My Students' Stories Became a Gift: A Tale of Poetic Professional Learning

• In Event: 43.068 - Fostering Relational Pedagogy: Self-Study as Transformative Praxis

Abstract

I teach and supervise graduate students in a school of education at a university in South Africa. My students are practising schoolteachers and university educators with diverse educational backgrounds. During the apartheid era (1948–1994), most of them would have been classified as African, Indian, or coloured, while I was classified as white. The apartheid administration used these racial classifications to stratify South African society. A hierarchy of racialised privilege and dispossession ensured that people labelled as white benefited from high levels of government spending and access to superior facilities and resources in all domains (including education), while people labelled as African, coloured, and Indian were disenfranchised and oppressed (Clark & Worger, 2016). Of particular relevance to this chapter is how the apartheid government deliberately aimed to impoverish education for the majority of South Africans (Nkomo, 1990). I bring personal history stories into my pedagogy through individual and group activities that provide support for writing and sharing such stories. Prior to becoming a teacher educator, I was an English language schoolteacher with a particular interest in creative writing. Hence, I encourage my students to explore creative strategies for composing and responding to personal history stories. My pedagogic practices draw on the literary and visual arts, which can heighten engagement and deep thinking, dialogue and sharing, enjoyment, taking action, and emotional growth (author et al., 2013). I also encourage reading and discussion of personal history narrative dissertations written by former students, and I invite these former students and other local authors who have published personal history narratives to come to talk with current students. I have found that such strategies bring to life reading as interaction with the author of a text as well as with the personal history narrative itself. Personal history stories written by local academics and student researchers offer relevant content presented in contexts and languages that are familiar and of interest to my students. Overall, my aim is to offer students opportunities and means to deepen and extend explorations of their personal and professional selves by reencountering and making meaning from personal stories of the past (both their own and others’) and re-envisioning hopeful stories for the future. In so doing, I encourage students only to share stories that they are comfortable with disclosing and also to respect the privacy and dignity of others who are implicated in these stories (Nash, 2004).

Author

• Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, University of KwaZulu-Natal