Towards a response-able pedagogy across higher education institutions in post-apartheid South Africa: an ethico-political analysis
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Date
2017
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Unisa Press
Abstract
Internationally there has been some interest in how critical pedagogies might be enabled
in higher education to support transformative social agendas. Few writers, however,
have theorised the ethico-political aspects of this effort from a feminist new materialist
perspective. By focusing on the analysis of an inter-institutional collaborative course which
was constructed across three disciplines and two differently positioned universities in Cape
Town, South Africa, this paper examines the design of the course retrospectively from a
feminist new materialist theoretical framing. In so doing, it moves beyond more traditional
understandings of critical pedagogy to consider the design and student engagement with
the course from the perspective of what we call “response-able pedagogies.” Response-able
pedagogies are not simply examples of the type of learning that can take place when power
relations, materiality and entanglement are acknowledged; they also constitute ethicopolitical
practices that incorporate a relational ontology into teaching and learning activities.
We propose that ethico-political practices such as attentiveness, responsibility, curiosity,
and rendering each other capable, constitute reponse-able pedagogies. The paper focuses
on the transdisciplinary and interinstitutional course to consider how these ethico-political
practices which constitute a response-able pedagogy might (be put to) work and how the
students were both enabled and constrained by this design in terms of their responses to
such ethico-political practices.
Description
Keywords
Response-able pedagogies, Critical pedagogies, Relational ontology, Feminist new materialism, Social transformation, Posthumanism
Citation
Bozalek, V. & Zembylas, M. (2017). Towards a response-able pedagogy across higher education institutions in post-apartheid South Africa: an ethico-political analysis. Education as Change, 21 (2): 62-85