The pedagogical risk of transformation

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Delecia Davids (picture: provided)

Reflecting on the Race and Transformation in Higher Education Conference, 15-17 November, Stellenbosch University

Last week, I listened to various scholars and practitioners reflecting on, debating and troubling over transformation at the Race and Transformation in Higher Education Conference at Stellenbosch University. As I listened to thought-provoking, sometimes deeply unsettling accounts, I reflected on my own positioning and role in the transformation project of the institution where I teach, have studied, and live among students as an assistant resident head. I offer some of my tentative thoughts here, as there is still so much to grapple with, to problematise and even to celebrate.

The intimacy of living spaces on campus

As an assistant resident head, I live among students. I can quite literally hear the conversations of my neighbours, who are two white male students, if they leave their door open and speak in a bit of a raised tone.

I am often asked why I choose to live and work in such close proximity to students, and my answer is simple. I believe residences are important learning sites for students’ being and becoming during their time in tertiary education, as they are one of the only spaces in South Africa where people from diverse backgrounds share social and living spaces in a very intimate way.

As one of my colleagues put it recently, we are, to some extent, putting both the problems and the possibilities of a transforming society together in one room, one corridor and one building. I have acknowledged elsewhere that “residences can be influential sites of transformation and social cohesion [yet] they could also be sites of personal and social deprivation, misrecognition and alienation” (Davids, 2021).

The recent urination incidents and the resultant Khampepe Report highlight residences and the university as mainly a site of misrecognition and alienation, particularly for black students. However, in a residence environment, the residence head is also at risk of being misrecognised and alienated by students, as much as they can also experience the residence as a site for deep change and social cohesion.

When the Huis Marais urination incident occurred, I was furious, although not entirely surprised. I was deeply hurt by this gross act of dehumanisation of one student by another. As mobilisations of residences ensued to support the call for swift action and expulsion for Theuns du Toit, I was deeply troubled by the lack of urgency and apathy from the students under my care in the residence where I work.

When our head mentor, a black female student, asked for the mentors to debrief after the mobilisation, I experienced the inherent risk of transformation. Tired and angry at the injustice, I sat with the cohort of mentors, who are mostly white male and female students, facilitating a conversation about the importance of combating racism on campus. I sat in this meeting close to tears, yet having to hold a conversation with students who were not sure why everyone else was angry, why exams needed to be postponed and why they needed to change their holiday plans.

I wanted to hold them accountable for their ignorance, yet simultaneously wanted to keep them in the conversation because they had showed up. They asked questions; they wanted to know how they could be better human beings. So, I spoke through my tears and leaned into the tension that was palpable in the room – both their internal tensions and mine – and we engaged in a pedagogical conflict which truly tested me as a (residential) educator.

Pedagogic distance and productive tension

This experience I describe above came up for me as I listened to Professor Dennis Francis’s presentation on “Troubling cisheteronormativity in South African higher education”. Professor Francis shared how, because of the modules that they teach within the Sociology Department, they are constantly being questioned, misrecognised and shamed by students who cannot hold their own dominant, mostly Christian and homophobic views, with the views and experiences of especially queer bodies and identities in our institution.

I gasped at the blatant dehumanisation of students by other students through their “intellectual” contributions in class, which Professor Francis described, and was saddened that students could so blatantly disregard someone who shows up to educate them simply because they do not agree with who the person is and what identities they embody.

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I gasped at the blatant dehumanisation of students by other students through their “intellectual” contributions in class, which Professor Francis described, and was saddened that students could so blatantly disregard someone who shows up to educate them simply because they do not agree with who the person is and what identities they embody.

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While in the four years of teaching in the Faculty of Education at SU, I have never had such a blatant experience of dehumanisation by my students, I have had moments where I felt that my identity stood in the way of certain students being open to the learning opportunities that I created for them. I sometimes stood in class, wondering whether I had pushed too far, wondering whether my bush of curly hair had suddenly washed away my expertise, wondering whether my choice of story to illustrate a concept was too personal or too revealing.

When engaging during my classes with the complexities of inequality that exist within the education system, there are bound to be conversations about race, gender, class and language. Generally, my students shy away from descriptors of race, stumble uncomfortably with terms that position schools and themselves linguistically and financially, and struggle to reflect on how their identity positions them and the students they teach during practicum and those they will be teaching in the future.

After very difficult lectures and conversations, I have noticed that certain students stay away from class for a while and return weeks later when the content is less contentious. I have also experienced how the same content gives licence to students who would otherwise not engage in discussion, to want their stories and experiences heard and acknowledged, and to challenge and support one another as tensions arise and are resolved.

What is similar in my own experience of teaching at SU and Professor Francis’s account is that our students establish a form of pedagogic distance when engaging with content and experiences that destabilise their existing frameworks. Students may move close to, away from or towards both the knowledge and the person who holds space for the knowledge to be uncovered. Fataar (2019) refers to pedagogic distance to account for how the practices of institutions misrecognise students. Does this, then, mean that my pedagogic encounters, when asking students to converse in English, for instance, misrecognise students who would much rather speak in a language in which they are more comfortable?

While speaking my mother tongue is much easier when expressing my views, the stress that occurs when having to translate my thoughts so that most of us can understand and engage with the intellectual contribution in English is, to me, productive for learning to take place. I fear that some of the recommendations in the Khampepe Report will unintentionally remove all kinds of tension that exist in the classroom and residence spaces, which are inherent when diverse people live and learn together.

Suppose a university education aims to enable students to acquire disciplinary knowledge and educational agency to contribute to a socially just society. In that case, tension is a requirement for learning and the overall transformation project. Students will develop their agency in constricting spaces, and much has been written about the negative tension and experiences that chafe away at students as they encounter their university lives. Our default reaction to “fix” this is to try and make the university experience easy for students.

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Yet, I think that students will develop their educational agency, and thus their becoming, when there is productive tension. The way I understand this, is that both teacher and taught engage in a way where there is an equal amount of challenge and support.

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Yet, I think that students will develop their educational agency, and thus their becoming, when there is productive tension. The way I understand this, is that both teacher and taught engage in a way where there is an equal amount of challenge and support. In speaking on a panel about his experiences as a queer person in residences, Fanele described his educational and social experience at the university as traumatic, but also shared a sense of appreciation for the experience because it shaped him into the person that he is today. Now, while I am not advocating any learning experience to be dehumanising and inherently misrecognising of the humanity of any person, without productive tension, there is no will to change, no will to push back against the structural and cultural conditions that keep the status quo in check – quite simply, no will to learn.

You can teach only what you are

While as educators – whether in a grade five classroom, a lecture hall or a residence – we cannot take responsibility for enabling all good behaviour or for being the cause of bad behaviour, we must acknowledge our role in both of these. We must account for when and how we are complicit in upholding the racist, patriarchal and homophobic structures and cultures in place at higher education institutions. We must establish practices of radical openness to confront the different truths which shake our belief systems, our sense of reality and our lived experiences. Since reading the book Dare to lead by Brené Brown, I have appropriated the quote, “Who you are is how you lead,” to “Who you are is how you teach.” These sentiments were shared at the conference, and to me, this was a call to reflexivity as an important lever for transformation.

Our ability to be reflexive requires us to evaluate our positioning and power in any given moment and to alter our ways of being during encounters. We are required to rumble with our humanity and vulnerability and to recognise the humanity of others. We must develop an alertness for the consequences of when we have power in the room, and when and how we need to share that power. This is an inherently risky task, one we need to embrace wholeheartedly if we want transformation in our classrooms, residences and society at large.

References

Davids, DA, 2021. The “place-attachment” practices of student residence leaders at their Stellenbosch University residences (Master’s thesis, Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University).

Fataar, A, 2019. Academic conversation: From the shadows to the university’s epistemic centre – engaging the (mis)recognition struggles of students at the post-apartheid university. Southern African Review of Education with Education with Production, 25(2), pp 22-33.

Delecia Davids – Lecturer, Faculty of Education, Stellenbosch University, and assistant head of one of the university’s residences

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