Carolyn McKinney

Caught between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’? Talking about ‘race’ in a post‐apartheid university classroom

This paper explores difficulties in talking about ‘race’ and difference in a post‐apartheid university classroom. The data come from classroom‐based research conducted in a first‐year undergraduate English Studies course at a historically ‘white’ and Afrikaans university in South Africa. Drawing on poststructuralist ideas on discourse and the self, discourse and society, I analyse moments from classroom discourse and argue that the ways in which the students talk and think about ‘race’ and culture echo both resonances of the past as well as discourses in current circulation. I draw on the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia in order to understand why ‘race’ is simultaneously a taboo topic and an important self‐identifier (the product of both apartheid discourses of discrimination and post‐apartheid discourses of equity and redress) and argue for the need to deconstruct essentialist notions of ‘race’ and culture in the post‐apartheid classroom.

‘… This apartheid story … we’ve finished with it': student responses to the apartheid past in a South African English studies course1

Research on student responses to Critical Pedagogy frequently highlights their opposition to transformational agendas. This paper focuses on student opposition at a predominantly ‘white’ South African university to materials that represent the apartheid past. Engaging with the imperatives of transformation characterizing post‐apartheid Higher Education in South Africa, and drawing on post‐structuralist identity theory, the paper analyses contradictions in student discourses on the apartheid past. The paper concludes by considering the extent to which a focus on identity could contribute to dismantling opposition to Critical Pedagogy.

Schooling in Black and White: Assimilationist Discourses and Subversive Identity Performances in a Desegregated South African Girls' School.

Research on school desegregation in South Africa has largely documented an assimilationist process. As in educational contexts elsewhere, the assimilationist position presupposes that learners from non‐dominant groups are made to change their ways of being on entering schools from which they were previously excluded. Drawing on an ethnographic case‐study of a suburban girls’ school in Johannesburg, South Africa, where ‘black’ learners have replaced ‘white’ learners, as well as on post‐structuralist theorizing of ‘discourse’ and ‘identity’, this paper engages with and critiques the assimilationist position. I reconstruct the discursive positioning of the girls within official school discourses, thus highlighting the powerful assimilationist project of the school, but go on to explore the ways in which the learners use a range of semiotic resources not valued in official school discourses to subvert their positioning. I conclude that in inhabiting the school, the girls experience both repressive and liberatory effects, and they themselves produce mobile points of resistance.

A Balancing act: ethical dilemmas of democratic teaching within critical pedagogy

Abstract This article discusses practitioner research that focused on student resistance to teaching about the apartheid past and issues of ‘race’ in a first year English studies course at a predominantly Afrikaans and ‘white’ university in South Africa. The study aimed to explore the way in which students and the teacher engaged with a form of critical pedagogy moment–by–moment in the classroom. In this article, I turn the analytical spotlight onto myself, analysing the way in which my own multiple and sometimes contradictory identity positions as an educator play themselves out. In particular, I explore the tensions between my preferred ‘democratic’ teaching style, and my moral or ethical views. I argue that this tension creates a dilemma for teaching within critical pedagogy, which is not easily resolved. I also reflect on the experience of researching my own teaching practice, and attempt to understand how my research insights were developed, linking this to the distinction between reflective practice and action research.

Orientations to English in post­apartheid schooling

As Voloshinov has famously argued, ‘the word is the most sensitive index of social changes, and what is more, of changes still in the process of growth’ (Voloshinov, 1986: 19). Scrutiny of young peoples discourses on language together with their language practices offers us a window into a society in transition, such as present-day South Africa. This article examines the language ideologies and language practices of Black youth attending previously White, now desegregated, suburban schools in South African cities, important spaces for the production of an expanding Black middle class (Soudien, 2004). Due to their resourcing during apartheid (both financial and human) previously White schools are aligned with quality education and perceived as strategic sites for the acquisition and maintenance of a prestige variety of South African English. This article looks at how mainly African girls (15–16 years) position themselves in relation to English, drawing on data collected using ethnographic approaches in four desegregated schools in South African cities: three in Johannesburg, Gauteng and one in Cape Town, Western Cape. The discussion focuses on two significant themes: English and the [re]production of race; and the place of English in young peoples linguistic repertoires. My aim is to show how African youth in desegregated schools orient themselves to English and what their language ideologies and language practices might tell us about macro social processes, including the (re)constitution of race in South Africa. Schooling, as Bourdieu points out, is one of the most important sites for social reproduction and is thus also one of the key sites, ‘which imposes the legitimate forms of discourse and the idea that discourse should be recognised if and only if it conforms to the legitimate norms’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 650). However, co-present with processes of reproduction are practices that work to subvert and unsettle dominant discourses. Suburban desegregated schools are thus productive sites for the re-making of cultural practices (including language) and identities.

Languaging-for-learning: Legitimising translanguaging and enabling multimodal practices in third spaces

Abstract While there have been significant paradigm shifts in conceptualising language in applied linguistics and in critiquing the historical monolingual bias in the discipline, monolingual approaches continue to dominate officially prescribed language teaching and learning approaches, curricula, policy and materials in South African education. In this paper we argue that monolingual ideologies have negative consequences for the positioning of South African learners as well as for their participation in the curriculum. We focus on how learner capacities are enabled when a heteroglossic and multimodal orientation to language practices and meaning-making is taken up. We explore processes of languaging-for-learning in two established third spaces—the first, an after-school literacy club for Grades 3–6 learners in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, and the second, a mathematics holiday programme for Grade 11 students in the rural Eastern Cape. We argue that our cases show how it is possible to bridge the gap between heteroglossic conceptions of language and languaging in applied linguistics, and what is conceived as legitimate language practices in the classroom. We conclude that the translanguaging and multimodal strategies in the two cases offer new pedagogical strategies for meaning-making that challenge the dominant monolingual orientation to children’s languaging in many classrooms.

Moving between Ekasi and the Suburbs: the Mobility of Linguistic Resources in a South African De(re)segregated School

Recent analyses of youth culture, and of popular culture more broadly, emphasise mobility — of people across global spaces and of global cultural flows. Yet for most youth, physical movement across national boundaries is relatively restricted. In South Africa, there are of course large internal flows of people between urban and rural areas, and significant for the focus of this chapter, a number of youth who travel between their homes in the townships on city peripheries, or inner-city areas, and the previously ‘White’ suburbs in pursuit of quality schooling (Fataar, 2009; Soudien, 2004). Historically ‘White’, now desegregated suburban schools in South African cities are important spaces for the production of an expanding ‘Black’ middle class (Soudien, 2004) as well as for scrutiny of a society in transition. This chapter examines the discursive practices of girls attending a suburban school in the urban metropolis of Johannesburg, South Africa, where ‘Black’ learners have replaced ‘White’ learners, i.e. a resegregated school (Orfield, 2004). It is informed by the view that exploration of complex everyday language practices offers us insights into changing cultural practices as well as into the different kinds of identity work performed by the girls.

Disinventing and reconstituting language for learning in school Science

Abstract Language ideologies profoundly shape and constrain the use of language as a resource for learning in ‘multilingual’ or linguistically diverse classrooms. In this paper, we draw attention in particular to the ideology of languages as stable, boundaried objects and to the colonial invention of African languages. Against this backdrop, we analyse an example of pedagogical practice which was designed in response to a linguistic ethnography of Year 9 Science learning in a South African high school. The aim of this intervention is to move beyond the constraints of current language ideologies and to enable bilingual isiXhosa/English students to use a wide range of resources from their semiotic repertoires for learning Science. We will argue that debates about language of instruction in post-colonial contexts which pit one named language against another, misdirect our attention away from how the resources of language and other semiotic modes are or are not being used for learning in classroom discourse and learning materials. We aim to show how pedagogical translanguaging and trans-semiotising can be taken up as strategies of disinvention and reconstitution of ‘language’ for learning Science. (195)

The Character of the Multicultural Education Discussion in South Africa

South Africa, as a country of great diversity, presents itself at first glance as an obvious place for the development of a multicultural policy. Its diversity is, moreover, of a kind that has caused immense difficulty politically and economically. But it does not have a specific multicultural education policy. Why this is so and what approaches the South African polity has taken to the question of diversity is what this contribution seeks to make clear. The chapter begins with a sociological description of South Africa. Important in this exposition is indicating how tightly bound up with political struggle the question and the description and analysis of social difference are. The chapter provides a description of the South African education system and its policy with respect to the questions of social and cultural difference. It then moves to an examination of the multicultural debate and an assessment of the value of this debate for both engaging with the questions of social difference and the complex ways in which power is instantiated in the debate itself. The importance of this discussion is about a recognition of the complexity of sociology itself and how this complexity, in terms of what it sees and does not see, is identified and articulated, and then mobilized and appropriated.