Abstract
Social justice in higher education is a core concern in South Africa. It involves matters of pedagogy, curriculum, recognition, as well as access to tertiary institutions. In light of the massification of higher education, the question that vexes many educators is how to promote student learning through pedagogical practices that are socially just in themselves and that can also promote social justice. A focus on, and sensitivity to, affect provides a way of addressing this concern. We open up our experiences as educators in different professional fields by using an ethico-onto-epistemological methodology, describing relationships that emerged from our classroom engagements. Affective forces and intensities materialising in our teaching and learning assemblages provide a novel relational approach to enacting social justice. We suggest that an attunement to the affective forces circulating in pedagogical practices has the potential to transform conventional teaching habits thereby promoting socially just teaching.
Highlights
Growing attention is being focused on social justice in higher education (HE) in South Africa amidst ongoing student protests that have foregrounded the precarity of students, educators, and institutional structures
Much has been written on social justice in teacher education (Cochran-Smith, 2010), on pedagogies that attend to social justice like anti-oppressive pedagogy (Kumashiro, 2000), and on bringing about social justice education (Adams and Bell, 2016; Strom and Martin, 2017), in this paper, we focus on teaching practices that go beyond content delivery
Our practices have affirmed that assemblages-in-the making are alive with agentic potential via the affective forces and movements emerging in our classroom teaching entanglements
Summary
Growing attention is being focused on social justice in higher education (HE) in South Africa amidst ongoing student protests that have foregrounded the precarity of students, educators, and institutional structures. A more productive and affirmative affective assemblage emerges from situations where students are actively engaged in participatory exercises, drawing on their own knowledges and experiences, which are valued and contribute to their learning Such a process requires facilitating students’ voices to be foregrounded in our educational engagements rather than contained and possibly only heard through various forms of protest action. Medical Education Thinking-acting-doing-writing-with Veronica’s classroom assemblage: In my curricular engagement and research with senior undergraduate medical students in the women’s health module, I have used classroom and online activities to encourage students to connect with the different stories emerging from their clinical experiences and to share their thoughts about the human rights issues related to their encounters. Students’ stories provide an open apparatus for eliciting affective flows rather than attempting to close off their past experiences
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