In Pursuit of Socially Just Pedagogies in Differently Positioned South African Higher Education Institutions

• In Event: 68.061 - Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: 68.061-6 - Critical Posthumanism, the Affective Turn, and Socially Just Pedagogies and Curricula

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation is to demonstrate the value of a posthuman approach to research on professional learning (learning to teach) in higher education in South Africa. Within this ontology human understanding is not central, but part of the discursive and material entanglements that constitute our coming to understand the world (Barad, 2003, 2007). The presentation will suggest a new, yet evocative and compelling account of how the spaces and places where academics work, impact on their commitment and personal growth. It provides an illustration of how unequal distribution of resources matters, and how this unequal distribution is interacted with by academics in their teaching role. The data on which the study is based comprise interview transcripts with ten lecturers at each of two higher education institutions, one historically advantaged and one historically disadvantaged, in the South African historical and political context. The data was collected for a project on professional learning in South Africa, and is being revisited from a sociomaterial perspective. In well-resourced institutions the facilities are taken for granted, they are mute and their role is not explored; in inadequately resourced institutions materiality and resources are assumed to play an important role, as limiting and constraining via their absence, but the condition of lack and absence is totalising, and not explored within the larger web of relations in which learning and teaching takes place. Using data from two very differently resourced higher education institutions surfaces what is absent or silent when looking at one type of institution only. The twenty transcripts are discussed as an encounter between the author and the data, with an emphasis on those elements that produce an affective reaction. An important concept that Barad develops, based on the work of Haraway (1992, 300) is that of a ‘diffractive pattern’. It does ‘not so much map where differences appear, but rather where the effects of differences appear’ (Barad 2007, 803). For this reason the emphasis is on the differences in the entanglements that might have an effect on lecturers’ and students’ participation in the phenomenon of ‘learning and teaching’. Institutional influence is discussed in relation to assemblages including: dimensions of space, time, discourse on teaching and learning, and material artefacts. The article concludes with a consideration of what agency and responsibility (Barad, 2007) and freedom and free acts (Grosz, 2010, with reference to Bergson) might entail under these conditions.

Author

• Brenda Lana Leibowitz, University Of Johannesburg