unsafe learning in an uncertain world

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Teaching in Higher Education

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Bringing the social into pedagogy: unsafe learning in an uncertain world

Brenda Leibowitz a; Vivienne Bozalek b; Ronelle Carolissen c; Lindsey Nicholls d; Poul Rohleder e;Leslie Swartz c a Centre for Teaching and Learning, University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa b Department of Social Work, University of Western Cape, Belville, South Africa c Department of Psychology, University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa d School of Health Sciences and Social Care, Brunel University, West London, UK e University of East Anglia, UK Online publication date: 06 April 2010

To cite this Article Leibowitz, Brenda , Bozalek, Vivienne , Carolissen, Ronelle , Nicholls, Lindsey , Rohleder, Poul

andSwartz, Leslie(2010) 'Bringing the social into pedagogy: unsafe learning in an uncertain world', Teaching in Higher Education, 15: 2, 123 — 133 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13562511003619953 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562511003619953

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Bringing the social into pedagogy: unsafe learning in an uncertain world Brenda Leibowitza*, Vivienne Bozalekb, Ronelle Carolissenc, Lindsey Nichollsd, Poul Rohledere and Leslie Swartzc a

Centre for Teaching and Learning, University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa; Department of Social Work, University of Western Cape, Belville, South Africa; cDepartment of Psychology, University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa; dSchool of Health Sciences and Social Care, Brunel University, West London, UK; eUniversity of East Anglia, UK

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b

The paper describes a collaborative curriculum development project implemented over 3 years at 2 universities in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. The project involved a short module in which students in their fourth year of study interacted and learnt collaboratively across the boundaries of institution, discipline, race and social class, about the concepts of community, self and identity. The pedagogic approach adopted is described, as well as the responses of the students, and a brief reflection on some of the learning outcomes attained. The paper considers the learning processes which the curriculum development team experienced, and suggests that in order to facilitate learning for an ‘uncertain world’, the curriculum designers, too, need to engage in learning processes in which they make themselves vulnerable, mirroring some of the learning processes they expect the students to undergo. Keywords: uncertainty; collaborative research; pedagogy of discomfort; boundary crossing

Introduction What kind of learning is appropriate to enable our graduates to prosper and to deliver services to others, in what Barnett (2004) has referred to as an uncertain world? While for Barnett, uncertainty and anxiety are the result of the overabundance of competing versions of knowledge and the truth, they are also the result of ignorance and fossilised truths, and a failure of higher education to equip graduates to deal with the practical, moral and intellectual dilemmas of living in a complex world. Paradoxically, it is precisely conditions of uncertainty in teaching and learning situations which present the potential to equip teachers and learners to respond to the uncertainty posed by the complex, globalising, but persistently unequal and strife-torn early twenty-first century. What kind of pedagogy supports this learning, and in turn, what perilous paths should curriculum designers traverse in order to be able to shape opportunities for learning in this unsafe world? These are the questions a group of six educators from comparatively privileged positions have been asking during a 4-year collaborative research and development educational endeavour, the Community, Self and Identity (CSI) project. The questions arose after the 9 years of post-apartheid freedom in the ‘new’ South *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] ISSN 1356-2517 print/ISSN 1470-1294 online # 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13562511003619953 http://www.informaworld.com

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Africa which carries a legacy of extreme (and on-going) social inequality, and during a time of increasing local sobriety about the limitations in the ability of a postapartheid government to put an end to the divisions and inequities of the past (Aliber 2001; Manganyi 2004; May 2000; Terreblanche 2003; Van der Berg 2001). The collaborative exercise began as an attempt by the team to present a pedagogic model, within a specific set of human service disciplines, which would respond to the inadequacies of our present educational system. The inadequacies pertain to the different quality of resources and teaching historically provided to students on the basis of race, and increasingly, of social class, or an intersection between race and class (Soudien 2008). Further inadequacies are geographically and socially divided institutions in which students learn, and the ingrained habits of thinking about the ‘other’ as inferior or superior. The results of the collaborative project have been successful in terms of student learning (within certain limits as demonstrated below). However, a somewhat unexpected outcome of the collaboration has been the learning and unlearning processes experienced by the teaching team. In this paper we describe our own learning journey, alongside that of our students. We suggest that the learning processes of ‘vulnerable’ (Barnett 2004, 258) educators are a powerful means to ensure enduring learning. We furthermore suggest that to make a difference in an unsafe, uncertain or unjust world, we need to become the change that we expect in others. Our team Our team comprises educators from two institutions in the Western Cape: Stellenbosch University (SU), a predominantly Afrikaans, white, privileged university with a historical association with the apartheid past, and a present desire to contribute towards the development of the region; and the University of the Western Cape (UWC), a multilingual/English, isiXhosa and Afrikaans speaking, black and ‘historically disadvantaged’ university with a historical association with resistance to apartheid in the two decades preceding the end of the apartheid era. Our team spans the diversity spectrum, but retains a strongly privileged disposition: of the six members, five are white and one ‘coloured’; we are four females and two males; we differ in sexual orientation; we are all English-speaking; we have different academic roles
three heads of departments or divisions, two lecturers and three of us were doctoral students; all concerned in one way or the other, to contribute towards social justice in and via education in South Africa. Motivation for our project Our motivation for beginning this collaborative project was a desire to ameliorate the conditions of comparative isolation of studying social work (at UWC), psychology (at SU) and occupational therapy (at UWC) at the two universities. We wanted to bridge the divides of race, class, language, institution and discipline and to provide fourth-year students with an opportunity to study the concepts of community, self and identity in social conditions of relative uncertainty. The attributes we wished to engender in students are that they have a sense of (their own) agency in relation to the material and social conditions in which they find themselves (Norton 2000; Walker 2006), a capacity for reflexivity (Fook and

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Gardner 2007; Giddens 1991; Taylor and White 2000), confidence in interacting with the ‘other’, an ethic of care (Tronto 1993) and the technical and technological competencies needed to study and become a professional (Mitchell and Aron 1999). Writing from an African perspective, Waghid (2005, 1306) argues that university education should inculcate in students ‘responsibility’, and a ‘responsivity’ towards the suffering of others. The emotional resonance needed (for example, identification and responsiveness across the differences between people) is difficult to initiate and sustain in a country that has been fractured by exploiting these identities (Swartz 2007).

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Description of the project We drew on the concept of a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ (Boler 2003) as a pedagogic approach when implementing the course. This approach involves the decentring of assumptions in an environment which is supportive, but which facilitates discomfort in order for learning to occur. We interpreted this approach as synthesising social, experiential, as well as theoretical components. As part of their learning experience, students were required to interact in three direct contact workshops at the beginning, middle and end of the course. They were placed in small groups, of six students each, where all disciplines were represented. Each group communicated in online discussion forums during their assignments and together prepared presentations for the final interactive workshop. The course content and process engaged students with theoretical writings on the topics of ‘community self and identity’ and they interacted with each other using participatory learning and action techniques (PLA) and small group discussions.1 The PLA exercises included drawing their community and a ‘river of life’ narrative of their journey towards becoming a professional. These exercises were also chosen in that they allowed for more participation from students whose home language was not the language of learning and teaching (i.e. English), and whose written academic literacy practices may have hindered their participation in the course. The blended approach of combining contact sessions and an on-line learning system, into which all assignments were logged and online discussions conducted, was a further significant feature of the course. During the 3 years during which the course was conducted, guest lecturers were invited to give presentations about related topics, for example; identity issues and peace education in Israel/Palestine (Ariella Friedman, Tel Aviv University), race and identity politics in South Africa (Kgamadi Kometsi, University of the Witwatersrand) and exploring issues of identity and migration through video and still graphic and performance art (South African artist Bernie Searle). Although the guest lecturers discussed matters of difference directly in terms of race, class or religion, and although most of the prescribed readings for the module dealt directly with these issues (see for example, Alexander 2004; Anthias and YuvalDavis 1992; Atkinson 2001; Christian, Mokutu, and Rankoe 2002; De Castro 2004; Dixon and Durrheim 2003; Dominelli 2002; Young 1990), the module outline did not overtly specify that the issues of race, class and professional status were a focus of the course. We did this for several reasons: not to predetermine the markers of difference that the students might discuss; and related to this, we did not wish to essentialise the categories to which the students belonged, or to impose our own assumptions about these issues onto the students. We hoped to investigate how the

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students themselves would discuss matters of difference. This approach had its merits and difficulties: on the one hand, it allowed us as educators and researchers to learn how the students understood difference. For example, they tended to stress issues of geography and neighbourhood2 far more than we would have anticipated, and for some, matters of age (being older than other students in the class) were significant. On the other hand, the danger arose that the students would hide behind a superficial politeness and other defence strategies in order to avoid talking about their differences, which we found occurred quite often. Furthermore, the team came to the realisation that learning to talk about difference is a process, during which students may require sufficient support and a level of explicit enquiry to break through the polite ‘rhetoric’ of the ‘rainbow nation’. The sentiment that we are, or can be all ‘one’, is demonstrated in the following comment by an African student studying Social Work at UWC in the second year of implementation of the project:

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As a group we are a community, meaning we all have the common goals and we have something in common that brings us together.

Course outcome Approximately 95 students took part in the course each time it was presented. The team was encouraged by the students’ responses during the three iterations of the course. At the end of each course, student feedback forms indicated that between 94% and 99% of the students responded positively to the question, ‘Would you recommend repeating the idea of learning with students from another discipline?’ The responses also indicated which learning outcomes the students had achieved. The team did a combined thematic content analysis (Krippendorff 2004) and discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995) of the final reflective essays of the second year the course was run and concluded that although all students learnt something about issues of difference, many students remained defensive, or continued to essentialise ‘the other’. A number of students became intensely and emotionally engaged and felt that they wanted to know more, and a small minority appeared to be able to build upon their previous experiences with difference to enhance what they learnt during the course. This latter group wrote convincingly about how they would use this understanding in their future professional activities, as a gay, white, female and more mature Psychology student wrote: I am struck by the need to work more mindfully. Mindful of who I am and how that plays out inescapably in relation to others. Mindful of where others are and where they have come from. Mindful of the imperative to try to find ways to engage in a more transformative rather than a purely ameliorative manner. My hope is that if I can hold this specific awareness and intention, that I’ll less easily miss opportunities affect real change, however small, one day.

After extensive reflection about the course each year, the team concluded that what students learnt during the short course is one element of their professional training, and as such, to expect students to make a major shift in their thinking and to reach a level of comfort and maturity in interacting with those whom they perceived as ‘other’ is unrealistic. Many of the prejudices and assumptions the students expressed are to a degree to be expected in what remains a segregated post apartheid society (Durrheim

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2005; Durrheim and Dixon 2005). The team also felt that the course provided a window of opportunity for students to experience and perceive issues differently. Three iterations of the course demonstrated that the pedagogic approach of carefully structuring the social interaction of the students had much value. A notable aspect of this, as far as the students were concerned, was the combination of an experiential and theoretical approach. A Stellenbosch Psychology student expressed the value in the reflective essay in the following way:

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I feel that coming together with the UWC students, not only during the course but specifically for the presentation, forced us to take a step out our comfort zones, and really experience diversity. Three years of psychology and some sociology taught me the ‘text book’ definitions of these concepts.

The use of PLA approaches played a strong catalytic role in introducing the face-toface discussions in a relatively non-threatening way and minimised the dominance of students who were stronger in terms of academic literacy. The personal experience of apartheid and oppression of the ‘marginalised’ students and their accounts of how this oppression affected the communities in which they lived and worked, was highly valued by the students. The discussions of how students’ histories and those of their communities had affected the identities of all who lived in the multicultural mix of South Africa were linked with literature that highlighted issues of power and privilege. The students’ experiences were thus given more credence in this course than in exclusively theory-based courses. Students who came from privileged backgrounds, many of whom had learnt in socially exclusive settings up to this point, found themselves particularly challenged, experiencing themselves in unusually vulnerable situations. A white female Psychology student from Stellenbosch demonstrated this point: For the first time in my life, I was the so-called ‘odd one out’, since I was the only white girl and I also come from a more privileged background than the other group members. I think that maybe the most valuable lesson that I have learnt is the feeling of the possibility of rejection and ‘standing out’ . . . As a community psychologist I will often work with races other than my own and therefore this is an important realization for me for my future work.

The students themselves played a significant role in attempting to ensure that the group dynamics were democratic and unthreatening, using collaborative interactive practices acquired during years of undergraduate study, and in other aspects of their lives. However, the attempts to ensure participatory parity (Fraser 1997, 2000; Fraser and Honneth 2003) in the learning processes could not undo the impact of the systemic inequality in our society. In the final assessments the top achieving students remained those who had more experience (from their past educational institutions) of the traditional academic discourses and analytic written mode. This problem was aggravated by an unfortunate design feature in the project, that although all were students in their fourth year of study, the students who took the Psychology Honours option were part of a post-graduate selection course, as opposed to those who were in the fourth year of their Social Work or Occupational Therapy undergraduate programme. Because of this, students who had been selected to the Psychology Honours programme tended to achieve higher grades in terms of academic writing style. It would be fair to say, too, that the dictates of academia and the expected outcomes of the professional bodies, as expressed through assessment practices and

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standards, place a limit on the ways in which one can affect participatory parity in a module of this nature. Structure and support In a keynote address to the Higher Education Close Up 4 Conference in Cape Town in 2008, Barnett asked, ‘If a curriculum is an educational device in part to develop forms of human being that are adequate to an age of uncertainty, can we any longer speak of ‘‘teaching?’’ Does not the student have to teach herself ?’ We would argue that in order to enhance the potential of students to gain from the fullness of a learning experience, a great deal of attention needs to be paid to the structure of the learning experience and to the quality of the learning platform, such that all students can learn, not only a privileged few. From the beginning, our team paid careful attention to the structure of the course, ensuring: a balance between experiential learning and theoretical approaches; a blend between e-learning and interpersonal contact sessions; the careful sequencing of activities, including the open-ended and highly interactive use of drawing and discussion; the conversational pieces students wrote to each other in the e-learning discussion forums; and the final (more academic/written) assessment exercises. The teaching team monitored the implementation of the course vigilantly, in order to ensure that the aims of the project would not be undermined by contextual factors. Instances of the way these factors influence the course were most visible in relation to the blended learning approach. The structured learning platform was facilitated by the use of an electronic learner support system, KEWL, which was devised by the UWC. The on-line system was fairly new, and in the first iteration of the course Cape Town was experiencing many intermittent power cuts. The project revealed other fault-lines caused by the ongoing disparities of resources in South African society, namely the differential access to transport and access to on-line facilities in residence or at home (see Bozalek et al. 2008; Rohleder et al. 2008a, for more details of the impact of differential access to resources on the programme and on students). The team devised ways to respond to these challenges in the second and third iterations of the course. During the third year of the course, the Social Work students at UWC were each issued with a laptop for the duration of the academic year as part of another e-learning project, funded from donor sources. The impact of these laptops on the confidence and ability of these students to participate in the module was noticeable. In the third year of the project more opportunity was provided for the students to work together to plan their final group presentations. This was done in order to minimise the problems caused by the geographically separate campuses, where students had unequal access to public and private transport. The team was thus reminded on many occasions during the project that, as Fraser (1997; 2000) and Fraser and Honneth (2003) would argue, social justice in education requires attention to both fair distribution of economic, social and material resources, as well as to fair recognition of the identities and social backgrounds of all participants. The group work and e-learning was complemented by the use of ‘facilitators’ who were allocated to each group to manage the communication and to mark the assignments of the student workgroups. These facilitators were lecturers from the same departments, interested staff members from cognate departments, part-time

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lecturers and supervisors. After the first year interviews with this group revealed that although the instructors felt invigorated by participating in the project, they felt they were not given sufficient support and information by the design team. At the end of the second year it became apparent that despite having attended training, the facilitators did not, in all cases, fully understand or share the assumptions and aims of the project. By the third year the group of facilitators were given substantially more training, and yet some facilitators continued to comment that they felt ‘a little at sea’ about the process. Despite the difficulty of keeping this group fully aligned with the message and aims of the course, the facilitators as a whole found their involvement to be an enlightening and stimulating experience. The design team recognised that if meaningful educational opportunities are to be provided in which students can play a strongly interactive role in their own learning, many resources and much planning, is needed. It is therefore preferable that academics from different settings collaborate to invest time and energy on one course, rather than to have many ‘minimal investment’ courses led by individual instructors. Educators as learners For students to learn to live in an age of uncertainty or unsafety, it is also true that the lecturers themselves have to be prepared to learn, and to venture into hidden areas of self and unfamiliar theoretical study. The CSI project became a valuable personal and educational experience for the team involved in directing it, far more so than the team had originally anticipated. The initial form of learning was amongst the team members, who each drew from their own varied disciplines, skills and life and work experiences, which were shared with other members of the team. Examples of these were: the knowledge about the use of e-learning within a course; how to draw on students’ prior learning and experience; knowledge of writing articles for publication; and project management. From the start the team had intentionally structured the project as a form of scholarship of teaching and learning and obtained research funding to run the project. The research approach adopted was that of participatory action research, which emphasises research as a practical and collaborative social process. It is emancipatory, critical, reflexive, and aims to transform both theory and practice (Kemmis and McTaggart 2005). The project was established as a response to the problem identified by the team as that of isolated learning, and each cycle of the action was documented for further reflection and improvement. The project provided a large reservoir of research data. The feedback forms and the recorded interviews with students, facilitators and the design team, all contributed to this, as did the participatory action learning prompts (drawings of community maps and rivers of life) and the written (assignment) responses which were automatically stored on the e-learning system. These data provided a rich source of information about how students understood and reflected upon issues such as, community, self and identity. The data were especially valuable in that they were not produced as interview prompts or responses to questionnaire items and were, in one sense therefore, naturally occurring. However, as mentioned earlier, the analysis was also constrained by the fact that the written pieces were produced for assessment purposes. In analysing the data the team learnt several important lessons. We learnt about the limitations of what can

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be achieved from such a course, about how students talk to each other across boundaries of class and institution, and about how they express their understanding of this difference (see Leibowitz et al. 2007). A second and deeper form of experiential knowledge occurred for the team during the collaborative teaching and learning project. This unplanned learning occurred as the team increasingly felt responsibility towards the students and the learning process, and would refer to this accountability during planning and research sessions. For example, when a disagreement occurred between team members, the team felt duty bound to resolve the disagreement by coming to a new understanding, as that was what we would have expected from the students in a group discussion. In this sense the team developed into a genuine ‘community of enquiry’ (Christie et al. 2007). After the second iteration of the course, we took steps to address our concern that the team was not sufficiently diverse, and that we might have been missing essential pieces of information which we required in order to lead the students to learn constructively about dealing with difference. This led the team to undergo a week’s diversity training with two experts on peace education from Israel/Palestine3 (see Halabi 2000 for more information on this approach). The training was conducted for members of the team and for other individuals who wanted to become facilitators for the final round of the project. This training required the facilitators (including the writers of this article) to undergo a process parallel to what we expected students to experience. We were aware that students found the course emotionally demanding, as one facilitator noted: Some of my students said they found the personal sharing (especially river of life) in the first workshop quite challenging
sharing such personal information with virtual strangers. They felt a need for a debriefing session afterwards.

Going through our own process of training was similarly an intense and emotional experience for all of the participants, leaving many feeling vulnerable and exposed. Team members came out of that workshop with very different feelings, varying between feeling traumatised, enlightened, frustrated and invigorated. Not all agreed about the workshop, or about its resolution, as one team member commented in an interview in the third year of the project: You know there were different perceptions of how the training was seen . . . and I think it was important that we did speak face-to-face, and that we did write things about it, but I noticed that there is quite a silence about it, that we haven’t really gone back to any depth, and I’m wondering why and whether we will . . .

This comment demonstrates that although the team have come a long way in learning to deal with uncertainty and discomfort, it has not reached a point of full resolution of dealing with the difficulties associated with talking about difference and diversity. One possibility for the difficulties associated with the training, is that the safe space that the team had created for its members did not ‘protect’ them from interacting on matters of diversity, with individuals outside of that space. Treacher (2001), a mixed race teacher who addresses issues of ethnicity in the classroom, writes that to be on ‘uncertain and shaky ground’ when talking about matters of race and ethnicity is ‘the only place to be’ (p. 325). These intensely and communal experiences assisted us to strengthen our sense of solidarity and to consolidate the team as a collaborative community of enquiry. It allowed us to focus our combined energies on making the final year of the course a more successful one.

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This was not unlike the experiences of many of the student groups, where despite finding the learning process challenging, they developed a sense of common purpose. Thus the team members were mirroring some of the processes that we were expecting the students to undergo, and were trying to ‘practice what we preached’ to the students. Team members expected to gain intellectually from planning the course collaboratively and across disciplines, but not to the extent that they did gain. In a series of interviews conducted with team members towards the end of the second year of the project, one team member reported, ‘I envisaged the thing as more teaching, I didn’t realise we would think so much’. Working together and across disciplines was also difficult, as another team member indicated that she experienced ‘stepping out of my comfort zone’. Another team member, who is a very experienced lecturer and researcher, and a head of department, said in an interview, ‘I don’t feel quite so out of my depth so often . . . which is a good thing . . . it is nice because I’m learning’. The beneficial impact of participating in the project was described by team members variously as: having our knowledge bases and sources of expertise broadened; having our understanding of theoretical as well as interpersonal issues deepened; and finally, team members experienced having their professional identities as teachers and researchers validated. It is fair to say that the team members, like the students, gained from learning through conditions of uncertainty. Team members had become aware that the experience of learning across boundaries was an intensely emotional one for students, but had not realised how emotional learning in an uncertain terrain would be for us too. Dirkx (2002) stresses the emotional nature of learning: The process of meaning making. . .is essentially imaginative and extrarational, rather than merely reflective and rational. Emotionally charged images . . .provide the opportunity for a more profound access to the world by inviting a deeper understanding of ourselves in relationship with it. (cited in Trowler 2008, 110)

Conclusion It is our firm contention that learning how to function as a professional in the health and caring professions involves much introspection, reflection and an element of risk-taking. We would argue, furthermore, that to teach students to become ethical, caring and reflexive professionals, we too, as educators have to become ethical, caring and reflexive. We, too, should experience the emotional risk of talking about ourselves and should reflect on who we are and what we are hoping to achieve, and should allow for the discomfort that such learning entails. Barnett (2004) asks how we might go about tackling curriculum issues in times of uncertainty. Our feeling is that in order to achieve a measure of confidence in our abilities to learn from each other and to solve problems, we should experience moments of epistemological uncertainty, and indeed, discomfort. We should go about this within communities of enquiry, constructing and sharing expertise along the way, and through experiencing or becoming what it is we want our students to become. Wenger (1998, 222) writes that ‘Learning cannot be designed. Ultimately, it belongs to the realm of experience and practice. Learning happens, design or no design. And yet there are few more urgent tasks than to design social infrastructures that support learning’. We hope that we have offered for consideration the social infrastructure that supported both our own, and our students’, learning.

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Notes 1. More information about the use of participatory action learning in the course can be found at Rohleder et al. (2008a) and Bozalek et al. (2008). 2. For more information about the references to space and neighbourhood, see Leibowitz et al. (2007) and Rohleder et al. (2008b). 3. The trainers were Ariella Friedman, Psychology Professor at Tel Aviv University and Ahmad Hijazi, Director of the School for Peace at Wahat al-Salam Neve Shalom.

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