict, its progression and consequences. They also identified parties, stakeholders and their roles in the conflict.

 

Activity 4: What Can We Do Together to Build Community?

This activity also involved group work building on enablers identified in the previous activity. However, here we arranged participants into small groups with a mix of local and foreign nationals and a mix of genders. Groups discussed and identified four key ideas for building community.

Each group then reported back on their discussion and list, leading to plenary discussion.

A final step of this activity, also in mixed small groups, allowed participants to discuss and plan two short-term actions that participants could engage in jointly in the next month and two long-term collaborative actions/projects. Each group's plan was then shared with the whole group.

This activity took place towards the end of the workshop and allowed for more forward-looking, action-oriented and collaborative dialogue to ensue.

 

Games and Social Activities

Interspersed throughout the workshop programme were some games and social activities to allow for lighter, fun interaction and breaks from serious and painful sharing. The revised three-day combined residential workshop allowed for more of this and for informal interactions over meals and in the evenings while in residence together. While games foregrounded the importance of collaboration and teamwork and were briefly unpacked, their primary purpose was to allow joint participation in a fun activity. Additionally, a Cultural Concert was planned for the final evening of the three-day combined workshop as a way of promoting cultural exchange and diversity through song, poetry and dance.

 

Deepening Understanding through Dialogue

The workshops were designed to create a safe space to share one's story and views and to listen to those of others. The primary objective was to create a space for dialogue in order to foster opportunities for critical thinking and deepening of understandings. Our reflections on the workshop process and analysis of the workshop transcripts indicate that the design did establish such a space for dialogue and accompanied critical thinking. These processes also show signs of initial positive shifts in understandings. While such workshop outcomes are welcomed in terms of Freire's promotion of dialogue, the sustainability of new understandings and how they may shape broader social change warrant further discussion. A further workshop outcome, of evoking painful memories, also prompts deeper analysis and recommendations for future workshops. Each of these outcomes is discussed and illustrated below.

Much of the reflections on the workshop from the project partners shared in this section emerged at a day-long review workshop held after all the workshops had been completed and transcripts and reports were available. This workshop was held to draw out key findings and to make recommendations to be shared at the roundtable forum planned as one of the end points of the project. For the roundtable, the press, local NGOs, the city mayor and various government department officials were invited to engage with participants and the project partners on the findings. We decided on a roundtable rather than a seminar as we saw this as part of an action-oriented process that would allow for another level of dialogue between participants and people in positions of power and influence over their lives, as well as other stakeholders. A roundtable suited the critical paradigm and advocacy goals of the project.

 

Reviewing Rigid "Us/Them" Dichotomies and Identities

Much of the popular discourse on the relationships between foreign nationals and local nationals is negative and involves polarised identities and accounts. This is characterised by strong "us versus them" constructions. There is deep and hostile Othering involved in these accounts. Another feature of this narrative is the identification of separate identities of foreigner and local, victim and perpetrator, and "good guys and bad guys". Without opportunities for safe and constructive dialogue this discourse is allowed to spread and become the dominant, polarising narrative. The workshops allowed us to see some shifts from this narrative after a short time and the emergence of what could become a counter-narrative if supported and allowed to grow. This counter-narrative is perhaps best expressed by one of the project partners in his notes on the first day of the workshop when he wrote: "A positive outcome of the first day is the discovery that 'I am not alone'" (Partner 1).

Below are several reflections that capture the softening of hard, polarised characterisations and the recognition of common experiences and identities. Importantly, three different workshop activities are mentioned as triggers of dialogue and deepened understandings.

The initial activity of the People's Compass was helpful in revealing that most people in the workshop had moved from their place of birth at some point in their lives and some had crossed borders. The following statements of two project partners illustrate the common experience of migration and accompanying fluidity of identity this creates:

Migrant and local are not distinct categories. Some locals are migrants and some migrants, like this Malawian, are locals. (Partner 1)

I am thinking of the children [of migrants born in SA]. How can you tell a child that he does not belong in South Africa [when the child says] "I have never been in Tanzania!"? (Partner 5)

The following comments, this time with reference to the River of Life activity, again reveal shared experiences and softening of us/them or victim/perpetrator dichotomies. This re-narrativatisation is discussed later. The final comment by a project partner makes explicit the connection between a safe, dialogic space and authentic sharing.

Both groups shared their struggles in the River of Life exercise:

The phenomenon of fractured families is widespread. It is not a question of good and bad guys. (Partner 1)

We do the big crimes and the foreigners do the petty crimes. It is the same thing with the stories of foreigners who impregnate women. (South African national)

We are not all angels. Not everybody is against us. (Foreign national)

Not all foreigners are innocent, sometimes some of us are perpetrators. ... Even it is important to note that there are differences between foreigners that can trigger the violence and sometimes it is blaming others/forgetting about ourselves. (Foreign national)

Members of both groups are self-reflective and self-critical. Both admit that there [are] criminals among them, whether foreigners and locals. When one creates the right space, people become less defensive. (Partner 1)

There were several indications of challenges to polarised and homogenised conceptions of the Other and acknowledgement of non-conflictual relationships. A third activity (Community Enablers and Disablers) was also identified as helpful and adopted in other work of one of the NGO partners:

The value of enablers and disablers from a methodological point of view. It elicits important information on the relationship between locals and foreigners. This concept was introduced by CAE [Centre for Adult Education] and is now used by Sinomlando. (Partner 5)workshop somebody defined xenophobia as

Just to come back to what my sister said, we don't need to blame only South Africans, so what we need to understand is the cause of that behaviour and I am sure when we understand, when we sit down together and talk we will come up with something very consistent. (Foreign national)

There is a difference between the fact and the representation of the fact. Hence the need to create a space for dialogue. . The problem is when we essentialise behaviours. The same happened with the genocide in Rwanda. The Tutsi were categorised as clever, arrogant . (Partner 1)

There was even mention that the changed understandings as a result of the workshop were impacting behaviour outside the workshop:

At Cinderella Park when a foreigner was attacked by a local, the locals intervened to stop this abuse as a result of the workshop. Before they said that they would not interfere. I heard it from Adam [pseudonym], the leader, and the mother of one of the participants. That was last week. (Partner 9)

 

Reviewing Stereotypical Understandings of the Causes of Conflict

The previous section discussed shifts in how participants started to view one another. A further significant and related shift we observed was in terms of how participants understood the sources of challenges they faced and causes of conflict. Here we noticed a move from homogeneous and stereotypical understandings to more heterogeneous and complex understandings. The dialogue appeared to open up a space for less defensive and blameful positions to nuance, critical thinking and self-criticism.

There are indications that common stereotypes and simplistic understandings on the sources of conflict were more critically interrogated and yielded acknowledgements of complexity. One of these related to the stereotype that foreigners are responsible for crime in South Africa and the other related to the view that foreigners take away jobs from local citizens. While not possible to undertake in this article, the intersectionality of xenophobia with gender and class warrants further attention. In our workshop a more nuanced understanding on the intersectionality of xenophobia and gender-based discrimination was aired only after some probing by the facilitators, as indicated in the penultimate comment below. The comment on how automation in the Natal Rubber factory has affected jobs and employment opportunities, a central tension in the xenophobia discourse, invites a deeper analysis on the intersection with class.

It [crime] could be a behavioural thing or the result of poverty. (Foreign national)

Another factor is the fact that locals and foreigners combine their skills. Crime is not necessarily the result of poverty. (Partner 9)

We could easily blame the foreigners but let's look at the situation where since the black government took over many companies have shut down. ... At Natal Rubber there are machines which the white owners have brought. Initially it required 15 people to do certain tasks but now with the new machines it needs five people. (South African national)

When Vaughn started to speak about gender, a woman spoke about the pressure she experienced from her husband. She put it in Swahili. Look at Cinderella Park and the relationships between South African girls and male foreigners. It is a bitter-sweet relationship. (Partner 9)

We have a double burden. Women are being divorced and husbands take local women. The SA system doesn't support the foreign women and their children. ... Even in cases of abuse in marriage, women would rather die in the abusive relationship for they can't survive alone. (Foreign national)

The deepening of understandings reported above shows some evidence of critical thinking that the process of dialogue generated. Freire placed much emphasis on critical thinking, but what about the other conditions identified as essential by Freire for authentic dialogue to occur? The project data allows for some engagement with Freire's discussion of profound love, humility and courage. Courage has been written about as the struggles and actions emanating from educational encounters. Our workshop planning saw action as important and created space for joint actions to be planned. However, as a funded project with time-bound workshops, we did not have the capacity and budget to support post-workshop actions. We provided voice within the workshop but beyond the roundtable that we facilitated with political, NGO, media and government stakeholders, we could not also support participants in making their case louder and better heard. In the end, courageous actions would have to be taken forward by the participants themselves, often from vulnerable positions. Freire's promotion of humility has been interpreted as a pedagogical orientation of non-hierarchical, nonarrogant openness to others' perspectives (Freire 1970). Listening respectfully is one way in which Freirean humility can be displayed. We witnessed this form of humility in the dialogue among participants, facilitators and project partners. Our diverse perspectives as project partners also demanded such humility in discussions outside the workshops. I believe this condition of dialogue was present in our intervention.

Freire's conception of profound love is a more difficult condition to identify in the workshops. Freire believed that a deep love for the world and fellow humans was necessary for dialogue to occur. It is noteworthy that a common definition of xenophobia refers to hatred or fear of foreigners, the opposite of love. Our interactions with participants in the relatively brief workshop interactions did not allow us to discern the presence of strong emotions such as hatred or profound love. A project partner did, however, note one reference to hatred:

In the first workshop somebody defined xenophobia as hatred. There were other forces behind. In many instances locals and foreigners live well together. They support the foreigners. (Partner 9)

The emotional climate of the workshops was one of sufficient trust and a willingness to engage respectfully in sharing views and exploring solutions. Workshop-only interactions cannot be expected to generate the deep love that Freire referred to. However, workshops could serve as the start of new understandings that become the foundation for new relationships. If the projects conceptualised in the workshops became viable joint projects of South African and foreign nationals, it would be interesting to track the nature of relationships and emotional connections over time.

 

Generating Painful Memories and the Need for Psychosocial Support

The River of Life activity, in particular, evoked many emotions from both participants and facilitators. A separate article would be needed to discuss in full the multiple and repeated traumatic events and displacements shared by participants, both foreign and local nationals. Two examples are provided below:

I was born in Lubumbashi. After Lubumbashi we moved with my parents to Uvira. After our parents died because of war, I found myself in SA where I am not free. (Foreign national)

My parents were born in Rwanda, after the genocide we moved to Mlembwe, then they moved to Uvira, then we stayed in Burundi after war in Congo in 1986. In Burundi war started so we moved to Malawi and stayed at a refugee camp called Dzaleka, Vilembwe. After that we moved to Mozambique, Maputo for quite some time. Then after that we moved to South Africa in a place called Manguzi and then I suddenly found myself in KwaZulu-Natal where I got married. (Foreign national)

Given that the project arose from a concern about the violence against foreign nationals, we had anticipated that this intervention was likely to generate painful memories. In our planning and for purposes of gaining ethical clearance, we had arranged to have psychosocial support available to deal with memories of historical trauma and possible re-traumatisation during the workshop. Two of the facilitators from Sinomlando were trained in trauma counselling. A third member of Sinomlando was a qualified social worker, and a qualified local psychologist was arranged to be on call if further counselling expertise was needed. Despite these arrangements, we were unprepared for the extent of the pain that surfaced and its effects on participants and facilitators during the final combined workshop. This is an area that requires much careful preparation in such interventions. I offer here a description of what emerged, how we dealt with it and what could be done in future workshops.

At the end of the first day of the combined session some of the participants and the facilitators became overwhelmed by the painful stories shared. Some broke down and cried. The facilitators realised that they could not continue with the planned programme and sent out a message for help. Three project partners, some with counselling skills, responded and ran a debriefing session. The following day, additional psychosocial support was provided and additional group and individual counselling was provided. These measures seemed to provide the care needed. A revised programme resumed, and the workshop ended with an entertaining cultural evening.

Our post-workshop reflections identified this breakdown as a key lesson for us and one needing more careful planning in future workshops. The following comments expose these concerns and some questioning regarding the combined workshop:

Each group has psychosocial issues. Once we trigger something, there are major issues. You have touched this, and I want to talk about it. I wanted to move on, but it comes back. The situation takes me back. (Partner 5)

There are multiple levels of fracturing in families and in communities. (Partner 2)

Foreigners are more emotional about the xenophobic attacks in South Africa than about the initial attacks in their home country. It is not the fact but the representation of the fact which is traumatic. (Partner 1)

Sharing Rivers of Life in front of everyone, that does not work. We need to rethink it. It was very overwhelming. Another concern is how to maintain relationships after the workshops. We have many people who call us, but we do not know what to do. In the planning we need to say what the facilitators will have to do after the workshop. (Partner 6)

As project planners and implementers, we found ourselves grappling with what trauma really means and how we could deal with it in a workshop context. The following comments reveal this:

What we have is endemic trauma and undealt with trauma. ... Re-traumatising is when a memory triggers the memory of the old trauma. We must have a discussion on the difference between multiple trauma or compounded trauma and re-traumatisation. (Partner 2)

We can have both. We have those who were not present during the xenophobic attack but are re-traumatised. (Partner 8)

A key concept in the theory of resilience is meaning. People who can make sense of a situation and articulate it respond better to trauma. (Partner 1)

There are people who feel bad about [having] abandoned their home. They do not see themselves as survivors. (Partner 3)

In addition to wanting to find ways to better deal with trauma as it emerges in workshops, the above comments also clearly show our attempts to deepen our own understandings and theorisation of this important outcome of the workshops we designed.

An additional insight on the River of Life activity is gleaned from the experiences of Bekerman and Zymbylas's (2010) facilitated dialogue workshops in Israel. They found that a storytelling activity sensitised participants to the suffering of others, which provided new pedagogical openings:

[T]he identification of small openings on the basis of common suffering offers a point of departure for going beyond victims and perpetrators and propelling teachers into a process of re-narrativization. (Bekerman and Zymbylas 2010, 588)

The River of Life activity was planned as part of the redesigned combined workshops for participants to share their life stories. We saw this as an important opportunity for participants to be sensitised about the reasons for migration and the challenges involved. This goal is also expressed by one of the foreign nationals who reflected on the activity and said "what we did yesterday with the river of life shall not just stay here, I hope that it will help improve the relationship". This statement points to a similar pedagogical opening reported by Bekerman and Zembylas (2010).

 

Implications for Workshop Design, Pedagogy and Future Interventions

We learnt about what worked and what could be improved through this project. The challenges regarding trauma certainly provide a key lesson. We recommend that similar future workshops provide substantial time at the beginning for participants to be informed of the types of activities and processes of engagement. This should include them being made aware of the likely discomfort and pain that the workshop could trigger when talking about past experiences and trauma. We did mention potential discomfort and the likelihood of painful memories in our introductions to the workshops, but there is a need for greater emphasis of this in preparing participants and letting them know what support is available. Equally important is the need to explore with participants what would be the best way to deal with deeply emotional reactions and painful memories that may be evoked and how they would like the workshop facilitators to deal with this. This could include the right to leave the room for timeout or counselling or a process to deal collectively with the emotions and pain in the room. Having trained trauma counsellors available throughout the workshop is clearly an important part of the plan and needs to be included in planning and budgets. Provision of such psychosocial support needs to also factor in the language profile of the participant group. This latter consideration means that recruitment has to be planned and secured well in advance of the workshops. This was not the case in the present project as recruitment became a challenge and several alternative recruitment strategies had to be implemented just prior to the workshops.

However, the River of Life activity proved to be extremely generative as a participatory educational and research tool. It allowed for personal reflection on participants' life journeys as they drew their River of Life. In sharing the River of Life with the group, participants mostly enjoyed the opportunity to stand up and let others know about themselves and their journeys. Given the contested understandings and stereotypes about foreign nationals, their motives for coming to South Africa, and their impact on the social and economic fabric of the country as discussed earlier, the telling of such stories provided powerful and challenging moments in the workshop. From an educational perspective, this activity was central in generating counter-narratives that could deepen understanding or create the openings for re-narrativisation identified by Bekerman and Zembylas (2010). From a research perspective, the activity triggers rich data and allows for collective analysis within the workshop, in keeping with the participatory ethos of the workshop. It also generates a visual illustration of the narrative, which can be recorded with the permission of the participant. Thus, subsequent content, visual and discourse types of analyses become possible.

The other activities were likewise generative and contributed to deepening participants' understandings by softening dichotomies and stimulating an appreciation of the complexity and challenges of life in South Africa for all. Our reflections identified the People's Compass as a participatory and safe process to get people sharing about themselves and their stories of migration. It also very powerfully illustrated early on in the workshop that most, if not all, are migrants of some sort. The sense of a common identity, albeit not a strong one, in a workshop about the troubles caused by perceived differences was a bonus outcome. The Community Enablers and Disablers activity allowed for a balance of foci on both challenges and assets. The latter could also be creatively harnessed into plans of action to move the workshop from exploration to intervention, meeting the condition of Freirean courage. For this to be authentic and have a chance of making an impact, some planning and budget allocation should be devoted to such post-workshop joint implementation of plans. Our project did not allow for this because the project design and workshop plans were not what was initially envisaged when the proposal and budget were developed. Future interventions of this kind should plan for post-workshop activities and support for participants to explore the potential for workshop-generated ideas and plans to be piloted and to become cycles of dialogue, collaboration and action, generating courage and hope.

Across the workshops, there was a clear sense that the design was successful in creating a safe space, which allowed for participation and dialogue with humility. Some of the activities fostered critical reflection, which helped participants explore alternative perspectives. These pedagogical goals, as espoused by Freire, are central to attempts at deepening understanding, challenging stereotypes and reshaping relationships. Gill and Niens' s (2014) review of literature on the role of peace education in post-conflict contexts identified the goal of humanisation, as advocated by Paulo Freire, as a major conceptual framework underpinning many programmes. They noted that "[p]eacebuilding education as humanisation is realised by critical reflection and dialogue in most curricular initiatives reviewed, an approach aimed at overcoming the contextual educational constraints often rooted in societal division and segregation, strained community relations and past traumas" (Gill and Niens 2014, 10). Humanisation, a counter to alienation, is an important goal in anti-xenophobia interventions, as much of the popular discourse involves stereotypes that dehumanise the "Other".

We have learnt a substantial amount about running participatory dialogic workshops with small groups of local and foreign nationals and believe that this was a worthwhile pilot intervention. However, making an impact on xenophobia requires interventions on a larger scale that involve many sectors of society. As the dialogue workshops held by Bekerman and Zembylas (2010, 590) in Israel clearly illustrate, "educational interventions alone-no matter how critical they are-cannot go far without structural changes that support these interventions".

The diversity among learner groups in educational institutions such as schools, post-school colleges and universities allow them to engage in such programmes. These institutions could find ways to include aspects of the workshop, reported here, in their curricula. As noted by Van der Dussen Toukan (2019), such engagements by actors in these institutions in the host country carry the additional benefit of increasing their awareness of how they are implicated in conflict and peacebuilding through relationships formed with refugee and migrant students. Many civil society organisations, such as NGOs and faith-based organisations, run educational programmes with communities and could likewise include anti-xenophobia themes and activities. Ongoing staff development for civil servants, who often project government ideology and policy, should also be included in such training. Only such wider societal participation can foster the kinds of political engagement and social transformation that were earlier identified by Gadotti (1996) and Rule (2004). Sharing the design features of such interventions and the experiences of participants and facilitators, as done in this article, contributes a southern perspective on dialogic, action-oriented peace education to a world faced with increasing migration and displacement of people.

 

Conclusion

This article reports on a small pilot project whose impact on relationships and society is understandably limited. The value of the project, and focus of this paper, is the design of a workshop and participatory pedagogy that shows some indications of encouraging critical thinking and deepened understandings through engaging in dialogue. In terms of the educational aspects, we designed a workshop process and set of activities with related participatory pedagogy that allowed for several objectives to be met. We have also learnt about what can be done differently to improve this process, especially with regard to psychosocial support. Theoretically, Freire's preconditions of profound love, humility, faith, hope, courage and critical thinking for dialogue provide a basis for guiding educational events and for interrogating their outcomes. While dialogic workshops alone cannot bring social change, when they lead to courageous actions, they can become a transformative praxis.

This design and the insights emerging from reflections on this small intervention may be helpful in planning interventions on a larger scale in South Africa and elsewhere where people live in contexts of polarised and conflictual relationships. Increasing displacements and migration as a result of war and economic factors and the tensions these raise require many more interventions of the type discussed in this article. Building an inclusive, cosmopolitan and caring society is a substantial project that requires many more interventions of this nature. Reflections on the project we piloted show how difficult and rewarding this work can be. They also illustrate that key to this is to design safe, dialogic spaces (Rule 2004) with adequate psychosocial support.

Reflecting on this educational intervention in response to xenophobia in South Africa, I am reminded of the calls by both Paulo Freire and Nelson Mandela, both exemplary practitioners of dialogue, for education that builds greater freedoms and humanisation. Education must contribute to increased freedom, physical and psychological, for foreign nationals and South Africans in this country and to building a humanising and inclusive pan-Africanism. The dialogic space created in the workshops discussed in this article could be harnessed towards this important project.

 

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by a grant from the Foundation for Human Rights in South Africa.

 

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ARTICLE

 

Ethical Curriculum Leadership and Alain Badiou's Ethics

 

 

Petro du Preez

North-West University, South Africa Petro.DuPreez@nwu.ac.za https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9100-6461

 

 

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ABSTRACT

Several curriculum scholars have argued for an ethical turn in the study of curriculum based on concerns about the debunking of ethics in postmodern society. The notion of ethics in curriculum scholarship, with specific emphasis on curriculum leadership, is explored through a narrative of a school principal and contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou's theory of ethics. The data indicated several conditions (which are by no means exhaustive) for ethical curriculum leadership to transpire. These include a truthful aspiration towards curriculum excellence and deep transformation, a loving encounter as a truth procedure underpinning ethical curriculum leadership, a longing for the truth, developing a collective fidelity, and creating a reflexive aptitude. It is argued that ethical curriculum leadership begins with love, that is, the antidote to acting in one's own interest. In addition, it is seen as a dialectic between managing school efficiency, building infrastructure and managing talent to enable optimal curriculum enactment, and a continual process of curriculum leadership. This article reports on one aspect of a larger research project titled "Women Leading in Disadvantaged School Communities".

Keywords: curriculum leadership; ethical turn; ethics; Alain Badiou; love

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Introduction: Ethics and Curriculum Leadership

The conceptions of curriculum from traditionalist, conceptual-empiricist and reconceptualist perspectives have been criticised for their inability to "move on; discover and invent new worlds and new ideas" (Morrison 2004, 487). In addition, an argument has been made for an ethical turn in curriculum studies based on the concern with the debunking of ethics in postmodern society (Cary 2007). Badiou (2002, 2) states that

ethics designates today a principle that governs how we relate to "what is going on", a vague way of regulating our commentary on historical situations (the ethics of human rights), technico-scientific situations (medical ethics, bio-ethics), "social" situations (the ethics of being-together), media situations (the ethics of communication), and so on.

What I am proposing is that if we have saturated the exploration of the ethical turn in the study of curriculum, why have we not been able to transcend the arguments of universalist versus particularist conceptions of ethics underpinning curriculum praxis? Why are we constantly engaged with questions of otherness when engaging in curriculum scholarship? Badiou (2002) would argue that these questions are the result of a confined liberal-humanist take on ethics, as described in the quotation above, and that we ought to think about ethics beyond the philosophical poles created as a result of this ethical ideology. For him, ethics concerns the part of philosophy that organises practical existence around representations of the Good (Badiou 2002). Following the work of Badiou, which is described by one reviewer as an assessment of the validity of the ethical turn (Gillespie 2001), I would suggest that we take a little more time to think about the ethical turn in the study of curriculum and accept Kesson and Henderson's (2010, 75) challenge: "Enacting a philosophically-informed ethical curriculum leadership practice will require us to undertake new ways of knowing, being and acting that embody new professional identities, and to maintain fidelity to strongly held personal values, beliefs and truths. Are we up to the challenge?" Following up on this challenge, I posed the following research question: What sort of being is required for ethical curriculum leadership to transpire? The aim is not to provide a prescriptive, instrumental answer to this question, but to explore what ethical curriculum leadership might encompass.

Perhaps at this point it is important to clarify the place of research in curriculum leadership in the broader context of curriculum scholarship. Curriculum leadership has been defined as "practical explanation, justification, guidance, and demonstration of a disciplined theoretical position on innovative curriculum work" (Henderson 2010, 220). This distinction is based on three principal differences, namely the differences between curriculum leadership and curriculum management, curriculum leadership and instructional leadership, and disciplined and undisciplined curriculum studies (Henderson 2010). The first distinction is concerned with whether school leaders engage in business efficiency or whether they encourage educational innovation (Henderson 2010). The second distinction concerns whether a school leader is merely interested in advancing innovative teaching practices or whether they understand that teaching is only one fundamental of curriculum work, and that questions about curriculum leadership require a more complex, interrelated understanding (Henderson 2010). With reference to the last distinction, Henderson raises the following questions: "Is the innovative idea properly situated in current educational circumstances? ... Has the curriculum scholar(s) carefully considered the relationship between theory and practice? ... Is the theoretical project thoughtfully informed by the history of curriculum studies, or does it attempt to advance a short-term fad?" (2010, 222). Next, I will introduce the research context that informed this article as well as the research process.

 

Research Design: Women Leading in Disadvantaged School Communities

The research reported on here formed part of a larger research project titled "Women Leading in Disadvantaged School Communities" (Perumal and Smit 2009). The project, which was funded by the South African Netherlands Partnership for Alternatives in Development, aimed at investigating how women educational leaders navigate the challenges of leading in disadvantaged school contexts.

The general conceptual tenor of the project was situated in a critical feminist paradigm. Methodologically, a qualitative critical ethnography from an advocacy and developmental perspective (Creswell 2007) was employed. Drawing from the work of Quinlan (2008), Hollingsworth (1992), Ortlipp (2008) and Clandinin (2007), data sources and fieldwork were generated through extended observations using video and photographs, shadowing principals to observe their day-to-day operations with the intention of observing the time they devote to curriculum-related matters, collaborative conversations with participants to service the aims of the research, and participant narratives regarding their conceptions of curriculum leadership. The primary participants comprised women in leadership positions (i.e. principals, deputy principals and school curriculum specialists) in disadvantaged schools in the Gauteng and North West provinces of South Africa. Purposeful sampling using network and snowball strategies was used to select information-rich participants for this inquiry. Discourse analysis was used to make sense of the data.

The case to be explored and discussed in this article is from a rural township area in the North West province's Kenneth Kaunda District. The primary participant was a female principal, Mrs Mbuli, in a secondary school. In line with the research process outlined above, this article focuses on her experiences of leadership more so than on other stakeholders' experiences.

 

Alain Badiou and Mrs Mbuli

For the purpose of this research I decided, for reasons that have been given in the introduction of this article, to explore my data sources with Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2002). Badiou (2002) describes his rendezvous with ethics as

a contradictory state of mind ... I was driven by a genuine fury. The world was deeply plunged in "ethical" delirium. Everyone was busily confusing politics with the hypocrisy of a mindless catechism. The intellectual counter-revolution, in the form of moral terrorism, was imposing the infamies of Western capitalism as the new universal model. The presumed "rights of man" were serving at every point to annihilate any attempt to invent forms of free thought. (2002, liii)

Stated differently, Badiou (2002) describes the current state of ethical affairs as an ethical ideology that is reminiscent of the liberal-humanist take on ethics. This ethical ideology leads to a priori evil (violence and suffering) with the ethics of human rights as riposte. Ethics in this sense is reduced to mere protection from abusive interference. This understanding of ethics intellectually justifies evil and the status quo. Badiou argues that "[w]e must reject the ideological framework of 'ethics' and concede nothing to the negative and victimary definition of man [sic]" (2002, 16). Furthermore, ethics in this conception is confirmed by two philosophical poles: the universalising pole and the differential pole. The former embraces a view of ethics as an abstract universality inscribed in human rights, while the latter conceives of ethics as an abstract respect for otherness (Badiou 2002). Neither of these conceptions is adequate for Badiou, as he argues that both these philosophical positions designate "the incapacity ... to name and strive for a Good" and consequently he suggests an ethic of truths (2002, 30).

To understand Badiou's notion of an ethic of truths, it is necessary to delve a little more deeply into his thoughts on this. For Badiou (2002), human action is divided into two separate but overlapping realms: the ordinary realm of approved knowledges that is structured in accordance with those who dominate and govern and that signals "the state of the situation", and the exceptional realm of singular innovations or truths constituted by a truth procedure that succeeds and evades the domination of the state of a situation. First, it should be noted that in the ordinary realm of approved knowledges a situation is not merely a set, but also consists of the network of relations that sustains a set (Badiou 2002). For example, if we think of poverty as a situation, it is not a one-dimensional set, but is constituted by and constitutes a network of relations such as, for example, HIV/Aids and crime. Second, the realm of the exceptional awakens when subjects instigate and maintain singular innovations (or truths) from within the realm of the ordinary (Badiou 2002). This is referred to as an event. An event is both situated, in that it is related to a specific situation, and supplementary, in that it is detached from all the rules of the situation (Badiou 2002). Such an event ruptures the ordinary realm and sets a truth procedure in motion (Badiou 2002). Badiou (2002) describes this process as follows: "To be faithful to an event is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking ... the situation 'according to' the event. And this ... compels the subject to invent a new way of being and acting in the situation" (2002, 41-42). This process could only be maintained through faithful "subjects who 'bear' its [the event's] trajectory" (Badiou 2002, ix), that is, people who reveal fidelity, perseverance and encouragement through selfless devotion to resist anything that could beset a truth (Badiou 2002). It is exactly this fidelity to the truth and perseverance to maintain the truth of the event that Badiou describes as the ethical, "the single imperative: 'Keep going!'" (2002, xi). This powerful truth is described as "the multiple, internal to the situation, that the fidelity constructs, bit by bit; it is what the fidelity gathers together and produces" (Badiou 2002, 68).

Badiou (2002) calls for the importance of bringing the reflexive "I" back into a thoughtful relation to an event, which perhaps calls for a change in one's being, where one's will plays a significant part. The sort of ethics or truths that Badiou (2002) argues for is one in which the individual "I" pursues a purposeful "good" in a particular event, and hence such a "courageous" stance is in contrast to nihilism. He observes that inevitably the reflexive subject will have to "invent a new way of being" in contrast to the apathetic manner in which consent from public opinion is usually gained, especially if one's presence in an event is to be regarded as "a loving encounter" (Badiou 2002, 42).

For Badiou (2012), love is a truth procedure: an encounter with an event, a desire to endure, and a powerful antidote to pursuing one's own self-interest. He states:

To make a declaration of love is to move on from the event-encounter to embark on a construction of truth. The chance nature of the encounter morphs into the assumption of a beginning. And often what starts there lasts so long, is so charged with novelty and experience of the world that in retrospect it doesn't seem at all random and contingent, as it appeared initially, but almost a necessity. (Badiou 2012, 42)

In an attempt to determine what sort of person/being is required for curriculum leadership to transpire, analytical questions were identified from the theory and used to think through the data sources.

 

The State of the Situation

What is the nature of the ordinary realm and the state of the situation in which the narrative unfolds?

Mrs Mbuli commenced her narrative with a historical overview of how the school started. The story of this school began in February 1994, just after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the abolishment of apartheid. After his release, he requested that all children who had not previously attended school as a result of the struggle return to school. This created an influx of learners from all areas to schools, especially those closer to cities, so that they could be closer to places of employment after schooling. This resulted in the need for a school to be established in the local area because at the time there were only "three or so secondary schools", Mrs Mbuli explained. Because new schools could not be built immediately, some schools commenced with a platoon-model in which one building hosted two schools. The time allocated for teaching in the primary school was 07:00-11:00, and from 12:00-17:00 the building was used as a secondary school. Mrs Mbuli elaborated on the difficulty of "platooning" since they did not have the basic resources to manage the school (such as bank accounts, paper and electronic equipment) and to allow for effective teaching and learning (for example, textbooks, stationery). She also mentioned that much difficulty was experienced with the learners at the time because many of them had been involved in the struggle and as a result had served time in prison, which gave rise to several disciplinary challenges. In addition, they had 709 learners and only six teachers.

From a curriculum point of view, the frequent reviewing and changing of the curriculum since 1997 created further difficulties. Due to all the confusion regarding the curriculum transformations, their matriculation (final school year) pass rate declined from 98% to 61%. According to Mrs Mbuli, this was mainly the result of inadequate guidance and ineffectual professional development workshops from the government on dealing with the changes in the mathematics and accountancy curricula.

 

The Event

What marked the event? What were the innovations that exceeded the ordinary realm? Who were the subjects who primarily bore the trajectory of the event?

Mrs Mbuli explained how she came to meet a director-general who was transferred from England and who was committed to school transformation in South Africa. He set her on the path of applying for a new school building. She explained, "it was hectic, because the only thing that they told me was that 'you are better off platooning, at least you don't teach under a tree' ... . So I had to fight and fight and fight and fight, and ultimately the building was granted." After the tender process for the building, they encountered a series of problems. The first was that the school was to be constructed on a dumping site in the township, and second, informal housing covered part of the proposed construction site. She explained the negotiations that accompanied the relocation of these people in detail. For them, building a school was a luxury given their daily struggle for food, clothes and a dry place to sleep. She commented that "although they lived in a shack [informal housing], it meant a lot to them because it was what they called home". When the people agreed to relocate, the school building was built and occupied by the teachers and learners on 25 August 1997.

The fact that the school premises were built on a dumping site posed problems because Mrs Mbuli and her staff were responsible for cleaning it up themselves. One of the teachers initiated a project in which each class teacher and her learners were responsible for putting all the refuse on the premises in heaps to form terraces. They then planted a lawn and made gardens on the terraces from grass that they had bought and divided into small pieces to form the lawn.

Mrs Mbuli explained how they also had to initiate extra-curricular activities such as sport to offer to the learners. They were not given any subsidy or assistance from the government in this regard. Fortunately, one of the male teachers in the school had a passion for sport and plenty of expertise in coaching soccer. Another female teacher took responsibility for the development of netball in the school. They sought international partnerships with the United Kingdom and Sweden to assist in the process of developing these sporting activities. As a result, the school has won many awards for sport. Through the partnerships, some of the teachers and learners were also given the opportunity to visit some of the partner schools in the United Kingdom.

 

New Ways of Being and Acting

In what ways was the event situated in the ordinary realm? And where was it detached from the rules of the ordinary realm? In particular, how were new ways of being and acting invented?

In a situation such as this, it is easy for schools and principals to remain bogged down by the privations they experience as a result of the ordinary realm. The principal, staff and learners in this school were in fact situated in this ordinary realm, but through the events that resulted from their innovations they were in a position to transcend the rules of the ordinary realm. Mrs Mbuli explained how she (and those who shared her passion) did not "sit down and push back" as a result of their privations. They continued to work around what they did not have by trying to get organisations, the Department of Basic Education, and international partners on board in their quest for advancement.

This disposition has created new ways of being and acting both on the part of the principal and the teachers and learners. In terms of school leadership, Mrs Mbuli explained:

[A] principal should manage and guide ... you should try to convene ... because when you are in front of those people, you'll end up being far ahead of them. You should be at a point where you could look backwards all the time, and see if there are people who ... are moving forward together with you, [otherwise] you might find yourself alone in front. ... There is no school that can belong to a principal. ... [A] school is an organisation. ... You need to get people to be with you all the time, otherwise you'll fail. ... Guiding is really a process. ... It's not an event where you say I've done it. ... [As a principal,] you're supposed to be visible; ... people should feel that you are there.

She explained that a good principal should be aware of the community's needs and truly understand them to bring about change. For example, she described how the government had suggested that the school governing body should manage school finances, but explained that their situation was different because most of the people on the school governing body were functionally illiterate. Therefore, she dealt with all the finances, based on her postgraduate experience in education management and leadership, and then used the school governing body meetings to explain to people how she managed school funds and how she budgeted for the future. In doing this, she transformed her position of power (due to her education and position at the school) into a learning and empowerment opportunity. She also stressed the importance of being visible to learners in classrooms and described how she shared her aspirations for the school with the learners and teachers. She was convinced that without their support no transformation would be possible.

In terms of her role in curriculum transformation, Mrs Mbuli acknowledged that in the existing situation she had no influence on national curriculum-making activities, but she believed that she was responsible for making a situational analysis of the local context and determining what was needed in terms of resources and infrastructure, human resource management, and the needs of the learners to meaningfully enact the curriculum so that learning experiences would be useful to the learners.

 

The Ethic of "Keep Going"

Are there specific examples when loyalty, perseverance, encouragement and selfless devotion (the notions that underscore the ethic of "keep going") were present in the narrative?

Mrs Mbuli's narrative demonstrates many examples of loyalty, perseverance, encouragement and selfless devotion, both from her side and from those who worked with her to realise their innovations and bring about positive change in a situation that could so easily ensnare them in negativity and static acceptance of the ordinary. She explained that it is essential to motivate people to persevere in situations such as theirs by recognising the good they do: "recognition goes a long way in influencing people to work better. ... If they realise that what they do matters to you, then they will do better." Her fidelity and selfless devotion as a school principal are also evident in the following statements:

With me sweetheart it's about nursing a baby really ... with my work. You know I stay at school in the afternoon, people don't understand why ... sometimes I do not understand why, but I spend most of my time here. ... I want to retire ... but I won't leave the school as it is right now. I want it developed-properly.

To realise this development ideal, she wrote letters to the Independent Development Trust, the local city council and the Department of Basic Education to seek assistance to finance some books for the school library. She optimistically said, "it's worth trying . try is free".

 

Evil

Badiou (2002, 91) warns that "Evil is possible only through an encounter with the Good". In this sense, any ethic of truths holds the possibility for evil. It is therefore important to detect possibilities for evil and to deal with them openly so that good intentions are not corrupted. The question for this research was thus: Has any form of evil arisen from the good in this situation? This Evil, emanating from the Good, Badiou states, could manifest in three figures. The first of these is referred to as simulacrum and is signified by the confusion of a mere likeness of an event with the real event (Badiou 2002). The second evil, betrayal, occurs when a difficult fidelity is abandoned as a result of temptation or fatigue. The third evil concerns the unnameable-the situation in which the power of a truth is forced or imposed as a result of arrogance and in so doing brings about the objectification and totalisation of truth. Badiou summarises these forms of evil as follows: "the simulacrum (to be the terrorizing follower of a false event); betrayal (to give up on a truth in the name of one's interest); the forcing of the unnameable, or disaster (to believe in the total power of a truth)" (2002, 91). He continues that the ethic of truths with its imperative to "keep going" serves as resources of discernment, courage and moderation (Badiou 2002). Discernment serves to remind a subject not to fall under delusions concerning the event; courage teaches the subject not to give up, and moderation warns the subject not to get caught up in totalitarian extremes.

Based on the above, it is also necessary to pose the following questions: Are there any traces of evil as a result of the good? Are there traces of a terrorising follower or a false event? Are there specific examples when the truth was discerned from the false? Did anyone give up on the truth as a result of their own interest? Or are there specific examples of courage? Are there traces of totalitarianism or is moderation in terms of the truth maintained?

To attend to these questions, it would probably have been better to expand the data sources and include in-depth narratives of other stakeholders in the school to obtain alternative perspectives. However, as mentioned initially in this article, this would fall beyond the scope of this research. In Mrs Mbuli's narrative there were no traces of evil as a result of the good in terms of curriculum leadership. There were no traces of a terrorising follower, of a false event or of someone who gave up on the event due to their own interest. For me, Badiou's theory of ethics and the subsequent understanding of evil do not draw a clear enough line between a healthy fidelity towards the truth versus a contaminated totalitarian agenda. This is probably because he uses very extreme cases, such as clandestine workers in the political situation of contemporary France, the French Revolution that constituted a definite break with classical monarchy, and Nazism as examples to illustrate the various forms of evil (Badiou 2002; Gillespie 2001). These extreme cases of evil are difficult to compare with minor cases and as a result it is difficult to make sense of them. By this I do not suggest that we essentialise the debate, but that we think of moderation in terms of a healthy fidelity towards the truth in the wake of obsession that might contaminate a healthy fidelity. Thinking about this can assist in detecting opaque traces of evil lurking in the good, so that we can deal with these openly and not taint good intentions.

 

Discussion: Lessons Learned from Mrs Mbuli

Based on collaborative innovations and initiatives it is clear that the principal and her staff jointly bore the trajectory of the event and that they sought assistance beyond the boundaries of the situation to sustain their innovations. Mrs Mbuli stressed the importance of a support system when one ventures beyond the realm of the ordinary. These innovations, however small they might seem, contributed substantially to the development of the learners, and assisted in creating a culture of excellence in the school. These innovations also proved to move the school beyond the confines of the situation in which they found themselves. In short then, what is it that Mrs Mbuli was true to? She was true to excellence and continual renewal through collaborative partnerships. To realise what she was true to, she balanced her management and leadership styles efficiently.

Mrs Mbuli's narrative illustrates a process of faithful commitment to the event and in so doing demonstrates the process of rethinking the situation according to the event. Her leadership style enabled her to invent new ways of being and acting in the situation. Throughout her narrative the ethic of truths is evident and revealed through the fidelity that she expressed. No forms of abstract ethics are revealed as such. As a matter of fact, she challenged othering processes when she stated that "we need to make them understand that South Africa is no more about black and white, it is about South Africa. It is for the good of the country."

In terms of dealing with the challenges posed by the curriculum, innovations were undertaken to address the ever-changing curriculum landscape. Mrs Mbuli encouraged her staff to engage and learn to deal with curriculum contents in communities of practice. These communities consisted of teachers from the surrounding schools who could learn from one another to better interpret and enact the curriculum. She also encouraged teachers to take short courses at the local university to better equip them to deal with the curriculum challenges they faced. It also involved a system where the learners from Mrs Mbuli's school would go to good neighbouring schools for winter camp classes where they received additional learning enrichment in an attempt to raise the pass rate through preparing the learners for examinations.

Mrs Mbuli's narrative illustrates how innovative ways of being and acting can inform ethical curriculum leadership practice (cf. Kesson and Henderson 2010). Being and acting in this sense require fidelity, perseverance and encouragement through selfless devotion on the part of the curriculum leader. In addition, her narrative illustrated how a thoughtful engagement with the event can facilitate the ideals of ethical curriculum leadership practice. Such engagement ought to be self-reflexive (a character trait she demonstrates throughout her narrative) and collaborative in nature.

Finally, three more remarks are necessary. One, Mrs Mbuli aspired towards a truth framed by curriculum excellence and deep transformation. Two, her work can, in Badiou's terms, be regarded as a loving encounter as love is a truth procedure in itself. Three, her will to invent a new way of being mobilised those around her to join her in striving for the truth, developing a collective fidelity, and creating a reflexive aptitude.

 

Parting Thoughts on Ethical Curriculum Leadership

Descriptively speaking, an ethical curriculum leadership practice could be seen as a dialectic between managing school efficiency, building infrastructure and managing talent to enable optimal curriculum enactment, and a continual process of curriculum leadership. Curriculum leadership requires a focus on "what is going on" but, more importantly, on "what should be going on". The latter is a visionary enterprise-one that continually seeks alignment of innovative curriculum imaginations and a culture of curriculum excellence.

On a normative level, ethical curriculum leadership begins with love, that is, the antidote to acting in one's own interest. Love is the essence of fidelity that starts with an encounter with an event that is marked by a severe desire to endure in an attempt to remain true to an event.

 

References

Badiou, A. 2002. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London: Verso.         [ Links ]

Badiou, A. 2012. In Praise of Love. New York, NY: The New Press.         [ Links ]

Cary, L. J. 2007. Curriculum Spaces: Discourse, Postmodern Theory and Educational Research. New York, NY: Peter Lang.         [ Links ]

Clandinin, D. 2007. Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a Methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452226552.         [ Links ]

Creswell, J. W. 2007. Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing among Five Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.         [ Links ]

Gillespie, S. 2001. "Badiou's Ethics". Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 12: 256-65. Accessed October 15, 2020. https://www.plijournal.com/files/12_15_Gillespie.pdf.

Henderson, J. G. 2010. "Curriculum Leadership". In Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies, Vol. 1, edited by C. Kridel, 220-24. London: Sage Publications.         [ Links ]

Hollingsworth, S. 1992. "Learning to Teach through Collaborative Conversation: A Feminist Approach". American Educational Research Journal 29 (2): 373-404. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312029002373.         [ Links ]

Kesson, K. R., and J. G. Henderson. 2010. "Reconceptualizing Professional Development for Curriculum Leadership: Inspired by John Dewey and Informed by Alain Badiou". In Thinking Education Through Alain Badiou, edited by K. Den Heyer, 62-77. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444391527.ch5.         [ Links ]

Morrison, K. R. B. 2004. "The Poverty of Curriculum Theory: A Critique of Wraga and Hlebowitsh". Journal of Curriculum Studies 36 (4): 487-94. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022027042000211458.         [ Links ]

Ortlipp, M. 2008. "Keeping and Using Reflective Journal in the Qualitative Research Process". The Qualitative Report 13 (4): 695-705.         [ Links ]

Perumal, J., and B. Smit. 2009. "Women Leading in Disadvantaged School Communities". Research proposal funded by the South African Netherlands Partnership for Alternatives in Development. Unpublished document.

Quinlan, E. 2008. "Conspicuous Invisibility: Shadowing as a Data Collection Strategy". Qualitative Inquiry 14 (8): 1480-499. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800408318318.         [ Links ]

Taylor, M. C. 2004. "What Derrida Really Meant". New York Times, 14 October. Accessed October 16, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/opinion/what-derrida-really-meant.html.

^rND^sHenderson^nJ. G.^rND^sHollingsworth^nS.^rND^sKesson^nK. R.^rND^nJ. G.^sHenderson^rND^sMorrison^nK. R. B.^rND^sOrtlipp^nM.^rND^sQuinlan^nE.^rND^1A01^nBruce^sDamons^rND^1A02^nAvivit M.^sCherrington^rND^1A01^nBruce^sDamons^rND^1A02^nAvivit M.^sCherrington^rND^1A01^nBruce^sDamons^rND^1A02^nAvivit M^sCherrington

ARTICLE

 

Reimagining community schools as beacons of hope and possibility in the South African context

 

 

Bruce Damons^I; Avivit M. Cherrington^II

^ICentre for the Community School, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa bruce.damons@mandela.ac.za https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3395-4789
^IIChair for Critical Studies in Higher Education (Cn'SHET), Nelson Mandela University, South Africa avivit.cherrington@mandela.ac.za https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8564-9452

 

 

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ABSTRACT

South African schools in poor communities are facing a crisis of inefficiency and inequality. The failure of the present education schooling system to address the needs of the majority of local communities requires a reimagining of the concept and function of schools. We posit that to adequately address the current education realities in the country, stakeholders in schools need to re-evaluate their role within communities, and how they can best serve these communities by opening up possibilities for a better future for all. Using findings from our respective studies with members of both rural and urban South African communities, we reflect on how fostering mutually beneficial partnerships between a school and its community can contribute towards the holistic development and well-being of all school stakeholders. The article advances an argument for the need to start a process of reimagining school as not only a space for pursuing academic outcomes for the learners, but as an evolving site of possibility of betterment of the community that it serves. As such, the aim of the article is to challenge the present deficit definitions of the "community school" in South African education discourses and to present a progressive reimagining of community schools. We further offer three propositions for enabling such community schools to become beacons of hope and possibility in socio-economically challenged South African communities.

Keywords: community school; hope in education; PALAR; schools as beacons of hope; values-driven schools

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Introduction

Open the doors and walk inside, you'll know a successful school right away. Look at the hallway walls, inside the classrooms and offices, and into the meeting areas. These are the best places to see how schools are working. They show how learning happens, how professional knowledge and planning work, even the extent of community involvement. They also show how students learn effectively-or don't. Excellent schools are schools that work well. (Langer 2004, 1)

Langer's description of an effective school is what most people imagine of schools that "work well", but what is often lacking in such descriptions is the context in which these schools have to survive each day. It is commonly believed that quality education can lift a society from poverty and oppression, and that the function of a school in society is to nurture future generations into responsible global citizens. However, schools are complex spaces that are susceptible to the prevailing sociopolitical and cultural milieu in which they are located, as well as legislative policies in a country. Despite many democratic changes, restructuring, and reforms over the past two decades in South Africa, its education system is still burdened by high levels of socio-economic inequality and poor levels of academic achievement in schools located in poor, working-class communities, comprising the majority of the South African population (Christie, Butler, and Potterton 2007; Jansen and Blank 2014; Spaull 2012). It appears that the remnants of an apartheid regime that discarded black education remain prevalent in "dysfunctional ex-Black schools", which simply serve to perpetuate social injustice and poverty in their communities (Spaull 2012, 3). As such, the failure of the present South African education schooling system to address the needs of the majority of local communities requires a reimagining of the concept and function of schools. Surely, an excellent school can only function when the community in which it is located is also able to "work well"?

We argue that to adequately address the current education realities in the country, stakeholders in schools need to re-evaluate their role within communities, and how they can best serve these communities by opening up possibilities for a better future for all. The aim of this article is to present how schools in rural, peri-urban, and urban township communities, in the pursuit of quality public education, could become beacons of hope and possibility within their communities. In positioning themselves as beacons of hope, these schools become more responsive to the socio-economic challenges faced by their community, which threaten the functionality of the schools.

We begin by outlining the current challenges facing South African schools in achieving quality education and the often strained expectations of school principals to deliver "effective" and "efficient" schooling in challenging contexts. The discussion then moves on to presenting an understanding of the complexity of the concept of a community school. As our argument tries to move away from the traditional deficit conceptualisation of this term, we present a review of alternative models of schooling, with a special focus on our understanding of the concept. Based on the assumption that the school-community relationship can be mutually beneficial, this article further explores how forging meaningful and collaborative ties for the benefit of all can be achieved through the concept of integrating community and school for a shared vision. The article then advances an argument for the need to start reimagining a school as not only a space for pursuing academic outcomes for the learners, but as an evolving site of possibility of betterment for the community that it serves. Using findings from our respective postgraduate studies (Cherrington 2015; Damons 2012; 2017), we reflect on how a values-driven school, which creates an enabling and supportive environment and works towards fostering a mutually beneficial partnership between itself and its community, can contribute towards the holistic development and well-being of all involved. We conclude by suggesting three propositions for guiding community schools to foster hopeful interactions on the personal, relational, and collective levels, and consider the implications of such community schools as resources for education transformation in an unequal South African society.

 

Considering Effective Schools and Quality Schooling in the South African Context

Education scholarship and policy in South Africa provide several key conceptualisations for considering effective schools and quality schooling (Christie, Butler, and Potterton 2007; DBE 2016; Prew 2009). Among these key conceptualisations are the following: responsibility and agency; effective leadership; teacher commitment, effective teaching and learning; safety; discipline; and a culture of concern for effective schools. Particularly, the focus is placed on the important roles of teachers and school leadership in contributing to learner performance in the school (Christie 2010).

In the South African context, as a country still dealing with the inequalities of past policies, there has been a renewed focus on finding ways to rebuild a severely damaged education system. However, the quality and effectiveness of schooling are still mostly measured against the outcome of the Grade 12 results each year (Berkhout 2007), and quantitative measurement of the performance of other grades using instruments such as the Annual National Assessment (ANA). Thus, "effective" schools in South Africa are primarily viewed as schools that are producing good academic results (Berkhout 2007). This understanding of effectivity leads resources from government, the private sector, and other sources to primarily be channeled towards academic outcomes of schools, especially in terms of improved Grade 12 results. However, according to Christie, Butler, and Potterton (2007) and Spaull (2012), for the majority of schools in South Africa, the legacy of a divided past has been largely ignored when it comes to setting such performance expectations. The result is that regardless of the various challenges facing many schools in impoverished and marginalised communities, they are expected to compete as though on an equal footing with their more privileged counterparts (Damons 2017).

To create an enabling environment for schools to be effective, the Department of Education (DoE 2001) introduced the Whole School Development Model (WSD). This model provides nine key performance areas to measure school effectiveness, which cover curriculum and learning programmes and assessments, the creation of a positive learning environment and extracurricular activities, professional staff development, accountable leadership, good communication and serving the governing body. This model has been met with sharp criticisms for its emphasis on improving internal processes within the school, but paying little attention to how schools can surmount the prevailing social environments of the communities in which they are located, and the role and function of community members in contributing to school development (Christie 2010; Witten 2006).

Along with other principals in the country, the first author of this paper (Damons 2017, 24) reflected during his research on the complexity of understanding school effectiveness in the local context:

As a school leader with more than fourteen years' experience, the concept of school effectiveness has always been a challenging one for me. "Efficiency" means doing things right, whereas "effectiveness" means doing the right thing. In my opinion, schools tend to focus more on doing things right (efficiency), instead of doing the right thing (effectiveness) in their context. This effort to be "efficient" is informed by the way the Department of Education conceptualises school effectiveness.

This has resulted in many principals prioritising efficiency over effectiveness, and thus the quality of schooling is affected. We support the argument that to achieve quality education for all in the country, South African schools should be shifting their focus from purely academic pursuits towards being more responsive to some of the socio-economic challenges that prevent them from achieving performance outcomes. According to Witten (2006), schools in marginalised communities often struggle with high absenteeism due to ill health and malnutrition, child abuse and general neglect, a lack of hope for the future caused by poverty, and a general apathy towards education. This means that socio-economically marginalised communities necessitate a different understanding of the role and function of schooling if the school is to meet the basic needs of the child, as well as the aspirations of the community. The notion of a community school then comes to mind, which Hoppers (2005, 118) proposes as a viable modality for "basic education provision that can respond better to the interests of learners and their communities while meeting social-policy goals of equity and social justice".

 

What Is a Community School (and What Is It Not)?

A survey by the National Center for Community Schools (NCCS 2011) found that the term "community school" has been adopted and adapted in more than 69 countries across the globe, including South Africa. Although definitions of the term vary, a common characteristic is the principle of complementary learning that requires systematic, multi-sector collaboration to ensure successful learning and effective schools (Bouffard and Weiss 2008).

In the United States of America and now in some European countries, the concept of community schools is mostly focused on government-funded schools that have opened their doors to community engagements that strive to actualise the full potential of the child (Blank, Melaville, and Shah 2003). As such, the community aspect entails mostly in-school and after-school programmes aimed at supporting learners' academic as well as psycho-social development (NCCS 2011). However, in the context of developing countries (such as those in sub-Saharan Africa), a community school often refers to a school that has been established and run by the local community, with some support from government and donor agencies (Naidoo 2009). These divergent views highlight the complexity, and as such lack of consistency, regarding the conceptualisation of the term community school in education discourses.

There are two distinctive models of schooling that build on the notion of a community school: The Health Promoting Schools (HPS) of the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF's Child-Friendly Schools (CFS) (Vince Whitman and Aldinger 2009). Although both models originated from the global North, they have been embraced by the departments of Basic Education and Health in South Africa as frameworks for emphasising the complementary support structures and processes required to enable children to actualise their full potential (Vince Whitman and Aldinger 2009). The multi-systemic approach promoted in both these models recognises that holistic health (mental, physical, environmental, spiritual, and emotional) is key to enabling effective schooling and human development. This is particularly relevant in the South African context in considering the educational context of children living in harsh socio-economic environments (Damons 2017). However, the notion of a Health Promoting School highlights the need for community schools to not only focus on the intellectual and social-emotional development of the learners, but also on the development of the stakeholders within the community who contribute towards and support the school's ability to reach its educational goals (WHO 2014).

These two models have informed our thinking about the role that community schools could play in promoting quality education in socio-economically challenging environments. To be successful these models require community schools to address the factors that impact their ability to deliver quality public education. However, according to Jansen and Blank (2014, chap. 7, loc. 383):

You cannot photocopy change. It is difficult to simply transfer the lessons of good practice from an effective school to a dysfunctional school. Every school is different in terms of the context in which it operates, the culture of the school and the challenges it faces.

This means that a failure to recognise the unique and shifting needs of the schools' community, and to build meaningful relationships and solidarity with stakeholders, could result in the generic implementation of programmes that will have little or no relevance to schools, thus dooming them to failure (Rowling and Jeffreys 2006).

Studies on the conceptualisation and effectiveness of community schools in an African context are still quite scarce. According to Hoppers (2005, 118), community schools are "established, run and largely supported by the local organizations, whether they be geographic neighbourhoods (villages or urban townships), religious groups or non-profit educational trusts". Further, it is a school that not only focuses on academic outcomes but also looks at "the building of stronger communities through complementary support and partnerships" (Damons 2017, 3). Hoppers (2005) found that community schools for the most part were established as alternative provisions for basic educational services in areas that otherwise would not have access to conventional public schooling. This makes community schools "primarily a phenomenon of the 'periphery'" (citing Cummings 1997). Building on Hoppers' work, we would like to propose that community schools should become the norm rather than the alternative. However, this requires a shift in the South African education discourse from looking at community schools from a deficit perspective to seeing them as positive spaces for community development and engagement.

 

Disrupting Deficit Views of Schools and Communities

Within the South African context, the notion of a community school has often been framed from the deficit understanding of a school located in what is known as a township or rural contexts, which are mostly black. Such schools are also often under-resourced and not seen as functional. Despite the bleak picture painted by most literature about the state of schooling in South African communities, there is also evidence that some township and rural schools have succeeded in achieving consistently good results (Jansen and Blank 2014). In 2006, the National Ministry of Education established a committee to look more closely at what they termed "schools that work". The report by the committee provides valuable insight into why some schools, despite being classified as historically disadvantaged, were performing well in terms of successful achievement in the National Senior Certificate Exam (Christie, Butler, and Potterton 2007). Overall, the report states that successful schools consisted of school members who were highly motivated, and although they had little control over their external circumstances, they battled social conditions by leveraging support from external agencies where possible, and acknowledging, rewarding, and celebrating the notion that success breeds success (Christie, Butler, and Potterton 2007).

Similarly, Jansen and Blank (2014), describing the common characteristics that make schools in challenging contexts work well, list the following strategies as key: Schools establish and maintain firm routines and extend time for learning; teachers teach every day and in every class and demand high expectations of their learners; learners are provided with love and discipline, while parents are encouraged to be involved in the life of the school; principals are visible in their leadership, and act on (and manage) the external environment; and while the school members engage in social entrepreneurship, the focus is on offering learners a life beyond the school. It is evident, as Prew (2009, 826) explains, that schools need to become more "flexible and resilient". Effective schools are those that are able to adapt to the needs of the environment, which means that principals are able to make better informed decisions around the structure and culture of the school. Langer (2004) describes effective schools as not only places where learning happens, but also considers the degree of community involvement in the school's daily functioning. This requires building and sustaining a complementary relationship between the school and its community, which is framed around the understanding that the school has something to offer the community besides education for its children; and conversely, the community has something to offer the school. We argue that it is such a relationship which requires us as educationists and researchers to look beyond the entire traditional construct of community and school engagement. The school in the community should serve a larger purpose than the legislative requirements and should champion the interest of the community it serves (Damons 2012). Similarly, the community should have a direct interest in ensuring that schools develop into spaces that actualise the full potential of their children. These ideas prompted us to ask: What constitutes a community school in a South African context? And, what role could such a community school play in becoming a beacon of hope in socio-economically marginalised communities?

To address these questions, we turn to some of the findings that emerged from our various studies in the field of education: two studies involved a township primary school and members of the community (Damons 2012; 2017), the other engaged with 9- to 12-year-old children and a group of childcare workers at a community-based organisation in a rural community (Cherrington 2015; 2017; 2018). As a comprehensive discussion of each of these studies and their complete findings is not within the scope of this paper, we instead offer selected ideas, reflections and moments from these engagements that shaped our own thinking around reimagining community schools and how these might enable hope and well-being in the community. In this article we offer a synthesis of our key findings on the characteristics of a community school, and then recontextualise these learnings with literature on hope in education. Guided by a Framework of Afrocentric Hope developed by the second author, we present our emerging ideas on how a school might be transformed to serve not only its primary academic purpose, but also as a beacon of hope for its community.

 

Methodology and Context of the Studies

The findings and vignettes presented in this article stem from two studies conducted by the first author (Damons 2012; 2017). In the first study, the focus was on exploring the value multi-stakeholders place on "efficacy" when establishing a new school in a socio-economically marginalised community. As an experienced school manager, Damons was formally requested in December 2011 by the Department of Basic Education to lead the opening of a primary school. The community in which the school was located was established as an initiative by the South African government to provide low-cost housing projects and infrastructure in informal settlements (HDA 2012). The challenges that confronted the community at the time included reliance on welfare assistance due to high unemployment as well as social and health challenges (due to HIV and AIDS, substance abuse, and domestic violence). At the time of the request there was only an empty building, with no resources allocated to the school or staff appointed. However, by the end of the year Damons was able to return to his original school and a principal was appointed to continue with the now established school. The study purposefully recruited participants from the teachers, community volunteers, and external organisations that collaborated to establish the school. Damons engaged with these multiple stakeholders to explore the key elements that need to be in place when opening a new community school for it to provide quality education. Returning to the school, his second study built on this work by engaging with a group of community participants, as co-researchers, on how community volunteers could be recruited, supported, and sustained to do work in a community school. Both these studies made use of Participatory Action Learning and Action Research (PALAR) methodology, a genre of action research. The process of PALAR entails developing a critical collaborative approach to dealing with complex challenges facing society (Zuber-Skerritt 2011) and was especially beneficial for allowing scholarship to emerge through praxis. The action learning set (ALS) (Zuber-Skerrit and Teare 2013) for the study comprised all the co-researchers (Damons, 15 community volunteers, and a foreign community worker who was volunteering at the school at the time). The transcripts and various artefacts generated by the ALS through the dialogical and dialectal discourse became the primary data, which was further triangulated with other secondary data sources (minutes of meetings, newspaper articles, visual artefacts) as the school had a rich history of community volunteerism (Damons and Abrahams 2009). The triangulation also included transcripts of a focus group held with the school management team (SMT). Data was analysed using critical discourse analysis (CDA) through narrative analysis and thematic analysis.

The discussion linking Damons' engagement with members of a township primary school to the concept of hope in education is framed by the findings of a third study, which was conducted by the second author. Guided by a critical transformative design, Cherrington (2015; 2017; 2018) engaged over a one-year period with 12 primary school children (aged 9-12 years) residing in a rural community. The children were all Sesotho home-language speakers and registered as beneficiaries of a children's programme (subsidised by the government, the Catholic Church, and various other organisations) where the study took place. The aim of the study was to engage rural South African children, through multiple participatory visual methods (drawings, collages, photo-voice, Mmogo-method), in constructing their experiences of hope. A thematic analysis of the visual and textual data was recontextualised with existing theories of hope and a Framework for Afrocentric Hope was developed to describe hope as conceptualised by rural South African children (Cherrington 2018).

The key findings and propositions below do not stem from a secondary analysis of the data generated by these studies, but rather are used to highlight the complementary value between the school and the community it serves. Further, we share selected vignettes and moments that emerged from these studies to evidence how our own rethinking about the notion of a community school as a beacon of hope and possibility had been guided and shaped into the discussion presented.

 

Findings: A Community School Is a School in the Home, and the Home in the School

The participants of Damons' study (2017, 168) describe the community school as "an inclusive space that united all stakeholders in creating a non-judgemental and collaborative environment for the children and community members to actualise their full potential". The school's purpose was not only to serve the internal stakeholders (learners, staff, and management), but also to nurture the developmental needs of external stakeholders (parents and other community members). This requires an enabling environment and relationship building, which can be achieved through practising the key values of care, love, loyalty, trust, and respect. These values should not only be enacted within the school to create a safe and enabling environment for learning, but also extended out into the community, encouraging hope and possibility for a better future for all community members. Stemming from this description, the school members' conceptualisation of a community school as a beacon of hope encompasses three key themes: A community school is values-driven; it creates an enabling and supportive environment for all; and it fosters solidarity and mutually beneficial relationships with the community.

A Community School Is Values-Driven

According to the community members in Damons' studies, for a school to be effective it must develop a positive culture that is values-driven. When discussing what values were most important for a community school to promote within the classroom and in the community, participants decided on love, respect, care, trust, and loyalty.

Love was regarded as the primary foundation for a caring school culture, as it "created a climate of trust, which assisted the school in meeting its obligation of providing quality education to its learners" (Damons 2017, 171). An unemployed community member volunteering at the school explained: "Many of us come from homes without love", therefore the school opens up spaces for learners, teachers and community volunteers to "experience love in different ways" (Damons 2017, 128). She added that coming to school every day and hearing someone say "I love and care for you" had taught her to love and care for herself, as well as to have more love and compassion for others. That is why she expressed that a community school should be founded on love.

Closely linked to the value of love was showing care and support for others by not only providing for their physical needs (such as food parcels and material support), but also by encompassing their spiritual and emotional welfare. According to another community member volunteering at the school, "this could be expressed by a simple 'thank you' for work done; a feeling of being respected by the staff at the school; or of being appreciated by learners" (Damons 2017, 190). The values of love, care, and support could be demonstrated in the school when everyone's contribution to the functioning of the school was meaningfully recognised, acknowledged, and appreciated.

The values of trust, respect, and loyalty were strongly intertwined and emerged when love and care had been established. Respect was discussed in terms of appreciating the role each person played towards improving the school. According to the community members who participated in the study, a community school is all about strong positive relationships, and a lack of interpersonal trust would result in problematic relationships (Damons 2017, 171). It is indeed critical for trust to be fostered between all internal stakeholders of the school through positive, respectful interactions, but it was equally important for the school to develop trust and respect with its community stakeholders. The participants stated that it is vital that members of the community also have trust in the school to be an agent for addressing the challenges experienced in the community. Consequently, trust would encourage loyalty by the community members towards assisting and supporting the school in reaching its purpose of providing quality teaching and learning (Damons 2017). In a community school respect and trust are put into practice when everyone's role and contribution is acknowledged as being equally important for serving the core business of the school (Damons 2012). Loyalty, in turn, can emerge when care, love, and trust are evident. Finally, the embodiment of all these values encourages mutual respect, manifested in the willingness to listen to each other and validate one another's opinions and feelings. For the participants it was clear that if interactions within and outside of the school are based on these values, "the school site becomes a home to the community members, the school is in the community, and the community is in the school" (Damons 2017, 171).

According to Nieuwenhuis (2007, 66), "Values are enmeshed in everything a school does or aspires to be and is a natural part of what education is about." It is important for schools to set out clearly what values will be upheld, overtly taught and reinforced. But merely stating a school's values will not necessarily translate into action. Values and policies need to be specifically designed into a school's operations, so that the school becomes a "dynamic and changing institution typified by collaborative practices and strategic planning to meet the changing needs of its learners" (Nieuwenhuis 2007, 75). This idea was also highlighted by the community members, who emphasised that while these core values were regarded as the heart or centre of the community school, there should be j oint ownership and responsibility between the internal stakeholders of the school (learners, staff and leadership structures) and the community members to ensure the values are upheld through ongoing collaboration and dialogue (Damons 2017).

A Community School Creates an Enabling and Supportive Environment

Once a solid foundation of values is established and agreed upon, it becomes incumbent on the principal and school management team to shape the school culture by ensuring that the values are enacted in consistent and purposeful actions in the school and beyond. From the participants' responses it seems that a community school recognises that learning occurs in an environment that is caring, enabling and supportive. Working on transitioning the primary school towards being a successful community school, Damons (2012, 133) reflects, "I believe that the culture that emerged was one of caring, compassion, and openness to learning. This was important in creating the conditions for the effective functioning of the school."

Another explanation of how the values could be put into practice was when the staff and learners at the school recognised and celebrated the role and value of community members in making the school successful. According to Damons (2017, 129), this is pivotal in creating "an enabling and supportive environment which further fostered the key values of the school". According to one of the older community volunteers who was part of the action learning set, being treated in a kind and respectful way by the teachers and learners created a positive climate at the school, which allowed her to develop her confidence and start respecting herself more. Reflecting on this participant' s engagement in the study, Damons (2017, 134) notes, "The better she felt about her role in making the school a success, the more she began to think about a better future for herself and her community too."

To ensure that the school environment is welcoming and supportive for all members who make use of the school, Damons (2017) suggests that the principal and school management need to adjust and revise existing school systems. Key recommendations include moving away from the hierarchal culture of schooling to a flatter organisation, where all the voices of the multiple stakeholders are heard, valued, and validated. This culture, which creates a humanising space, will encourage voice, create community, and promote agency (Zinn and Rodgers 2012).

The reflections presented here align with Witten's (2006) argument that issues emerging from the context of the school must be addressed for effective learning and teaching to take place. The third theme that emerged strongly from the community members about a community school is that it should be a place that takes responsibility for everyone's development and learning.

A Community School Fosters Mutually Beneficial Relationships with the Community

A visual representation created by the participants in Damons' (2017) study portrays their idea of a community school being a "home" (see Figure 1). In the centre are the images of a house and a school, which comprise the key stakeholders-learners (L), teachers (T), and parents/volunteers (P). The surrounding blocks indicate the key areas in which the community volunteers were active (library, administration, teacher assistants, caregivers for orphan and vulnerable children, grounds and security personnel, toilet, clinic, garden, volunteer project manager), and the chief motivators for their involvement, support from the school and experience of the school as a humanising space (see Damons 2017 for further discussion of these). Finally, the outer circle represents the core values that should be present in the interaction between the school and the community. This representation envisions that the "integration of school and community serves the purpose of creating the desired mutually beneficial relationship between community volunteer and school, in pursuit of the creation of a positive learning environment for the community and its children" (Damons 2017, 169).

 

 

This shows that a community school is not only a place of learning and holistic development for the learners, but should serve to enhance the well-being and hope of the surrounding community. From the participants' discussions, Damons (2017) concludes it was important that a community school should play a meaningful and nurturing role in the community during and outside school hours. It should be available not just for the children, but for all community members who need assistance. Again, one of the co-researchers, who had volunteered for more than 10 years in schools, described that a community school was seen to be "a school that works to involve the community, e.g. when something happens in the community, the school opens the doors for the community. And also it is a school that opens the gates even after school for the children, even during holidays" (Damons 2017, 167). Thus, a community school provides opportunities for all community members to learn and better themselves. According to another community member with several years of volunteering experience, "[a] community school helps old people to learn new language. A community school is a beacon of hope. Allows everybody to come in developing capacity. ... Community school combines parents, learners and teachers to work together" (Damons 2017, 168).

Another way for a school to foster a stronger relationship with community members is to initiate a volunteer support programme. In describing the success of the community volunteer programme initiated at the school featured in his study, Damons (2012, 127) states that it was the exchange-based relationship that was a key factor:

The community volunteers were exposed to a variety of opportunities that included training programmes from the institution of higher learning, on site job experience, job creation opportunities and eventually all of them receiving a monthly financial allowance through a government sponsored programme. In return, these community volunteers offered a broad range of support to the school that varied from nutritional support to teacher support in the classroom.

By providing community volunteers an opportunity to work at the school, Damons (2017, 190) reflects that the participants "were motivated when the school expressed an interest and willingness to support and develop not only their spiritual, physical and emotional needs, but also the needs of the broader community as well". It became apparent that the volunteers saw the school as a space in which they could develop their skills as well as their perceived value in the school and community, both through experiential learning from the voluntary services they were rendering and through other programmes offered in the school by external stakeholders. Discussions around the stakeholders of a school usually include the learners, their parents, staff members and the management teams; however, Damons (2012) emphasises that the feeling from the participants in his study was that everyone in the community must share in the ownership of the school and thus should benefit from it. While some literature has focused on how schools can create an enabling learning environment for the learners to achieve their full potential, there is little mention of how schools could enable the development of the community as a whole (Damons 2017).

Finally, the community of the school can be served through beneficial partnerships between the school and external agencies. By virtue of its nature as a subsidised government service, a community school is in an ideal position to leverage key resources for the community through external stakeholders outside of the geographical area of the community. This can include health and social services, further education and training, as well as NGOs, business organisations and external funders. Damons (2012) reflects that the school not only benefited from various donations from, and associations with, external organisations, but that he and his staff also reciprocated by making presentations acknowledging this support. Further, the school was able to extend the core values driving its own success towards a funder who was struggling to get another community involved in its project. This reciprocal sharing of resources and knowledge further strengthened the school and the community it serves. The school also developed a relationship with a public university, providing a space for research and engagement opportunities that served to both expose students and researches to what the school has done, as well as add to further improvements in the school such as improved ICT infrastructure, Grade R assistance and training, and book donations. Such relationships also provide government departments and other stakeholders access to communities through the school as a gatekeeper, ensuring holistic services are delivered to the members of the community.

 

Discussion: Nurturing Hope and Possibility through Community Schools

From the observations presented, it can be argued that a values-driven community school creates an enabling environment for learning and development, and fosters mutually beneficial relationships and solidarity with its internal and external stakeholders. This led Damons to the idea that such a community school could become a beacon of hope, promoting transformation within the school and community. However, to frame his understanding of how hope might be operationalised in a school context, he turned to Cherrington's (2015) work on hope in the South African context.

Hope as a construct of positive psychology and well-being is often described as a positive human virtue associated with an expectation of goal attainment (Snyder 2000), and a necessary state of being for enduring adversities and finding meaning and purpose in life (Frankl 1984). According to Snyder (2000), hopeful actions require not only a vision of a desired future but include an individual's constant self-appraisal of his/her capability to pursue these goals and what pathways and resources are available. Therefore, concepts such as agency and perceived self-efficacy play an important role in shaping an individual's hope, thinking, and behaviour. We subscribe to the notion that hope is "as much a process as an outcome" (Larsen et al. 2014, 10). Similarly, Stephenson (1991, 1459) defines hope as "a process of anticipation that involves the interaction of thinking, acting, feeling and relating, and is directed towards a future fulfilment that is personally meaningful".

Other authors such as Marques and Lopez (2011) have expounded on the benefits and virtues of building hope in individuals (see, for example, Marques and Lopez 2011). Elevated levels of hope have been linked to a developing sense of self-efficacy, belonging, and identity (Yohani and Larsen 2009). Attributes of hope include goal-setting, perceived competence, and self-worth, which in turn lead to better problem solving and resilience in facing life's difficulties (Scioli and Biller 2010; Snyder 2000). High-hope individuals demonstrate better academic performance (Maree, Maree, and Collins 2008), pursue healthier lifestyle choices (Scioli and Biller 2010), and present fewer psychological problems such as depression and anxiety (Snyder et al. 1997). Viewed as a universal human experience that can be influenced by multiple contextual, personal, relational, and systemic factors, it can be said that hope can be shaped, built, and maintained by purposeful interventions and actions. Thus, it is believed that hope can be injected and cultivated in a school setting to create an atmosphere of motivation, caring, and cohesive functioning (Cherrington 2017; Lopez et al. 2009; Marques and Lopez 2011).

Our discussion is guided by Cherrington's (2015) description of hope as experiencing a better life on a contextual, personal, relational, and collective level. Her study with rural South African children highlights that "building and fostering an individual's hope in the context of an Afrocentric worldview¹ is a multi-layered and multi-dimensional experience", which means that hope can be intentionally enacted at the personal, relational, and collective levels of human engagement and functioning (Cherrington 2018, 510). The notion that hope exists and can be developed on multiple levels connected with our reimagining of the concept of a community school and provided the groundwork for thinking how hope might be enacted by the school in service of its community. Such conversations resulted in a new understanding of how community schools could become beacons of hope in the community. We present these ideas as three key propositions for guiding schools towards operationalising hope.

Proposition 1: A community school that creates an enabling and supportive environment for personal growth for its learners, staff, and community members is able to foster Personal Hope

On a personal level, being hopeful means taking responsibility for building one's own hope by making positive life choices. This includes planning for a better future and actively engaging in activities that develop the individual physically, cognitively, psychologically, and socially. Thus, being hopeful is central to one's identity and character, indicating that hope is located in a person's self-concept (Cherrington 2018).

According to Skovdal and Campbell (2010), individuals form hopeful identities when they are encouraged to see the world and their communities in a way that gives meaning to their circumstances. This could be seen in the comments from the participants in Damons' study (2017) about their personal experiences of being part of the school in a time of transition. Their own value and the value they attributed to the school shifted positively when they began to see possibilities of a better future for themselves and their community. By being a part of the school community that was caring and supportive, the volunteers stated that their sense of self-worth and agency increased. However, Rodriguez-Hanley and Snyder (2000) have argued that self-efficacy itself is not necessarily sufficient for individuals to engage in meaningful actions to improve their life. The missing component for enacting hopeful actions lies in external motivation and the belief that personal actions would be supported and encouraged by people in one's environment. Snyder and Lopez (2007) opine that collective self-efficacy and agency can develop in groups or communities where individuals believe that by combining their efforts and working together they will be more likely to accomplish shared goals.

School culture lays the groundwork for enabling hope; therefore, establishing an environment of care and trust is key to nurturing hope-enabling schools (Cherrington 2015; Marques and Lopez 2011). This notion is also presented by Barr and Gibson (2013) who explain that to build a culture of hope in schools requires enriching optimism and opportunity through encapsulating what they term four key "seeds of hope": a sense of optimism, a sense of belonging, a sense of pride, self-esteem and self-confidence, and a sense of purpose. When these seeds of hope are nurtured, they lay the foundation for positive transformation in schools. Such seeds can be created through a welcoming environment, an atmosphere of respect and safety, an emphasis on success, high expectations, and community-wide celebrations of positives and achievements (Barr and Gibson 2013). According to Scioli and Biller (2010), creating a sense of belonging is a crucial first step in fostering a hopeful environment.

This mirrors the sentiment of the community members in Damons' study (2017) who described the community school as a "home" in the community. Further, it has been shown that schools that provide opportunities for goal-setting and focus on building competence, creative problem solving, and teamwork can transform classrooms, playgrounds and staffrooms into hope-enhancing spaces (Lopez et al. 2009; Marques and Lopez 2011). Finally, engaging all school stakeholders in taking responsibility and ownership over the success of the school and community instils a sense of purpose, which builds autonomy and pride (Barr and Gibson 2013).

Being hopeful can be viewed as a self-generating process, which, once initiated, is able to grow and sustain itself in a nurturing context. According to Stephenson (1991), once the momentum of hope is activated, people report feeling invigorated, full of purpose, renewed, calm, and encouraged. When people take action towards building their personal hope it energises them to effect hope in their context. In Damons' study, participants expressed that the act of volunteering at the school gave them purpose and value and thus sustained their hope in a better future for themselves and their community. For example, a teaching assistant shared how becoming a volunteer at the school had improved the quality of her life, stating that in the act of contributing towards the success of the school she developed a sense of purpose, which she did not have previously as an unemployed member of the community. Being part of the school made her hopeful (Damons 2017). It seems that because they were a part of a hope-enabling school culture, the community volunteers began to feel motivated and energised to contribute more towards the school and felt they were making a positive difference not only in their personal lives but also in the school and community. It can be said that their personal hope had been activated, which nurtured a positive outlook and motivated them to develop a sense of pride and purpose.

Proposition 2: A community school that is driven by-and lives out-the values of care, support, trust, respect, and loyalty promotes Relational Hope

It has been noted that hope exists, develops, and grows in a person's interactions with other people. It functions on a relational level (Jevne 2005; Scioli and Biller 2010; Scioli et al. 2011; Snyder 2000). According to Cherrington (2018, 10), hope is "relational and generative, and therefore, to build, maintain, and foster one's own hope, an individual needs to engage in hope-enhancing positive interactions with others". Snyder (2000) notes that hope's value increases when it is shared; thus relational hope refers to the acts of doing hope with others (Cherrington 2018). Cherrington (2015) further posits that hopeful actions have reciprocal value, meaning that by sharing and enacting values such as love, care, trust, and respect with others, an individual is also simultaneously strengthening his/her own hopefulness.

Hope hinges on experiencing trusting relationships and a sense of belonging with others (Yohani and Larsen 2009). Thus, according to Scioli and Biller (2010), hope can in turn be passed on to others through secure attachments and positive interactions. Hopeful thinking almost inevitably arises in the context of other people who teach and enact hope (Snyder 2000). This level of hope could be said to have been demonstrated in the volunteers' statements in Damons' (2017) study: the more they interacted positively with others, the more they began to feel respected and valued themselves. Experiencing a school environment that promoted and enacted positive values yielded positive relations and interactions between the learners, staff, and community members, to the benefit of all. Further, similar to the findings of Vézina and Crompton (2012), the volunteers at the school supported the notion that there is a connectedness between a sense of purpose and making a difference on a broader societal level.

When looking at schools in socio-economically marginalised South African communities, it is important to consider that from an Afrocentric worldview, which espouses collective-oriented and relational principles, foundations of care, respect, and trust within the family and community contexts strongly guide an individual's sense of meaningfulness and purpose in life (Cherrington 2018). Skovdal and Campbell (2010) argue that for children, hope-related coping is influenced by the value frameworks within their school and community. This carries meaningful implications for a community school in terms of actively fostering positive interactions among stakeholders (both within and outside the school premises). The value-enabled space of hope is further confirmed in Damons' later study (2017, 134):

An SMT [School Management Team] member in the focus group felt that it was because of that welcoming environment ... the warmth that they as volunteers received, the participants seemed to suggest, imbued them with hope, and the various programmes offered to the volunteers further increased that hope.

Proposition 3: A community school that understands that the holistic development of the child and the success of the school lie in the well-being of the community is able to promote Collective Hope

According to Jacobson et al. (2013, 6), the community school's "integrated focus on academics, health and social services, youth and community development and community engagement leads to improved student learning, stronger families and healthier communities". Similarly, we argue that when the school becomes the heart of the community, working collaboratively with all stakeholders, everyone benefits and grows. Hope also exists in the level of cohesion and caring experienced within the community. When members of a community are striving for a better future and engaging in hopeful actions, it contributes towards collective caring, compassion, kindness, and motivates personal and relational hope within individual members of that community. This is described as the collective level of hope.

For schools to become hope-enabling spaces for learners and staff, they need to foster positive and meaningful support from the school community through mutually beneficial relationships. Naidoo (2007, xxi) emphasises that in marginalised settings "community participation is fundamental to the success of schools". The members in Damons' two studies were adamant that a key function for a community school should be to build and maintain caring, supportive and respectful relationships between itself and the various community stakeholders. However, the key premise was that such connections have to be bidirectional, and beneficial for both the community and the school. The community itself was seen as a valuable resource for the school, even when members described their own community as disadvantaged or challenged (Damons 2017). Similarly, Jacobson et al. (2013), in their study of successful community schools in the United States, have found that inherent in the strategy and functioning of community schools were valuable community partnerships that supported the core of the schools' work. These partnerships went beyond mere involvement to shared responsibility and ownership for ensuring quality education and services to the learners and community. According to Damons, hope evolved in the community volunteers as they were being nurtured in fulfilling their own potential in a value-filled space of interaction with others in the schools. Such hope-enabling interactions "created a sense of belonging for the community volunteer rendering a service to the school and, in return, volunteers played a major role in supporting the basic functionality of the school" (Damons 2017, 169).

Prilleltensky and Prilleltensky (2007, 1) state that an individual's well-being "cannot be fostered in isolation from the organisations that affect our lives and the communities where we live". An individual's well-being is critically tied to the level of well-being in his/her environment and community. Hopeful actions promote harmony, togetherness, a sense of belonging, and mutual respect. Cherrington and De Lange (2016) demonstrate that active participation, collective learning and shared reflection can create spaces for fostering hope and collective agency towards active citizenship. However, in line with Nieuwenhuis (2007, 72), we also caution that "creating, nurturing and advancing values does not simply lead to human rights culture and democracy; it must be managed and leadership must be provided". A community school could become a source of hope and support to all when its management is proactive in establishing a collaborative relationship with the community and encouraging holistic development of the learners, their families, and the broader community.

Nieuwenhuis (2007) asserts that socio-political and economic realities strongly influence learners' behaviours and their motivation for learning, as well as parents' interest in school involvement. We agree with his sentiment that trying to enforce positive values in the classroom without addressing the larger social ills that affect the learners in their home and community is futile (Nieuwenhuis 2007). According to Lopez et al. (2009), when hope flows from one person to another it can alter each person's perspective on the world, what goals they set for themselves, and how they go about pursuing these. They believe that building hope within a school has the potential to ripple out into the school community. To spread hope in an educational community they suggest that perceived barriers to learning and systemic challenges to pursuing a better future must be identified and addressed. Schools can do this by providing resources and services within the community to support members' personal and collective development and growth. Provisions from the school that could be extended outwards towards improving the well-being of the larger community include access to meal provision, access to and use of telephone and fax facilities as well as access to the library and ICT resources for skills development. Schools and management teams can demonstrate resilience to adversity by generating alternative pathways for addressing obstacles in their community, providing stories of success and perseverance to community members.

A community school can also foster collective hope by ensuring open channels of communication between the school and its multiple stakeholders. We argue that when a community school can provide key services to community members through its partnerships with external stakeholders, the community members in turn become more active in supporting teaching and learning within the school. This can only happen if the school extends the core values of care, love, respect, trust, and loyalty towards its community, establishing an enabling environment for mutual growth and success for all.

 

Contributions, Implications and Limitations

This article is intended to make a theoretical contribution by reimagining community schools as beacons of hope in their community. We posit that a community school thrives by promoting hope and well-being on the personal, relational, and collective levels. The following characteristics of a learning school described by Nieuwenhuis (2007, 74) mirror our reimagining of a community school as:

• having a clearly defined vision with a purpose rooted in collectively agreed values;

• constantly searching for quality in teaching and learning by continuously undertaking self-evaluation and professional development;

• seeing itself as publicly accountable to the local community for the service that it renders to the learners, and the example that educators and parents are setting for the learners;

• placing a high premium on its relationship with-and the involvement of- the broader community. All members are valued as complementary to the educators.

As Nieuwenhuis (2007, 74) so succinctly states, "learning schools never give up on their children but offer hope for the future". We believe that our reconceptualisation of the key characteristics of a community school in the South African context contributes towards a shift in the present discourses on school improvement and quality education. This will require a rethink of the purpose of schools as currently defined in regulations such as the South African Schools Act, shifting the primary focus from only academic delivery to one that includes broader societal transformation. It would also require deeper critique on the required skills and competencies of teachers and principals, as well as support needed by schools to fulfil this mandate. Further, while the importance for schools to foster positive relationships with parents and to encourage parental involvement in learning has been well covered, there is a paucity of literature looking at the generative connection and meaningful relationship-building between a school and its community. Putting guidelines in place to promote such partnerships would further require a review of current education policies on the roles of parents and communities in school improvement, and how schools could be more responsive to the needs of their communities.

While schools and teachers are often associated with providing hope, there is very little support or instruction on how hope can be operationalised and developed as part of their daily functions. We would like to advocate that the concept of a community school should be synonymous with a place for nurturing a sense of community, modelling positive values, and engaging all community members in pursuing a sense of purpose and hope.

The arguments we have presented in this article can also inform educational policy and programmatic decisions on school improvement, allowing for reconsideration of the whole school development policy (DoE 2001). We propose that a community school should be defined and enabled by the community in which it functions. The "one-size-fits-all" approach to basic school functionality, as defined by the Department of Education (2001), is further challenged when community voices are not given an opportunity to shape and inform the quality of education their children have access to. There is a difference between promoting community members' involvement in the school and the school's involvement in the community, which is where we are proposing the emphasis should be. According to Damons (2017, 203), quality schooling is "not only about results, but about changing the lives of learners and communities. The implication of this is that if the community participates and is supported, they will then support the contextual definition by making themselves available to help the schools."

According to Nieuwenhuis (2007, 69), policy makers "often seem to have a myopic vision that education should be able to solve all societal ills. This is an unrealistic and narrow view which places responsibilities on the education system that it cannot meet." We realise that our discussion here somewhat indulges a utopian view of schools and communities. While we promote a cohesive and collective picture of a school, we are aware that many schools in socio-economically challenged communities experience many internal tensions and challenges to achieving such a culture. Schools as political systems are fraught with challenges, and many South African communities are very diverse and struggle to maintain cohesion, unity, and a sense of belonging.

 

Conclusion

In this article we have argued that to adequately provide quality education in the current South African context stakeholders in schools need to re-evaluate their role within communities, and to find ways to engage with all school stakeholders to open possibilities for a better future for all. Consequently, we sought to challenge prevailing deficit definitions of the community school in current South African education discourses by proposing a more progressive definition that actualises community schools as beacons of hope and possibility in socio-economically marginalised South African communities. We advocate that to meaningfully pursue the notion of providing quality education, public schools in South Africa should encompass the three key characteristics of a community school and be guided by the three propositions to foster hope and possibility within their communities. In positioning themselves as places that foster and nourish hope on the personal, relational, and collective levels, these schools can become more responsive to the socio-economic challenges faced by their learners, staff and community members, which in turn allows for open dialogue, the promotion of positive relationships, and collaborations towards improved education for all. Ultimately, we believe that it is through collective action that schools and communities can make a meaningful impact on the education of their children, and through this possibly also meaningfully improve the trajectory of their own lives and that of the community as a whole.

 

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1 The term "Afrocentric worldview" was first presented in Molefe Kete Asante's book The Afrocentric Idea (1989). In this article it is guided by the following: "Afrocentricity is a paradigmatic intellectual perspective that privileges African agency within the context of African history and culture transcontinentally and trans-generationally" (Asante 2007, 5).

^rND^sBerkhout^nS.^rND^sBouffard^nS. M.^rND^nH. B.^sWeiss^rND^sCherrington^nA. M.^rND^sCherrington^nA. M.^rND^sCherrington^nA. M.^rND^nN.^sDe Lange^rND^sChristie^nP.^rND^sDamons^nB. P.^rND^nS.^sAbrahams^rND^sHoppers^nW.^rND^sJevne^nR. F.^rND^sLarsen^nD. J.^rND^nR.^sStege^rND^nW.^sEdey^rND^nJ.^sEwasiw^rND^sLopez^nS. J.^rND^nS.^sRose^rND^nC.^sRobinson^rND^nS. C.^sMarques^rND^nJ. L.^sPais-Ribeiro^rND^sMaree^nD. J. F.^rND^nM.^sMaree^rND^nC.^sCollins^rND^sMarques^nS. C.^rND^nS. J.^sLopez^rND^sNaidoo^nJ. P.^rND^sPrew^nM.^rND^sRodriguez-Hanley^nA.^rND^nC. R.^sSnyder^rND^sRowling^nL.^rND^nV.^sJeffreys^rND^sScioli^nA.^rND^nM.^sRicci^rND^nT.^sNyugen^rND^nE. R.^sScioli^rND^sSkovdal^nM.^rND^nC.^sCampbell^rND^sSnyder^nC. R.^rND^nB.^sHoza^rND^nW. E.^sPelham^rND^nM.^sRapoff^rND^nL.^sWare^rND^nM.^sDanovsky^rND^nL.^sHighberger^rND^nH.^sRibinstein^rND^nK. J.^sStahl^rND^sStephenson^nC.^rND^sVézina^nM.^rND^nS.^sCrompton^rND^sYohani^nS. C.^rND^nD. J.^sLarsen^rND^sZinn^nD.^rND^nC.^sRodgers^rND^1A01^nEvelyn^sMuthama^rND^1A02^nSioux^sMcKenna^rND^1A01^nEvelyn^sMuthama^rND^1A02^nSioux^sMcKenna^rND^1A01^nEvelyn^sMuthama^rND^1A02^nSioux^sMcKenna

ARTICLE

 

The Unintended Consequences of Using Direct Incentives to Drive the Complex Task of Research Dissemination

 

 

Evelyn Muthama^I; Sioux McKenna^II

^IRhodes University, South Africa e.muthama@ru.ac.za http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8117-232X
^IIRhodes University, South Africa s.mckenna@ru.ac.za http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1202-5999

 

 

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ABSTRACT

Universities have used an array of incentives to increase academic publications, which are highly rewarded in the South African higher education funding formula. While all universities use indirect incentives, such as linking promotion and probation to publication, the mechanisms used in some institutions have taken a very direct form, whereby authors are paid to publish. This process has paralleled a large rise in publication outputs alongside increased concerns about quality. Significantly, there are ethical questions to be asked when knowledge dissemination is so explicitly linked to financial reward through the payment of commission to academics. Based on an analysis of institutional policies and data from an online survey and interviews with academics from seven South African universities, we argue that when money is the main means used to encourage academics to contribute to knowledge, numerous unintended consequences may emerge. These include a focus on quantity rather than the quality of research, a rise in predatory publishing, and resentment among academics. We argue that incentives, in particular direct payment for publications, undermine the academic project by positioning publications in terms of exchange-value rather than their use-value as a contribution to knowledge building.

Keywords: funding formula; quality research; financial incentives; knowledge economy; predatory publishing

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Introduction

At the end of 2019, the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) released the report of the independent assessors of the University of Fort Hare (DHET 2019a, 16), which includes the following conclusion:

In the academic sphere, we also found some perverse incentives. For example, the Research Incentive Policy allows substantial payments for research outputs to be made to academics-not into a research account, but into their personal bank accounts, on top of their regular salary. ... The university has paid out more than R86m in research incentive money into personal bank accounts since the beginning of 2014. Currently, the UFH research income from outputs is about R45 million p.a., of which about R18m p.a. is paid out directly to researchers. In other words, of the order of 40% of the university's output-based research income goes into the private bank accounts of academics. Fourteen professors have each been paid extra income of more than R1m in this way since 2014. The highest amount paid out to an individual over this time is R2, 64m. The risk of such direct payment of research incentives is obvious: that academic quality may be sacrificed in order to increase quantity and throughput.

This report is referring to a practice that exists in many South African universities. In this article, we consider the effects of paying direct incentives for publishing and argue that there is indeed the possibility that academic quality is sacrificed in the interests of receiving the incentive.

It is important to acknowledge that incentives are not inherently problematic, and that all social activity is incentivised in one way or another (Holloway 2010). In universities, like many other institutions, the rewards are often quite explicit. Salaries are earned for undertaking various teaching, research and community engagement activities, and promotions are awarded for increasing one's participation in these.

Academic work results in many outcomes, but perhaps none are as explicitly valued as publication. It is thus not surprising that various incentives are attached to this activity in universities across the world. In the United States of America (US), publishing is the central requirement for tenure (McGill and Settle 2011) and in the United Kingdom (UK), it is the dominant measure in the national Research Excellence Framework (Townsend 2012). In almost every university, publication is used as a key measure in probation and promotion processes, and is often the means whereby departments are able to bid for institutional funding. However, as the economists tell us, where there is competition and incentives, we are likely to see unintended consequences emerging as individuals learn to "play" the system (Muller 2017).

Harley (2017) asserts that academic work is increasingly conceptualised for its exchange-value rather than its use-value. This means that from the point of view of value, what matters is quantity and not quality or purpose. Academic publications in such a context have the potential to become a metric for personal gain more than a means of knowledge dissemination, with all the ethical implications this shift brings. This article looks at the South African context to argue that while all forms of incentive may have unintended consequences, where incentives have been monetised and authors are directly and individually rewarded for their publications, we see exchange-value thinking dominating our understanding of research activity.

Muller (2017) and Tomaselli (2018) both use the economic concept of rent-seeking to reflect on the effects of incentives for various academic activities such as knowledge dissemination. Rent-seeking is the process whereby individuals and organisations (such as academics and universities) maximise the opportunities offered by actions of the state to earn "rent" that is greater than they would earn in a competitive market. Muller (2017, 63) suggests, "Arguably, the most blatant and costly form of rent-seeking behaviour in South African academia relates to the publication subsidy scheme administered by the national department of higher education and training (DHET)."

Research on the impact of financial incentives on the quality of publications shows that increases in publication counts parallel increases in low-impact and local journal publications (see for example Butler 2002; 2003; Vaughan 2008). Woodiwiss (2012, 424) reviews the literature on South African responses to funding for research publication and shows that unless such rewards are explicitly linked to (the contentious issue of) the quality of publications, the effect is often that of (1) salami-slicing, where data that merits a single publication is spread over many, (2) increases in publication in in-house and national journals over international ones, and (3) the preference for low-impact journals in which it is perceived to be easier to publish.

In a use-value conception of academic publishing, incentives include participating in the dissemination of knowledge, contributing to a field, a commitment to knowledge production and a sense of attending to problems that the relevant field deems legitimately concerning (Langa 2015). In an exchange-value conception, the incentive to publish may be more individualised and direct, such as professional status and career enhancement. It is unlikely that any social activity is conceived of only for its use-value or its exchange-value, but rather it is always some combination of the two. In looking at the system of incentives in South Africa, we raise concerns that many current institutional processes privilege the exchange-value to the detriment of the use-value of academic publication.

 

Pressure to Publish in the International Context

The pressure to publish is experienced around the world with an array of negative consequences. Barbour, for example, looked at the rise in problematic publishing behaviours internationally that occurred as publications have taken on a more "direct monetary value in terms of increased salaries, bonuses and jobs" (2015, 1225). She identifies scams that range from fake reviewer reports to the take-over of whole journals publishing articles that fall far beyond their area of specialisation. Tijdink, Verbeke, and Smulders (2014, 67) found that 72% of Flemish researchers reported that publication pressure was "too high" and showed a strong correlation between such pressure and scientific misconduct. Adeleye and Adebamowo (2012) found that in Nigeria there is a significant degree of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism in academic publications, and they argue that a lack of knowledge of research ethics coupled with pressure to publish enough papers for promotion were at the heart of this phenomenon. Shah et al. (2018) reported increased incidents in India of "honorary authorship" among academics, that is, the inclusion of an author on an article whose contribution to the article did not warrant authorship (2018, 187). In South Africa, it has been found that the majority of academics find it difficult to apply authorship criteria and there are high levels of disagreement concerning who should be included as a co-author and in which order (Breet et al. 2018). There is also evidence of incidents of plagiarism whereby academics draw on scholarly work of others without acknowledgement or they republish their own ideas and concepts without appropriate citation (Thomas and De Bruin 2015).

More broadly, it has been argued that the tendency to reward the means of knowledge dissemination, that is, academic publication, without a nuanced consideration of whether it is achieving its ends, which is the sharing of knowledge, can result in quantity being privileged over quality. "The tendency within science to reduce the impact of science to that which is easily quantifiable and optimized-namely, publication and citation in internationally recognized journals-is strong" (Neff 2018, 199). The pressure to publish has taken a particularly acute form in South African higher education since the country emerged from the academic sanctions that isolated it during the apartheid era.

 

Research Funding in a Differentiated South African System

The South African higher education system suffers from both low research productivity and relatively small numbers of postgraduate graduations, and both are unevenly distributed across the university types. In 2017, the six universities of technologies (UoTs) produced 5.8% of research publications, the seven comprehensive universities produced 20.55%, and the 12 traditional universities (excluding Sol Plaatje University) produced 73.65% of the country's research publications (DHET 2019b). This differentiation by institutional type is shadowed by a different kind of differentiation: differentiation based on institutional history. The five historically white universities (that is, Stellenbosch University, the University of Cape Town, Rhodes University, the University of Pretoria, and the University of the Witwatersrand) produced the highest publication output per capita,¹ ranging from 1.8 to 1.43 units per capita (DHET 2019b), though the University of KwaZulu-Natal, an institution formed through the merger of an historically white and historically black university, disturbs this trend with a per capita output of 1.51 (see Table 1 below).

 

 

The need to address the highly uneven nature of the higher education landscape was at the forefront of the agenda when the democratic government came into place in 1994, and various strategies, such as institutional mergers and the allocation of some redress funding, have been implemented over the past two decades to this end. Funding initiatives such as the Teaching Development Grant and Research Development Grant (now collectively the University Capacity Development Grant) have seen the Department of Higher Education and Training spend billions of rands to achieve parity of outcomes between institutions in both teaching and research endeavours (Moyo 2018).

While attending to the legacy of apartheid in the sector, there was a concomitant need for South Africa to navigate its participation in a globalised order. With the rapid entry of South Africa into the world arena in the early 1990s came a desire by the government to increase research output so that South Africa could play its role in the "knowledge economy".

The "knowledge economy" refers to the premise that the economy is largely driven by the innovative development and use of knowledge. Universities are then perceived as key players in economic development through knowledge production and dissemination, and through the development of highly skilled human capital to sustain such productivity (Bloom, Canning, and Chan 2006; Castells 1994). There are many arguments in the literature that suggest that this has had the effect of conceptualising knowledge as "an intangible commercial good" (Tomaselli 2018, 2) that can be marketed for economic benefits, rather than as a public good (for example, Shore 2010; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004).

This particular way of conceptualising knowledge has increasingly come to dominate the higher education sector across the world (King 2004; Vaughan 2008). In many countries, policies are dominated by discourses about the role of universities in the provision of immediate economic benefits (Boulton and Lucas 2008). South Africa is no exception as higher education policies increasingly focus on an economic role and function (Badat 2009). While the university can indeed play a significant role in the economic development of a country, Allais (2014) contends that universities form only one small part of multiple complex social structures that affect the economy, many of which actually constrain the impact higher education can make. Furthermore, focusing only on the economic purpose of universities undermines the inherent function of the university as an important space for the development of humanity's critical and creative ability (Collini 2012; Higgins 2014; McArthur 2011). Despite such contestations in the literature, the discourse of the knowledge economy continues to be embraced and has led to various structures being put in place to drive knowledge production, such as the funding incentive by the Department of Higher Education and Training.

The formulations in Policy and Procedures for Measurement of Research Output of Public Higher Education Institutions (DoE 2003) were used to determine how research was to be funded in the newly reconfigured higher education landscape. The subsequent national funding formula included strong financial incentives to institutions to produce research publications in an attempt to increase the country's participation in this new "knowledge economy". Block grants are allocated to each university annually through a complex formula, which includes student enrolments, graduations, and research outputs, among other factors. The research output portion of the calculation includes funding for each accredited publication produced. This is important because it shows that the payment to universities for accredited publications is only one part of the larger block grant, which is used to run all aspects of institutions, covering everything from salaries to buildings and equipment.

The DHET uses a combination of international lists to determine what constitutes an "accredited" publication along with its own list of South African journals that meet various criteria. For each publication in such an accredited journal by its employees, the university accrues an additional funding unit within its block grant. The ability of its employees to generate a number of publications is thus important for the revenue of the university.

 

Incentives for Individual Researchers

In response to the direct financial benefit that universities receive in the block grant for publications by their employees, many institutions have established systems through which direct financial incentives are paid to researchers. Some academics believe that offering such rewards to individuals is the implementation of the "DHET subsidy disbursement scheme" (Tongai 2013, 3) and argue that the DHET funding system is "intended" to provide direct financial reward to individual researchers (Woodiwiss 2012, 423). But the DHET has recently indicated that while it intended the incentives in the block grant to drive universities to increase research outputs, it did not intend institutions to translate this into direct incentives to individual researchers. The research policy states: "The Department [of Higher Education and Training] subsidises institutions and not individual authors or academics. Institutions should be cautious of directly incentivising individual authors as this practice is promoting perverse behaviour in some cases" (DHET 2015, 5).

Despite such cautions, most universities continue to offer personal rewards for accredited publications and even for completion of postgraduate supervision. Only two universities, the University of Cape Town and Rhodes University, do not offer individual incentives to those researchers who publish in accredited outlets, electing to use the bulk of this funding for research development more broadly. It should be noted, however, that in these two institutions, as in all other universities, research output remains a key criterion for promotion, and so there are other exchange-value incentives, though these are less direct than the individual payment.

The structure of the individual incentive schemes varies by institution. As an illustrative example, consider the following extracts from policies at the University of Fort Hare and the University of Venda:

The University will pay an incentive amount of R20 000 for each research accredited unit (publication and postgraduate output) that is approved by the Department of Education on the Research Output component of the University subsidy.

The incentive will be paid once the Department of Education approves the audited number of units.

The person receiving the incentive will have the choice of taking the full amount as cash (which will be put on the person's salary and taxed) or have all or a portion of the amount placed in a research account in their name. (University of Fort Hare Research Policy 2008 [implemented at the time of writing])

A subsidy from publication output, an amount determined annually is received for publication output by University of Venda staff. 50% of the subsidy received from the Department of Higher Education and Training will go to the University's Research and Publications Committee account. A researcher is entitled to 35% which goes to his/her account to be used for research purpose after approval by the Director of Research and Innovation or the Research and Publications Committee and 15% will be paid to a researcher as an honorarium. (University of Venda Research Policy 2010 [implemented at the time of writing])

The amount per unit paid by the DHET varies year on year. In the 2017/2018 academic year, the amount for a single unit, such as a single accredited journal article, was R108 000. At the University of Venda, to continue the example, this would result in R37 000 going into the author's research account and R16 200 being paid into the author's salary in the case of a single-authored article. For a co-authored article, the amount would be divided between them. The DHET would similarly divide payments between institutions where the co-authors come from multiple universities.

 

Questioning Causal Claims

The implementation of the funding incentive as part of the block grant has correlated with a rapid increase in research publication output in the South African higher education sector (CHE 2016; DHET 2013; Lee and Simon 2018; Pouris 2012). At the time of the implementation of this formula in 2005, the number of publication units for the sector was 7 230; in the years since, publication output has risen dramatically, with 18 872 accredited publication units being recorded for 2017 (DHET 2019b). This impressive increase suggests that the reward to institutions has had the desired effect, especially given that the number of academics in the system only increased by 12% in the same period (CHE 2016; DoE 2006). However, such claims that the rise in publications in South Africa is caused by the payment of incentives by the DHET need to be slightly tempered by an awareness that this is an international phenomenon, as academic publishing worldwide has increased by 300% since the end of World War Two (Bornmann and Mutz 2015).

As to the whether the incentives being paid directly to researchers, as opposed to broader incentives related to promotion, have driven increased outputs in South African universities, it should be noted that the increase in research productivity has taken place at all universities including Rhodes University and the University of Cape Town, despite these universities not implementing such individual financial reward systems. This raises the question as to the causal effects of direct incentives being paid to individuals.

 

Methodology

The article emerges from a recently completed study (Muthama 2019), which investigated the conditions enabling and constraining the production of research in the Historically Black Universities (HBUs), as part of a larger project on institutional differentiation in South Africa.² One of the findings of the study was that the use of research incentives as a driver of research has had both enabling and constraining effects on research production, and it is this finding that is explored in more detail in this article.

We draw on a social realist approach in this research (Archer 1995; 1996), which considers events and experiences in the social world as context bound and emerging from the complex interplay of structural, cultural and agential mechanisms, many of which may not be readily visible to those involved in such events or having such experiences. Structures, in social realism, refer to institutions, systems, positions, roles and so on. Cultures refer to values, ideas, theories, beliefs, perceptions and so on (Archer 1995). Agency refers to the ability to take action in one's own interest (Archer 1995). The social world is understood to come into being through the complex interplay of these domains. Identifying how each of these domains enable or constrain an event, such as the dissemination of knowledge, means moving beyond assumptions of simple causal relationships.

Structures are often used in institutions to drive change. Policies, committees, and so on may be introduced within universities with the intention of driving people to act in certain ways. In this study, we can see that incentives were introduced to drive increases in publications. But the messy nature of the social world means that we need to be careful in according to structures full causal powers, because other variables are always at play (Archer 1995). Even where the link between a structure and an emergent event can be tentatively tracked, the same structure may play out quite differently in another context where other variables are in effect.

In the case of this study, to be able to understand the emergent events and experiences of research production or lack thereof, data was collected from all seven HBUs (as so designated by the DHET). HBUs have particular constraints on research production (Bozalek and Boughey 2012; Muthama and McKenna 2017). They were largely prevented from undertaking research or offering postgraduate studies during the apartheid era (Bunting 2002). They also worked under severe financial constraints whereby they were allocated very restricted annual budgets and expected to utilise them within the year without any scope for long-term planning or for interest-accruing investments (Moyo 2018). Moreover, the positioning of HBUs in rural areas, with the exception of the University of the Western Cape, has also had an impact on the capacity of these institutions to attract and retain researchers (Bunting 2002).

Ethical clearance for the study was first sought from the institution where the larger team project on institutional differentiation was lodged and then from each of the seven institutions where data was collected (more detail can be found in Muthama and McKenna 2017). The first form of data consisted of any institutional policies that related to research. Where we refer to such documents, the institutional identity is given as these documents are in the public domain and thus readily identifiable. Second, an online questionnaire was sent through the heads of research to academics in these institutions. One hundred and fourteen respondents completed the questionnaire. While this is a low response rate given the potential number of researchers at these institutions, the responses represented all seven institutions and a very wide range of faculties. The survey included both closed and open questions, many of which elicited lengthy and rich responses. The questionnaire was anonymous, and we assured participants that we would reveal neither their identity nor the identity of their specific institution. The last item in the questionnaire requested that those respondents willing to be interviewed submit their contact details separately. We undertook 40 interviews with academics and heads of research (DVC: research, directors of research, senior research manager and so on) from all seven universities. Participants are cited as AC1 to AC34 (for academics) or as HoR1 to HoR6 (for heads of research). Forty interviews may well not constitute a representative sample, particularly given that more productive researchers may be more likely to self-select to be interviewed about their research production, but we believe that the extensive nature of their inputs (the interviews lasted between half an hour to over an hour) provides useful insights on this complex phenomenon.

 

Incentives Are an Expectation

Across all the data emerged a broad understanding that the provision of incentives to researchers as a reward for publications is an expected practice, and there was also a strong belief that the payment of incentives had a causal relationship with the increase in publications.

The publication record at [University of XYZ] has completely shifted, if you look at the ten-year stretch, all of a sudden it is very high. So definitely there are incentives which are put in place to make this possible. (AC29)

Look, if there were no incentives, I think a lot of people wouldn't take part in research. (AC14)

... with finances in difficult economic times, you can just do more. Because you feel motivated, you can even take students with you to conferences, you can also open up worlds for them, and you publish of course with them so that they also be mentored and follow that path. So, everything around incentive, it's like when you have a snowball effect, they say you also need something in order to make something and that's also true at the university. The more you put into people you will definitely see the rewards. (AC21)

Here we have some incentives for each and every publication that you get, your researcher gets some proportion . in my opinion, this can actually motivate some researchers. (AC16)

... we are improving and increasing the number of the graduates and in publication and so I do see tangible impact of these incentives. (AC9)

This accords with Pouris' s (2012) claim that publication incentives in the South African higher education sector encouraged the increase in publication output. Some of the participants linked this causal relationship to their particular type of institution.

The previously historically disadvantaged institutions you find that they provide incentives for research publications and for the supervision of students, then that ... like adds more output. So, the incentive is also working to increase the output. (HoR1)

There were a few individuals who indicated that the payment of incentives did not encourage an increase in research output because the incentives were not sufficient.

According to my view they [the incentives] are very minimal because you are expected to produce one paper in five years and I am saying that cannot be expected to be incentive or something that can drive research. (AC10)

Dominant across the data was the view that incentives were the norm and were an important driver of research productivity. But there was also reference in the data to a few unintended consequences of the direct incentive process, as we will now discuss.

Incentives Drive Quantity, But Not Quality

The pressure to publish combined with incentives for publication can drive a focus on quantity and not quality. This has been argued in various publications (see, for example, CHE 2016; Lee and Simon 2018; Tomaselli 2018) and emerged strongly in our data.

A lot of academics that I know go churn the papers out, but then they've got to find a journal for it to go to. And it's very difficult. ... So normally what they do is they send it to journals that will take anything. (AC 13)

Many academics articulated the goal as increasing the number of publications rather than making contributions to knowledge. This was particularly evident in the data in a lack of concern about where their work was published as long as it was "on the lists" to get the financial rewards.

Whether you are publishing in a journal that has high impact factors or low, you see, here we don't care about that. What we care is whether that journal gives the university money. (AC 19)

Accreditation for subsidy was understood as the measure of quality rather than a consideration of how significant the research contribution is. The 2014 University of Zululand policy on the administration and management of research funds explicitly uses this language:

Special recognition should be given to researchers who have a record of producing subsidy-generating outputs and who have clear research plans for generating further subsidy-generating outputs. They should accordingly have an advantage when research funds are allocated in certain categories.

A few participants spoke of their fears on this issue, indicating that there is little concern about where the publications occur, what they are about, or who reads them, as long as they "count".

But then of course there is a point of quality that is also important, because it's where you are publishing, and this is something I have taken seriously. I just don't publish anywhere. I categorise where I want to publish because it leads to that other incentive of, I want my work to follow me, I don't want to be known as the guy who just published in the journals that were easy, you know. (AC14)

The DHET has recently cautioned universities to "remember the importance of research integrity when submitting their claims and are urged to focus on maintaining quality of research" (DHET 2015, 6). But as Muller (2017) points out, such appeals are unlikely to be successful. Indeed, it may even be considered obtuse for the DHET to make such appeals as it created the national system of incentives now seen to be "undermining cultures of ethical practice" (Muller 2017, 64).

The exchange-value discourse with its focus on research as measurable units arguably has acted in what Archer terms "complementarity" (1996); that is, drivers in the domain of the structural align with drivers in the domain of the cultural, emerging in the proliferation of quantity over quality. There is also a concern that such complementarity makes institutions particularly vulnerable to predatory publishing, an issue to which we now turn.

 

Use of Incentives Encourages Predatory Publishing

Institutions have been warned by the DHET to "safeguard against predatory journals whose main purpose is financial gain and not quality of research" (DHET 2015, 7). Predatory publishing refers to the "publishing of academic papers without necessary controls, such as appropriate peer review and professional copy editing to ensure high-quality research" (De Jager et al. 2017, 35). But the pressure to increase publications, rather than to enhance knowledge dissemination, has created a context that has allowed predatory journals to flourish in South Africa, as emerged in the data.

Because of the incentives ... you see a trade-off ... some academics when they are starting they start off by publishing in ... predatory journals that are just like after money, they are not really following the peer review processes. ... So, in the way that kind of competition, that kind of pressure could also put like academics in a tight fit where it compromises the quality now also of the output. (HoR1)

The university lost a huge amount of revenue because . staff had published in this journal. And then of course it was taken off the accredited list, so we lost a huge amount of revenue there. (AC13)

The problem with predatory publications is that they do not get read or cited, and so they fail to contribute to knowledge dissemination (Hedding 2019; Le Grange 2019; Maistry 2019). It can be argued that it is an exchange-value culture that makes it possible for such publications to flourish and, therefore, there is a need to nurture a research culture focused on the ends of knowledge dissemination and not the means of output (Muthama and McKenna 2017). There is also a need for the Department of Higher Education to continuously interrogate the quality of their list of accredited journals, which in the past has been found to have weak criteria for selecting journals (ASSAf 2018).

While "falling" for a predatory publisher is often blamed on the actions of individual academics (Maistry 2019), it can be argued that the structural and cultural contexts within which academics work make predatory publishing more or less likely (Le Grange 2019). Archer (1995; 1996) calls this "upwards conflation", when problematic events, such as the rise of predatory publishers, are blamed on the actions of individuals without recognition of the role of structural and cultural conditions. Tomaselli (2018) and Muller (2017) both unpack the institutional nature of the dynamics that enhance the likelihood of predatory publishing and related problems.

 

 

Not every university in South Africa has fallen for the scam of predatory publishing to the same extent, as can be seen in Table 2 above. In the period between 2005 and 2014, work by Mouton and Valentine (2017) shows that research-intensive universities had less than 1% of their publications in journals that showed strong evidence of being predatory, while in the same period, the HBUs and Universities of Technology had between 1% and 16% of their publications in such journals, which suggests that having a strong research culture is one mechanism that constrains this problem. Muller (2017, 62) argues that where institutions have weaker research cultures, rent-seeking behaviour can be particularly damaging because there are "limited controls-in terms of ethical norms or enforcement mechanisms-on the extent of harmful rent-seeking behaviours". Defining a "strong research culture" is a challenge (Billot, Jones, and Banda 2013), but we argue that it is one in which the culture focuses on the use-value of research more strongly than its exchange-value.

 

Use of Incentives Leads to Resentment

Muller (2017, 66) notes that "there is good reason to believe that the types of rent-seeking created by existing mechanisms divert resources from teaching", and our data found that this was indeed perceived to be the case.

There are lots of attractive incentives behind research which started as a good thing anyway because it encourages the academics to do research, to have a love for research. But I think that is now coming at a cost. It's costing teaching and learning because now every academic is more interested or more concerned about publishing, and then they know that if they publish ... there are going to be very good incentives. (AC 15)

Our study data suggested that the use of financial incentives to drive research productivity can lead to resentment because established academics who get paid the incentives are often not expected to participate in teaching and other responsibilities to the same degree. The financial benefits the university accrues from their research productivity lead to structures being put in place to protect those who actively publish from other activities, so that they are doubly rewarded through both financial incentives and workload adjustments.

And that means you don't do any of the drudge work, you don't do any of the other things ... that we have to do. We've actually got two research Profs who don't do any teaching whatsoever. We're not quite sure what they do, they just get paid a heck of a lot more than we do. (AC 13)

Many junior staff noted their own difficulties in establishing a research profile alongside heavy teaching loads.

Many of us feel that our teaching load is too heavy to allow us to do research and for many people that is still the case. But I do think they are trying to improve the situation. (AC2)

It's just that sometimes it's difficult to actually do research while you teach and you have got so much load. But it is a core business of my profession. (AC 17)

A problem arises where novice researchers do not yet have access to research funds through incentives. (AC 10)

Some participants noted additional rewards beyond direct financial incentives accruing to those who published or graduated postgraduate students:

And there is such a strong emphasis on publication and postgrads. You know, for example, I had my first student graduate March this year, and I was invited to a dinner by the Dean and we went up to [nearby town] and they paid for the accommodation, and all the staff who had had Master's or PhD students who had graduated, were invited to this dinner. It was sort of a congratulation and celebration. (AC13)

Another issue related to incentives that emerged in the data as causing resentment was the relatively new requirement in some universities that postgraduate students publish from their research prior to graduation. The dissemination of knowledge created through taxpayer-subsidised master's and doctoral studies is undoubtedly important, and indeed the Higher Education Qualifications Sub-Framework (CHE 2013) states that a doctorate should merit peer-review publication, but there were concerns about requiring publications from postgraduates.

It's just a new ruling from Senate, is that before the student can graduate, they've got to submit a paper. One paper if they're Master's, two if they're PhD ... to journals, before they're allowed to graduate. (AC 15)

Tomaselli (2018, 4) suggests that demanding publications from postgraduates is a case of universities "milking" the system. It would certainly seem that the policy requirements for postgraduate publications are entirely based on exchange-value notions of outputs rather than use-value notions of knowledge dissemination.

The Scholarship is renewable for a second year subject to satisfactory progress, indicating that an accredited publication has been published or proof that it is in press or under review. The Scholarship is renewable for a third year subject to satisfactory progress, indicating that the article for the second year was published and that a second accredited publication has been published or proof that it is in press or under review. (University of Limpopo 2010 Research incentive policy)

The call for postgraduates to submit an article for publication prior to graduation can also be seen to contribute to the overburdening of the national academic publishing system. Tomaselli (2018) points out that the rapid increase in publications has placed enormous pressure on editors and peer-reviewers, and that both these tasks remain beyond the realm of metrics for promotion and payment of direct incentives.

Only individual academics who produce publications or complete postgraduate student supervision are eligible for personal incentives. We had thought that, in a South African context, incentives might work against collaborations, but there was no evidence in the data that the provision of individual incentives had decreased collaboration. And it is important to note that there has actually been an increase in collaborations, as evidenced in co-authorships both across the South African higher education system (DHET 2019a) and internationally (Bornmann and Mutz 2015). The increase in research co-authorships has especially taken place between the Global North and Global South (ASSAf 2018), although some literature suggests this may reflect problematic power imbalances already embedded in the academic publishing industry (Boshoff 2009; Harrison 2006). Boshoff s study (2009) looked at the nature of research collaboration between 82 authors from the UK, France, Cameroon and the US, and found that researchers from Cameroon were predominately involved in data collection and in the contextualisation of the study while their counterparts in the Global North were the lead researchers.

Though there was no evidence of a reduction in collaboration in this study, concerns were raised about the extent to which supervisors and others might "poach" work from their students to get increased outputs. There were also some concerns expressed in the data about the basis on which co-authorship was allocated:

You find that you are able to see your name in four or five publications, you wonder how much impact you've made, or your contribution, how much quality did you bring to that publication? (AC15)

The use of incentives as a structural driver of research output needs to be considered alongside its complementarity to the exchange-value discourse in the cultural domain, where the goal of research is seen as obtaining incentives and promotion (Muthama and McKenna 2017).

It [research] is supposed to be a core function or one of the major things that one should be able to do whether one might be able to or not. It is a major thing in the policy, if you are to be assessed to get promotion they consider your academic output. (AC 24)

It [doing research] is a must. The university gives you funding if you need. ... Once you are given the funding you are expected to give back in terms of publications. (AC 27)

Well, as I said, academics, you don't get promotion unless you have produced a certain number of papers. And in fact, we have a quota system for the number of papers that you have to produce each year. (AC 13)

The widely held belief that academic staff should do research and that the function of a university includes research (Graham 2013) was evident across our data, but there was very little consistency in the understanding of the purpose of research (Muthama and McKenna 2017).

 

Conclusion

The state's use of funding as a structure to drive academic publications in the so-called "knowledge economy" has been matched in most universities with direct individual rewards to authors in the form of research funding or commission payments or both. All the academics who participated in this study were at universities that provide such incentives, and many indicated that they found the payment system beneficial to them. However, at least three concerns arose in our analysis of the data on the use of incentives: (1) they seemed to drive quantity with little consideration of quality; (2) universities were vulnerable to predatory publishers; and (3) there was resentment that those whose main work allocation was research and supervision were then paid additional incentives for doing this work.

We have argued that there needs to be more nuance in such a system and that institutions need to be wary about the extent to which a focus on payments reduces publications to their exchange-value. The use-value of publications as contributions to knowledge becomes of secondary importance or could even be seen as a constraint on output. We have argued that the effects of the structure of incentives are particularly problematic given the complementarity between this structure and a culture of instrumentalist conceptions of research and the commodification of knowledge. Having incentives that focus on one-sided indicators, that is publication rather than knowledge dissemination, "will ultimately lower the performance of the science sector in total" (Schmoch and Schubert 2009, 165), so the consequences of these processes go far beyond individual institutions. As Macleod (2010) states:

The incentive system is a blunt instrument that serves the purposes of increasing university income rather than supporting scholarship and knowledge production in South Africa. It is essentially a managerialist solution, in which bean counting trumps over concerns for scholarship.

This study's findings echo many of the concerns in the literature (for example, Muller 2017; Tomaselli 2018; Vaughan 2008) and add the empirical data of academics' perspectives on the unintended consequences of this phenomenon. We have argued that this requires a system-level change rather than blaming individual academics who make poor choices in their desire to achieve promotion and direct incentives, or chastising universities for developing policies and practices of direct reward that mimic that of the DHET. We need to revisit the metrics used to drive knowledge production and dissemination. At present, the funding formula rewards the supply of publications without any consideration of the demand for knowledge and thereby rewards "the pursuit of mediocrity" (Vaughan 2008, 91). Looking back at our social realist underpinnings urges us to question the perverse effects of structures, such as direct incentives, that are put in place without careful thought as to the desired culture. Vaughan (2008, 96) asks a key question:

What sort of behaviour do we wish to encourage in South Africa? Should we be rewarding universities whose academics produce the greatest number of publications, without regard to quality, or should our emphasis be on a system that inspires our academics to aim for a level of scholarship which can withstand the scrutiny of an international audience?

We would hope for the latter. If we want universities to be spaces of critical knowledge production and dissemination, and if we want academics who are committed to the pursuance of that knowledge, then we need to be very careful about the structures we put in place to drive this.

 

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1 Research output per unit capita is a measurement indicator for the number of research outputs produced in a South African university. It is calculated by measuring the total number of all research outputs (publications and postgraduate graduations) by a university and then dividing that total by the total number of permanent academic staff at the university (DHET 2011).
2 NRF grant number 876460 and 94969