Metaphor Drawing and Storytelling as Tools for Catalysing Gender Transformative Education with Teachers in South African Rural Schools

• In Event: Gender Transformative Education: An Emergent Concept’s Opportunities and Limitations in the Global North and South

Proposal

Participatory research links “three approaches: to create more democratic forms of knowledge, through action and mobilisation of groups of people on their own affairs, in a way that also involves their own critical reflection and learning. It is perhaps when these are effectively combined, that participatory research may contribute to the possibility of challenging and expanding the boundaries of the possible” (Gaventa & Cornwall, 2008,p.127). To decolonise dominant methodologies it is becoming necessary to analyse local folklore, songs, dance, and poetry to provide insight into the values, history, practices, and beliefs of formerly colonised societies (Chilisa & Ntseane, 2010). In our Ford Foundation-funded project: Girls’ Clubs: Building the capacity of girls to address gender inequality and GBV in and around their schools and communities, we used PVM (photovoice, drawing, cellphilming, storytelling, collage) with 11 young women teachers to facilitate Girls’ Clubs/ Girl Groups in their rural schools. The PVM workshops enable the CTs to dialogue on their lives and work in facilitating the Girl Clubs. These ‘Champion Teachers’ (CTs) invited 12 to 15 girls to join an extracurricular Girl Group and serve as accessible mentors. Drawing on African people’s kinship with the animal kingdom (through totems/diboko/izithakazelo), and our long history of oral forms of knowledge making (such as ritualistic chants, riddles, songs, folktales, storytelling and parables), we invited the CTs to use an animal metaphor drawing and storytelling to ‘reflect forward’ the kind of teacher and mentor they want to be while addressing gender equality and GBV in/around their schools.

Animal metaphors articulate a distinct cultural identity and give voice to cultural, social and political, aesthetic, and linguistic systems long muted by centuries of colonialism and cultural imperialism (Elabor-Idemudia, 2002). Animal metaphors are a creative linguistic and conceptual device that imagine ways of ‘being, feeling and doing’ and ‘imaginative strategy for communicating nuances that might be lost in describing participants’ lived experiences (McShane, 2005:6). They are a reflexive mechanism (Patchen & Crawford, 2011) and a tool for ‘taking stock of situations and assisting in envisioning how things might be different’ (Storr, 2012: 9) and activism’/‘resistance’, including strategies for challenging and subverting existing power relations in the participants’ contexts (Madhok, Philips & Wilson, 2013).

References
Chilisa, B., & Ntseane, G. (2010). Resisting dominant discourses: implications of indigenous, African feminist theory and methods for gender and education research. Gender and Education, 22(6), 617–632. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2010.519578Elabor-Idemudia, 2002.
Gaventa, J. and Cornwall, A. (2006). Challenging the Boundaries of the Possible: Participation, Knowledge and Power. IDS Bulletin, 37 (6), 122- 128.
Madhok, S. Philips, A. & Wilson, K. (2013). Gender, Agency, And Coercion. DOI 10.1057/9781137295613
McShane, S 2005, Applying research in reading instruction for adults: First steps for teachers. National Institute for Literacy, Washington, DC.
Patchen, T., & Crawford, T. (2011). From Gardeners to Tour Guides: The Epistemological Struggle Revealed in Teacher-Generated Metaphors of Teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 62(3), 286-298. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487110396716
Storr, D. (2012). ‘Keeping it real’ with an emotional curriculum’, Teaching in Higher Education, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 1–12. doi: 10.1080/13562517.2011.590976

Author

• Relebohile Moletsane, University of Kwazulu-Natal