6.2 Teaching and Learning for Citizenship in a Postapartheid South African University Classroom: An Interpretive Interlude

Abstract

Teaching and learning in post-apartheid university classrooms have been intended to produce teachers and students who could contribute towards cultivating democratic practices in society, considering the country’s history of segregation and discrimination in the public sphere. Much of the research that I have embarked on over the past decade and a half involved foregrounding the view that deliberative teaching and learning ought to be fostered in university classrooms, and that this can open up the possibility for responsible human action. I argue that responsible action involves producing citizens who act deliberatively, compassionately, and justly. Only then it might be possible to produce a society which takes seriously global cosmopolitan norms that integrate what is local, and vice versa. I show my attraction to the philosophical method of interpretation by situating my arguments in interpretive reflections of Jűrgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Martha Nussbaum, Amy Gutmann, Iris Marion Young and Stanley Cavell on what it means to act responsibly in and beyond university pedagogy. Simultaneously, I show how interpretation has become central to my own exposition of what it means to cultivate deliberative, compassionate and cosmopolitan citizens.