What Makes Us Different? South African Education Students' Construction of an Antiracial Narrative Identity

• In Event: 60.085 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: 60.085-4 - Critical Education in the Classroom and Beyond

Abstract

This paper explores and interprets how final year South African teacher education students negotiate the construction of race in a digital storytelling project. Data in form of ‘small stories’ (Bamberg, 2006) are drawn from focus group conversations held at the end of the project. Focusing on African and Coloured students we consider in this paper how they constructed narrative identities which positioned themselves as anti-racial, agentive self-constructors, rejecting a victim narrative. We argue that rather than interpreting this as a naive and sentimental misrepresentation of their reality, it can be seen as a conscious attempt at repositioning themselves vis-a-vis their White peers and in the process disrupting asymmetric power relations in the classroom.

Authors

• Daniela Gachago, Cape Peninsula University of Technology

• Vivienne Grace Bozalek, University of the Western Cape