Toward a "Response-able" Pedagogy Across Higher Education Institutions in Post-Apartheid South Africa: An Ethico-Political Analysis

• In Event: Posthuman and Care Ethics for Re-Imagining Higher Education Pedagogies

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this presentation is to consider how the perspective of a relational ontology might be put to use to examine an inter-institutional course which was collaboratively designed across three disciplines and two differently positioned universities in South Africa. This course was conceptualised and implemented from 2006-2012 by educators who wished to address the issue of monocultural institutions in South Africa, as an inheritance of apartheid past (Cooper 2015) by bringing together students and teachers across disciplines and higher educational institutions (HEIs) in a new course. This paper looks at the extent to which this intervention could be considered a ‘response-able’ pedagogy.

Theoretical framework
The notion of response-ability is one which has been written about by feminist new materialist scholars such as Karen Barad (2007), Donna Haraway (1992, 1997, 2008, 2016) and Vinciane Despret (2004, 2015, 2016). Generally speaking, response-ability refers to the ability or capacity to respond. The ability to respond is not only seen as human but also as a relational capacity by which humans and more than humans are co-constituted through their relationships with each other. A relational ontology, on which response-ability is based, holds that entities or individuals do not pre-exist their relationships - they come into being and are rendered capable through multidirectional relationships.

Methods
The project provided a large reservoir of research data, but for the purposes of this paper, the final reflective tasks from 2006-2012 were read and analysed. This task asked questions about participants’ conceptions of community, self and identity, as well as what they had learned about their own and other disciplines and institutions from working together:

Data sources
We investigate the students’ engagement with the course from the perspective of a response-able pedagogy looking at their final reflective essays in terms of what they had to say about attentiveness, curiosity, responsibility, and being rendered capable - all elements that we have identified as being crucial elements in a response-able pedagogy.

Results
The CSI course, emerging from the legacy of apartheid with its geographical separateness, was set up to engender a more heterogeneous history of South African higher education than its monocultural and geographically separated institutions had afforded. The course provided practical, playful and sometimes risky and discomforting ways of engaging with the other. There were many opportunities in the course for attentiveness, curiosity, responsibility and rendering each other capable to happen, but also constraints in some instances for why these practices did not happen.

Significance
The CSI course is a powerful reminder of the insight that “[t]he past is never closed, never finished once and for all, but there is no taking it back, setting time aright, putting the world back on its axis. There is no erasure finally” (Barad 2010, 264). The course provided an opportunity not just to confront the past and future but for affective engagement with the ‘entangled relationalities of inheritance that ‘we’ are, to acknowledge and be responsive to the contemporaneity of the present’ (Barad, 2010, 264).

Authors

• Vivienne Grace Bozalek, University of the Western Cape

• Michalinos Zembylas, The Open University of Cyprus