English as a Language of Learning Teaching and Inclusivity: Examining South Africa's Higher Education Crisis 9781032466330, 9781032466408, 9781003382645

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English as a Language of Learning, Teaching and Inclusivity

Hibbert explores South Africa’s higher education crisis utilising case studies and first-hand experiences with English as the language of instruction. The historical overview provides a framework with which to understand the complicated nature of using English as a language of instruction in South Africa, past and present. Student narratives are presented to illustrate mainly breakthroughs, but also challenges. An overview is provided, of imported English teaching methodologies and how they have emerged and developed in the local educational system over decades. It is demonstrated how these methodologies relate to socio-economic and political events and trends at each juncture. By applying defamiliarisation as a research method of investigation, students’ translanguaging struggles are recorded and discussed, both pre-pandemic and during the pandemic period. The experiences of non-monolingual English-speaking staff and students, and of local English/African language bilinguals is foregrounded, as they are by far the majority in South African higher education and schools. The relevance of the experiences and learning paths of those staff and students is enhanced. This book aids lecturers across disciplines and English language facilitators in the improvement of English acquisition curricula through exposure to arguments, case studies and learning path narratives in this volume, and prompts and inspires researchers to develop further theories and experiments in their own context. Liesel Hibbert is Professor of English Education in the Faculty of Education at Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town, South Africa. Before that, she was Professor in the Department of Applied Language Studies at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Cape Town in 2000. Her research has been mainly cross-disciplinary i.e. global trends in youth development, literacy and language policy, language development in higher education, political rhetoric, linguistic ethnography in the classroom and South African writing. Her work has been published in, among other journals, the Journal of English as an International Language, the Review of Research in Education, the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and in a variety of books and local journals. Her two previous books are Multilingual Universities in South Africa (a co-edited volume) and The Linguistic Landscape in Post-apartheid South Africa. In addition, Liesel Hibbert has designed numerous English Studies courses and a graduate course in language acquisition and has supervised student research on translanguaging as pedagogy for MA and PhD projects.

Routledge Advances in Teaching English as an International Language

Teaching English as an International Language (TEIL) is a new paradigm in English Language Teaching (ELT) that has emerged as a response to the rapid increase in the global spread of English, which has brought about structural, functional, and demographic changes to the language. These changes include the fact that the majority of communicative events in English that are currently taking place around the world are between so-called ‘non-native’ speakers of the language. Around 2 billion people on the planet are now using English on a daily basis, and English has an official role in more than 70 countries and territories. The rapid spread of English among communities of speakers around the world has also led to the localisation or nativisation of the language and the development of many new varieties, such as Chinese English. These recent changes to the English language and the ways in which the language is being used call for revisiting many aspects of teaching, learning, and using English. Although an increasing number of publications have come out on the topic of EIL, no book series to date has been dedicated to the teaching and learning of EIL. The series will publish original research and theoretical essays on various aspects of TEIL. It will also publish books that engage with practical aspects of TEIL, such as pedagogy, EIL assessment, EIL material development, and intercultural communication in EIL. Series Editor: Jette Hansen Edwards, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Founding Editor: Farzad Sharifian, Monash University, Australia International Advisory Board James Dean Brown, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, Hawai’i Seran Dogancay-Aktuna, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, USA James F. D’Angelo, Chukyo University, Japan Nobuyuki Hino, Osaka University, Japan Guangwei Hu, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Aya Matsuda, Arizona State University, USA Sandra McKay, San Francisco State University, USA

Mario Saraceni, University of Portsmouth, UK Zhichang Xu, Monash University, Australia Phan Le Ha, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei & University of Hawaii at Manoa, Hawai’i Teaching of Culture in English as an International Language An Integrated Model Shen Chen and Thi Thuy Le Englishes in English Language Teaching Marzieh Sadeghpour The Place of English as an International Language in English Language Teaching Teacher’s Reflections Ngan Le Hai Phan Pragmatics Pedagogy in English as an International Language Zia Tajeddin and Alemi Minoo Language Teacher Education for Global Englishes A Practical Resource Book Edited by Ali Fuad Selvi and Bedrettin Yazan Glocalising Teaching English as an International Language New Perspectives for Teaching and Teacher Education in Germany Edited by Marcus Callies, Stefanie Hehner, Philipp Meer and Michael Westphal English as a Language of Learning, Teaching and Inclusivity Examining South Africa’s Higher Education Crisis Edited by Liesel Hibbert

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routle​d ge.com/Routle​d ge-Advan​ces-inTeach​i ng-Engl​ish-as-an-Intern​atio​n al-Langu​a ge-Ser ​ies/book-ser ​ies/RATE​I LS

English as a Language of Learning, Teaching and Inclusivity Examining South Africa’s Higher Education Crisis Edited by Liesel Hibbert

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Liesel Hibbert; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Liesel Hibbert to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781032466330 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032466408 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003382645 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003382645 Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

List of contributors Foreword Acknowledgements 1 Introduction

ix x xi 1

L I E S E L H I B B E RT

2 A narrative account of the history of English in South Africa

13

L I E S E L H I B B E RT

3 Assessing student writing: ‘A tangled situation’

29

L I E S E L H I B B E RT A N D A N N E K N O T T

4 The complexity of curriculum design for English as a medium of instruction (EMI)

44

L I E S E L H I B B E RT

5 Students’ self-narratives of linguistic migration: Opportunities for relinking

61

L I E S E L H I B B E RT A N D T H O KO B AT Y I

6 The benefits of collaborative bilingual reading

85

T H O KO B AT Y I

7 The film Black Panther as catalyst for changing perceptions of Africa and/or ‘being African’ among students in South Africa and the UK L I E S E L H I B B E RT A N D RO B E RTA P I A Z Z A

102

viii  Contents

8 Developing a transformative Critical Language Awareness-focused curriculum

126

L I E S E L H I B B E RT

9 Cross-disciplinary learning: Radical defamiliarisation in art teaching

143

L I E S E L H I B B E RT A N D G R E G O RY K E R R

10 Reflections on teaching for social justice at a South African University of Technology

155

Z AY D WAG H I D

11 Postscript

168

L I E S E L H I B B E RT

Index

171

Contributors

Thoko Batyi is Research Associate and Former Academic Developer at Nelson Mandela University, Gqeberha, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Her recent article in Language, Culture and Curriculum (2022) is titled ‘Enhancing the quality of students’ academic literacies through translanguaging’. Thoko. [email protected] Liesel Hibbert is Professor and Adjunct Professor of English Education at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town, South Africa. [email protected] Gregory Kerr was Professor in the Department of Fine Arts, University of Stellenbosch. Since 2001 he has been teaching and painting through his art school, Greg Kerr Fine Art. [email protected] Anne Knott is Research Associate at Mandela University in Gqeberha, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. She has worked as a writing consultant, is a published poet and is a language policy activist. Her most recent article was published in the South African Journal of Higher Education. Anne.knott@ mandela.ac.za Roberta Piazza is Associate Professor/Reader in English Language and Linguistics in MAH (School of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Surrey, UK. She is the recipient of the BA/Leverhulme Grant for the project ‘Dirt or cleanliness? The tension between Travellers and Gypsies and settled society’ and the article ‘Aspirational identities and desire through discourses of productivity in marginal individuals. A case study of three women’ in Language in Society. [email protected] Zayd Waghid is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town, South Africa. [email protected]

Foreword

In English as a Language of Learning, Teaching and Inclusivity: Examining South Africa’s Higher Education Crisis, Liesel Hibbert presents an insightful and context-rich exploration of English language teaching in South Africa. The volume excels in immersing readers into the historical and current-day practices in English language teaching in South Africa due to the engaging and original presentation of case studies across various contexts in South Africa. The case studies, both illustrative and illuminating, allow both a deeper understanding of the challenges of language teaching in multilingual and multicultural contexts such as South Africa as well as a means for readers to connect the insights shared in the volume with their own language contexts and teaching practices. The focus on an underresearched context offers a timely and important contribution to the Routledge Advances in Teaching English as an International Language Series as well as global discussions of the decolonisation of English language teaching curricula. This volume is essential reading for researchers and teachers teaching English as a Medium of Instruction in higher education settings.

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Acknowledgements

Firstly, I wish to thank the NRF (National Research Foundation, South Africa) for a partial contribution to this book in terms of a National Rating Award. Secondly, I would also like to thank the students for taking the tasks seriously and for being prepared to learn from each other’s stories and from our sometimes hit-and-miss collaborative efforts. Thirdly, I would like to thank Paul and Helga Seward and Alison Fullard who undertook to fine-comb my work and to present me with invaluable feedback.

1 Introduction Liesel Hibbert

Volume overview – themes, concepts and research methods It is of great concern that there seems to be a crisis in education. The concern is generally similar in other parts of the world, because of capitalist modernism, but is also distinctive in different parts of the world, and therefore not easily quantifiable. Within the framework of postcoloniality and transliteracies, this book aims to equip practitioners in higher education who are situated within linguistic as well as cultural superdiverse higher education contexts, with strategic pedagogies to ‘reboot’ outdated educational systems, to address fossilised thinking (regarding culture, race, ethnicity, religion and language) and to expand performance in English within the framework of English as a lingua franca and as an African and international language. The overall volume is designed to provide practical ways of dealing with this key challenge underlying learning processes related to superdiversity as the norm, resulting from micro- as well as macro-population migrations. Decoloniality requires a process of delinking from a state of mind of automated modernist ways of seeing the world, ourselves and others, and taking up positive trajectories which are not reactionary or a continuity of resistance politics. This presents an enormous challenge for practitioners within outdated systems, given the solid structural constraints which have been designed in the past to prevent socio-economic equitability. This volume is relevant to anyone who is teaching in English as an international language in higher education, or who is teaching through the medium of English in higher education. Basically, anyone who is in search of sound theories for practicing linguistically and culturally inclusive pedagogies with English as language of learning and teaching, will find blueprints for replicable and modifiable pedagogies. The details are presented in easily accessible English, often in verbatim accounts and conversations. The reader will find alternative ways of teaching English as an international language in higher education and alternative ways of dealing with English as a medium of instruction. Secondly, readers may be prompted to develop their own theories and experiments in their own context, hopefully inspired by arguments presented by means of case studies. Institutional contexts may differ, but also have DOI: 10.4324/9781003382645-1

2  Liesel Hibbert similarities, in the majority of higher education contexts in which transculturality and linguistic diversity are the norm. By foregrounding the experiences of non-monolingual English speakers, this volume presents an example of how defamiliarisation techniques and ‘the flipped classroom’ enhance the learning paths of staff and students. Examples are provided on how to create safe spaces for staff and students to experience having their own voices heard, within the walls of the university, albeit within the decolonised spectrum. The aim of the examples provided is to demonstrate to course designers and facilitators how to disrupt entrenched and fossilised racial, cultural, ethnic, political, and religious belief systems which separate and alienate. This publication models a variety of ways of working with existing feelings of alienation, prejudices and hostilities. In terms of an answer to questions regarding research context, such as ‘Who is generating southern theories and epistemologies?’ and ‘Who is studying knowledge production in the South?’ a few relevant authors are Manthalu and Waghid (eds) 2019, Osman and Hornsby (eds) 2018, Pattman and Carolissen (eds) (2018), Molefi (2017), Waghid (2019) and Bezerra, Paterson and Paphitis (2021). The case studies presented, demonstrate how delinking from coloniality is put into practice within classroom-generated agendas. It demonstrates how the ‘flipped classroom’ develops capacity for critical reflection and reflexivity and an ecology of care. The case studies directly address the question of what constitutes educating empathetic, mindful, literate professionals for a world in which English is the main lingua franca, albeit with many complex variables related to senses of communal as well as personal well-being. In addition, it is shown how students develop a strong sense of awareness and responsibility towards the self and others while their linguistic performance in English is hugely impacted, improving possibilities for them to experience collaboration and learn to contribute to social justice thinking and action, thereby developing strong senses of belonging. The disruptive effects of the 2015 ‘fees must fall’ student movement in South Africa have focused more attention on the feelings of students and staff and the diminishing viability of the current state of higher education. In the same year, the #Rhodesmustfall campaign called for the decolonising of higher education in South Africa, and students (and many academics) raised specific demands regarding the implementation of a curriculum that critically centres on Africa and the subaltern (Waghid & Hibbert 2018:264). This would mean treating African discourses as a point of departure. The content, languages, and methodologies of education and learning would need to be addressed. Only where Western traditions are relevant to the African experience would they be included in education and learning (Rhodes Must Fall collective statement of demands, March 2015). Andriotti, Anzo and Polizzi (2011) posit that modernity depends very much on coloniality for its existence. Mignolo (2000a) calls for the use of border thinking as an epistemic principle that aims to break the modernity and colonial imaginary. Without deliberate reflexivity within institutions, repetitions of crisis are imminent.

Introduction  3 This particular volume distinguishes itself from related titles in that it focuses on the challenges of English as the medium of instruction (EMI) in higher education per se and not on generic educational challenges. The combination of the four main features of this book, as listed below, indicates that there is at present no equivalent title. This volume is written in a mix of narrative and academic genres and styles, which means its interest value, readability and accessibility. The volume is very comprehensive in that it covers past, present, as well as present realities, imaginings and suggestions for practices in a post-COVID-19 era. A similar volume by Fenton-Smith et al. (2017) has a near-equivalent focus but does not focus on African or South African educational contexts. Furthermore, this title expands the existing literature well, in that most of the existing sources stake out the problem, the challenges, the reasons for coloniality, and the extent of its reach, but not much is available in terms of ethnographic experimentation with English in higher education as experienced as transformative by all participants. Clearly, the contexts in which research addresses coloniality through classroom interventions are very different, but also similar, as coloniality has left differential residues in multiple societies. To be specific, this volume has an English language development focus. The introductory section provides a historical account of English in South Africa and English teaching methodologies passed down through the decades, mostly from Northern sources, i.e. the UK and US, and how these have shaped our lives as English teaching practitioners in higher education. Secondly, the book demonstrates how using out-of-the-box prompts and interactive activities in strategically created transcultural groups, benefits the agenda of decoloniality. Decoloniality is the process by which bodies of knowledge that have frozen around mono-perspectives, ‘taken for granted realities’ which are characterised as inward-looking, are identified and critiqued. In the context of the volume, inclusion refers to pedagogical strategies which encourage students to address, in their curriculum, pressing social problems as a way of contributing to, and cultivating Global Citizenship Awareness through embodiment (Francesconi & Tarozzi 2012). It is important for curricula globally to become more research-based and provocative so as to engage students more fruitfully. It requires us to replace conventional conceptualisations of individual differences in the regular classroom with a broader, organisational, interactive perspective relating to all aspects of identity, particularly a strong sense of belonging. My own efforts of delinking, and relinking, are evident in the way in which this book is structured. I experiment with alternative and mixed genre writing, recording, and reporting, i.e. letters, conversations, anecdotes from my own life experience, to validate perceptions of those working in the context under discussion, with adequate references to such work in a variety of contexts in other parts of the world. These need to be discussed side by side, in relation to each other. In making suggestions towards decolonising sociology, Connell (2018:404) generates the useful term ‘mosaic epistemologies’, in which ‘separate knowledge systems sit beside each other like tiles in a mosaic, each based on a specific culture

4  Liesel Hibbert or historical experience’ … ‘replacing the priority of one knowledge system with respectful relations among many’. Connell (p. 404) further encourages a research lens which identifies connections between different ‘ecologies of knowledges’. According to Ellis (2019), ‘conversion from individual transformative experience to transactional and transformational efficacy is only possible through association, collaboration, involvement in collective shared agenda’. In relation to this, it is demonstrated in this volume, how deliberate and strategic cross-cultural groups are created to facilitate a wider cross-pollination of ideas and to introduce more strenuous negotiations of meaning between students of differing pathways of thinking, as well as between them and their mediators. Through authentic resources which raise questions around real life, contradictory and conflictual information in current affairs, students become researchers and learn ways of raising urgent issues and making suggestions regarding how these can be addressed. With multiple step-by-step group tasks and e-learning built in, the process invites students to widen their intellectual, social and self-awareness trajectories towards action (also Ellis 2019). Taking an experimental lens into the classroom shows to what extent it is surprisingly possible to create great satisfaction in commitment to a process and each other, within functioning communities of inquiry, which include facilitators and mediators. The volume aims therefore to equip practitioners in higher education who are situated within a linguistic as well as culturally diverse student and staff body, with strategic pedagogic models that are designed to ‘reboot’ stale systems from within curriculum practice. The case study method (Yin 2011) was used to experiment with ways of working in the classroom with ‘out-of-the-box’ prompts. This method is termed defamiliarisation (Kaomea 2014 and Shklovskij 1965). Through authentic resources and a co-designed, task-based curriculum, students experience intellectual growth and develop a strong sense of awareness and responsibility towards self and others (Waghid 2014:6). Given the realities of a cyber world with English as a lingua franca, the book addresses what constitutes a multiliterate professional. Emotional maturity, empathy, mindfulness, collaborative competence and holding recognised membership of a community with a shared discourse and/or metalanguage of inquiry, have proven to be extremely relevant growth areas for young communities. Motivations for this, and examples of how this could be approached, form a large part of the content, which the chapter overviews demonstrate. In order to interpret these, the reader needs insights into the education system in South Africa, a description of which appears in the next section. The education crisis in South Africa – background and current challenges South Africa provides perhaps the extreme case of where a class-based and divided society persists and inequalities predominate, despite so-called ‘democratic government’ supposedly based on the ‘Human Rights Charter’. The overriding variable in challenges of equitable epistemological access is dealing successfully with

Introduction  5 superdiversity and cross-cultural encounters, by definition, the norm in South Africa. These life and research contexts are currently characterised by what Connell (p. 404) calls ‘relative chaos, gross economic disparities, displacement, uncertainty and surprise’. Since the beginning of the South African democratic political transformation process, more than 20 years ago, racism and stereotyping, contrary to expectations, has not noticeably diminished but seems instead to have become more overt, almost to the degree of having changed into a form of symbolic violence. This kind of racial stereotyping remains highly visible in pre-service teacher education, and for pre-service teachers of English in particular, where students from different ethnic groups with differing competences in English appear in the main not ready to deal with difference or to communicate freely with what or whom is still largely regarded as the ‘other’. From the classroom evidence of this research, students continue to live and act in separatist groups from each other within the classroom. They often appear to operate socially, and in the institution, as separate racialised ‘tribes’. This situation persists even though they have spent several years together in a classroom as a supposed learning community. South African education might be regarded as an interesting e­ xample – on the one hand, apparently able to engage with decolonial epistemological and ontological resources, yet on the other hand, languishing with outdated pedagogies. The reader will be able to access tried and tested ways of counteracting this pedagogical lag, evident in the South more generally, and adapt the methodologies for self-directed learning and empowerment of all participants. It is hoped that this kind of spread of impactful teaching may impact on future systems design in higher education globally. The education system in South Africa keeps students trapped in a rote-learning paradigm in which lecturers tend to collude to ensure good pass rates. Olivier (2020, pp. 13–14) describes the South African education system as the continual replication of an outdated, unethical pedagogical system of authoritative explication and explanation. This approach is in conflict with collaborative learning. Since 2015, students in South African higher education have been resisting colonialist curricula and pedagogies. A major current challenge in the system is the reluctance on the side of stakeholders to embrace zones of ‘discomfort’ and pressure to negotiate difference constructively. This results in the replication of the old apartheid system, diminishing student motivation and fuelling student resistance. It is difficult to deliver excellence in the context of inequality and the catastrophic recycling of a colonial system. The South African government’s objectives to redress the social injustices inherited from the previous regime’s segregationist Christian national education system and ideology are manifested in numerous economic policies based on the South African Constitution, as well as manifested in education policy, for example in the White Paper of 1996 (Department of Education), the South African Schools Act of 1996, and the Higher Education Act of 1997. The White Paper of 1996 directs the state and its institutions towards their social imperatives and goals through higher education (Badat 2010:4). Embedded

6  Liesel Hibbert in the White Paper is the assumption that the state and its social institutions (universities, schools, and colleges) would contribute to the significant transformation and development of all education, including higher education, and in turn, to society (Badat 2010:5). In its preamble, the Constitution of South Africa (1996) commits the state and its institutions to asserting the values of human dignity, equality, the advancement of human rights, freedom, non-sexist, and nonracialism. Educational institutions are generally regarded as the cornerstone of a democratic society, and the Constitution recognises the importance of the role of these institutions in building a more robust and equal society; it states that all individuals are legally entitled to equality in education irrespective of their race, religion, ethnicity, or culture. However, despite the enshrinement of these rights in the Constitution, and after more than 20 years of democracy, the majority of the population remains systemically marginalised in a system and state that continue to fail to deliver on these rights (Waghid & Oliver 2017). The Higher Education Act of 1997 (pp. 1–2) clarifies the government’s goals for higher education. These are to: 1) redress past discrimination, and ensure representativity and equal access; 2) provide optimal opportunities for learning and for the cultivation of knowledge; 3) engender respect for, and encourage democracy, academic liberty, freedom of speech and expression, creativity, scholarship, and research; 4) pursue excellence, and promote the full realisation of the potential of every student and employee, as well as foster the tolerance of ideas and an appreciation of diversity; 5) respond to the needs of the population and of the communities served by the institutions; 6) contribute to the advancement of all forms of knowledge and scholarship, in keeping with international best practices of academic quality; and 7) ensure that higher education institutions enjoy freedom and autonomy in their relationship with the state within the context of public accountability and the national need for advanced skills and scientific knowledge. Le Grange (2016:1) suggests that, despite the Act’s aspirations to positively transform higher education, impoverished university students are burdened in multiple ways: many are academically underprepared, lack finance, or find the culture of the university significantly foreign. Le Grange further argues that South African universities, which are typically attached to neo-colonialism, may be experienced by many students as foreign institutions within an African context. To address the epistemic violence of colonial thought and knowledge, there is a need to Africanise and decolonise higher education; African texts and perspectives are generally conspicuously absent in higher education curricula. There is currently a discrepancy between national multilingualism policy and practice because English is typically the default Language of Learning and Teaching/EMI. The national language policy for higher education states that African languages should be languages of learning alongside English. Instead, African languages (that were not officially used in the education system prior to 1994) are now largely used as a means of scaffolding, for example in tutorials orally and in unregulated social spaces on campus and are not used as languages of teaching and learning.

Introduction  7 Resource inequality related to language options can restrict or expand the degree of distribution of multiple perspectives. This volume provides theoretical motivations, resource material, and ideas for alternative ways of engaging students equitably, as well as demonstrating how to make use of the linguistic resources which exist within learning communities, alongside English. Increasingly, and particularly evident because of COVID-19, social inequalities have become more evident in most parts of the world. It would therefore be useful to provide a wide lens on this to frame the relevance of the volume. The theory and practice presented here is particularly applicable in low-income parts of the world where, increasingly, English is imposed as the preferred language of instruction. Each chapter outlined below, is designed to address one, or a combination of issues related to creating more empowering, inclusive curricula. What follows, is the chapter outlines. Chapter outlines In Chapter 2, Liesel Hibbert presents a historical overview of literacy in English in South Africa. In world politics, South Africa represents a specific emblem of peaceful transition to a democratic constitution. The author sketches a linguistic landscape in which many positive initiatives were put in motion by the new government to provide a structural framework for a democratic future for all. This was done despite many obstacles. The book covers governmental discursive trends over a 20-year period, roughly 1994–2014, tracing the highlights and challenges of the transformation of policy, practice and discursive formations around some key issues as they have evolved. Discursive trends are viewed against the background of global trends, particularly South Africa’s re-entry into the international economy after the lifting of international economic sanctions. One of the arguments which emerges is that the hard-earned democratic constitution is currently under threat by counter-democratic discursive trends that signal a clear departure from democratic governance, like that which occurred during apartheid. What is different now, however, is that citizens can challenge legislation which does not pass constitutional muster in the courts – something which was absent from the legal system under apartheid laws. This has elicited serious dissent within the ranks of the ANC as well as widespread contestation of the ANC as the legitimate mouthpiece of the populace. Debates around the role and use of English in the transformation of South Africa to democratic [rule] are traced, ending off with some speculation about where the discourse practices of the ‘born frees’ (those born after Mandela’s release) may lead us. Translanguaging and polyphony by the youth signal a movement towards a new discursive order, strongly linked to global economic shifts, resultant linguistic migration and accompanying technological impacts. In Chapter 3, ‘Assessing student writing – ‘a tangled situation’, Liesel Hibbert presents an overview of methodologies of language learning and teaching which have been imported and developed over time in South Africa, starting from the ’60s. It is demonstrated how these methodologies relate to world events and

8  Liesel Hibbert socio-political trends at each juncture in history. Discursive trends dominant in a particular era inevitably impact on how the discipline and practice of language learning and teaching is played out in the classroom. The change of government in 1994 initiated much policy reform. Increasing local and world-wide trends in migration impact hugely on educational contexts of higher education because most students in sub-Saharan Africa have English as LOLT. Some of the case studies in this book provide evidence that much curriculum renewal and pedagogic reform is needed to align students to English as the lingua franca and LOLT, albeit alongside other languages. The aim is to employ translanguaging as a pedagogy. The New Literacy Studies offer dimensions to the analysis of student texts which expand what traditional discourse analysis practices (e.g. Stubbs) and critical linguistics approaches (e.g. Fairclough, Kress and Janks) could offer. Firstly, the chapter outlines what the theory at that time had on offer, my own practice, and what one can learn about student writing through reflecting on this retrospectively. As one student put it, ‘It was a very tangled situation’, by which she refers to negotiating a cacophony of instructive voices from different lecturers. The controversies raised here, eventually culminated in the Fees Must Fall ‘revolution’ of 2019 onwards, linked to Black Lives Matter in 2020, and spider-netting on this trajectory in South Africa and globally. In Chapter 3, Liesel Hibbert and Anne Knott describe how existing theory in the ’90s impacted on their view of the first-ever attempt by Portia Geswind to produce an argumentative essay. Strategies for teaching extensive and intensive writing in higher education are explained. Chapter 4, ‘The complexity of curriculum design for English as a medium of instruction (EMI)’ reports on a teacher education curriculum development project conducted in 2018 with 3rd-year pre-service teachers in a compulsory course named English as Language of Learning and Teaching (LOLT) or English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) at a South African university. The broad aim of the course is to improve the English performance of students in order that they might enter schools and teach confidently and competently across disciplines in English. The course was designed to challenge entrenched linguistic and cultural prejudices through defamiliarisation. Social justice topics and strategically managed group processes were designed to lead students beyond familiar, dominant narratives, thereby cultivating reflections and reflexivity. The data consisted of course-related written reflections and follow-up focus group discussions. Students reported having improved their confidence and performance in critical literacy in English. It is recommended that pre-service teacher training be led by enquiry-based learning to make EMI more inclusive. Chapter 5 by Liesel Hibbert and Thoko Batyi, discusses student narratives of linguistic migration and provides an argument for student linguistic autobiographies as tools towards addressing coloniality in higher education. The question raised here is how student linguistic autobiographies can contribute to pedagogy that leads to enhanced engagement and motivation. The principal theoretical framework encompasses superdiversity, social identity migration and cross-cultural integration. A diverse selection of student essays reflects the diversity of positive

Introduction  9 and negative linguistic experiences of students’ personal linguistic autobiographies with self-evaluative comments regarding key events in their language development experiences. At the hand of defamiliarisation processes, linguistic shift and identification theories, which they study, students gained self-respect for their own linguistic achievements. They were provided with an opportunity to reposition themselves, or at best, delink, from their negative perceptions of themselves in the higher education environment, where English (not necessarily their prime language) is one of the measures of academic performance. Data were collected by means of written essays, backed by prompts and activities described in the methodology section. Through the construction of retrospective perspectives on their own linguistic autobiographies, students’ senses of agency, motivation for expanding their linguistic repertoires for educational purposes, and their willingness to use language creatively, were impacted. Most importantly, they were afforded the opportunity to delink consciously from negative self-perceptions of their own linguistic challenges, having been shown a pathway for focusing on linguistic achievements through translanguaging struggles. A key finding of the narrative project was that the language histories and experiences of students of colour in South Africa are so diverse, therefore discounting the ‘only one story’ theory, which continues to be superimposed on people of ‘African origin’. One of the main aims of the project was to apply defamiliarisation as a research method of investigation, which turned the participating students towards a positive, empowered perspective of their own language histories, to get them to see their challenges and achievements as very important in the face of having to express themselves in English in the academe. This aim was adequately achieved. Chapter 6 provides an assessment of the benefits of a collaborative bilingual reading process. In this chapter, Thoko Batyi presents a case study in which students participated in a collaborative reading and interpretation process conducted bilingually. This was done as part of a larger study (Batyi 2014) for the purposes of identifying strategic interventions using Xhosa alongside English as a language of learning and teaching. Data were collected from students participating in 1st-year Tourism Communication tutorials. The research took place in the Business Faculty of a comprehensive provincial university in South Africa. Data were collected from assessments of student performance in written work, analyses of written questionnaires, and interviews. The research aim was to ascertain whether, and in what way, the students experienced bilingual reading comprehension as beneficial to their language acquisition process in English. The benefit of bilingual reading was assessed objectively (the content of the student assignments) and subjectively (how the students felt about the process). The results were remarkably positive. This addresses the question of whether transliteracy practices can be employed as a basis for introducing decoloniality into teacher education. The aim of the project was to devise ways of turning learning spaces into critical areas of enquiry. Discursive spaces were created to strengthen cross-cultural interpretive sensitivities and to develop a stronger sense of voice and reflexivity among student teachers.

10  Liesel Hibbert Examples are provided of various collaborative tasks devised and implemented in this process. Evidence from student course feedback suggests that a transliteracies framework can interrupt the discourse of coloniality, thereby enacting epistemological and social change. Chapter 7 by Liesel Hibbert and Roberta Piazza, asks three main questions. Firstly, to what extent does the film Black Panther shift student teachers’ perceptions of Africa and their awareness of themselves as Africans? Secondly, can the film be used to raise social justice awareness? Finally, to what extent do future teachers of English regard Black Panther as lending itself to opening debates around fossilised prejudices, and teaching social justice awareness? The aim was to steer classroom activities away from textbook-based passive learning to create more interest and motivation among pre-service teachers and to address dystopic views of Africa and of themselves as ‘African’. Data were collected from student essays and follow-up focus interviews. The main breakthrough in this project was that students reported having been prompted to delink from previous negative perceptions and conceptions of Africa and of African selves, individually as well as in their group identification as ‘African’. Furthermore, they reported having developed critical views of the US global media sweep. This specific group of student teachers of English reported having been prompted to become more reflexive regarding their academic habits, as well as their own identity formation, which means that the film was beneficial to them in terms of developing heightened social justice awareness. Chapter 8 focuses upon the question of what kind of language awareness can be brought to bear to transform the perpetual, and self-perpetuating, standoff on race/ethnicity and separatist discourses in South African pre-teacher education. The pedagogical implications of transliteracy practices are set out (Stornaiuolo, Smith & Phillips 2017). Collaborative tasks were provided to students, together with opportunities for guided reflection on these tasks. This research project made use of Critical Language Awareness tasks according to Fairclough) distributed to a class of student teachers at a university of technology in the Cape Province of South Africa. These tasks were found to enhance the critical thinking of student teachers enabling them to recognise taken-forgranted assumptions in their cultural milieu and interrogate them. This process of recognition, identification and self-reflection, was undertaken by creating discursive spaces in the classroom and introducing learning tools to strengthen cross-cultural interpretive practices. Chapter 9 reflects on the editor’s own experience of learning to paint in oils as an adult. The chapter considers some aspects of the experiential dynamics that arise when an art teacher (facilitator) uses a variety of instructive and heuristic devices to guide students through a process that is intended to liberate them from stereotypes and assist in their access to their own resources as self-actualising art practitioners. Among the theories that inform the approach is a radical form of defamiliarisation. The ‘data’ takes the form of a dialogue in which the facilitator sets out the guiding principles of the teaching strategies and the student/ participant describes the ways in which the methodology finds meaning in her

Introduction  11 own praxis. The recording of parallel or opposing narratives regarding the same ‘event’ constitute an example of duo-ethnography. The underlying philosophy of the teaching is a progression from prescription (based on theoretical and practical dispositions at the commencement of the year-long oil painting programme) to critical reaction to the work produced by the end of the programme, at which stage the role of the facilitator has changed from prescriber to responder through a process of creative engagement. Finally, a critical analysis is offered regarding the value and challenges of such approaches to art education. In Chapter 10, Zayd Waghid reflects on the implications of the arguments and illustrations regarding the creation of inclusivity in pedagogy in higher education with transculturality as the key variable. Most importantly, it discusses the search for theory and practice coming out of the South African experience, as put forward here, and how this might be relevant elsewhere. The book concludes with Chapter 11 which ties together the links between the different chapters and the overall themes of the book, thereby creating a conceptual umbrella for key concepts related to English as a medium of instruction in higher education, namely inclusivity, transculturality, translanguaging pedagogy, relinking through defamiliarisation and decoloniality in its broadest sense. Conclusion To reiterate then, the case studies presented in this volume show how it is possible to disrupt entrenched and fossilised racial, cultural, ethnic, political, and religious belief systems which separate and alienate people from themselves and others. This volume models a variety of ways of working with these challenges. Each chapter describes a different way in which this can be done through alternative curriculum interpretations and practices within classroom-generated agendas. The kind of reflexivity of language practitioners, artists and academic staff across disciplines which is modelled here, is important. The variety of instances of border thinking (Mignolo 2000b) as demonstrated in the chapter to come, aims to break down coloniality for participants. Without deliberate reflexivity within institutions, the education crisis with English as a medium of instruction for multiliterate citizenship cannot emerge. References Andriotti, A., Anzo, M., & Polizzi, E. (2011). Local welfare systems: A challenge for social cohesion. Urban Studies, 49(9), 1925–1940. Badat, S. (2010). The challenges of transformation in higher education and training institutions in South Africa. Development Bank of Southern Africa, 8(1), 1–37. Batyi, T. (2014). Development of Tourism diploma isiXhosa students’ academic literacies: a multilingual intervention. PhD thesis. Port Elizabeth: Nelson Mandela University Library. Bezerra, J., Paterson, C., & Paphitis, S. (eds) (2021). Challenging the apartheids of knowledge in higher education through social innovation. African Sun Media. Connell, R. (2018). Decolonising sociology. American Sociological Association 47(4). https:// doi.org/10.1177/00943​0611​8779​811

12  Liesel Hibbert Ellis, M. (2019). Critical global semiotics: Understanding sustainable transformational citizenship. London and New York: Routledge. Fenton-Smith, B., Humphreys, P., & Walkinshaw, I. (2017). English medium instruction in higher education in Asia-Pacific (p. 195). New York, NY: Springer International Publishing. Francesconi, D., & Tarozzi, M. (2012). Embodied education: A convergence of phenomenological pedagogy and embodiment. Studia Phaenomenologica, 12, 263–288. Kaomea, J. (2014). Reading erasures and making the familiar strange: Defamiliarization methods for research in formerly colonized and historically oppressed communities. Educational Researcher, 32(2), 14–25. Le Grange, L. (2016). Decolonising the university curriculum. South African Journal of Higher Education, 30(2), 1–12. Mignolo, W. (2000b). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, Subaltern knowledges and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princerton University Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2000a). The role of the humanities in the corporate university. PMLA/ Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 115(5), 1238–1245. Molefi, N. (2017). A Journey of diversity and inclusion in South Africa – guidelines for leading inclusivity. ebook Partnership. Olivier, B. (2020). How not to approach nature: Devlin’s Geostorm (2017) and nature’s ‘blowback’. South African Journal of Art History, 34(3), 37–48. Osman, R., & Hornsby, D. J. (eds) (2018). Transforming higher education: Towards a Socially just pedagogy – new tasks and challenges. London: Routledge. Pattman, R., & Carolissen, R. (eds) (2018). Transforming transformation in research and teaching in universities in South Africa. Stellenbosch: African Sun Media. Shklovskij, V. (1965). Art as technique. In L. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis (eds), Russian formalist criticism (pp. 3–24). Lincoln, USA: University of Nebraska Press (Original work published in 1917). South African National Education Department, The Higher Education Act of 1997 South African National Education Department, The White Paper on Higher Education. Stornaiuolo, A., Smith, A. and Phillips, N. C. (2017). Developing a transliteracies framework for a connected world. Journal of Literacy Research, 49(1), 68–91. Waghid, Y. (2019). Towards a philosophy of caring in higher education. Palgrave Macmillan. Waghid, Z. (2014). (Higher) education for social justice through sustainable development, economic Development and equity. South African Journal of Higher Education, 28(4), 1448–1463. Waghid, Z., & Hibbert, L. (2018). Advancing border thinking through defamiliarisation in uncovering the darker side of coloniality and modernity in South African higher education. South African Journal of Higher Education, 32(4), 263–283. Waghid, Z., & Oliver, H. (2017). Cultivating social entrepreneurial capacities in students through film: Implications for social entrepreneurship education. Educational Research for Social Change, 6(2), 76–100. Yin, R. K. (2011). Applications of case study research. London: Sage.

2 A narrative account of the history of English in South Africa Liesel Hibbert

Introductory note This chapter is a transcript of a lecture delivered to graduate students at Penn State University, 2 May 2019 by invitation from an ex-colleague, Sinfree Makoni, Professor in Applied Linguistics at the Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, US. This is a narrative account of the history of the language policy development in South Africa, and language policy in education in South Africa, and how this was impacted by the political situation at each stage over almost two centuries. Particular attention is paid to the 1994–2014 period, during which many positive initiatives were put in motion by the new government in order to provide a structural framework for a supposedly more democratic education system. This chapter highlights some of the challenges of policy transformation, subsequent practices and discursive formations around language education. This story also explains how English became the lingua franca in education, business and the public sector, and the many detours language policy took, to end up again, where it started with the missionaries, namely with English as most desirable. It is of great importance to the international readership to have this background story, so as to better be able to interpret the tensions inherent in the various contexts described in the other chapters. A small number of minor edits have been carried out where the reader might have had difficulty in understanding the transcript. However, the author’s spoken voice has been retained. This chapter contains minimal formal reference. This is deliberate, as I did not want to divert into academic circumscription, so as to present an attempted decolonised version of this story. There are many formal versions available, if the reader should feel like accessing them. My story One day I received an email from Pennsylvania, from Professor Sinfree Makoni, who said that he would like to invite me to come over to Penn State University in the US and speak about my work. He said ‘I’ve been reading your work’, and I was very flattered. He added that maybe I’d like to come and talk about the work I am doing in South Africa to his Linguistics and Language Education Graduate DOI: 10.4324/9781003382645-2

14  Liesel Hibbert students. It was such an honour to receive this invitation. Thanks very much, Sinfree. It has been lovely to spend the last few days with a couple of other South Africans from other universities, here at Penn State. So, what I’m going to do is to tell a story. I’m originally from a literature background, so I’m a bit of a storyteller. What I was asked to talk about is the history of the language policy, and language policy in education in South Africa, and how this was impacted by the political situation at each stage of its development over the last two centuries. The English language history for African language speakers in South Africa started from a colonial perspective in the Cape of Good Hope from the time of the English occupation under Lord Charles Somerset in the eighteenth century. A century later after the arrival of the 1,820 English settlers in the Eastern Cape, English became a dominant language in the area of the Xhosa, Mandela’s ancestral land. ‘Englishification’ was introduced by the missionaries, mainly from the UK. One such missionary organisation was the London Missionary Society, which brought English and Christianity to Southern Africa. Their method was to impose their own language and culture upon the local inhabitants. This approach was quite in contrast to the Jesuit idea of enculturation employed in South America whereby the indigenous culture and language embrace and transform the ethics and habits of missionaries in their own way. And, of course, the whole reason why people became missionaries, was that they were not only educated in matters of Christianity but were also educated as economists, as medical doctors, and as scientists. They were sent out to the British colonies to go and see what they could set up there, in terms of trade and industry, which might be lucrative for their home country, who employed them to do this. They knew that they could set up trade, and identify what resources there were that they could cream off from the locals and carry off to the home country. So, it was not only about religion but money. The missionaries, and the British colonisers in general, thought of local Africans as heathens, so they brought them into the church schools, and taught them basic reading and writing in English; using the Bible as a main frame of reference, but also Shakespeare and a number of Anglocentric texts which were regarded as seminal and essential for a rounded education ‘back home’ in England as part of an English public-school curriculum. Little attempt was made to recognise the inherent value of languages and cultures that had developed and were deeply embedded in African languages, cultures and religions. This imposition of foreign culture and inability to recognise indigenous wisdom, thought and speech led to conflict. And so, the history of language policy is about violence. And it’s about people getting killed, and it’s about interracial marriage. And so, all that history shows what colonisers did well, and sometimes shamefully, often brutally, but occasionally in all the Love of God. From the first moment of contact, indigenous communities began resisting colonisation, although the missionaries didn’t realise it because they did not recognise the intelligence, culture and linguistic skills of local inhabitants. Despite their resistance and resentment, however, the local population of African language speakers started writing songs and poems in the British tradition and used the mode of the ballad quite comfortably, mixing it a little bit with the oral tradition.

The history of English in South Africa  15 It came quite easily to them, and was a comfort zone. An imbongi in Africa is a praise singer – the poet. By the way, the rhetor of Homeric times in Gree played a remarkably similar role in the Bronze Age community (Stefanescu 2015). I don’t know if you know – a performing poet who summarises political discussion and praises the leaders. They introduce big tribal events and celebrations. So, they were a kind of recorder or recording of all events; if somebody became a king, or whatever event was actually orally recorded, and memorised by certain experts who acted as the ‘institutional/state memory’, as we might call it. Those resources, stylistic resources, were extant before white occupation and melded naturally with such poetic forms as the Western ballad. Mission-trained Xhosas started writing poems in English, and missionaries didn’t realise it, but all of them were resistance poems, saying things such as: We will put down the spear, we will take up the pen, but we will, you know, plan for our own free and prosperous future while being colonised. One sample would be the poem by I.W.W. Citashe (Alvarez-Pereyre 1984: 117) and numerous songs by the Prophet Ntsikane. So, they couched hidden messages in what looked like British traditional ballads etc., and missionaries didn’t realise it. I love that story! And then, of course, the Dutch and the British, alternatively, took over the Cape until the British finally occupied it during the Napoleonic wars. But Dutch settlers moved or trekked north to escape this last occupation and set up farming communities and eventually independent states. But the discovery of diamonds and gold meant the British desired these northern territories too, so the Boer War was fought and won by the British, at which point English became the official language with Dutch as a secondary force and black languages largely spurned. So my late grandmother told me that she had to learn everything in Dutch from grade one. And then when she was a bit older, suddenly they had to learn everything in English, because of the policy change in the country, which was taken up again by the British. And so African intellectuals came to be trained at mission schools. Sons of the chiefs were sent to exclusive mono-racial missionary schools in the cities such as Cape Town. There were special schools for them. They could not go to the other schools because of the already unofficial strict segregation policies enforced in education before apartheid set in officially. So it happened that the leaders and the intellectuals in these tribes would send their sons to get educated because they realised they themselves couldn’t stand up to the infiltrators from Europe. Their sons were young men who were being groomed by their elders to take over the ruling of tribes in the future. The elders consistently resisted colonisation. A delegation of five prominent African intellectual leaders even took a ship to England in 1904 in order to speak to the Queen about this. In order to be heard, they were well aware that in order to speak back to the colonisers, you had to know the culture, the language and everything about the frame of mind of the oppressors. The five delegates, in the most polite and dignified way, tried to negotiate with the delegation of the Queen, to be taken seriously. They said, ‘Look, the way you guys are colonizing us back home is not smart, not very nice, you know. It’s not really working for us. We don’t like the way we are being coerced into all kinds of menial arrangements. And we would like to appeal to you to come to some

16  Liesel Hibbert better agreement, because you know, there is land at stake. We are talking about fixed property as assets and capital, we are talking about our livelihoods. We are wanting peace. This can be negotiated’. But this didn’t work. It failed. From then on, in 1910, South Africa became a union. This does not mean that the Dutch and the English came to some friendly agreement either. Afrikaans emerged, or rather was imposed as a Dutch African language; quite different from Dutch by now, mixed with Indian languages, Malay and Arabic (the languages of the then slaves at the Cape), but still based on Dutch. So, the Dutch people can still more or less understand what we’re saying in Afrikaans. And there is this joke that emerged, you know, after marijuana was legalised in our country. It’s on my WhatsApp. Somebody sent this joke: Dagga has already been legalised in the Netherlands for a very long time and that is why the Dutch speak Afrikaans so strangely. Dutch, Flemish, Danish, German and Norwegian are, of course very similar to Afrikaans, as they historically, provide the grammatical root constructions of Afrikaans. So, after the Boer War of 1905, everything became very British and Afrikaners became the defeated underclass: the working classes, the farmer classes, and they started resisting the subhuman treatment of them by the British. During the war they hounded all Afrikaners off their land, burnt down all the crops and farmhouses and interned/imprisoned Afrikaner women and their children in concentration camps. These events were quite shocking in terms of the extreme violence perpetrated by the British army. Nobody talks about this anymore, but it really happened. It was a genocide. There was one English woman who you might have heard or read about, namely Emily Hobhouse, who was appalled at the British treatment of the Afrikaners and saw this as a gross violation against humans. She mobilised help and went into these concentration camps, with medicines and food and tried to save the lives of the children and the women, many of whom died of starvation and diseases. So, in any case, why is this all so important? It is because the Afrikaners were very, very angry. They decided that they were going to take action. So they founded this club/organisation called the Broederbond. The brothers (‘broeders’) decided to act in unison, as brothers, and stand up against the British. The first task of this organisation, headed by Vader Laurie, was to rescue their own people out of poverty and unemployment. They set up funds, orphanages for the war orphans, homes for women etc. As a result of this impetus, after some decades, they became very powerful. They started collecting funds, building houses, helping each other, starting up schools for Afrikaners, and working towards declaring Afrikaans a language with its own Bible translation from Dutch. They were left to their own devices in these endeavours, as the English-originated population, which had been economically active and flourishing for decades, were not particularly interested in what the Afrikaner, who were regarded as the poor and disrespected underclasses, were up to. The Afrikaners started to mobilise en masse, produced books, and started educating their children. And this led them to think that once they had bypassed the English population, and had gained economic power, they could take control. But things in South Africa as a whole became really bad in

The history of English in South Africa  17 the ’40s and ’50s. The ’50s, through to 1960, was the real height of Afrikaner power and that is when they actually managed to take over the country. In this process, all Africans and what is known as ‘Coloureds’ (in South Africa, a term for people of mixed racial descent) became severely sidelined and oppressed. Once the Afrikaners were running the country, from around 1960 onwards, they relegated African and Coloured people to the role of labourers. A Pretoria-based theologian, Professor A. S. Geyser, was given the task of justifying from the Bible for apartheid, but when he found non, he was punished. Apartheid had set in. They quoted/misquoted the Bible, that they, the whites alone, were the chosen people and had gone to the promised land, and that the local people were their Godgiven subordinates. And that God had put them there for them as ‘helpers’ and labourers. Afrikaners believed that the land was theirs, that they were the people of God who were guided to the land and fought so hard for it. And now it was theirs. This is so similar to the history of the American Civil War, which finally led to the abolition of slavery in the United States of America on 1 January 1865. So, due to overwhelming resistance, resistance had to go underground. Resistance, from the ANC (African National Congress) against apartheid laws, which were harshly and thoroughly enforced, went underground. The ANC, which was everyone who was black in South Africa, turned their energies toward resisting White domination by the then Afrikaner-led autocratic Nationalist government. So again, there was this massive resistance and force, this time coming from the majority population, an audible force to reckon with. So that happened? So, all those years from 1910, right through to the 1960s and to 1994, all those years in between, English and Afrikaans were the only official languages. The African vernacular languages were all but officially dismissed. There were all these other languages which had existed and evolved for thousands of years, but they were not recognised. So, if you had any schooling, it was in English or Afrikaans. And because of white dominance, they said everyone who was black in this country and had an African language must adopt Afrikaans as the language of learning and teaching. And then you need to write down this date. You probably already know that 16 June 1976 is the date of the big Soweto Uprising. Many children were killed because the whole African school population in the country went onto the streets to demonstrate against Afrikaans as the language of learning and teaching. At the time, and until 1994, Black and Coloured children were getting one of four parts of what the white kids were getting in terms of government subsidy for education. All those years, white children were getting free education, beautifully equipped, well-maintained buildings and free books. The ANC, with the help of international trade boycotts of South Africa almost globally, the ANC managed to push the national government overboard in 1994. Ironically, the then Nationalist president, FW de Klerk, won the Nobel Peace Prize for releasing Nelson Mandela from 25 years in jail and for handing over the country to the ANC. We know it was not his doing, and credit was not due to him, but this is a story for another day. This happened, one must remember, because of the international economic boycotts against SA led by the USA. The Nationalist,

18  Liesel Hibbert mainly white racist government, had to give in to international pressure to firstly release Nelson Mandela, and secondly, to assist in implementing a democratic system, to end international exclusion. They had to succumb to this pressure or lose their own economic stronghold. You probably know this happened at the time when Mandela came out of jail. This was the end of the white man’s dream of dominance: gone with the wind. So, by 1994, English and Afrikaans were still the only official languages. I was teaching at the Teacher Training College for Primary school teachers in Khayelitsha, a DET institution (Department of Education and Training to which the black population was relegated, though it was run by the Nationalists) at that time. The students we interviewed were all African language speakers who had suffered poor education under this policy of exclusion. In order to even be interviewed, the students had to be fluent in English, Afrikaans and an African language, in speaking, reading and writing otherwise they couldn’t become teachers. But a white kid who wanted to be a teacher had to have one first language – either Afrikaans or English, with only communicative competence required in a 2nd language, as it was then called. Naturally, African language speakers were incensed by this injustice. Intellectuals identified the need to recognise all the eleven language groups. So, after liberation, a symbolic move to multilingualism was made. The policy of eleven official languages was launched. Later on, however, the reality kicked in and officials realised how complicated it was going to be to roll this thing out. So, then they decided that each province should have three official languages. So, for instance, in the Western Cape, there are three official languages. At the time, around 1994, Afrikaans was the dominant language in the province, which included white Afrikaners and also most Coloured people. And then there were a few, like 10 to 15 or 20%, maybe, English speakers. And then there were very few Xhosa speakers. Today, after 1994, you know, there are a great number of Xhosa speakers from the Eastern Cape rural areas residing on the peripheries of Cape Town. But then Mandela said, let everyone come from Africa who wants to come; as a way of repaying the kindness shown to ANC liberation fighters who were granted hospitality during apartheid from 1948 to 1994. A lot of people started coming into the big city centres at this stage. They came from all over Africa, and especially neighbouring countries, due to the ANC’s lifting of what was previously known as ‘influx control’. At this point, and correct me if I’m wrong, but the statistics are now like this in the Western Cape: there are 65% who are Afrikaans speakers. The majority of the Afrikaans speakers are not white Afrikaners but are ‘Coloureds’ (which in South Africa means mixed race.) The Coloured people speak mainly Afrikaans, which is of Dutch origin, right? Mixed from the Dutch. And then there are the English speakers in the province, which are only about 10%–12%. And the rest are black Africans, and isiXhosa is now the second most common language in the Western Cape. Okay. So everything is changed. But if you told middle-class suburbanites in Cape Town these statistics, they would not know them. They would think that you’re speaking in their dominant language or they have no idea that something

The history of English in South Africa  19 has happened, something has changed, turning a determined blind eye. Isn’t it interesting, that. Also, the ANC had a policy of not releasing statistical information for many years, due to the embarrassing rise in crime statistics after the ANC took over. The increase of crime is mainly due to rising anger and frustration due to non-delivery of basic services in the country, meaning water, electricity and sanitation, besides which, poverty is on the rise. In 1995, when I started doing my PhD thesis on language and change in parliament and following local social and political changes and trends. And I heard people say, oh, we must publish more black authors. Maybe, you know, African names, because they must write in English. So publishers started looking for black writers. But in the end, 10 years later, we started thinking maybe it was just a tokenistic recognition; there may never have been the intention to actually roll these languages out. But there were a small group of us who tried to roll them out. So, I became part of the provincial language committee, whose job was to roll out multilingualism. Within this committee I was working with Neville Alexander, one of the most prolific language activists in South Africa at the time. I don’t know if you know his name. He was in jail with Nelson Mandela and his compatriots. The government budget was R600,000 in the years 2002 and 2003. Simply, I don’t know how much that is in dollars, R600,000 for each year. I was there for three years, I was chairing this committee, and we had to decide where we were going to spend this money on translation and training. In the health sector, in the safety sector and in the government sector. So, if you are a parliamentary speaker, you now had the constitutional right to speak in your own language in parliament. And if other people didn’t understand that, a translator was paid. And every text must be written out and published in Zulu and English. And they actually started doing that. So that was what made my research very interesting. And so they did that. And we did give him the budget for training and for spontaneous translation, and also for translation for the publications. The committee decided to target hospitals, because all the doctors in the public hospitals were white; now suddenly, everyone who was white went to private hospitals while black patients were able to go to the public hospitals. The ANC government promised that all children under the age of six could get free treatment. There were many African language-speaking patients in the public hospitals because suddenly they were allowed in there after 1995, and they all ran to the hospitals with their sick children, and everything had to be dealt with. There is this joke about the cleaning lady: if the patient needs to be understood it is safer to first call the cleaning lady because she can explain to the white English or Afrikaans-speaking doctor what the African language-speaking patient was saying. However, if the patient says her heart is sore, we don’t know whether her heart is in danger or whether she is referring to grief or any other emotional factor. And it was obviously supposed to be a free service. We got to allocate funding to train translators, medical translators, police translators and translators in the public sector, and got them paid. They had to know something about medicine, they had to have studied basic science. It was very expensive to train language experts. A similar problem faced the police force. For instance, if you were an African

20  Liesel Hibbert language speaker and a white English- or Afrikaans-speaking policeman pulled you off the road, and you’re in court and you’re trying to explain what happened and you can only speak Zulu or Xhosa or some other African language, you were not able to defend yourself adequately. All kinds of deliberate/non-deliberate misunderstandings occurred and mis/facts were recorded. The provincial government eventually made it clear that they were not allocating funds to language issues. They decided that their speeches, which were written in English, would be delivered in English. Any other language spoken was eventually relegated to interjections, in-house jokes or side comments. So, without any official decisions, the use of multilingualism in the health, safety, and public sectors, petered out. The government take on this was: ‘We can’t pay for textbooks. We’ve got other things to see to’. The publishers shut down for a period of around 10 years. They didn’t publish anything educational. Because they wanted to see where it was going; where are we going to make the most money – it’s definitely not in education, there’s too much confusion. Historically, the British had an agreement with South Africa that all the textbooks had to be published in the UK. That agreement with the South African government when it was still, you know, preliberation, that everything that is published here in English must be published in Britain. So, we had all these British books you know, we grew up with British textbooks. Hello here’s Rover. Hello here’s Kitty. Hello here are Kitty and Rover. Rover catches the ball. And here’s the garden man. You know what I am saying? It was bizarre. So far from our experience. What I’m saying is it was dissolved. So that eventually there were other publishing houses like Heinemann. They said, ‘No, no, we are not designed for this. We are going to publish in Africa for African people. We’re going to publish local teacher’s textbooks, we are going to start. So, there are not very many publishers who are publishing for the African market. And so, some of the poems and stories I’ve written for little kids have gone all over Africa through Maskew Miller and other publishers with local production. And we have a lot of little publishing houses. And this is going very, very well. But the school market is still difficult. Because who’s going to pay for it? So, 25 years later, that problem has not been solved. It’s very, very serious. In education to this day, which is 25 years later, we still have only minimal textbooks in the classrooms and certainly almost no textbooks in African languages. What is most sad is that the official major publishers didn’t even publish stories in African languages for the lower grades, although some smaller private companies did. And now, getting to the current status quo… There are hundreds of issues impacting on the quality of education in South Africa at present – a whole volcano of issues mostly related to a kind of caste system, if I may call it that, entrenched by coloniality and further entrenched by apartheid. What makes things even more complicated is that we’ve got a lot of refugees, asylum-seekers and immigrants who came here as part of the ANC’s attempt to honour the hospitality paid to its cadres during the liberation struggle. But the numbers have increased to the point that there are huge xenophobic attacks on the poor socio-economic fringes of all South African cities, where the ‘foreigners’, which is what they are regarded as being, are attempting to

The history of English in South Africa  21 settle. Most classrooms in these poor areas, but also in the metropole, have groups of French-African students. Some schools have almost 50% French-speaking learners, without any French-speaking teachers. Some NGOs have been founded to address the challenge, but they are peripheral and regarded as non-mainstream, in the same way as the issue is relegated to marginally, and certainly not linked to official government funding in any way. Despite the significant migration trend into South Africa, French has remained relegated to the status of unofficial, foreign and/or immigrant language. The language policy in education at present is completely ridiculous. It prescribed mother tongue for the first three years of schooling and English or Afrikaans from the fourth year. So now every child who is an African native speaker at grade four is compelled to switch to English as a language of learning and teaching. What’s going to happen a result of this? Is the education level going to improve? It’s educational sabotage. Question: multilingual language implementation, has it happened? It’s very, very slow and it’s slowing down as we speak. Was this policy just a gesture of goodwill? Where is the political will to support this? At moment there is none because there is so much else to be dealt with that it doesn’t seem to be a priority. The ANC has faction fighting within the party and they are paying the price in terms of diminishing funds and consequences related to their credibility and perceived (and indeed real) lack of delivery and ethical action. No one is talking about language policy anymore. Where is the government funding for this? It wasn’t really allocated. We as the committee in the Western Cape Province had to basically squeeze it out of the subcommittee budget for advocacy and convince the provincial government that it was important. Okay, so the budget allocated paid for some training and research in a limited number of provincial government sectors, but the other provinces did not allocate funds to multilingual policy roll-out at all. So, the roll-out of multilingual language policy implementation has been very slow. And it is slowing down as I speak. The obvious answer is to comply with the South African Constitution and mandate schools to allow learners to learn in their mother tongue until their final year at school; with the proviso that they learn English at a level which prepares them for English as an International Language as well as English as a lingua franca within the country. Similarly, it is obvious that universities should gradually respect such priorities too – therefore this book, which explains some of the dynamics to consider when trying to apply English as a language of learning and teaching in higher education. In terms of being able to be admitted to a teacher qualification today, each student has to be proficient (reading, writing and speaking) in two languages, one of which is English. The quality of language education is, however, constantly being lowered, to produce a substantial school-leaving population, with passable grades, which means that pre-service teachers enter the system much more linguistically compromised than ever in past decades. For comparative purposes, let’s focus on Zimbabwe, one of our neighbouring countries, for a moment. In Zimbabwe, for many decades the schools enforced

22  Liesel Hibbert Cambridge O and A levels. The Zimbabwean refugees/immigrants and asylumseekers who went through this system speak a near-southeastern-UK-version of London/metropolitan English They are the most fluent in English of all African language speakers. More accurately, they are closest to the ‘standard’ UK pronunciation and inflection and accent. In other words, their system in Zimbabwe was solidly English until a decade or two ago. This is due to them having had a lot of mother-tongue English-speaking UK Peace-Corporation teacher volunteers from the UK in the schooling system over some decades. Even in small villages, villagers learnt to speak English as it is spoken in England from these volunteers. Due to the lack of residual or overt racism and other prejudices, and a lack of complex conflicts of power, the system worked really well up to the point at which President Mugabe became a dictator and the entire country’s infrastructure collapsed due to neglect. So overall, foreign English teachers and textbooks, both from the UK, seem to have had a positive impact on the level of prioritised government English-imposed policy, of course to the detriment of the African languages as the language of learning and teaching, which has not yet come to fruition. Language issues within the present schooling system So, what has happened to the schooling system from 1994 onwards? Everybody thinks, ‘Wow, you know, now everybody can go to any school they want to go to’. We all actually believed this. But it didn’t really pan out like that. Three sets of schools were introduced in 1994: the top one was model C only for the White population only. The House of Representatives, bizarre I know, but it was for the ‘Coloured’ and ‘Indian’ population groups and then there was the DET – the department of education for the African-speaking masses and there were masses and that was equivalent to all African language speakers in poor schools, under-resourced and so on. Instead of previously disadvantaged black schools being brought into an ambit of inclusivity with previously privileged white schools and adding resources and space, the previously white schools have become exclusive semi-private schools which generate elitist capitalist priorities and only admit those who can pay the high fees and who can move into the geographical areas where these schools are located. At this time, when I was enrolling my two teenage daughters into a high school across the road, they initially turned her down because they didn’t want any single parents in case the high fees became an issue. After a fight I put up, my daughter was admitted, but left after one year as she refused to comply with the sexist and military-style ethos there. Poor schools have become poorer because there hasn’t been much of an added investment. What the ANC’s education department wanted to do was to create more autonomy for school headmasters. The intention was, perhaps, positive in that each school head had to decide what the funding should be spent on. I know in America it is different. A school head is, by definition, a financial and logistic head. But in South Africa, a school headmaster is not necessarily a trained financial

The history of English in South Africa  23 manager, in fact rarely. Many of these schools later became free schools, where parents didn’t have to pay and little would come in terms of renewable resources. And a lot of poor Xhosa-speaking parents in the Western Cape Peninsula area, for instance, wanted their kids to go to better schools, and they were prepared to pay their entire salaries to get these kids there, and then they actually started sending them to the Afrikaans ‘Coloured’ schools. When we interviewed them for a project, they said they didn’t care what language the children are getting educated in because in the economically depressed areas the children were not being educated at all. So, a huge number of DET learners (most Xhosa speakers from another province who came to settle in the outskirts of Cape Town in the hope of employment opportunities) placed their children in Afrikaans-speaking schools). As far as wealthy Indian and Muslim South Africans are concerned, most parents opted for model C (so-called ex-White) schools. As soon as this happened, wealthy white parents started sending their kids to private schools because the parents simply took their kids out and said we are not playing the integration game. Sorry to be so blunt. But that is what’s happened. At present, the majority of African language speakers are still in economically depressed areas in poorly managed and poorly resourced schools. The Model C schools have high school fees coming in from the parents. Due to a lack of teaching expertise in 1st language Xhosa, Xhosa speakers who are in the school cannot study Xhosa at 1st language level as it is not offered. The other thing that happened in the meantime was that around two decades ago ‘experts’ here in South Africa imported outcomes-based education (OBE). You may have heard of it. OBE originated in Scotland and was adopted by the liberation government in South Africa. It was implemented right across the board. And, they realised earlier on, that in Australia and New Zealand where it was also introduced, it worked, as all teaching and textbooks there are in English only and fully paid for from government funds. Was this relevant to South Africa? No, it wasn’t appropriate. It didn’t work. Publishers refused to publish schoolbooks in multiple languages until they could see who was going to pay for it. Most parents, of course, could not afford it at all, so it didn’t happen. But a prominent South African academic of international fame accurately predicted this mess, namely Professor Jonathan Jansen (2019). And publishing houses said, ‘Okay, we’ll publish all these books if we know who will pay for them to get into the schools’. And then they said ‘No, we must have a new thing which followed OBE or Outcome Based Education’. They called the new system CAPS, namely Curriculum Assessment Planning Statements. So that’s what we’re using now. Now, our teacher training institution is training high school English teachers – but the new CAPS curriculum is not being rolled out in schools. Not even the previous system’s books, the outcomes-based books, are in the schools. The teacher comes into the classroom and says can you please hand out the books, and children go to the shelf. After the class, the books go straight back onto the shelf where they have been for the last twenty years. These are old books from the old apartheid system. They look after these old, tattered books

24  Liesel Hibbert very well but there are no new ones coming into the system. But they now get a few new books. So, the country started publishing local books. It is clear from this brief survey of the field that the power of English is still spreading and is sidelining the credibility of African languages at school, in business, in hospitals, parliament, the military and even at home. This is equal to a stifling of valuable culturally rich languages and habitus and may be regarded as a serious loss. Languages carry much more than linguistic structure and vocabulary. They bear the rich and ancient freight of intuitive cultures which have evolved and are passed down generations through millennia, having created a kind of legitimate and collective subjectivities, which are now minimalised. Yet, just as the first English missionaries imposed English and its literature onto African peoples (literally Shakespeare’s writings and the Bible), so now five hundred years later the same pattern is uninterruptedly carrying on at a much larger and more pernicious global scale, spearheaded by English. Keeping in mind that a sudden switch from home language to English in the fourth year of schooling is psychologically and cognitively disabling, one wonders why there has never been any extra support and tutoring for these children having to deal with this process. Where Xhosa has been the main language of instruction from grades 1–12, most students managed to cope and achieved a good school leaving certificate. Neville Alexander started this particular project in a remote rural economically very poor area, namely in Tarkastad in the Eastern Cape. The theory underpinning this project was that if you learn a first language through deep processing, orally, in writing and across the curriculum, the cognitive and linguistic plasticity of the brain develops pathways for easy access to another language. It was an experiment which showed hugely positive results but has not been expanded further due to political issues, funding issues and withdrawal of the support systems for the school because it helps. But when these kids get to grade four, and then just start reading in English, and get textbooks in English, that’s where the first school dropout rate is located. Then the next dropout rate is when they go to high school, grade eight, where science and mathematics and all other content subjects have to be studied in English, a second, foreign or additional language for most learners, especially in non-metropolitan areas. Children don’t cope. They leave school. So that’s a very, serious problem. African languages are marginalised. This is most often the case in the schooling system. However, the policy calls for mother tongue as additional language and learning ‘where appropriate’ which, of course, does not imply any pressure. And is an easy escape route. If, for instance, a school doesn’t have any resistance from the parents then if African languages get to be included as a language of learning and teaching, then it’s less of a ‘problem’. What happens to African languages is that they are mostly also not taught, except as 3rd languages, which means they are not fully used, just introduced at a low level of reading and writing and comprehension. As I said, the teacher was the speaker, because she knows, okay, but there’s not even like classes for other students to learn those languages and no real support.

The history of English in South Africa  25 I can give you one example from my own experience. I was heading up a language centre for multilingual development at a university near Cape Town at the time, which attracted a lot of funding. We took a basic Afrikaans course into a school for grade 1–3 Xhosa-speaking learners with no previous experience of Afrikaans. They came from an informal settlement a few miles down the road, across the freeway. The project went well. In the afternoons, we’d keep the children after school, feed them and play literacy games, songs and other activities with them to get them speaking Afrikaans. I know full well that this accommodationist strategy was not ideal and by no means in line with social equity, but it was all we were allowed to do in this school, and it did have a helpful effect on the children. Firstly, they were safe in the afternoons, they got their one meal of the day and they were taken home afterwards. Their progress in Afrikaans was reported as excellent by the teachers. They were also happy that they didn’t have to deal with getting the children into Afrikaans themselves. The funding covered food for the children as well as transport to their homes, as it was deemed unsafe for them to cross the busy freeway by themselves to get to their homes in the informal settlement The impact of this afterschool programme was fairly huge and helped the children to become more integrated into Afrikaans. But we spoke to the principal and said you need to change your policy. You need to make this a bilingual school so that some children are learning in Xhosa and others in Afrikaans. And that is how it should be, or ideally, all the children becoming fluent in both languages, seeing that roughly 50% of them were Xhosa speakers and around 50% Afrikaans speakers. And he said: ‘never on my life will I allow this to happen to my school’. Well, this is a perfect example of resistance to change and an uncompromising separatist mindset of a so-called Coloured headmaster (at an Afrikaans community school not wanting to admit Xhosa-speaking children from a poor, semi-urban, shack-dweller community across the freeway some miles down the road on the outskirts of the wealthy ‘world-class’ city of Cape Town with all its well-provided infrastructure). It is suggested by one of the NGO (Non-Governmental Organisation) projects in the Western Cape Province, that a range of linguistically competent teachers ought to be appointed in the lower grades to facilitate bi- and tri-lingual translation and interpretation. The headmaster of this particular historically ‘coloured’ school was willing to co-operate up to a point, which was to provide space in the afternoons for extra Afrikaans lessons for Xhosa 1st Graders, but that was all. He also said he would think about it a bit. Unless this kind of project is funded from external sources (again, parents were not able to contribute) it doesn’t happen. I guess if the Provincial Department of Education had offered to appoint a Xhosa-speaking teacher, he might have considered it. However, it was clear that he considered the school to be traditionally Afrikaans and did not seriously entertain the necessity for Xhosa-speaking staff. A good thing that seems to have been put in motion in recent years though, is that the ANC government has started recognising the need for pre-literacy skills. Consequently, grade R (Reception Year, pre-grade 1) is being rolled out currently. It hasn’t been officially a government commitment until now. In the past,

26  Liesel Hibbert if the reception year was offered at an established school, it would be funded, but attending it was optional. This seems to be changing, as more and more reception classes are being funded and teachers for this are starting to be trained in recent years. My strong feeling is that it is imperative to have children attending such a year, as it affects school readiness. It leads to the creation of disadvantages for children later on if they lose out on essential pre-literacy skills. That to me is probably the biggest problem, when the cognitive development must take place at a young age as well. I’m not saying it is wrong to learn any language you can, but you need time, depending on how motivated you are, how supported you are, and how willing you are to put in the hours. But a small child in a rural area isn’t getting the preschool year and so a lot of kids that go to grade 4 aren’t even ready. Regarding stress-inducing factors in the classroom, other than transcultural and translinguistic-related complexities How does one give recognition to the child as an individual, when one is dealing with 60 or 90 kids in a classroom? I mean, how does one teach a language there? The answer is that it is absolutely debilitating for the children as well as for the teacher. Hardly any child in that circumstance can be given individual attention. This also means that policy and practice are moving in two different directions. The picture is very bleak. For those of us who believe that cultures can coexist and that a bilingual community is ideal, it is hard to create. Regarding learner preferences, you may ask, do learners want to be taught in their 1st language or in English in South Africa? Is there a push-back tendency to resist translingual and bilingual education in favour of English only? The students have experienced that African languages and Afrikaans have no status and do not lend a voice, so they tend to be in favour of English only. Parents also prefer English due to the perception of English as the language of employment. There has never been any real political will to accommodate all the languages in the schools. For instance, many years ago, my daughter was studying Xhosa as a 3rd language in her model C school. The school ended up offering only Xhosa 1st language for the Xhosa speakers, but not Xhosa 3rd language, for cost-cutting reasons. Xhosa 2nd language was offered by the same teacher as Xhosa 1st language, but that is too difficult for 3rd language speakers of Xhosa, as they can read and write but don’t speak it fluently. This also means that an English or Afrikaans child is hardly ever presented with the opportunity to learn Xhosa at school level, which is unacceptable in my opinion. So, basically, the Education Department specifies that each child must have two languages: one at first home language level, or whatever you want to call it, and another additional language. So that’s what is done. So each child only has the opportunity to learn two languages at school. So, in the newspapers, you will see job advertisements recommending the applicant should be fluent in an African language, and that it would be an advantage. However, it means that the job is reserved for African language speakers. According to the employment quota system and employment laws, the majority of employees need to be black as a matter of redress, as the previous government employed almost only whites. So this means there are already too many whites in corporate and government sectors and the quota is mostly full. Or the quota is

The history of English in South Africa  27 full. So that the government is very strict on that point. The point I wish to make is that race redress is hidden under arguments for language preferences. This also indicates that no satisfactory discourse of talking about, and dealing with, racial inequality has yet been developed in the system of government and economics in South Africa. The higher education landscape Within higher education, learning English should be seen as a ‘necessary evil’ throughout because specialist textbooks at tertiary level are often available in English only. The University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand should be the only English-medium universities. Stellenbosch and Pretoria should be Afrikaans universities and Natal should have two officially Zulu-speaking universities, just as the Eastern Cape should have two Xhosa universities and so on. This arrangement would strengthen and validate all languages and allow for fair mother-tongue instruction. I’m not sure how much they are currently allocating to multilingualism because I’m not involved any more in this work. Maybe the amount of funding has increased? And of course, you can do less and less with the same amount of money after 20 years have passed. So, there isn’t much action in this field, I suspect, and not much chance of a turn-around. There is a policy that African languages should be used for learning and teaching in higher education. But the teachers are very against translanguaging, which refers to a wide spectrum of code-mixing, code-meshing and codeswitching. There is no real political will, and the old teachers just like to carry on doing what they have always done. So, most of them who are not African language speakers will not code-switch in public spaces. But if the learners can speak African languages, and they are encouraged to do so, it works with a teacher who does it as well. Students in higher education flock to classes where bilingualism is practiced and their mother tongue use is encouraged. Most lecturers haven’t tried. Some try and fail. Some succeed. It is not a matter of random bilingualism. It needs to be strategically planned and tried and tested, such as the examples in Hibbert & van der Walt (2014) demonstrate. In one of the institutions in which I was active, of about 50 lecturers who were educating high school teachers, I would say about five believed in bilingual education and practiced it. And there may have been another five who believe in it, but don’t do it, because they don’t know how. Then there are some lecturers who want to implement bilingualism, as it sounds right to them, but do not know how to do it. They haven’t been exposed to the new methodologies and don’t have the confidence to experiment. The majority of academics of course say they are not language teachers and should be left to their own devices, as they are not interested in the issues, and have better things to do. The situation is, therefore, overall, not conducive to change. The National Research Foundation mechanisms also contribute to the non-spread of cutting-edge practice due to the fact that it rewards academics more if they publish internationally. This makes it hard to build up core groups of informed linguistics, for instance, to counteract the monolingual beliefs

28  Liesel Hibbert within education. Also, grassroots-level publishing is not actively supported by commercial publishers, and if publications do appear, the average non-teacher in a peri-urban/urban area would not be able to understand the terminology used by academics who are also practicing language activism. In fact, due to awareness of this stifling framework, which hinders the spread of theory in layman’s language, I tried my best to cut out specialist terminology. For instance, instead of status quo, I use the phrase not ‘current scenario’ but ‘current situation’, hoping that this might address the issue of off-putting strenuous readability. Postscript The story of my pathway through the decades with higher education pedagogy in South Africa might well resonate with pathways others in different parts of the world have recently followed. With migration and cross-lingual communities becoming the norm, I assume that this historical overview links to similar recent and past pathways most university teachers must recently have travelled. Another reason this volume will resonate with all higher education facilitators is that most universities globally are switching to English as a medium of instruction. What we thus all have in common, is the urge to decolonise our own minds and practices in order to create equitable provisions in mega-diverse digitalised universities. This volume has demonstrated how this can well be set in motion through collaborative delinking, followed by relinking, through transcultural and translinguistic awareness and practices. References Alvarez-Pereyre, J. (1984). The poetry of commitment in South Africa. Nairobi: Heinemann. Geyser, A. S. (1975). The letter of James and the social conditions of his addressees. Neotestamentica 9(1), 25–33. Geyser, A. S. Theological Studies 70(1), 1–10 (between 1946–1961, exact information not digitally accessible). Hibbert, L. (2009). Boxes of apples and language development in higher education. Inaugural Lecture, Nelson Mandela University, available from NMU Library, Gqeberha, South Africa. Hibbert, L. and Van der Walt, C. (eds.) (2014). Multilingual universities in South Africa: Reflecting society in higher education (Vol. 97). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Jansen, J. D. (ed.) (2019). Decolonising in universities: The politics of knowledge. JHB: Wits University Press. Stefanescu, A. (2015). Philosophy of rehtoric in Ancient Greece: From Homer to Plato. Revue Roumanine de Philosophie 59(1), 115–166.

3 Assessing student writing ‘A tangled situation’ Liesel Hibbert and Anne Knott

Introduction and background After the change of government from minority rule to supposed democratisation in 1994 there was a huge influx of students at this specific university in the Western Cape due to its motto ‘free education for all’ and ‘the doors of learning shall be opened’. The university was obliged to offer free accommodation, zero fees and free books to all. As many students came to Cape Town from rural areas, they were not well-prepared to enter higher education as independent thinkers and writers, let alone make their way in a large city. It took a number of years to find out what kind of writing guidance these students needed and how we could fast-track their performance in English. The questions which were raised, were, among others: • What are the implications in terms of general oral class feedback, individual feedback in consultations, written comments and marks? • What are the skills we are mediating to students? • What do our interventional practices mediate? • Are they ways of enhancing metalinguistic awareness? • Are they ways of enhancing reflective practices in students? • Are they ways of enhancing awareness of intertextuality at play in own and other texts, mainly aimed at the increased ability to decode academic reading? Our main insight following this project was that we needed to provide finer guidance regarding the criteria of written argumentation. Each different written assignment requires a different set of criteria, as the genre for writing in academia were already beginning to widen, and much free writing was also encouraged and assessed. Finally, our particular emphasis in this chapter is on trying to create a shared understanding of writing which is both extensive and intensive. The theory section below provides an overview of theories which had come to us from the international literature on the issue of writing practices. It was becoming a requirement in the teaching of academic literacy to see context as ‘the culture or background the learner is coming from’. This notion prompted lecturers/markers and tutors to make allowances for students’ misinterpretations of texts by not DOI: 10.4324/9781003382645-3

30  Liesel Hibbert and Anne Knott wanting to impose preferred readings or to guard against ‘colonising’ the writer’s text with preconceived ideas of what and how the student ought to be thinking and what and how the student ought to be writing. The university in question carried the labels ‘access to tertiary education for all’ and ‘academic home of the left’. These labels placed a certain pressure and some accompanying expectations on staff. At the time, the course ‘English for Educational Development’(EED) in which the essay of one of my students, Portia Geswind, was written and assessed, was the general literacy course (called English for Educational Development), geared to develop all communication and academic skills students have, in an integrated way. Speaking, reading, writing, listening and thinking skills were regarded as complementary in this programme. Thus, when we refer to student texts, we refer to student oral and written work and the multiple conscious and subconscious behaviours students engage in, some more quantifiable than others. A written product for assessment of student performance, viewed in isolation, although the most convenient, is not necessarily the best or most reliable way in which to monitor student progress and competence, although by far the most convenient. Especially at the first-year level, students are not only in the process of becoming competent in writing academic texts in English, as is the commonly held narrow view, but are exposed to a multitude of essential academic and social discourses which impact on their processes of identification in different ways, sometimes positively, but often negatively. Focusing only on academic discourses of specific disciplines then would be holding a one-dimensional view of the student experience. In this course of study, students gained marks for participation, formal oral presentations, informal presentations and group tasks. The high degree of oral engagement enabled one as lecturer or tutor to validate to some degree at least, student primary discourses. The task of the lecturer was, of course, to facilitate transfer of these discourses, and discourses acquired socially, into their ‘formal’ writing. What interested us most in working within the above categories of interactions across micro- and macro-contexts, is the tension between generalities versus specificities. As one student, whose work we cite, put it: ‘It was a very tangled situation’, by which she refers to negotiating a cacophony of instructive voices from different quarters, as illustrated below. The controversies raised here, eventually culminated in the Fees Must Fall ‘revolution’ of 2019 onwards, linked to Black Lives Matter in 2020, and spider-netting on this trajectory in South Africa and globally. I will attempt to describe how I have used these categories and how they have impacted on my view of Portia Geswind’s argumentative essay in which she herself describes the debate she engages in as a ‘tangled situation’. A historical overview of theories which impacted on our practices The teaching of English in the 1960s was based on the Second Language Acquisition model developed with UK demographics in mind. In the UK at that time, foreigners were enculturated into English as the sole official language, and

Assessing student writing  31 according to strict British English grammar and spelling rules. This period, better known as the hippy era, was the beginning of the end of colonisation and a period of mass migration from ex-British to the UK. The frame of reference was British culture and ‘standard’ English. The American equivalent was (and partly continues to be) teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) with an emphasis on assimilation into American English. This can perhaps be understood in terms of Marxist conceptions of ‘the centre’ and ‘the periphery’. In South Africa (and other colonies or ex-colonies), millions of people learnt English with Britain as their frame of reference. Mission schools in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, such as Lovedale and Healdtown, were then being closed down by the then Nationalist Government because they were offering an excellent, British-style education for the African-languagespeaking population, as did Fort Hare University at the time. It was highly successful, due to its mono-standards enforced by mono-lingual English ‘native’ speakers of South African English, the grammar being identical to British English, with a slightly Dutch/Afrikaans pronunciation. This was followed in the ’70s by a move away from a focus on formal grammar towards composition studies and accompanying free/exploratory writing. The understanding was that skill in and knowledge of grammatical rules does not necessarily translate into compositional competence and ability to convey meaning. This can be related to the anti-formal grammar movement and an acknowledgement in Britain of variations of English apart from standard received pronunciation, etc. It was also the beginning of a move away from the ‘canon’ in English literature and the acknowledgement of English literature written by African Caribbean and African writers, for instance, in English, from other parts of the world, attached to other cultural contexts and value systems. This new, more loosely defined body of English literature also included reconstructions of pseudo-slavery autobiographies. The 1970s furthermore, saw the onset of the American notion of College Composition Studies in South Africa, communicative language teaching, antiformal grammar movements, and exploratory writing. Critical Language Awareness (CLA) became popular around the 1980s, introducing the notion of power relations embedded in discourse, as important for conscientising learners in English language teaching. The popularity of this approach took hold of the Southern world as well, with Hilary Janks initiating it into English language materials in South Africa. This trend was popularised and initiated largely by who was in touch with the UK trends. Important UK theorists who became international names related to critical approaches to language awareness research and teaching are Norman Fairclough (1989), Ruth Wodak (2014), Brian Street (1993), Deborah Cameron (2014), Cope and Kalantzis (1993) and James Gee (1989). They continue to be important in Critical Discourse Analysis and the ‘new’ social theory-based literacy studies. An important South African theorist in this regard is Hilary Janks, who edited the Critical Language Awareness series. The 1980s were a period of activism and resistance among some teachers at the time, and critical analysis of apartheid rhetoric and documents and also the social context was done. Analysis by

32  Liesel Hibbert and Anne Knott Jeanne Prinsloo and Hilary Janks of 1970s’ Natal language examination papers is an example: English language papers encouraged (limited) self-expression with reference to the British canon, Afrikaans papers emphasised morphology, syntax and rules and Zulu papers were based on the Afrikaans cues – with an emphasis on African languages as ‘different’ and relating to their special and separate cultural ways. Well-recognised social theorists such as Foucault, Gramsci and Althusser, were very influential in steering language acquisition theory towards social critical theory. and their work can be referred to as the critical/social turn in language acquisition studies. What was exactly their impact? The important point is that power relations (of class, race, ethnicity, gender, etc.) are embedded in language; language is not independent of this context and the wider (situational and institutional) discourse. The trend shifted the base of perspectives on linguistic research from languages as whole-bounded systems with an emphasis on correctness to social and cultural theory-based discourse theory. This was a significant move away from the hegemonic understanding of English as we used to know it. In South Africa in the 1980s apartheid education continued but there were moves in language teaching (especially in English, towards analysis of real-life texts such as advertisements, cartoons and newspaper articles in teaching. Thus, the British literary canon-based way of English teaching all over the world was somewhat disrupted by an ever-growing mass of additional current, popular genres. In South Africa, the move away from the hegemonic understanding of English occurred in the 1980s and became known in activist circles as People’s English, as part of People’s Education. The idea was to conscientise masses of oppressed learners as to how and why they were being undermined and dumbed down in the apartheid education system. The trend became visible through introductions of ‘real’ texts in education and self-generated materials, mainly based on media text and the analysis of advertisements, which was then incorporated into the matric/ school leaving exam question papers. Students were encouraged to write English as they wished. The 1990s saw an upswing of the study of intercultural communication due to the increase of global migration. This was accompanied by a focus on political and economic dimensions of language in actual situations i.e. the dialectics between text, audience, speakers (Gumperz 1982), Discourse Theory and studies of register, tone, tenor, mode and stylistics and pragmatics. What followed was an emphasis on discourse theory. Bakhtin is one relevant theorist here. This conception of heteroglossia – many ‘speech-ed-ness’ – articulated an understanding of a continuum of variation of English within one national standard, or South African English and African English. Derrida’s ‘Of Grammatology’ (2016) was translated into English by Spivak (1976) and in it he proposed the notion of ‘deconstruction’ – a close reading of written language that shows that it is based on ultimately irreconcilable foundations. This influenced the movement away from an emphasis on reading and writing as the only significant language competencies and a move away from traditional destinations between orality and literacy – oral

Assessing student writing  33 versus literate culture. What follows are various other approaches and ‘methodologies’ that continue to influence us in the 21st century. The post-1915 era The late ’90s were dominated by The New Literacy Studies. Street (1993:12) distinguishes between literacy events, literacy practices and communicative practices. Street uses Heath’s definition of literacy events which is ‘any occasion in which a piece of writing is integral to the nature of participants’ interactions and their interpretive processes’ (Heath 1983 in Street 1993). According to this definition, a student text is one literacy event among many conversations, actions, gestures etc., mediated and unmediated. Street explains that literacy practices ‘incorporate not only “literacy events” as empirical occasions to which literacy is integral, but also “folk models” of those events and the ideological preconceptions that underpin them’ (Street 1993:13). This means that literacy events are to be viewed within a broader framework of literacy practices which are based on literacy conventions to which ‘communities’ subscribe and conventions used to analyse these. Multiple discourses are at play in literacy events, for example when a writer writes, which means that discourse analysis is not only concerned with microcontexts or the effects of words in sentences or conversations but also with macrocontexts. I define macro-contexts as the values, beliefs and, attitudes of the different discourses individuals control at different times which are constantly in motion. In the same way as when a writer writes, when the reader reads, a multitude of discourses a reader juggles are thrust into tension by the specificity of the context in which the reading occurs. Porous discourse boundaries are crossed, broken, patched and amended by what is read and written. In reading and evaluating student texts, tensions are located in the interactions between: - the student’s literacies and the student’s discourses, the lecturer’s literacies and discourses and both these two acting on one another. - the student’s primary and secondary discourses, the lecturer’s primary and secondary discourses and the two acting on one another. In drawing on the multiple discourses students bring into the tertiary experience, one facilitates the student’s reflection on ‘new’ discourses, in terms of the value systems and norms of their primary discourses: ‘Liberation (power) resides in acquiring at least one or more Discourses in terms of which our own primary Discourse can be analysed and critiqued’ (Gee 1989:10). To me, this demonstrated the centrality of primary discourses with which student identity is tied up, in the acquisition of secondary discourses. ‘Discourses derive from a multiplicity of non-discursive practices’ (Pennycook 1994:130). If we subscribe to this notion of discourse, then we are subscribing to discourse-based notions of knowledge. This would imply knowledges which are negotiable within the realms of bounded yet open-ended discourses. The

34  Liesel Hibbert and Anne Knott questions were thus: What are the implications of this boundedness yet openendedness for us as academic literacy mediators and those who are being mediated to by us through our feedback? What are the implications in terms of general oral class feedback, individual feedback in consultations, written comments and marks? What are the skills we are mediating to students? What do our interventional practices mediate? Are they a way of enhancing metalinguistic awareness? Are they a way of enhancing reflective practices in students? Are they a way of enhancing awareness of intertextuality at play in own and other texts, mainly aimed at the increased ability to decode academic reading? Discussion of our train of thought while assessing a writing sample from 1995 The new first-year students in the academic literacy course were asked to write an essay on the topic ‘Should abortion be legalized?’ For a number of sessions, different groups of four students each were asked to debate this among themselves, following the structured group work discussion method as outlined in Chapter 7. This process was followed by a full class feedback and discussion session with around 100 students. In the essay which followed, students were asked to weigh up the pros and cons of abortion and come to some conclusions as to what degree they agree or not. They were given a few newspaper articles to think about as resources which demonstrated different possible stances on the topic. They were invited to quote from the examples or to refer to ‘hear-say’ examples of their own, which they had heard about or experienced. The instruction sheet clearly explained the criteria for argumentation which the markers would be looking for during assessment. For us, the markers, it was important to see the simplistic school-based ‘for or against’ arguments to be broken down and analysed more in depth, as demonstrated in the class discussions. We had also introduced the preferred sequencing of written argument, by showing them the possibility of logical writing through first making a statement, explaining it, giving examples and then interpreting it according to the degree with which they agreed or disagreed with various perspectives. If they were ready to use formal quotations, referencing was encouraged, but not required this time. The questions which we were struggling with, were: - How is ‘situatedness’ of discourse/s at play here? - What genre and discourse boundaries am I and the student aware of/not aware of when interacting by means of this assignment? - With what general assumptions and expectations of the text and of the writer am I approaching this text? - What discourses are being used/practiced/applied/chosen/appropriated by the student in this instance? How are they evaluated by me, and why in that way? The essay analysed was written by Portia Geswind, who essentially argued against abortion, but felt she had to include the points that came up in class. Finally, she

Assessing student writing  35 could not reconcile herself with the pro-abortion point of view and tried to indicate that it is a very tricky issue to make that choice. She was not able to take any clear stance in the essay due to her strict, received religious views from her upbringing. Unfortunately, a copy of the essay is no longer available, but we hope to demonstrate how perplexed she was, trying to write the essay according to the set requirements. Primarily we looked at choices made by the student writer in terms of lexical items in relation to the argument and in relation to ideological positioning. Secondly, we tried to locate our own literacies which have a bearing on my evaluation and reflect on them. This student in question had some idea of the requirements of academic writing. The student in question was repeating her BA in 1995 but changed from Sociology/Anthropology to English 105 (called English for Educational Development). We assumed that she had decided to do the English 105 course because she had interpreted her failure to pass as failure in ‘English’. She was from the remote rural ‘coloured’ and poverty-stricken community in the town of Laingsburg in the Karoo and had done her secondary schooling in Afrikaans in Laingsburg and Worcester which means that she probably had never needed to speak English outside of her English lessons. In terms of organisations into paragraphs, the use of paragraph markers and the type of information selected for inclusion as well as the order in which it appears places was commendable. This evaluation sheet was designed by one of the lecturing staff on the EED course. Comments on the scripts, either in the margin or on the coversheet serve the purpose of indicating specific persistent weaknesses or strengths in that particular essay. During a class feedback session, general comments were made and only four students of the 60 queried their marks. Querying marks usually comes in the phrase ‘Where did I go WRONG?’ which again indicates that the students are engaged in consciously constructing lists of acceptable vs unacceptable practices in academic writing for different courses, lectures, disciplines and situations (as in exam vs assignment writing). The fact that only four students came with queries may have indicated that students responded well, and adhered to, procedures of assessment and feedback in cases when these are overtly explained and consistently implemented. The student also made attempts to contextualise locally/nationally by referring to popular South African publications, but also lends knowledge/power credibility to the text by stating up front that the format of reference is the ‘medical and juridical indications’ of abortion which she distinguishes from ‘social indications and my personal understanding’. The exercising of choice to group the four categories as she did, could have been influenced by the status of discourses as defined within this institution but also in the context of the country as a whole, for instance, the medical and legal professions as professions of elevated status. Faced with the need to make a conscious decision, the student has chosen to move between these four discourses. Furthermore, the students chose to remain objective and not choose one side or the other: We need to be very careful on both sides of the argument to remain sober and realistic.

36  Liesel Hibbert and Anne Knott ‘We’ is used rather than ‘I’, in referring to the public at large as well as students engaged in the discussions around abortion. The last sentence of the first paragraph, as does the above quotation, indicates that the student realises that argumentation is not necessarily directed at choosing for or against, which is one of the notions I have been trying to instil. It also links with her second last paragraph in which she gives her reasons for not being able to take sides on the issue: ‘this is a very tangled situation …’. The word situation is used as opposed to ‘issue’, probably of lack of awareness of the vocabulary options in this case. In some other instances, for example through the use of the word ‘paper’ and ‘essay’ interchangeably, the student indicates an awareness of the metalanguage/terminology of tertiary learning context, without having full control over them as yet. Audience awareness (link with metalanguage above, lecturer/reader as audience): This student has a way of drawing in audiences by addressing ‘People’ of the community at large. This may also be as a result of it being a moral issue, which means she is borrowing from the discourses of Biblical Studies (part of her secondary discourses repertoire) as well as her primary discourse repertoire related to her religious i.e. Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk, very conservative church upbringing. Her statement ‘…is to give proof ’ showed that the student realises that statements need to be accompanied by evidence. In the last paragraph, the attempt to supply evidence has been overused. The long quotation introduced by the following statement: ‘I will bring my paper to conclusion by a quotation from …’ was not adequately framed. No links were drawn between the quotation and the rest of the essay or the text from which it was extracted. This last paragraph needs to be taken ‘ownership of by the student’. This student’s disclaimer statement (second last paragraph) of not taking sides, shows that the student is grappling with subjectivity. At the top of page two (first three lines) the student has copied out text without quoting and then summarises the argument put forward in this bit of text in the two following sentences. The issue she raises is: Whose prerogative is it to choose? Whose point of view is validated in abortion procedures? We felt that the two sentences she used to raise these questions are valid. ‘Others think we need to consult the Bible’. This last statement could have been expanded on and framed with reference to the other authoritative bodies/powers she alludes to earlier in the text. The mention of the Bible in isolation, as is done here, indicates, semiotically speaking, that to her mind it stands as an unchallenged authority and should not be categorized among the other secular ones she mentions, for example, legal and medical. Her veiled feminist sentiments also come to the fore in the laying of the issues in these terms and become less veiled in the second last paragraph where she urges ‘everyone to remain sober and realistic’. This plea might be a direct response to the preceding heated class debates on the

Assessing student writing  37 issue of this nature and the student’s attempt to grapple with a gut feeling which is in conflict with the discourses of her primary socialisation, namely ‘coloured’, conservative, rural, NG church upbringing. But this is of course our own reading of the student, which is an attempt on our part to cast our minds beyond the text on the actual page and try to imagine what went on in the mind of the student at the time of writing. By doing this we tried to be aware of another dimension of reading, which is the social constructedness of the reader. The conventions of essay writing and argumentation as mediated by the specific course framework in English 105, were successfully negotiated by her. She demonstrated an awareness of referencing systems and awareness of the purpose of those systems. She had attempted to integrate references with her own ideas to some degree, in comparison to many students who seem to have developed a habit of recording what they have read in terms of the question asked and then patchworking, what they call their ‘own opinion’, into a concluding paragraph. In terms of the logic of the essay, the whole argument contradicts the opening statement. We put this down to the student’s own dilemma with the issue, which also became evident in her comments in class. She stood severely challenged by the class on this issue. We are not sure whether she handed in the essay after or before she presented her argument as part of a panel discussion on abortion. If she had rewritten the essay after the debate, she might have reformulated and refined the argument. The essay demonstrates clearly that Portia, the student, was wedged in the tension between a variety of contradictory discourses, particularly the four mentioned above, which shows that she was engaged in critical thinking. Student text then is a domain of the particular, referring to a particular student, writing in a particular situatedness while drawing on particular uses of the discourse possibilities in a framework of the literacy practices the students have accessed and appropriated to some degree, and those the students have chosen to put to use in this particular essay on this particular topic. Implications This example illustrates how we tried to assess the degree to which the student measured up to critical, reflective and sustained argumentative writing. Often the ‘insider’ of a discourse (lecturer for instance), has ‘tacit knowledge’ of the ways in which the discourse works. This remains largely unarticulated ( Jacobs 2005). Often lecturers find it difficult to describe how a particular piece of writing ‘lacked structure’ (Lee & Street 1998), for instance. Students are often not given explicit instruction on how the writing of the discipline works, due to their own automated covert processes of thinking and writing. Students are often asked to voice opinions on issues which they are culturally and affectively totally alienated from. In this particular case, the student, due to her entrenched, so far unchallenged fundamental beliefs regarding abortion, could not bring herself to accept that there may be good reasons for abortion, as for instance in the case of rape.

38  Liesel Hibbert and Anne Knott Portia had travelled some distance down a pathway of learning to analyse arguments and weigh up different points of view but was not yet quite able to grapple head-on with evidence which does not fit into her previously held belief systems. We felt that our mediation skills still had some serious gaps. This prompted the question: Who are the role players responsible for student writing development, and for instilling confidence in the acquisition of a variety of creatively applied discourses? Besides lecturers at the interface with students, we came up with some ideas for language development structures across disciplines, as outlined in the next section. Recommendations We believe that lecturers and students need to have fairly similar understandings of what is meant by intensive and extensive writing. They also have to agree on the definitions of ‘critical’, ‘reflective’ and ‘sustained argumentative’ writing. In the COVID-19 environment, online assessment of written work comes in a variety of different formats, but, in the event that lengthy essays may be required, an overtly negotiated definition of, for instance, ‘lack of sufficient evidence provided’ can actually be addressed in practice, which seems to be a global challenge within student writing. Often the ‘insider’ of academic discourse generation, namely the lecturer, has ‘tacit knowledge’ of the ways in which the discourse works. This often remains unarticulated by facilitators. In many instances, lecturers cannot describe how a particular piece of writing ‘lacked structure’, only, that it did lack structure. Students are often asked to voice opinions on issues which they are culturally and affectively totally alienated from. In the next section, it is argued that the overt teaching of intensive and extensive writing practices contributes positively to fostering inclusivity and feelings of belonging in new students. Intensive writing practices have grown in a new culture of thinking of the ways in which we learn and the way in which texts are situated. There has been a move away from conceiving of learning as ‘knowledge acquisition’, as if it were given, like an object from teacher to student towards ‘a participatory metaphor which recognises the active role the student needs to play in learning (Sfard 1998). Student writing performance is enhanced if the academic writing practices expected by the lecturers are made explicit. Essay layout, referencing and the conceptual framework within which the student is expected to understand new ways of thinking need to be discussed in advance. In the early millennium in South Africa, a shift towards understanding texts as being situated within mobile discourses and mobile cultural matrixes and across cultures took place (see Hibbert 2011 for details). Although academic texts are often meant to be rational and to convey information clearly, they are always to be viewed as embedded in the context of the discipline. It follows, therefore, that literacy, which refers to not only the ability to read but also to understand discourse. It is not just about decoding a text but about mastering a ‘set of social practices’ (Archer 2010). Literacy practices, therefore, came to be viewed as shared by a specific community.

Assessing student writing  39

Figure 3.1 An outline of the responsibilities of the different actors.

Extensive writing refers to sustained writing, which includes definitions, elaboration, circumscription, the provision of examples for arguments presented and critical reflection on those arguments. The term ‘intensive writing practices’ refers to student writing performance which is enhanced if the academic writing practices expected by the lecturers are made explicit. Essay layout, referencing and the conceptual framework within which the student is expected to understand new ways of thinking need to be discussed upfront. Providing an adequate framework for the academic writing process in English to yield success, requires three loci of responsibility, namely institutional, language development practitioner and content subject/disciplinary lecturer responsibility. Providing a transparent framework for academic writing entails three-way responsibility, as illustrated in Figure 3.1 below illustrates this model as designed by Knott (2011). The structural responsibility of the institution The institution’s responsibility is to provide disciplinary-based language development structures. The institution’s responsibility towards lecturers, literacy mediators and students, is often not spelt out clearly enough, and not documented as formal policy, which is why there is, in most cases, a lack of accountability. What is provided often is an inspection structure which is applied every few years. Lecturers have to display their work, but not much follow-up is in place. Institutions would do well in providing a triangular structure for ongoing conversations to line up institutional provision, lecturer attitude and practices, and student needs. These conversations could ideally be interactive, cross-disciplinary as well as discipline-specific. The language and literacy mediator’s responsibility The language practitioner’s responsibility is to integrate explicit teaching and learning of different literacies and genres of writing into lecturing and supervisory practices in and across disciplines. Facilitators need to work in a sustained,

40  Liesel Hibbert and Anne Knott interactive and systematic way to provide formative guidance through conversation, listening to students and through interpretive negotiations with subjectspecific lecturers. The language lecturer’s task is therefore, to make explicit: • • • •

Tacit knowledge of literacy practices in the discipline Design clear written task instructions Create rubrics which match the instructions Instil democratic classroom values, i.e. equity through creating a ‘give and take’ ethos in the process of formation of ‘transdisciplinary collectives’ • How teamwork is to be structured Furthermore, opportunities for peer- and self-reading and assessment and reflective writing are to be provided. It needs to be ensured that assessment practices are valid, reliable (consistent) and fair (‘outsiders’, who know very little about assessment and are not disciplinary specialists, often assume full responsibility for formative feedback and even summative assessment). The disciplinary-specific lecturer’s responsibility The lecturer’s responsibility is to implement a facilitatory pedagogy which is multimodal and socially situated with interactive classroom practices. However, even if this is in place, there cannot be much institutional transformation towards a more Africa-centric curriculum and student-diverse needs, if the institution does not take on decolonisation per se as a major stumbling block. Fatyela (2022:30) says about South African historically white universities: ‘while quick to dub themselves African universities, they remain guardians of white supremacist and Eurocentric traditions, views and values. The institutional cultures and curriculum detach black students and academics from their languages, cultures, communities and lived experiences’. Despite this lack of political and social will in the macro-context and South African society at large, facilitators at the interface with students are continuing to make a difference, by refining and shifting their roles and adapting to change as required. The disciplinary-specific lecturer’s responsibility toward language and literacy educators would be to formalise joint planning in relation to timelines and task division. Team teaching needs to be carefully structured, rather than random and voluntary and sporadic. This would ensure that assessment tasks, rubrics and pre-writing guidelines are streamlined. To ensure students’ full understanding of tasks, samples of a variety of well-accomplished written tasks in different genres should be provided well in advance. A checklist for what needs to be made explicit is: • Academic principles (e.g. consistency) and conventions (e.g. referencing) • How word processing programmes can support writing (e.g. thesaurus) • How to identify, track, evaluate and explain academic arguments

Assessing student writing  41 • The differences between describing, defining, narrating, reporting, persuading, identifying and solving problems, explaining, interpreting, evaluating and critiquing • The metalanguage of academic discourse e.g. ‘plagiarism’, ‘audience’, ‘genre’, ‘context’, ‘coherence’, ‘revising, ‘editing’, ‘argument’, ‘thesis’, ‘claims’, ‘concept’, ‘voice’, ‘analysis’, ‘synthesis’, ‘synopsis’ • Monitoring of reading logs and portfolios (including expressive creative writing and hybrid texts) • Monitoring whether students participated on Moodle and act on formative and interim responses Furthermore, opportunities for peer- and self-reading and assessment and reflective writing should be provided. It needs to be ensured that assessment practices are valid, reliable (consistent) and fair. Language practitioners, and relative ‘outsiders’ such as small group tutors, who know very little about assessment and are not disciplinary specialists, often have assumed full responsibility for formative feedback and even summative assessment. The student’s responsibility The student’s responsibility in working towards pass requirements is to submit a full, reader-friendly draft long before the due date, for example, cover/title page, table of contents, introduction, body conclusion, citations and full references. The student needs to specify in good time what type of help is required from the respondent. The student needs to respond to task instructions, specific learning outcomes and assessment criteria. Finally, the spelling and grammar check needs to be used. Also, it is advised to read the draft out loud as a form of self-editing as well as use grammar instructions on the internet (e.g. to check punctuation). A thesaurus should be used to build vocabulary and enhance the style of the writing. Check broad guidelines again and make sure you have stated the purpose of the narrative, given an outline of the context, presented a logical argument and supporting evidence coherently. It is advisable to maintain a reading and writing log and portfolio of a range of written genres, hybrid genres as well as creative writing. Additionally, the students should participate online and in and out of class, for example, evaluate drafts of peers and own writing based on rubrics. They should form study groups of ideally four students to meet each week to workshop their own writing jointly. Conclusion Finally, we would like to emphasise the importance of motivation and critical engagement of all stakeholders, in order to succeed with a rigorous framework for writing practices in higher education. The majority of our students, even in 2022, still arrive at institutions not knowing what it means to express informed

42  Liesel Hibbert and Anne Knott opinions or to critically analyse what they read in terms of the lecturer’s criteria. These techniques form the basis for writing success stories and need to be precursors to all writing assignments. The fundamental job of educators is to provide access to extended discourse maps, ones that reflect the workings of discourses throughout society and which facilitate enhanced understandings of the base disciplinary concepts. As in the teaching of Critical Language Awareness (in Chapter 8) and the learning process suggested for emerging art practitioners (in Chapter 9), joint responsibility and teamwork of all participants, including the facilitator, are crucial to the success rate of the processes under discussion. The next chapter elaborates on this and provides further theories and examples of practices which enhance the teaching of English as a medium of instruction and points out the complexities of this task. This investigation showed us as facilitators that we were not providing adequate access to the know-how and metalanguage of writing practices suited to the academe at the time. In addition, we did not have a clear understanding of our students’ diverse social and school-based discourses to know how to lead them towards writing success. This investigation prompted the research project in which students were asked to write their own linguistic autobiographies. The highlights of their cognitive and affective experiences in migrating into higher education appear in Chapter 5. Both projects proved to be very enlightening for us as writing mediators. References Archer, A. (2010). Challenges and potentials for writing centres in South African tertiary institutions. South African Journal of Higher Education, 24(4), 495–510. Bakhtin, M. M.,1981. The dialogic imagination: Four essays by MM Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press. Cameron, D. (2014). Gender and language ideologies. In The handbook of language, gender and sexuality (pp. 279–296). Wiley Online Library. Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M. (1993). The power of literacy and the literacy of power. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Powers of literacy: A genre approach to teaching writing (pp. 63–89). University of Pittsburgh Press. Derrida, J. (2016). Of grammatology. Jhu Press. Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. Routledge Fatyela, A. (2022) African universities for African solutions. Mail & Guardian, Education Section. Nov 18–24, p. 30. Gee, J. P. (1989). Literacy, discourse, and linguistics: Introduction. Journal of education, 171(1), 5–17. Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse strategies (1). Cambridge University Press. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge University Press. Hibbert, L. (2011). Language development in higher education. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 29(1), 31–42. Jacobs, C. (2005). On being an insider on the outside: New spaces for integrating academic literacies. Teaching In Higher Education, 10(4), 475–487.

Assessing student writing  43 Knott, A. (2011). Seminar presentation to Honours in Applied language Studies students on ‘Explicit and collaborative teaching and learning of literacies through language in and across disciplines on a comprehensive university campus’. Lee, M. R., & Street, B. (1998). Student writing in higher education: An academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education 23(2), 157–172. Pennycook, A. (1994). Inconsumable discourses? Applied Linguistics 15(2). Raskin, M. (Ed) (1981). JTOR (no other ref available) The Dialogic Imagination: Four essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors of learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher 27(2), 4–13. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Translator’s Preface. In L. Derrida, Of grammatology. Johns Hopkins University Press. Street, B. (1993). Cross-cultural approaches to literacy (23). Cambridge University Press. Wodak, R. (2014). Critical discourse analysis. In C. Leung & B. Street (Eds.), The Routledge companion to English studies (pp. 302–316). Routledge.

4 The complexity of curriculum design for English as a medium of instruction (EMI) Liesel Hibbert

Introduction This paper describes the evolution of the course Language of Learning and Teaching (LOLT) within a faculty of education in a higher education institution in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. The course is compulsory for all pre-service middle and high school teachers, and the aim of the course is to prepare students to use the medium of English across the curriculum. Over the years, the teaching of this subject has raised many questions for this practitioner, some related to language fluency and others to cultural and social capital. In the main, the education system in South Africa keeps students trapped in a rote-learning paradigm in which lecturers tend to collude to ensure good pass rates. Olivier (2017:13–14) describes the South African education system as the continual replication of an outdated, unethical pedagogical system of authoritative explication and explanation. This approach is in direct conflict with the approach of a teacher as a facilitator. Since 2015, students in South African higher education have been resisting colonialist curricula and pedagogies. A major current challenge in the system is the reluctance on the side of stakeholders to embrace zones of ‘discomfort’ and pressure to negotiate difference constructively. This results in the replication of the old apartheid system, diminishing student motivation and fuelling student resistance. It is difficult to deliver excellence in the context of inequality and the catastrophic recycling of a bad education system, and while institutions seem to continue to cling to blinkered and outdated approaches. The South African government’s objectives to redress the social injustices inherited from the previous regime’s segregationist Christian national education system and ideology are manifested in numerous economic policies based on the South African Constitution, as well as manifested in education policy, for example in the White Paper of 1996 (Department of Education), the South African Schools Act of 1996, and the Higher Education Act of 1997. The White Paper of 1996 is particularly pertinent for this paper. The White Paper directs the state and its institutions towards their social imperatives and goals through higher education (Badat 2010:4). Based on the direction of the White Paper, it was assumed that the state and its social institutions (universities, schools, and colleges) would contribute to the significant transformation DOI: 10.4324/9781003382645-4

The complexity of curriculum design for English  45 and development of all education, including higher education, and in turn, to society (Badat 2010:5). In its preamble, the Constitution of South Africa commits the state and its institutions to assert the values of human dignity, equality, the advancement of human rights, freedom, nonsexism, and nonracialism (RSA 1996:9). Educational institutions are generally regarded as the cornerstone of a democratic society, and the Constitution recognises the importance of the role of these institutions in building a more robust and equal society; it states that all individuals are legally entitled to quality education irrespective of their race, religion, ethnicity, or culture. However, despite the enshrinement of these rights in the Constitution, and after more than 20 years of democracy, the majority of the population remain systemically marginalised in a system and state that continue to fail to deliver on these rights (Waghid & Oliver 2017). The Higher Education Act of 1997 (pp. 1–2) sets forth the government’s intentions for higher education. These are to: 1) redress past discrimination, and ensure representativity and equal access; 2) provide optimal opportunities for learning and for the cultivation of knowledge; 3) engender respect for, and encourage democracy, academic liberty, freedom of speech and expression, creativity, scholarship, and research; 4) pursue excellence, and promote the full realisation of the potential of every student and employee, as well as foster the tolerance of ideas and an appreciation of diversity; 5) respond to the needs of the population and of the communities served by the institutions; 6) contribute to the advancement of all forms of knowledge and scholarship, in keeping with international best practices of academic quality; and 7) ensure that higher education institutions enjoy freedom and autonomy in their relationship with the state within the context of public accountability and the national need for advanced skills and scientific knowledge. Le Grange (2016:1) suggests that despite the Act’s aspirations to positively transform higher education, impoverished university students are burdened in multiple ways: many are academically underprepared, lack finance, or find the culture of the university significantly foreign. Le Grange (2016) argues that South African universities, which are typically attached to neo-colonialism, may be regarded as, and experienced by many students, as foreign institutions within an African context. The disruptive effects of the 2015 ‘fees must fall’ student movement in South Africa have focused more attention on the feelings of students and the state of higher education. In the same year, the #Rhodesmustfall campaign called for the decolonising of higher education in South Africa, and students (and many academics) raised specific demands regarding the implementation of a curriculum that critically centres on Africa and the subaltern (Waghid & Hibbert 2018:264). This would mean treating African discourses as a point of departure. The content, languages, and methodologies of education and learning would need to be addressed. Only where Western traditions are relevant to the African experience would they be included in education and learning (Rhodes Must Fall collective statement of demands, March 2015). Luckett (2016:418) argues that coloniality presupposes that cultural or structural change ends up mostly as reproduction

46  Liesel Hibbert if deliberate reflexivity is not engaged with by the institutional powers that be. Andreotti (2011) posits that modernity depends very much on coloniality for its existence. Mignolo (2000) calls for the use of border-thinking as an epistemic principle that aims to break the modernity and colonial imaginary. There is currently a discrepancy between national multilingualism policy and practice because English is typically the default LOLT. The national language policy for higher education states that African languages should be languages of learning alongside English. Instead, African languages (that were not officially used in the education system prior to 1994) are now largely used as a means of scaffolding, for example in tutorials orally and in unregulated social spaces on campus and are not used as LOLT. The study discussed here was situated at a university in the Western Cape Province. The province has three official languages, namely Xhosa, Afrikaans and English. Almost 50% of the population are Xhosa speaking. Staff at the university are predominantly Afrikaans speaking and from a pre-1994/pre-democratic era in which ‘coloured’ people (at that time, this referred to predominantly ‘brown’ Afrikaners) were educated separately. Few use English as a home language and speak a regional English lingua franca in the classroom. Currently, a larger number of Xhosa-speaking students are admitted than before, because of the large number of schools which exist in their areas of residence. The reason for this majority intake is the fact that more Xhosa-speaking teachers are needed in township schools, as these schools are in the majority. Consequently, Xhosaspeaking prospective students tend to be admitted with low entrance criteria, due to the demand for more teachers in the township areas. Currently, a compulsory generic academic literacy course provides support for students at the 1st-year level in areas such as information literacy and writing. A colleague and I once asked students what it felt like to be an African language speaker in an English medium institution. Contrary to the belief that inner-city and suburban students would feel comfortable learning and communicating in English, most indicated feeling extremely cut off from the learning process. I had mistakenly thought that the sense of alienation experienced by students was a thing of the past. However, the language factor is not the only variable. Black students from townships (primarily Xhosa/English speakers) feel socially and culturally excluded. At the time of the research, Black students were in the minority (around 25%) and were not treated as intellectual equals by their peers who are metropolitan and suburban coloured youth (English/Afrikaans or Afrikaans/English speakers). Since the advent of democratic policy within education, this division has only shifted marginally. An interesting, and corroborating, aside is that this university has a separate campus 120 km outside of the city, which uses Afrikaans as the LOLT and accommodates typically monolingual Afrikaans (‘white’ and ‘coloured’) students who live in surrounding rural areas and small towns. At the Faculty of Education at the target university, the LOLT course is a mandatory course for all education students in the 4-year Bachelor of Education degree and is carried through from the first to the fourth year. In 2018, there were two groups of approximately 80 students participating in the LOLT course. To teach

The complexity of curriculum design for English  47 students to work transculturally and translingually, group work projects were introduced. Group projects were also introduced to minimise marking. Because the course does not carry many credits towards a degree, it is largely facilitated by part-time staff. These staff do not have access to offices, photocopiers, and other institutional facilities and connections, and do not have computer access on a regular basis; they are therefore structurally and effectively marginalised. One full-time researcher/lecturer and one part-time lecturer manage the process, and there are two periods of one and a half hours each per week allocated to the course. Despite the efforts of the lecturers, it was found that 3rd-year students who had been studying the LOLT course for three years had not markedly improved in their reading and writing in English across the curriculum. For the students, this resulted in poor motivation and poor buy-in. From this it can be concluded that socio-political variables inadvertently impact on student performance. When I became the co-ordinator of the course in 2018, I decided to develop a more appropriate LOLT curriculum. Students often struggle with the notion of having to ‘research’ something. My belief is that all student research should be done collaboratively, and that students and lecturers need to work in partnership. When students face interaction challenges that arise in cross-cultural groups in a multilingual classroom, their input in conceptualising research and adding new insights for the research can help them develop self-confidence. In a project that used a similar strategy, Filipiak & Caraballo (2019:339) posited that narrative agency through cultural representation can have a socially healing outcome for students. Maistry (2020), in a recent South African-based study, emphasises the benefits of this type of project for social awareness education, in which the human subject is repositioned as critical, reciprocal, and in relation to the human other and non-human in the Anthropocene. According to Caetano (2015), discourse use, personal life histories, and immediate automatic action are no longer key markers of reflexivity. Instead, reflexivity can be seen as intercultural competence (socially and internally) that leads to social mobility. In the particular metrolingual context of this study, a strategically designed enquiryfocused learning pedagogy (Walsh 2020; Wells 2000; Healey & Jenkins 2009; Radcliffe 2020) serves as the over-arching frame. The novelty of this study lies in the fact that students gained enhanced awareness of how knowledge is created, perpetuated, questioned and negotiated. A second problem identified in the LOLT course was the use of an outdated textbook. The book was designed for Business English and predated an awareness of discourse and power relations as a grounding for any transformative syllabus. Since few students can afford to purchase books, the lack of a suitable English textbook provided the opportunity to design a process in which students could develop an understanding of critical issues in the existing curriculum, the often very thin content, and the often very poor quality of writing; through the process, existing negative features of the curriculum and entrenched pedagogical approaches could be addressed. In the process, students examined their own points of view from multiple perspectives. And to address the challenges, a research component was introduced that was specifically designed to break away from colonial

48  Liesel Hibbert approaches to language teaching. The theory underpinning this research component is described below. Theoretical orientations Achieving decoloniality (Andreotti 2011) in language teaching, according to Cushman (2016:239), refers to the process of ‘generating pluriversal understandings, values and practices’ by revealing ‘the ideologies established in modernity’s colonial matrix of power’. According to Pashby, da Costa and Sund (2020:46), this does not mean rejecting modernism, but seeing it for what it is, and situating it among other points of view; of particular importance is the need to challenge ‘naturalised dominant narratives’ (Pashby et al. 2020:49). A variety of joint discourses emerge through cross-cultural critical group work. The group work results in metalinguistic and meta-rhetorical dexterity (Cushman 2016:240) that translates into linguistic fluidity, and which students find empowering. The transliteracies pedagogy (Stornaiuolo, Smith & Phillips 2016) refers to a learning situation as a coming together of multiple discourses around a specific task. Learning communities are groups in which certain practices originate, are developed, perpetuated, and discarded, or adapted with the intention of moving forward. Performance and ‘progress’ should be measured by a cluster of variables, such as economic well-being, social well-being and a strong sense of agency and meaningful connection between individuals. Given that the context of this research is urban-based, and because students come from hugely diverse language, religious and cultural groups, the students were exposed to many metalinguistic processes related to translanguaging. This involved student exposure to processes such as conducting street interviews bilingually or multilingually, and the creation of bi-, tri- or multilingual glossaries, which was one of the requirements of the written research report. For students, this was a major change from the usual experience of producing a project report with an emphasis on correct formatting. Furthermore, a discursive space is created in the classroom as a learning space of enquiry which demands ‘cognitive presence’ and ‘epistemic engagement’ (Shea 2009:551–2). The intention is to create a strategic classroom organisation that may facilitate collaborative learning in the form of group work, while also removing the pressure that leads to one-upmanship. Staff and students are viewed as co-practitioners with dialectic styles of interaction between them. In this way, students learn to be practitioners and to confidently and competently negotiate meaning. Emphasis is placed on the importance of direct engagement with difference, particularly racist structures in the systems and fossilised racial thinking, and ‘structural marginalization’ (Pashby 2020:51). In this study, it was the Xhosaspeakers who were marginalised. They are in the minority in the classroom and come from township schools located on the sub-economic fringes of the city. An inclusive curriculum entails transformed views as well as attitudes to language teaching. Conventional conceptualisations of individual difference in the regular classroom need to be replaced with a broader, institutional ‘social’ or ‘interactive’ perspective relating to all aspects of identity. Deliberate and strategic

The complexity of curriculum design for English  49 cross-cultural groups are created to facilitate wider cross-pollination of ideas and to introduce more strenuous negotiations of meaning between students with different ways of thinking. The project design section describes the choice of authentic resources and guided group research process, which invite students to widen their intellectual, social and self-awareness trajectories. Lautenbach & Heyder (2019) provide an overview of studies regarding changing attitudes to inclusion in pre-service teacher education which are pertinent here; these studies can be seen in contrast to past curricula that were based on formulaic and static blueprints for information gathering. The group work negotiations of meaning in the pedagogy for English as LOLT provides the space and time for translingual networks of enquiry. The premise is that if lecturers and researchers model new ways of interpreting curricula, learning will be enhanced within classroom-generated agendas by taking up the power of interpretation and using unusual ‘out of the box’, i.e. defamiliarisation prompts and guidelines. Defamiliarisation (Shlovsky 1965) disrupts one’s regular mindset and attitudes by making one look at familiar issues from a variety of unfamiliar perspectives. Defamiliarisation is designed to encourage the learner to delink from familiar, dominant narratives, and in doing so, cultivate critical reflection on grand narratives and automated responses. ‘Delinking’ (Mignolo 2013:130) is designed to destabilise traditional curricular activities. For educators, this means providing safe spaces for students to have their voices heard within the walls of the university, albeit within a decolonised spectrum. It also requires delinking from previously held beliefs and perspectives. Questions related to social and linguistic empowerment constantly plagued me. Questions like: What should the content be? How should LOLT be taught in order to prepare students to teach through the medium of English across subject areas? What specific knowledge do students struggle to master/understand? What general knowledge of current issues in the South Africa context should all pre-service teachers be familiar with? How does one facilitate the development of linguistic fluidity for those students who have English in their language repertoire but are not necessarily fluent in it? How does one prompt students to produce ‘informed’ responses and opinions? How does one turn a deficit model around in terms of student confidence, agency and voice – a model that is based on the entrenched belief that students generally require remedial help? Finally, the question remains: How does one link models of critical interpretation to a social responsibility-based curriculum? From these questions, and based on the theoretical framework outlined above, an enquiry-based curriculum was designed. The following two main questions guided the study: • How does one best build conceptual and linguistic fluidity in English as LOLT among the pre-service educators in this specific context? • How does one best build inclusive networks of enquiry to enhance critical literacy among these specific pre-service educators?

50  Liesel Hibbert Curriculum design Creating pathways for subject-specific literacies to develop, entails creating knowledge pathways through exposing students to doing, organising, explaining and arguing (Meyer, Coyle, Halbach, Schuck & Ting 2015; 46), all of which are directly related to a language ecology. According to Li, Steffensen and Huang (2020:5) a distributed language perspective (DLP), indicates that knowledge is developed through languaging within an ecological context, which is linguistically and culturally diverse and fluid in this case deliberately framed by the aim of increasing educational and linguistic performance. The following activities were therefore strategically embedded, and are inscribed into the process outlined below, namely, a high degree of interaction, based on subject-specific discourses, group role rotation for maximum exposure of individuals to practice participation in different capacities, self-accessed information gathering, negotiated points of view and decision-making through consensus. The transformed curriculum is thus based on strengthening the connection between the conceptual continuum and the communication continuum (Meyer et al. 2015:50) to provide an enhanced pathway to meaning-making. The aim of the new curriculum was to prompt students to choose their own group research projects, which would relate to an important question in their two main teaching subjects. Again, an element of choice was introduced in terms of a focus sub-topic within a specific discipline in which they were majoring. The topic had to be curriculum compliant with specific subject areas, but not textbook-bound. It was important to me to provide practice for expressing creativity, collaborative negotiation of meanings, and border-thinking at each step. This design converged into a practical cyclical learning curve as illustrated in Figure 4.1 below. Implementation

This section briefly describes the implementation of the revised LOLT curriculum over 12 weeks. Step 1 Choice of research topic

The facilitator/researcher explained the process and introduced topic choices to the students. The choice of material was based on the following question: Could these materials raise enough interest and motivation to prompt the shaping of functioning, inclusive, communities of enquiry in the classroom? Topics were chosen from important current issues raised in the national media at the time. Each group of four students chose one of the Social Responsibility-framed research topics generated in collaboration with the facilitator from the list below. • Whose responsibility is the water crisis? • Is war avoidable?

The complexity of curriculum design for English  51

Figure 4.1 Cyclical learning curve.

• • • • • • • • • •

Should we care about migrants? Would the world be a peaceful place if we all spoke the same language? Is the pollution of the world’s oceans our issue? Is Cape Town a world-class city? Is there room for women in politics? Are good laws the foundation for a democratic country? Is the recycling of plastic making a difference? Is music really the food of the soul? Is sport actually just politics? Are the Kardashians setting a bad example?

52  Liesel Hibbert In some cases, students generated their own critical questions related to issues pertinent to their own lives, for example, attitudes to teenage pregnancy, or whether drug abuse can be curbed. These were negotiated with the facilitating lecturer. In some instances, student-generated topics had to be tweaked to fit the framework of the project more closely. For example, a group that wanted to discuss ‘Women in the workplace’ had to spend time formulating a specific focus e.g. Do women in the workplace feel exploited? Is it true that women work longer hours? Step 2 Choice of group

For the tasks described above, students were asked to group themselves in groups of four according to an overlapping specialisation subject they were currently studying. Students were prompted to choose group members across different racio-linguistic and cultural groups. The facilitator explained to students how an inclusive group should operate. Within each group, individual students took up a specific role, each one taking up a specific role, i.e. monitor (monitoring equal participation), scribe (recording the contributions to the discussion), timekeeper (keeping track that members have equal time to report back), or speaker (reporting a summary of the group discussion, and consensus reached regarding points of view). This ensured the participation of all members of the group with equivalent voice time. These roles had to be rotated at each meeting so that each person got a turn to learn how to fulfil the different functions within a group learning process. In the first four weeks, over a period of eight hours in total, lecturers introduced students to the basic theory of searching, analysing, synthesising, and presenting information and perspectives. There were no prescribed readings and material extracted directly from textbooks was not permitted, to deepen and expand the subject knowledge of students. This was achieved using prompts, samples of which are embedded in the steps outlined below. Groups formulated a proposal according to set guidelines, and evaluation procedures were explained. Step 3 Formulation of a question or proposition

Groups presented their proposals to the class for further input and ratification. In this task, groups learnt to defend their choices and to negotiate with the respondents. Groups were encouraged to use the de Bono Thinking Skills exercise, called PNI. The ‘P’ stands for listing all the positive aspects of a proposition. The ‘N’ stands for recording all the negative aspects in relation to the proposition. The ‘I’ stands for interesting, which is the heading under which all additional ideas, facts, and thoughts are recorded. This sequencing of mind-mapping responses helps student groups to consider their own, and previously ignored or skewed or differing, perspectives on any issue. For example, if the proposition is ‘The water crisis is everybody’s problem’ then, under ‘P’ the group would

The complexity of curriculum design for English  53 list agreements and reasons for this statement being valid. Under ‘N’ the group would list reasons why this may not be a valid proposition. Under ‘I’ the group might list facts, perspectives and any other opinions which may influence a decision regarding the general validity of the proposition. After that, they made final decisions regarding the wording of the proposal. Step 4 Presentation of the proposal

Guidelines were provided for presentation and proposal presentations were evaluated. Step 5 Design of questionnaire and conducting of interviews

You need to discuss what role questionnaires and interviews played in the research project. So far, I assumed that the research project did not involve empirical research. Groups designed and drafted a questionnaire in at least two languages based on the main questions and conducted interviews individually during the week. Guidance was provided for the design of the questionnaire. Step 6 Synthesis of findings

The formal research report was a collaborative product, combining each student’s contribution: literature review, the data collection experience and data analysis, and an introduction and conclusion. Guiding questions for data analysis were provided. The facilitator explained how the report should be coherently compiled. The instructions were introductory: Look at what other authors have said versus your questionnaire responses, i.e. what did others find out and how does this match with your results? For a critical view, compare the following: • • • • • • • • •

facts versus opinions similar findings versus different findings agreements versus conflicting findings compare and contrast different data sets, or different studies summarise the above and explain point out problems in the data reveal what went wrong and what this means state what you perceive the limitations of the data to be state to what degree you consider your results to be generalisable

Each student was responsible for one of the four elements, namely the literature review with references, the data collection process experiences of each student, data analysis recorded by each of the four students and the introduction and conclusion. The facilitator showed students how to design a research report,

54  Liesel Hibbert addressing a specific ‘real file’ audience. The following guiding questions helped students to draw conclusions and to formulate recommendations: • Your conclusion needs to be your group’s conclusions, directly related to your data and to the wider context. • Arguments, remarks, answer questions and issues raised in the introduction and in the beginning are revisited here. • Who are the researchers asking similar questions, or the researchers in your geographic area asking questions related to the target subjects? • How will you represent the data? (Tables? Graphs? Quantitatively or qualitatively?) • What are you hoping to conclude? Prove? Demonstrate? Describe? Argue? Dispute? • Feel free to change your topic, angle, title of the project in line with the argument you finally make. • Record what went wrong. • Outline the limitations and assumptions of the study. Step 7 Collaborative report writing

Groups collated the first draft full report together and formulated anticipated questions in preparation for the presentation session. The following guiding questions for writing reports were provided: • • • • • • •

Are the introduction and conclusion linked? Is the formatting and presentation consistent (i.e. font size, page numbers etc.)? Is the language appropriate and is the editing carefully done? Does the analysis and conclusion match up and present depth of insight? Have you used at least three sources of information? Does the questionnaire have four different types of questions at the very least? Does the questionnaire match the aims of the project?

Students checked the flow and logic of the full joint report, particularly the responses, findings, and results. Each student was allocated a section of 2–3 pages to finalise and write up. Groups designed eight overhead slides each. Group members decided jointly which student would present and which student would field particular questions. Step 8 Presentation of reports

Each group of four students then presented their report in the format of a PowerPoint presentation. In the penultimate step in this first round, students handed in the 10-page group project according to the guidelines provided. Allocated group members fielded questions from the class.

The complexity of curriculum design for English  55 Step 9 Revision of reports

Students from each group then met to incorporate new information that arose in the class discussion into their written report. Step 10 Writing reflective commentary

Students wrote individual 10–15-line reflections on the language learning process, which served as course feedback for students and preliminary data for the facilitator/researcher. The reflections were prompted by questions related to the two research questions. Groups collated their four reflective reports into one agreed-upon version. Guiding questions for feedback were, for instance: • How and to what extent did you benefit from conducting a collaborative research project? (Answers to these questions were found in transcribed follow-up focus group interviews, which were optional). • Are the presentations and written classroom materials which students produced through group work infused with multiple alternative perspectives on the topic and also provide evidence of reflexivity? • Do the materials produced by students deal with in-depth expanded knowledge in relation to the basic minimum requirements of traditional textbooks in the chosen discipline (e.g., Social Sciences, Natural Sciences)? • Do the materials prompt ethical action, social justice, and awareness of the importance of communities of enquiry, socially and in the classroom? The value of the research component to the students could only be assessed in retrospect, and on final reflection and course feedback. Step 11 Analysis of reflective feedback from students

Groups handed in their refined reports with reflections on the value of the language learning curve to them, as well as the benefits of collaborative research that they had experienced. The student groups’ reflective comments were handed in together with the project as an addendum. The lecturer/researcher could then use these to measure the impact, or perceived impact, on student commitment to literacy development across the curriculum and feelings of agency in this specific mediated learning process. Step 12 Overall feedback on their performance and reflective commentary

Groups received feedback and marks on content and presentation. A focus group reflective conversation with invited participant volunteers was recorded as data for the researcher. The groups who performed well and provided deep processing during reflections on their learning were invited to participate in these discussions. Thereafter, the researcher and the co-facilitating lecturer on this course wrote

56  Liesel Hibbert their own reflective reports on the whole process, which fitted in well with the collaborative nature of the experiment. This leg of the process also provided triangulation (lecturer’s dispositions and feelings also impact on student responses). The section below presents preliminary findings. It should be noted here that curricula complexity and evaluation thereof need to be sustained over long periods of time in order for significant shifts in student performance to be more scientifically monitored. This would only have been possible in a longitudinal study. Discussion The two main research questions were used to formulate a summary of this study’s conclusions. The research questions were: (1) How does one best build conceptual and linguistic fluency in English as LOLT and critical literacy in English among the pre-service educators in this specific context? (2) How does one best build inclusive networks of enquiry, and what benefits did the students experience in this study? The reflective written responses and group conversations were organised into clusters in relation to (1) the key findings regarding the successful shift towards enhanced language fluency and a critical literacy in English, and (2) the benefits of enquiry-based learning and inclusivity. This curriculum component provided linguistic growth and opportunities for social awareness. Translingual awareness and sensitivity to attitudes and innovations are crucial for understanding the concerns and motivations of aspirant teachers. Students started interacting in a common discourse around enquiry and experienced a deepening of their level of engagement with each other across language and cultural differences. It is hoped that positive aspects of the project will transfer from the students to the schools where they will be teaching in the future. Feedback from students has provided some insights into the reception of this curriculum and their readiness to engage with critical reflection within a decolonised spectrum. Most student groups agreed that multiple opportunities for improvement of linguistic fluency were offered, with oral presentation leading to peer critical assessment. One student remarked that: We learnt communication skills and found that it was unethical to ask someone’s age to publish in our report. We developed critical thinking skills through analysing and interpreting our results. Having to do the reports in groups raised awareness in our own personal lives, and we gained insight into the perspective of others. Conceptual development through reflexivity became the go-to method of engaging in academic and situational social challenges: We were able to evaluate our work and that of others and were able to make judgements about the value of information from their data. We presented our work to peers and received critique which boosted our confidence. This

The complexity of curriculum design for English  57 confidence motivated us to use our initiative to make decisions instead of waiting for the go-ahead to do the usual basic tasks. This student now recognised the value of learning how to research to produce ‘thick descriptions’ of an issue. The work had appealed to her intellectually and challenged her appropriately. A Natural Science lecturer colleague was asked to comment on any changes she had seen in student project work within her discipline. She reported that she had noticed that students had written about content and issues in their projects that were not found in textbooks, and that she had not taught them. She was pleased to report that the notion of researching a topic independently from formal input had transferred to her students and had enhanced their deep processing of knowledge and their critical writing. The benefits of enquiry-based learning and inclusivity

The collaborative group work helped to create more equitable access and thereby the creation of a ‘feel-good’ community of enquiry and the production of an evolving, mutually understood, meta-discourse on research. Students grew curious about varieties of discourses in English concerning their areas of specialisation. The following end-of-year reflection on the course (at the end of 2020) by one of the part-time lecturers attests to the mutual benefit of co-researching and collaboration between staff and students. What follows is an extract from a reflective letter from a staff member to his group of students: This group research project we did in LOLT was probably the most important part of the year’s work for me. This is where I could learn from you. You acknowledged the value of the teaching and the benefits of learning writing through reading. I worked 20 years at UNISA so felt trained to compose distance-learning tasks. I certainly enjoyed taking time to think up themes and find passages. I was there for the students all year and felt privileged and not a little humbled to read their responses. Best wishes for your futures. The country desperately needs teachers who can teach learners to think, question and argue for themselves. You will be able to do this, although you felt lost sometimes by having to figure things out by yourselves. One student group who researched, presented, and wrote a project related to the current water crisis in South Africa provided detailed feedback reflecting the feelings and experiences of those students who were highly motivated and had put significant time and effort into their joint project: Doing the actual research taught us a lot. We subscribed to divergent methods of researching. At times it got a bit challenging. Doing research was not new to us, but for some it was the first time extracting information from people for research purposes. Some of us had to learn to be more open-minded when

58  Liesel Hibbert dealing with people who did not share the same views as us. When questioning people, it also taught us to think more creatively so that we could get the most relevant information. Analysing data and choosing what data to use was one of the main skills we all learnt. The water crisis we are in right now is a big deal and therefore there are many different sources which have a lot to say about it, but choosing what information to use was a skill. Critical thinking was another skill we learnt. Although writing and compiling this assignment was a huge part of this teaching assignment, it is something that not all of our group members enjoy doing. However, everyone made an effort and tried to learn how to structure their work. Even though everyone had different ideas and there was a lot of content, we had to learn to find evidence to substantiate the points we were trying to get across. Conclusions Regarding English performance and critical enquiry across the curriculum, the achievements observed when reflecting on the renewal of the outdated and irrelevant curriculum show evidence of having developed student resilience in coping with English as a language of teaching and learning. With the built-in linguistic and cultural exposure and integrated literacy practices, i.e. the simultaneous application of listening, speaking, reading, and writing in English, alongside other languages mixed into a translingual lingua franca as base, the route to critical writing in English as the LOLT was found to be effective. With ongoing input, guidance, monitoring, feedback, and step-by-step marking from the course facilitators, the success of the process can be safeguarded. Using a design-based research method that reflects on outcomes and introduces refinements with each iteration of the delivery of the course, it should be possible to arrive at a more scientific and quantitative assessment of responses and analysis of action performance in student written work over time. With regard to the experience of inclusivity and how students benefit, the following achievements were noted: Collaboration helped to create more equitable access, a ‘feel-good’ community of enquiry, and an evolving, mutually understood, meta-discourse on research. One of the main variables to highlight in further studies could be determining the degree of change of attitudes within facilitators, the degree of commitment towards the theoretical framing of this kind of study, and the extent of the political will to see the process through with the students. Intense face-to-face negotiations of meaning and group decision-making, as well as meetings in general, may shift totally to online processes; the features of the curriculum and pedagogy, namely enquiry-based learning, cultural and linguistic inclusivity, and social justice-orientated topics of enquiry, as well as the group processes, are easily retained online. The number of steps in the collaborative group research process may differ, but each element should provide a learning opportunity for the development of a critical, inclusive orientation.

The complexity of curriculum design for English  59 Acknowledgements I wish to sincerely thank my two colleagues at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, John Foncha and Matthew Curr, for their willingness to collaborate and for their contribution to the success of this study. I would also like to acknowledge the National Research Foundation in South Africa for the Human and Social Development Grant 2018–2020 awarded to me. References Andreotti, V. D. O. (2011). (Towards) decoloniality and diversality in global citizenship education. Globalisation, Societies and Education (3–4), 381–397. Badat, S. (2010). The world-class university and the global South. World Social Science Report, 245–247. Caetano, A. (2015). Defining personal reflexivity: A critical reading of Archer’s approach. European Journal of Social Theory 18(1), 60–75. Cushman, E. (2016). Translingual and decolonial approaches to meaning making. College English 78(3), special issue: Translingual work in composition, January, 234–242. Filipiak, D., & Caraballo, L. (2019). Growing together: Literacy and agency in an early-college research collaborative. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, special issue: Sustaining multilingual literacies, 63(3), 337–341. Healey, M., & Jenkins, A. (2009). Developing undergraduate research and enquiry. York (UK): The Higher Education Academy. Hibbert, L. (2018). Critical language awareness – a decolonising tool for a unifying ecology in teacher education. South African Journal of Language Teaching 52(2), 78–98. Lautenbach, F., & Heyder, A. (2019). Changing attitudes to inclusion in pre-service teacher education: a systematic review. Educational Research 61(2), 231–253. Le Grange, L. (2016). Decolonising the university curriculum: Leading article. South African Journal of Higher Education 30(2), 1–12. Li, J., Steffensen, S. V., & Huang, G. (2020). Rethinking ecolinguistics from a distributed language perspective. Language Sciences 80, 1–12. Luckett, K. (2016). Curriculum contestation in a post-colonial context: A view from the South. Teaching in higher education 21(4), pp. 415–428. Maistry, S. (2020). Curriculum theorising in Africa as social justice project: Insights from decolonial theory. In K. G. Fomunyam, & A. K. Khoza, (Eds.), Curriculum Theory, Curriculum Theorising and the Theorisor (pp. 133–147). Leiden: Brill. Meyer, O., Coyle, D. Halbach, A., Schuck, K., & Ting, T. (2015). A pluriliteracies approach to content and language integrated learning – mapping learner progression in knowledge construction and meaning-making. Language, Culture and Curriculum 28(1), 41–57. Mignolo, W. 2000. Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, Subaltern knowledges and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mignolo, W. (2011). The darker side of western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Durham: De Kell Press. Mignolo, W. (2013). Geopolitics of sensing and knowing: On (de)coloniality, border thinking, and epistemic disobedience. Confero 1(1), 129–150. Olivier, B. (2017). Bourdieu, Ranciere, inequality and education. Koers 1–15 https://doi. org/10.19108/Koers .82.1.2315

60  Liesel Hibbert Pashby, K., da Costa, M., & Sund, L. (2020). Pluriversal possibilities for global education in northern Europe. Journal of Social Studies Education 19(4), 45–62. Radcliffe, S. A. (2020). On decoloniality and geographies. Postcolonial Studies 23(4), 584–588. Rhodes Must Fall (2015). Rhodes must fall statements. The Johannesburg Salon 9, 6–19. RSA (1996). National Constitutions of South Africa. RSA (1996). The South African Schools Act. RSA (1996). White Paper, Department of Education and Training. RSA (1997). Higher Education Act, No. 101 of 1997. Shea, P., & Bidjerano, T. (2009). Community of enquiry as a theoretical framework to foster ‘epistemological engagement’ and ‘cognitive presence’ in online education. Computers & Education 52(3), 543–553. Shlovskij, V. (1965). Art as technique (L. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis, Trans.). In L. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis (Eds.), Russian formalist criticism (pp. 3–24). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (original work published in 1917). Stornaiuolo, A., Smith, A. & Phillips, N. C. (2016). Developing a transliteracies framework for a connected world. Journal of Literacy Research, 49(10), 1–24. Waghid, Z. & Hibbert, L. (2018). Advancing border thinking through defamiliarisation in uncovering the darker side of coloniality and modernity in South African higher education. South African Journal of Higher Education 32(4), 263–283. Waghid, Z. & Oliver, H. (2017). Cultivating social entrepreneurial capacities in students through film: Implications for social entrepreneurship education. Educational Research for Social Change 6(2), 76–100. Walsh, C. E. (2020). Decolonial learnings, askings, and musings. Postcolonial Studies 23(4), 604–611. Wells, G. (2000). Dialogic enquiry in education: building on the legacy of Vygotsky. In C. D. Lee & P. Smagorinsky (Eds.), Vygotskian perspectives on literacy research (pp. 51–85). New York: Cambridge University Press.

5 Students’ self-narratives of linguistic migration Opportunities for relinking Liesel Hibbert and Thoko Batyi

Introduction This chapter provides an argument for using student linguistic autobiographies as tools for addressing coloniality in higher education. This argument was explored by addressing the following questions: (1) can student linguistic autobiographies contribute to pedagogy that leads to curriculum renewal for enhanced agency? and (2) does this represent as investment in the linguistic challenges of the academe? A selection of extracts from student essays is presented that reflect the positive and negative linguistic experiences of students’ personal linguistic autobiographies. The essays include self-evaluative comments regarding key events in the students’ translinguistic development. More specifically, students are provided with prompts to reflect on the extent to which their linguistic migration histories have been the result of chance, choice, or opportunity (Thomson et al. 2002). Data were collected by means of written essays, which were supported by prompts and activities described in the methodology section. Through the construction of retrospective perspectives on their personal linguistic autobiographies, the students’ sense of agency and their motivation for expanding their linguistic repertoires for educational purposes were impacted. Most importantly, they were afforded the opportunity to delink consciously from negative self-perceptions of their own linguistic challenges by being shown a pathway to focus on their personal and professional linguistic achievements tin the face of transcultural and translinguistic struggles. These ‘struggles’ provide the opportunity to reinterpret and reorder their experiences in a positive light, i.e. relinking (Suarez-Krabbe 2020) which refers to reconstitution of the self in the world. A key finding of this project was that the language histories and experiences of students of colour in South Africa are very diverse, therefore not one story only, as African stories are often lumped together and continue to be superimposed on people in Africa. Secondly, students gained confidence in their academic voices, which in turn impacted on their positive performance in English writing. Defamiliarisation as a research method of investigation turned the participating students towards a positive, empowered perspective of their own language histories. This aim was adequately achieved. We as facilitators learnt that the language DOI: 10.4324/9781003382645-5

62  Liesel Hibbert and Thoko Batyi histories and experiences of students in South Africa are so diverse, therefore discounting the ‘only one story’ theory, which continues to be superimposed. A diverse selection of student essays reflects the diversity of positive and negative linguistic experiences of students’ personal linguistic autobiographies with self-evaluative comments regarding key events in their language development experiences. At the hand of defamiliarisation processes, linguistic shift and identification theories, which they studied, students gained self-respect for their own linguistic achievements and lecturers learnt just how diverse student experiences are. Background The motivation for undertaking and reporting on this project was two-fold. Firstly, there is a perceived need for more Southern-generated data and methods, and research generated from the global South needs to be linked more closely to indigenous ways of communicating. Secondly, in South Africa, English as a language of learning is supposed to prepare students for future professional identities through communal and professional activities in the classroom across disciplines. Teaching facilitators are therefore challenged with the question of how to build a working, democratically functioning community in a super-diverse classroom. It is thus useful to gather information on how students process linguistic influences, peer networking, and belonging on campus, and, in retrospect, in their recent high school lives. South African schools are still using too much desk work and teacher talk, as well as rote learning, to the detriment of the development of critical skills, and inquiry and analysis. Teaching staff in higher education in South Africa are looking for information and strategies on how to address systemically enforced learner passivity and perpetually reinforced outdated pedagogy, which disempowers students. This disempowerment is exacerbated because the students study in a context where English is the default language of learning and teaching. In most cases, English is not their primary, and certainly not their only, language. It is therefore important to be explorative in narrative research methods. South African-generated views on collaboration with the subjects/students need to be reflected in order to elicit more locally generated theories of self-narratives and identity in educational contexts where English is the Language of Learning and Teaching (LOLT) and as a lingua franca. These views need to be more related to African oral traditions, positive self-representation, and empowerment discourses, and delinked from historical residual narratives of exclusion, such as those originating in coloniality. In this study, the task of generating self-narratives of linguistic migration was designed to present themselves as opportunities for decolonising identities, and for students to take responsibility for, and gain respect for, their own complex voices from theoretically informed positions. The aspect of coloniality that is addressed in this process is related to the support of student bilingual voicing, confident transculturality, and multi-voicing for educational purposes. Lee & Anderson (2009:204) refer to ‘sites of opportunities for the negotiation of linguistic and cultural potentials’. Ideally, instead of having to choose either their linguistic and cultural heritage maintenance or

Students’ self-narratives of linguistic migration  63 acculturating into academic mainstream discourses, languages and cultures (which would characterise them as ‘straddlers’) they become fully fledged ‘transculturals’ (Lee & Anderson 2009:197). The empowering aspect of constructing their own narrative linguistic histories, and reflecting on the journey is, beyond acquiring new language skills, that students are provided with ‘a new range of perceiving and displaying their own personality’ (Veltkamp et al. 2012:1), and learn that this is an ongoing, flexible process; new languages and discourses are added to their personal repertoire, as deemed useful and beneficial by the student, from time to time. The personal student language histories selected for analysis, reflection, and theorising highlight key events that, for the students, represent a turning point for ‘delinking’ from colonialised identities, i.e. from the unfortunate, dominant idea that English is all, and that the perfection of it in speech and writing indicates ‘being educated’ and having status. Students habitually characterised as predictably ‘at risk’ become included in conversations which directly affect their lives. A word of caution is needed, though. While ‘can do’ approaches to life may be a necessary condition for progressive personal change, these are unlikely to be sufficient in the face of structural constraints (Thomson et al. 2002:351). This is particularly the case in South Africa, where the racial, ethnic, gender, linguistic, and class divides are shrill and dominate social and public life. The project described in this paper project constitutes working strenuously against the current with students who have been thought of as ‘listeners’ and consumers of knowledge. These perceptions have arisen as a consequence of the difficulty teachers have in managing 50 or more learners in one high school classroom, as well as the historical ideological impacts of apartheid. The students who participated in this project are ‘born-frees’, that is, born after apartheid, after 1995, and yet heavily embedded historically in dominant apartheid discourses such as ‘I am a Xhosa’, ‘ I am a coloured’, ‘I am Afrikaans’, ‘In my culture we do xyz’, and ‘It is my culture to do xyz’. All of these discourses are devoid of sensitivity to intersectionality (Block & Corona 2016), which underlines the fact that ‘social categories are often overlapping and interdependent’ (Norton & de Costa 2018:94). In this project we sought to address the question of narrative constructions of linguistic identity in order to make overt the reality of transculturality as the norm in South Africa and to emphasise the normality of hybridisation. An additional aim was to foster in student writers an increased empathy towards difference through the acquisition of metalinguistic skills gained through engagement with theories of linguistic identity formation. Lastly, we realised that we had much to learn from the students in terms of their massively diverse experiences of English acquisition. These need to be taken into account in order to provide curricula which are relevant and challenging. Theories which inspired the principal author to launch this project are presented in the next section. Theoretical framework The discursive approach (Pavlenko & Lantoff 2000:171) used in this project ensures that the stories are ‘interaction-orientated productions, and thus as

64  Liesel Hibbert and Thoko Batyi evidence of the co-constructed nature of our life stories’. The writing of individual language histories by students moves them away from the desire to fit in and to produce what the lecturer wants to read/hear, and towards a process of identity under construction. Identity, as defined by Norton (2016:476) is ‘the way a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is structured across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the future’. Furthermore, the very act of writing constitutes an identification process (Pavlenko 2007:180) and moves identity, and the awareness of its complexity, to another level in terms of how they perceive and display their identities in writing. According to Veltkamp, Recio, Jacobs & Conrad (2012:502), for mature learners, learning a second language, particularly if it is a majority regional and national lingual franca, always provides the individual with a new range of perceiving and displaying his or her own personality. Enrichment of personal space is, apparently, highly desirable for those speakers of English who have primarily been African language speakers at home and at school. Xhosa, for instance, has low official status, is largely an oral lingua franca in the region of study, and has no significant representation at the institution of study. As a result of writing their narratives for the current project in English, significant events are reshaped, re-owned, and re-contextualised. This provides the student with empowering perceptions of some of the linguistic events which may previously have been experienced as disempowering, or as a life-changing trauma. What emerges is a taking on of voice and a positioning of themselves in terms of social voices in a way which provides choice. The writer can choose to use lexical borrowing, loan translations, or semantic and syntactic transfers, to reveal, or to conceal, the tensions of the bilingual condition (Pavlenko 2007:180). This conscious or unconscious manipulation of translingual and transcultural resources is a powerful form of discursive construction (Pavlenko 2007:181) and provides the students with the ability to reposition themselves, thereby leading to competency in English. The complex process of writing a linguistic-autobiographical self-narrative leads to what Zidjaly (2009:177) refers to as agency as an interactive achievement. A key argument in favour of linguistic ethnography (Norton & de Costa 2018:105) is that it ‘investigates the local and immediate actions of social actors from their own point of view and considers how these interactions are embedded in the wider contexts and structure’. The aim of critical ethnography (the finecombing of discourses, awareness of rejection, and internalisation of a variety of discourses) is enhanced equity and awareness of how inequity is a result of power struggles, and linguistic styles and languages vying for power in particular classbased and cross-economic communities of enquiry, such as in the academe: Education in its many forms, mirrors the society around it, including its patterns of privilege and marginalization. Personal histories of living through and being part of these patterns highlight for the readers [and writers, researchers own addition] the ways we are affected by and affecting institutionalized power and privilege. (Marx, S. Pennington and Chang, H. 2017, p.3). Because ‘stories

Students’ self-narratives of linguistic migration  65 relate to the larger sociocultural context, all authors provide social critique’. (ibid.) Autobiographical writing in English as a lingua franca in South Africa helps to decentre perspectives (Garcia 2016:5) and enhances self-knowledge and the capacity to embrace change (ibid. p. 20). Consequently, autobiographical writing helps organise past experiences as springboards for future action (ibid. p. 5) and also helps prompt individuals to explore social and political cause-and-effect sequences, and to question these sequences more overtly. Pavlenko & Lantoff (2000) explain how, for bilinguals, linguistic autobiographies constitute an opportunity for ‘reconstruction of selves’. Far from creating objective interpretations of key events in linguistic histories, ‘recent diary studies reflect the postmodern sensibility and highlight disadvantages experienced by women, immigrants, and refugees in access to linguistic resources and interactional opportunities, privileging the categories of gender, race, class and ethnicity in analysing learner’s experiences’ (Norton 2016). Norton and de Costa (2018:104) explain that there are three levels of narrative inquiry: (1) thematic (focusing on content); (2) structural analysis (focusing on how the inquiries are produced); and (3), focusing on the positionings adopted by the interlocutor. The analysis in this project encompasses all three levels, and emphasises the third level, as students write about having changed their thinking about themselves, a process of relinking as healing (Suarez-Krabbe 2020), which refers to moving towards seeing their linguistic exposures and developments as ‘feel good’ accomplishments. Methodology Sample linguistic-autobiographical narratives, submitted by students as 3rd-year essays in Applied Language Studies at a comprehensive university (a university that offers a wide spectrum of undergraduate programmes that are not necessarily aimed at leading to research specialisations or higher degrees) in 2015, were analysed to show how language challenges and breakthroughs experienced in a mediated writing process have shaped the translingual and transcultural identities of this sub-group of students. Additionally, the analysis aimed to reveal how students felt empowered, through their own reflection, on the achievements and challenges that they have overcome in the process of being exposed to a plethora of languages and discourses of English as a lingua franca in their various educational journeys. A selection of academic articles addressing theories of the politics of linguistic identity formation were discussed with students during the writing process to facilitate an informed interpretation of their own linguistic histories. The students were guided through a key reading by Le Page & Tabouret-Keller (2005), in the article ‘Acts of Identity’. This was the main reading prescribed to students and was chosen by them because of its lucidity and brevity, and because it highlights relevant theories on how people respond on an ‘adapt or die’ continuum in the

66  Liesel Hibbert and Thoko Batyi conscious identification process. A number of other prescribed readings were provided as part of the coursework and were also discussed in detail in class. These are visible in the extracts from student scripts discussed in the next section. Most of the additional readings and theories were not generated in South Africa. The application of these theories, however, enabled the students to correlate their South African experiences with the experiences of researchers and students in the global North. Plueddemann and Janks, two South African academics, have been addressing this field of research and the students in this study related well to their writings. The students participated in Applied Language Studies, where they were exposed to a module that was designed to address the understanding of language in society and in education, thereby linking their language studies to their own lives. They were asked to review theories about how multilinguals develop and adjust their own discourse to gain agency according to time, space, context, and situatedness. In summary, generating language development self-narratives combines theoretical understandings of multilingual development with selfnarrative and reflections, which is not an easy task. The lecturer/researcher/facilitator introduced step-by-step prompts for the process in order to shape the narratives with a critical, multi-perspective, reflexive stance. This was done by focusing students’ attention on critical moments. Critical moments, also termed ‘cornerstones’ or ‘critical incidents’ (Wijaya & Kuswandono 2018:108) or ‘turning points’ (Hall & Townsend 2017) impact hugely on one’s future life. Thomson et al. (2002) characterise the critical moments pin-pointed in linguistic narrative accounts as chance, choice, and opportunity created in the curriculum for identities in transition. Given prompts to examine them closely in the classroom, these critical moments constitute powerful opportunities for delinking from colonised identities and relinking with a perceivable decolonised self, thereby making crucial identity choices for a potentially empowered future. This process refers to a state of liminality, which borders on personal transition, rather than constituting a state of marginalisation (the default position students take up when under personal threat of linguistic labelling, linguicism, minoritisation, and marginalisation). Twenty-three 3rd-year students participated in the project. They were doing a module called ‘Language in Society’ as part of their major in Applied Language Studies. The ten narratives used in this discussion were selected for various reasons. Some were selected because of the high-interest value provided by their in-depth observations, and some were selected because of their richness in insight combined with accomplished, vivid story-writing techniques. However, the main reason for selection was the representation of well-sketched transformative experiences through reflection as well as evident reflexivity (Caetano 2015), which means that they displayed the capacity to change their views of their own experiences. They did this by delinking from pervasive, deficit and struggle narratives, with the help of relevant theory, to confidently establish more integrated hybrid, metrolinguistic identities. This was experienced by most of them as very affirming.

Students’ self-narratives of linguistic migration  67 A three-part analysis Sample student linguistic-autobiographical narratives show to what extent challenges and breakthroughs have shaped their super-diverse transcultural identities. Grammatical inconsistencies in the student scripts were corrected for the purposes of maximum clarity for the reader, who may not be accustomed to the forms of English lingua franca as used by this institutional, and geographically located student sub-group. Reference to the name of the university has been changed to ‘the university’. Representative sample illustrations of how students correlated theories with their own narratives were grouped into three loosely created clusters i.e. (A) linguistic identity migration, power and credibility; (B) linguistic identity and inclusivity; and (C) agency in the making. Cluster A – Linguistic identity migration, power and credibility In this first extract from a student essay titled From Xhosa to Xhosa/Afrikaans translanguaging in Grade 3, the student overtly describes migrating from being a Xhosa speaker to becoming a Xhosa/Afrikaans bilingual: The first school I attended was an isiXhosa medium school so it was not unfamiliar territory to me as my home language is isiXhosa. It was however slightly different moving from the purely conversational version of the language to the more regulated version. I was moving into the start of regulated space. Regulated spaces are what Sebba (2007) describes as language policies that emphasize control and prescription. I have vague memories of my first grade but I remember this once instance being punished for not knowing the Xhosa name for some animal. That was the first time I had an encounter with rules in language. It seemed to be an offense to not know. It had become apparent that I wasn’t as fluent in my home language as I thought I was. Even when I was told the correct word for that animal, my spelling was way off the mark. These regulations seemed to make me feel clueless. This was the beginning of my struggle with what I thought was natural ability. After my first grade I had to change schools to go to Caledon Preparatory School. This was the first time I was introduced to English – a new culture and way of speaking. I felt like a fly in a bowl of milk, because in my mind I had to come to this school equipped with some English skills. I was a migrant in this context and as Auer put it, I could no longer perform my acts of linguistic identity construction as based on my community ‘s shared knowledge. lsiXhosa had no part in this school, English was the language of instruction here. I now found myself having to discover new contextualization cues. Gumperz describes these as intonation, body language and code-switching. I unconsciously opted for intonation and body language. Whenever I spoke English my intonation would change to a higher pitch with a deliberate change of accent. My body language would change from that of a playful child to a more poised form with lots of hand gestures. All this was to enhance my credibility.

68  Liesel Hibbert and Thoko Batyi This might seem far-fetched but I accredit my receiving of first position in the grade at the year-end prize giving to these contextualization cues. In the third grade I had to migrate to a different context yet again. I went to another school that a dual-medium school with English and Afrikaans being the languages of instruction. Afrikaans was a whole new world for me. I don’t remember ever hearing the language before grade three. This was a struggle for me to cope with. This was mainly due to what Le Page and Tabouret-Keller refer to as constraints to coping to multilingualism that stem from differences of access rather than differences of capacity. The struggle went on for some time because the only time I would encounter Afrikaans was in school. Other than the Afrikaans I learned in school I noticed that there were a lot of what Pluddemann calls the heteroglossic ideology in which code-switching, codemixing and heteroglossic utterances were between isiXhosa and Afrikaans, mostly common in isiXhosa. For instance, some Xhosa people would say, ‘Ngomso ndizaku frurha’. The word ‘frurha’ is pronounced as ‘vroeg-a’ from the Afrikaans word which means ‘early’. What that Xhosa quote means is that, ‘I am going to wake up early tomorrow’. The narrative clearly shows that, through being exposed to linguistic theories of migration and the power dynamics of identity struggles and linguistic performance, the student gained insight into his/her own journey into creolisation and relinking. An extract from the second essay, My Language History, the student provides insights into his experiences of shifts in identity and belonging as related to linguistic migration: I grew up in an Afrikaans home, both of my parents and grandparents are Afrikaans…My earliest attempts at learning to speak a proper foreign language came on the age of six and a half before I went to primary school. My mother taught me how to count to ten in English in preparation for going to ‘the big school’ then on the age of seven I go to school were English was a second language. In Primary school was the first time I met different ‘groups’. If you want to be in the popular ‘group’ you must speak Afrikaans, so the code-switching of pre-school didn’t exist anymore. The ‘group’ can definitely be related to Hilary Janks theory of power. Everyone wants to have the power to belong somewhere. Children want the power to belong in a group. At the age of thirteen and a half it was time to go to high school and again I go to an Afrikaans-medium High school. My English was not so good, because I go to an Afrikaans medium school where English was a second language and the teachers there were not the best English teachers there was. In High school my English teacher’s greatest complement to me, was that I had a good accent. When I was sixteen going on seventeen English was no more fun for me. It seemed to me that the teacher was trying to make my life hell. She had a particular way of teaching a grammar point and then going around checking comprehension. At that it felt more like ‘torture’. To make

Students’ self-narratives of linguistic migration  69 things worse I discovered network language. My group and I started to use abbreviations for example: Abt- shorthand for about BTW- shorthand for by the way, DO- shorthand for the, F2F- shorthand for face to face LOL – it means laughing out loud PLZ- please and U – Short hand for you. At the age of eighteen and a half I had decided to go to this university. This was by far the most difficult decision of my life. To go to an Afrikaans medium school to an English university seems to be impossible at that time. My first year was very difficult and I had to learn extra hard, because everything was in English, but from my second year it started to become more normal. Now I am in my final year and 1choose CES as one of my majors to push myself harder in to learn English. I think this could be related to Peter Martin’s theory about getting education in another language. It is not so easy to learn and get educated if your mother tongue is not English… The high emotional content of these two paragraphs illustrates the distress which the student experienced in her schooling. The sense of how deeply this anxiety is felt was an eye-opener for us as well as for the student himself. The student probably just accepted his performance as poor, never knowing how to understand it properly. The third sample essay, An English and Afrikaans Bilingual Upbringing, addresses the price one has to pay for fitting in and the investments one makes for gaining recognition (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 2005). The student (often writing in the third person) summarises his essay in which the central identity formation issue is his Indian Hindu family background and culture in the home. The student states that: To summarise, over the past few years, Prash underwent some pivotal linguistic identity transformations. Ultimately accepting both his South African and his Indian heritage and is proud of both. He highlights two pivotal moments of identity transformation. The first one being on his return from India (his family’s ‘Indian Hindu heritage country’). The other major aspect of Prash’s identity is the South African aspect. His sense of national identity of being South African was reinforced on his trip to India: When I got back from my trip to India, I felt so proud to be a South African Indian. Not only has the religion and culture evolved from that of the South African Indian culture but also there are extreme differences in the behaviour and mannerisms of the Indians from India*. When I got back to South Africa I appreciated and embraced my South African culture and heritage even more. * Here Prash presumably means Indians living in India as opposed to Indians living in South Africa, here. This links to the Le Page and Tabouret-Keller theory about identity and how individuals themselves design their linguistic behaviour. This can be to either reflect the

70  Liesel Hibbert and Thoko Batyi behaviour of those they want to be associated with, or, as in this case, to differ from the behaviour of those they want to be dissociated from (the ‘Indians from India’). Prash discovered to his surprise that Indians in India are not the same as South African Indians (of which those residing in the Cape Province, are mostly speakers of both English and Afrikaans. As a result, on his return, he finds that he has developed a stronger South African feeling of affiliation, remaining proud of his heritage and embracing it anew. The second pivotal moment occurs when he relates his deliberate attempt to fit in by changing his activities in order to conform with his peers on campus: Moving forward in his academic career, Prash attended a very prestigious semiprivate model C school and as a result there were very few other Indian kids in his immediate environment. In an attempt to make new friends and integrate with the rest of his peers, as well as being inspired by his new found sense of national pride, he decided to start playing rugby, just to try to be part of a group. Here Prash discusses deliberate choices of activities at school, to fit in better. Students who are migrating to a new context i.e. campus, tend to try and conform with the existing status-related behaviours and activities. For instance, they start playing rugby, even if they would never have thought of doing this before. This is a process of identity integration, or transitional identity, versus a process of loss: leaving certain identity-marking activities behind, or discontinuing them, or perhaps relearning how they are acted out in the specific new context into which they are seeking credibility as recognized members. One observes how Prash decides not to discard any part of his identity, but makes the choice to embrace all aspects available to him which he values, and takes on new bits, like becoming a rugby player. Following Meierkord (2007), the term ‘migration’ can be used to refer to the migration of an individual from one group to another and not just global population migration. In this case, Prash was migrating to the rugby group. Referring to Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (2005), Prash explains how he creates linguistic patterns for himself that are similar to that of the group he wants to be identified with. He is thus influenced by his motivation to belong and be identified with the group. By speaking and behaving like them, he adopts the supposed rules of the group. Another theory that can relate to this story is Jorgensen’s concept of polylanguaging, which states that we use language intentionally to achieve our aims ( Jorgensen 2008). Additionally, we use features which the interlocutor does not know to act as a gatekeeper of the group. In summary, then, we observe that Prash, as a child from a privileged middleclass background, having enjoyed good schooling, and having travelled abroad, was able to take the transformations more or less in his stride. Many other students who have dealt with, and are still dealing with poverty issues, are, we assume, not able to deal with the issues as resiliently.

Students’ self-narratives of linguistic migration  71 Cluster B – Linguistic identity and inclusivity The fourth essay, My History of Multilingualism demonstrates the student’s understanding of the fact that there is a price to pay for fitting in. Essay 4 discusses the issue of loss of the home language, Xhosa. The student is not yet aware of new theories which do not view languages as separate whole systems but as constantly evolving entities. This is understandable in a context where ‘standardised’ English still continues to be required: At the age of six I was enrolled in a school with Afrikaans as the language of instruction- I knew a bit of Afrikaans but it seemed somewhat even less than basic. So, although I was acquainted with Afrikaans at the time it was not enough. Le Page et al. (2005:184) states that ‘the individual creates for himself the patterns of linguistic behavior so as the resemble those of the group or groups which from time to time he wishes to be identified …’ This statement was true for me on many occasions. I remember being shy to ask the teacher to go to the restroom because I was worried about whether I would say it right and also worried about being laughed at by the other children. I soon decided that I would use the restroom every morning before class and during lunch breaks so I wouldn’t have to suffer the dilemma of a pressing urge and an unwillingness to talk. I tried my best to blend in as much as possible. At this stage in my life I experienced serious trouble feeling like I belong as I was not yet a legitimate speaker of the Afrikaans language. I soon made friends and finally found out how to ask the teacher how to leave the class. This extract illustrates how the effort of trying to blend in linguistically and otherwise, creates physical discomfort, anxiety and feelings of alienation. ‘Total Linguistic Fact’ (TLF), is a concept coined by Silverstein, pioneered by Gumperz and currently researched by Peutrell & Cooke (2019). The central idea is that variables that impact on a human life and its language acquisition track, cannot be easily quantified. Linguistic form, cultural values and identities, perceptions and beliefs about the social world (i.e. ideology), all play a role. More recently, it has been affirmed in the literature on mindfulness, that affective well-being is a prerequisite for deep-processing of new information and ideas. My Afrikaans quickly developed and improved while I was simultaneously learning English as a first additional language. In this phase of improvement in Afrikaans, my knowledge of English was still basic. Block (2007:80) refers to legitimate speakers as ‘how they come to be accepted and fully functional members of different communities of practice’. On the basis of this statement it can be assumed that in order to become a member (legitimate speaker) of a certain group, any prospective members must become competent in the group’s language and gain the approval of group members. I remember making sure I do all my homework and extra reading in a pursuit to master Afrikaans and English. In grade three I was fully comfortable and satisfied with the progress

72  Liesel Hibbert and Thoko Batyi I had made- I finally felt like I belong. I finally felt like a legitimate speaker- on the same level with as my peers and mostly above average academically. Grade nine was the final year at the Afrikaans ‘primary’ school I attended, by then it seemed like I was competent in Afrikaans and English on an additional language level and in relation to my peers. The following year, at the age of fifteen, it was my first time at a high school. Not only did I find grade ten difficult, but I also has to deal with being taught in Afrikaans only half the time during classes. This new school had two languages of instruction- again I found myself at a place where I needed to fit in. The teachers taught in both Afrikaans and English, but did not repeat everything in both languages due to time constraints. I used to make notes in both languages and later on translate the English notes into Afrikaans. This kind of situation is the epitome of translanguaging. Pluddemann (2011:10) refers to translanguaging as ‘a bi/multilingual person’s use of their language repertoire to communicate and express themselves’. The more I got used to the new environment, the more I felt like I belong. A lot of it had to do with realising that everyone around me was at least bilingual and most probably facing similar challenges as I was. Throughout my three years of high school I always felt more comfortable using Afrikaans in both regulated and unregulated spaces, This comfort zone soon became compromised. After my final year in high school I worked at a restaurant for a year. Speaking in English most of the time was not a problem because I was already used to it as this was my school-holiday job. Ironically a few months down the line I felt like I was ‘losing’ my Afrikaans. I would even speak in English to Afrikaans speaking customers because I had lost confidence in how my Afrikaans sounded. In the mean while I was still not good at reading and writing in isiXhosa. After the year of working I enrolled in university. This was particularly difficult for me because the language of instruction was English. I remember thinking about and analysing my course work in Afrikaans before translating my thoughts about it into English. I did this for a few months before I actually processed everything automatically in English. I am currently in my third year of study and I feel confident in my English, weary of my Afrikaans as I hardly use it anymore, am confident only my verbal Xhosa. This script raises the question as to whether it is worth giving up one’s original language and sacrificing it for economic reasons, and what this means for ­life-long linguistic competence and social life, particularly with reference to outsider/insider groups, feelings of home and belonging, and affiliative and affective ­psychological touchstones. If, as has been often suggested, African languages were strategically turned into languages of economic value after 1994, no one would feel that one’s languages had been sacrificed for economic purposes. This means that colonisation by English has continued despite the 12 official languages policy implemented by the new government. That also means that while these students are regarded as ‘born frees’, meaning born after the apartheid era, they are not yet free from the bondage of colonialism or apartheid, until a process of de- and relinking has occurred.

Students’ self-narratives of linguistic migration  73 An extract from the fifth sample essay, The Language Triangle- Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa as Mother Tongues, deals with identity and inclusivity in terms of ‘fitting in’ and ‘being cool’ on campus. in an essay. The student demonstrates his understanding of translanguaging as a way of speaking and mixing language that is understood by all on campus. He understands that it is a strategic phenomenon and not the same as random mixing. In the social matrix on campus, it signals a feeling of belonging: A term which is popular among Afrikaans mother tongue speaking students is ‘salute ma se kind’. This is yet another slang term; hence it is used in informal speech and in unregulated spaces. Sebba (2007: 47) asserts that unregulated spaces are ‘places where prescription either has not yet reached, or where it holds no power’. In other words unregulated spaces are places where rules of language do not matter. Examples would be the university student canteen. Conversations with friends and posts on social networks. An interesting quality about ‘salute ma se kind’ is that it is a genderlect as it is more likely to be used by males rather than females. The first word in the phrase ‘salute’ is taken directly from English (or rather ‘borrowed’ in linguistic terms) – it maintains its meaning and shows above average respect for informal speech and addressing fellow students. This could be an identity marker or an indication of social rank in status. Addressing members of a group with ‘salute’ could outline qualities such as integrity and prestige as part of the group identity and this is what the group members will convey to non-members of the group, therefore it can be seen as an identity marker. The word ‘salute’ in an informal student discourse setting can also be indicative of rank in status within a group. In the extract above, the student indicates that the metalanguage of the Applied Language Studies course has benefited him He is able to use the term ‘identity marker’ correctly and has a deep understanding of power struggles related to language, by having to reflect on these. The following observation shows the student’s awareness of the fact that even close social circles have internal relations of domination. The second part of the term ‘ma se kind’ means ‘mom’s child’ when it is directly translated into English, but a more accurate definition in terms of semantics would be the popular English slang phrase ‘brother from another mother’. This part of the term is the epitome of creating a feeling of belonging. Referring to someone as a sibling means that they are regarded as family- one of the closest connection people can share. Afrikaans mother tongue speaker students who belong to subgroups that use the term ‘salute ma se kind’ therefore have a group identity of being like family and portray a lot of respect towards one another. In the sixth extract from an essay titled English as a Mother Tongue quite a few borrowed words emerged, indicating the interdependence among the languages he uses.

74  Liesel Hibbert and Thoko Batyi isiXhosa seems to be one of the most pervasive mother tongues among this university’s students, particularly in this campus. Again, however there seems to be a staggering amount of isiXhosa mother tongue student speakers that converse in English with one another. What are the possible causes of this? It might be in pursuit to fit in and belong to what they perceive as the norm at this university or perhaps in a specific subgroup at this university. It might also be due to a fear of marginalisation and stigmatisation (this could especially be true for students from rural areas who are new to the city and experiencing a culture shock), and it might be to attain the identity marker of coolness; and of course various other reasons might exist. Le Page et al. (201 0:184) states that ‘the individual creates for himself the patterns of his linguistics behavior so as to resemble those of the group or groups from which time to time he wishes to be identified …’. This simply means that individuals, in this case this at this university, might alter the way they communicate linguistically to belong to a group. For example a mother tongue speaker of isiXhosa who starts to only speak English to fit into an only English speaking group. lsiXhosa student discourses are very interesting and can usually be generalised to the general youth of isiXhosa speakers. Terms which are frequently used by interlocutors of isiXhosa student discourses at this university include ‘ek se’, ‘eita’, ‘moja [The speculation here is that the word originates from the Afrikaans word ‘mooi’ which means great/pretty or nice] or kanjani’ and ‘sho’. The first term, ‘ek se’, is slang and a genderlect because it is more likely to be used by males. It is, like many isiXhosa words, borrowed from its Afrikaans translation ‘ek se’ which in a direct translation into English means ‘I say’. As an isiXhosa slang term it has got nothing to do with its English and Afrikaans meaning. In the isiXhosa slang context ‘ek se’ is a greeting such as ‘hala’ or ‘awe’ but it is more confined to the meaning of greeting and as a term used to grab someone’s attention (like ‘hey!’), there seems to be no other exceptions of its use in different contexts. In its isiXhosa context this term can easily come across as blunt and a bit aggressive, hence it is less likely to be used by females and not very popular. In the paragraph above, the student uses the metalinguistic term ‘genderlect’, which shows that he is assimilating some of the coursework discourse from the readings provided and has become gender-conscious in observing speech. The second term, ‘eita’, [ from the original Khoi San word ‘heita’, but the student may not know this.] is a contraction from the Afrikaans phrase ‘hey daar’ of which the ‘hey’ is an English word commonly used by Afrikaans mother tongue speakers. The full term then means ‘hey there’ which is a more polite greeting, is not very popular at main campus, but is very widely used. This term seems to have been around for more than two decades as it features in one of the apartheid era’s toyi-toyi songs (i.e. anti-apartheid dances and songs sang at protest marches and mass gatherings during the previous political era). South Africa’s newest mobile network ‘8ta’ might have fuelled the popularity of this slang term. The third term ‘moja or kanjani’ seems to be a combination of an

Students’ self-narratives of linguistic migration  75 altered version of the English word ‘mojo’, the English conjunction ‘or’ and the isiXhosa word ‘kanjani’. In a linguistic sense ‘mojo’ refers to the casting of spells and magic, but is also commonly used to refer to talent, sex appeal and self-confidence . In its Xhosa version ‘moja’ it means that ‘I am fine’ or ‘I am well’. The second part of this term means ‘or how’ when it is directly translated to English. The ‘kanjani’ part means ‘how’ which would not make any sense to a person who does not understand Xhosa. It is simply amazing how student discourses, and broadly youth discourses, sometimes consist of words and phrases that are conjured up from different and unrelated words (even from different languages) to form a unified and coherent idea (mostly solely understood by legitimate speakers of that specific discourse or members of the particular subgroup). To some extent these slang words and phrases can be linked to an emergence of new languages. The final example of terms used by isiXhosa mother tongue student speakers is ‘sho’. This term is simply the slang isiXhosa version of the English word ‘sure’. It is sometimes used by its exact conventional English meaning (free from doubt) in isiXhosa, but more frequently used as ‘okay’ which is also common in its use in English. The term ‘sho’ is closely related to the isiXhosa slang term ‘shap’ which is directly translated from its English meaning ‘sharp’. In isiXhosa slang ‘shap’ can mean ‘okay’, ‘cool’ or ‘I am well’ (when used with the prefix ‘ndi’- it then becomes ‘ndishap’). Firstly, a clear problem of subtractive bilingualism is implied throughout the text above, through the emphasis on the fact that Xhosa speakers tend to speak to each other in English, despite having the same home-based/regional language. This is because they feel under social pressure to migrate to the language of high status, which is English. Xhosa speakers tend to translanguage in a specific way, that is, they usually do not finish a sentence in English only, whether they are at university or outside the classroom. Inside the classroom, they prefer to be silent as they are not allowed to use words or phrases from other languages. Secondly, the student has observed how Xhosa speakers on campus, particularly in the canteen, socially, converse mainly in English. The mixing he describes is one-sided code-mixing, starting a sentence in English and then switching to Xhosa halfway through. Finally, the student describes a much-documented phenomenon among African language speakers in English classrooms at all levels of education, namely the ‘culture of silence’, which refers to African language speakers not participating in class, due to feelings of not belonging and feeling that they are not able to express themselves in English in the preferred way. This is particularly the case where monolingual pedagogy is the norm (Maseko and Mkhize 2021:471). Cluster C – Agency in the making Extracts from the seventh sample essay titled Am I Becoming Someone Else?

This essay discusses negotiating power around identity and asks whether the student is indeed becoming someone else (as in the reading he was exposed to by

76  Liesel Hibbert and Thoko Batyi Pavlenko 2007). The student provides an account of being caught up in decisions in which he describes how it feels to tread a narrow path between who he was and who he finds himself becoming and the choices he is confronted with along the way: I grew up in rural areas at Maclear in Eastern Cape, near Umtata. I was raised by the fluent lsiXhosa speakers. I then grow up speaking lsiXhosa fluently. Janks (2009:55) refers to this process as the acquisition as ‘a process whereby we gain knowledge of a language and how to use it, without any explicit knowledge of its grammar in the same way as the infants acquire their home language’. My parents sent me to Primary school when I was six years old. In my Primary school there were only lsiXhosa educators, who then taught us with lsiXhosa everything. In my Primary school, we were only Xhosa’s and few Zulus. The presences of the lsiZulu speakers gave us an opportunity as the lsiXhosa speakers to learn lsiZulu. Zulu is the language that is very close to lsiXhosa, so it was very easy to understand their conversation. During lunch or break time we usually interact with our home languages, we tried to exchange some words that are in Xhosa to the Zulu speakers and explain to them what do they mean, and they would also do the same to us. At the age of twelve I went to high school…Firstly, I was still continuing with isiXhosa as the home language, English now was the Second Additional Language. We were taught all subjects which were written in English, in Xhosa. Our teachers translate everything which was written in English and simplify it by telling us in Xhosa so that we can understand better. Secondly, at this stage we were old enough to catch everything from outside. We listen and watch Television and understand something’s that can make a difference towards our studies. We were able to write the tests in English, because we were not allowed to write some English subjects in Xhosa. I liked to study even if sometime I do not understand all the theme of some books, and I think that had helped me very much with my studies. Janks (2009:55) mention the fact that ‘when we learn a language, it is in response to formal teaching, which gives us the explicit knowledge of the grammar, of the structuring rules’. In this point which Janks mention, as the English was the Second Additional Language, we were taught the basics, like Janks mentioned grammar and other structure rules. This had helped us when we are writing, at least because we were unable to speak English. Lastly, we started to use some English. The minimal presence of my Xhosa in this text serves to emphasise how it was never greatly advanced. Mesthrie et al. (2000:360) refers to the phenomenon’ in which the learning of a societally dominant language leads to a loss of skills (or even a complete loss) of the home language’ as subtractive bilingualism. I have done five beginners level isiXhosa modules to improve my reading and writing- it was quite helpful. I also have a good friend that is highly proficient in isiXhosa and teaches me a thing or two every now and again. Furthermore, multilingualism holds various challenges for its interlocutors. The two biggest challenges for me were becoming a legitimate speaker (which

Students’ self-narratives of linguistic migration  77 included a fear of marginalization and stigmatization) and learning in different languages. Looking back on my history of multilingualism it seems as if I had a convenient gap between primary school (being taught in Afrikaans) and university (being taught in English) of being taught in both Afrikaans and English at High School. This student relates his/her observations to translanguaging and his/her identity migration and adjustments that he/she made when entering this specific university. The extract demonstrates how this process usually requires students to maintain apartheid languages at the expense of decoloniality: This university attracts thousands of students and staff members the ‘diversity’ is one of its characteristics because people of different races, cultures and beliefs are all working in the same environment daily. Most of students use English to interact with others as it is the medium of instruction. It can be noticed that students tend to totally not use their home languages once they arrive at the institution. After some long time they realise that they are mother tongue speakers of the same home language that they have never used ever since they met each other. meaning that the environment plays a role in shaping student discourses as it can be found that most people, when they go back to their homes after attending their lectures or during holidays, they use their home languages, for an example if one’s home language is Afrikaans or isiXhosa they only communicate using it at home only and not on campus. The above quotation emphasises the great extent to which students are colonised by apartheid language group separations of the past, as well as oppressions through perceptions of themselves as lesser beings. As indicated by Nascimento (2019:965), race and language have resulted in African people having to address a double sign, which includes mastery and well as resistance to language as well as through language. Some of the narratives here express this complexity as trauma, evidenced by such words as ‘hell’ and ‘torture’. At the end of this essay, the student indicates an awareness of having learnt useful skills through the reflective self-narrative, and provides an account of independent analysis and the discourses they are constantly bombarded with in a new habitus and how they are treating a fine line between mastery and resistance to new discourses and ways of being, as a form of survival in a context where purely indigenous ways of speaking, living and acting, are discredited: At the university you find that a level of competition is high between students, they would argue, brag and even show case their talents, skills, fashion and even the way they speak as indication of certain identities that they wish or associate themselves with. The student discourses make the environment to be enjoyable because you learn something new daily, for example sharing the way we view the world and how does certain representations shape us in our classes with help from our lectures makes us to view a world differently too. Young

78  Liesel Hibbert and Thoko Batyi people always love vibrant, colourful, interesting and exciting things and this makes our small world (at the university) to be even smaller and brighter with its interesting events daily. To always gain a critical way of analysing the discourses that we are living with is a vital tool for life and independence from being shaped by ideologies and discourses that are bombarding our lives. In the following paragraph, the student includes an explanation of a social marker/ naming practice. Although the name and its meaning is rather simple, it has many complex manifestations and social indicators attached to it, and can make or break a student’s acceptance or rejection in particular in-groups: …Furthermore, around the campus amongst many groups most of students uses the nickname ‘Peto’ to call each other and associate those with groups they like to identify. ‘Peto’ is a nickname originating from Xhosa people that were born in this city or been residing there, and it mean ‘Friend’ in English. ‘Peto’ shows legitimation of people that are from around this city, but is used even if they are not friends yet, but would like to end up being friends with those from the city. It is used to indicate to other students that you are from the city, even if you are not, or that you have been staying there as a result you are used to their terminology. It becomes even more interesting when you hear coloured people and white people using this nickname to call their friends. As Le Page, R and Tabouret-Keller (2010) say: ‘Our ability to get into focus with those with whom we wish to identify with, however, is constrained ...and the constraints in general terms be categorized under four heads as: The identification of the group, access to groups, positive and negative motivation, and ability to change one’s behaviour in order to be accommodated in the group’. Also, this nickname can be used as a form of persuasion. When you want something from someone and you know that it is not easy to get, to call him/ her Peto can persuade his way of thinking and end up doing what you wanted. Again, when you call males ‘Peto’ they tend to rebel because they say its feminine and they are not gay to be called ‘peto’ and others can be harsh or get offended if called them like that because they associate it with gay tendencies. The use of this nickname can have a negative impact as well because, people end up not knowing each other’s name and call each other ‘Peto’ and it becomes an embarrassing to realise that your friend has been not knowing who you are after a long time of interaction or relationship. Meaning that loss of identity can be result from this. Finally, In Xhosa speaking students that were born in Port Elizabeth code switching and inter-language can be found in South Campus. For example instead of saying ‘quickly or soon’ in Xhosa they say ‘Gou’ and instead of saying ‘Early in the morning’ in Xhosa they say ‘Vroeg’ and all these word are Afrikaans words but because they migrated with Bantu people and situated in Port Elizabeth they influenced the language that is dominating in this city, and now ended up being used academically in Xhosa lectures by students while it

Students’ self-narratives of linguistic migration  79 is totally wrong . In this case lsiXhosa as an official language experiences loss or replacement of its linguistic features and even students that are coming from rural areas with good Xhosa, end up being influenced to use these Afrikaans words because they are always together on campus. Sarangi and Slembroeck (1992), found that ‘the responsibility for achieving mutual understanding and maintaining the flow of conversation fell in most cases on the shoulders of the immigrants’. As a result of this, The marks students gain in Xhosa are on the decrease and even in the community because it is no longer used correctly because there is no longer a conversational ‘standard’. In some modules I was able to draw on my own experiences and issues to do with language and my identity. I found this module quite empowering, being able to draw on my own experiences and issue to do with language and my identity at that point. I used to go home crying thinking that this university is not the right place I was supposed to be in. To me that was the difficulty journey. Again, Janks (2009) spoke about literacy and illiteracy. I quote ‘Literacy, the ability to read and write. Literacy is often translated as ‘educated ‘or ‘school’, with notions of refined, learned, well-bred, civilized, cultivated , genteel , lying just beneath the surface’ ( Janks 2009:3). I started to trust myself when we were grouped, in order to work in groups, and that is when I found that I was not the only one who is not fluent in speaking English. As time went by, I felt so much better, and proud of myself. No one had ever stood in front of me and taught me how to speak English. I learned it during communication with others students on campus. When I go back home, I code switch most of the time when I speak with my parents, and speak English with my younger sisters and cousins, and I am so proud of that. In conclusion, students should not be expected to cast off the language and culture of the home and community as they enter the University campus, and  neither should the University and school represent two totally separate and different cultures which have to be kept firmly apart. Studying the second language especially English if it is not your home language is very important. Learning other languages does not mean that you have lost your identity, but it simply means that you have increased your knowledge of other languages. People outside are bilingual, trilingual and even multilingual, but they still consider their home language as the language that has shaped their identity. Being bilingual, trilingual and multilingualism helps people to in term of getting jobs. Extract from the eighth essay Am I still a Xhosa?

The student writer here expresses a sense of drifting and insecurity. He worries that he might be becoming someone else, not being able to deal with this very easily at this point. This resonates with Pavlenko’s (2007) question: When we adopt a new language, do we also take on a different or new personality and become someone else? The student’s name is Sisa and his home language is Xhosa. He grew up in rural Libode, near Umtata, and was sent to high school in Butterworth and

80  Liesel Hibbert and Thoko Batyi attended a university in a provincial city. He weighs up the negative and positive impacts of these migrations on his identity: I grew up in a family and location that speak a Xhosa dialect called lsimpondo I spoke lsimpondo from when I was a child until I was 16 years of age. Because the language I spoke is a dialect of Xhosa, it is clear that I was not powerful at speaking Xhosa. At the school I went to, the teachers taught Xhosa, and English as first additional language but, I did not speak the languages when I was outside the school premises because I was so powerful in speaking lsimpondo. I believed that what I was speaking was the real Xhosa because since I passed the class activities that were given to me even though I was answering the questions in lsimpondo. At the age of 16 years I found it crucial for me to try speaking English after I visited English speaking family for which my mother was working as a domestic worker. I did not feel well there because I could not say other things that were so important to be included in youth conversations, and that made me not to be powerful in the things we were chatting about with the friends I met in that family. When I came back from the holiday, I began to use some English words pretending as if I can fluently speak English. The student reveals new insights into the fractured concept of ‘Xhosa-speaker’, by comparing his previous belief of Xhosa as a whole-bounded historically based language as one system and is amazed to find speakers from other, fairly near home, areas and towns, speaking Xhosa totally differently from himself. He experiences these insights as empowering, which we recognise through his use of ‘I began to use some English words …’. As an aside, people who are not familiar with the Xhosa language will perhaps not realise how diverse Xhosa can be. There is a rural dialect, there are urban sociolects, urban patois, there is deep Xhosa (spoken by the elderly in rural areas who are still living a traditional cattle-herding lifestyle), and then there are regional varieties as well. He writes about the observation of a big change which occurred in his language as he entered higher education, keeping in mind, of course, that the university itself is also a sight of perpetual historically entrenched colonisation re-enactments, of coloniality all around: When I joined the university I came across diverse cultures and diverse languages. This influenced me to speak English more than I speak my home language because I did not understand the languages of the students, I had conversations with some of them but they did not understand mine but we were so interested in getting to know each other. Some students who speak my home language managed to influence students from other provinces to speak our language but I did not do that, Instead I preferred to use English to communicate with them. I was 19 years at that time and I was no longer powerful in Xhosa. I remember when we had arguments about the meanings of Xhosa idioms with my roommate. I gave wrong interpretations to the majority of

Students’ self-narratives of linguistic migration  81 the idioms he asked me but fortunately he was only asking me things to check whether I did learn Xhosa at High School. In the above extract, the student uses phrases such as ‘no longer powerful’, ‘fortunately’, ‘at least’, all of which are highly emotive, expressing a sense of relief in gaining insights into hybridity being normal. At high school I passed Xhosa with 70% but I feel like if I could be asked to go to write the Xhosa subject again without studying it, I would not do well. At the age of 20 years, I was completely not powerful at speaking Xhosa but at least I had the ability to critically analyse what other students do with my home language and make judgements upon the way they speak. The way city people here speak Xhosa is different from that of Butterworth people, and the way Butterworth people speak Xhosa is different from that of Umtata people; I came from Butterworth to the city with a belief that the Xhosa that people speak in Butterworth is the best. This leads him to the opportunity for dramatic personal decision-making and a key turning point in his life. He has to choose between taking up liberatory selfdevelopment, or continuing to feel somewhat dehumanised by his own negative observations of his identity trajectory so far: My language history tells me that I should go back to my Xhosa grammar and literature books when I have time, in order to regain the power I had in my language. I see books as the sources that can very helpful because nowadays we have so many different contextual discourses that take away our original identity and our culture. The majority of Xhosa students do not see the need to go back to our language because their focus is of economic issues rather than social and cultural issues. By trying to belong and to feel more powerful within a group, this student negotiates significant shifts in identity by circumstances characterised by a mix of choice, chance, and opportunity. Reflections The main finding of the project was to apply defamiliarisation as a research method of investigation, which turned the participating students towards a positive, empowered perspective of their own language histories, to get them to see their challenges and achievements as very important in the face of having to express themselves in English in the academe. This aim was adequately achieved. A key finding of the analysis of narrative project was that the language histories and experiences of students of colour in South Africa are so diverse, therefore discounting the ‘only one story’ theory, which continues to be superimposed on people with African roots.

82  Liesel Hibbert and Thoko Batyi In summary then, our answer to the main question, ‘How can student linguistic autobiographies contribute to pedagogy that leads to renewed engagement and motivation?’ is as follows: Self-narrative accounts tracing multilingual student identity contribute to understandings of how awareness of their own historical trajectories of translanguaging provide evidence of transculturality as the norm among students in South African higher education. In this regard, the main limitation of this study was that the students spent no time work-shopping and sharing their insights with one another, staff members, or with staff/student focus groups. Sharing insights could have been beneficial in terms of inspiring structural changes to accommodate more sharing within, and across, faculties and staff-student groups. Each of the thirty-five 3rd-year students had a unique story to relate because the path of education they followed was unpredictable. Students indicated having experienced enhanced agency through reflection and confident decisionmaking regarding their own identity. This form of curriculum responsiveness fosters graduate attributes that could translate into social responsibility and provide them with opportunities to relink. In these narratives of transition, students became more motivated to make greater investments (Norton 2016:476) in the preferred discourses of the academe and found the matching of their linguisticautobiographical observations with theoretical explanations deeply insightful and empowering. They acquired metalinguistic skills (evaluative and critical dispositions) as well as the confidence to use their linguistic resources, both English and their home- and school-based discourses and languages, creatively, to their own benefit and satisfaction. Through defamiliarisation processes, and the linguistic shift and identification theories that they studied, the students gained respect for their own multilingual achievements. Additionally, they had the opportunity to become aware of the multitude of structural inequalities in the wider socio-political matrix. Students were provided with an opportunity to reposition themselves within a broad spectrum of languaging, within their social lives, as well as in the higher education environment, where English (not necessarily their first language) is one of the measures of academic performance. Through construction of retrospective perspectives of their own linguistic autobiographies, the students’ sense of agency, motivation for expanding their linguistic repertoires for educational purposes, and their confidence to use their multiple languages creatively, in order to further their social, academic and psychological aims, were impacted. Most importantly, they were afforded the opportunity to delink consciously from negative self-perceptions of their own linguistic challenges after being shown a pathway to conceiving these rather as strenuous, yet worthwhile and much appreciated linguistic achievements. What was an eye-opener for the facilitators, is captured aptly in the following quotation: Viewing transitions as rhizomatic appreciates the diversity of students’ experiences, and viewing transitions as ongoing becomings acknowledges that

Students’ self-narratives of linguistic migration  83 students have ‘fluid, diverse and messy experiences that do not follow one homogeneous path, but rather can be understood as ongoing’. (Gravett 2019:12) Narratives of linguistic migration are eminently suitable as strategic instruments for prompting relinking as healing. The disruptive events embedded in the curriculum as suggested, provide opportunities for seeing different personal attitudes options and a wider range of insights towards that which has been lost and what is to be mobilised, in terms of being and doing, for the future. As students sifted through complex linguistic dynamics of ‘chance, choice and opportunity’ (Thomson et al. 2002) which they had been exposed to in their lives, they began to understand the larger sociocultural context of inequality that has shaped their lives (Marx, Pennington & Chang 2017:3, Reed-Danahay 2017:152). Through this experience, they clearly developed empathy towards themselves, and a tolerance of difference, a key aspect of post-COVID-19 social and educational trajectories. References Block, D. & Corona, V. (2016). Intersectionality in language and identity research. In Preece, S. (ed), The Routledge handbook of language and identity (pp. 507–522). Routledge. Caetano, A. (2015). Defining personal reflexivity: A critical reading of Archer’s approach. European Journal of Social Theory 18(1), 1–16. Garcia, M. C. M. (2016). Intercultural reflection through the Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters: students’ accounts of their images of alterity. Language and Intercultural Communication online 1747–1759, 1–28. Gravett, K. (2019). Story completion: Storying as a method of meaning-making and discursive discovery. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 18, p.1609406919893155. Hall, J. M. & Townsend S. D. C. (2017). Using critical incidents and E-Portfolios to understand the emergent practices of Japanese student-teachers of English. Teaching and Teacher Education 62, 1–9. Jorgensen, J. N. (2008). Polylingualism and languaging around and among children and adolescents. International Journal of Multilingualism 5(3), 161–174. Le Page, R. & Tabouret-Keller, A. (2005). Acts of Identity. Introducing language use: A coursebook, 183–189. Lee, J. S. & Anderson, K. T. (2009). Chapter 7: Negotiating linguistic and cultural identities: Theorizing and constructing opportunities and risks in education. Review of Research in Education 33, 181–211. AERA. Martin, P. (2010). ‘They have lost their identity but not gained a British one’: non­ traditional multilingual students in higher education in the United Kingdom. Language and Education 24(1), 9–20. Available through Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. Marx, S., Pennington, J. L. & Chang, H. (2017). Critical autoethnography in pursuit of educational equity: Introduction to the IJME special issue. International Journal of Multicultural Education 19(1), 1–6. Maseko, K. & Mkhize, D. N. (2021). Translanguaging mediating reading in a multilingual South African township primary school. International Journal of Multilingualism 18(3), 455–474.

84  Liesel Hibbert and Thoko Batyi Mignolo, W. D. (2000). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges and border thinking. Princeton University Press. Nascimento, G. (2019). Racism in English language teaching? autobiographical narratives of Black English language teachers in Brazil. Review of Brasilian Linguistics Apl. 19(4), 959–984. Norton, B. & De Costa, P. I. (2018). Thinking allowed- research tasks on identity in language learning and teaching. Language Teaching 51(1), 90–112. Norton, B. (2016). Identity and language learning: Back to the future. TESOL Quarterly 50(2), 475–479. Pavlenko, A. & Lantoff, J. (2000). Second language learning as participation and the (re) construction of selves. In Lantoff, J. (ed), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 155–178). Oxford University Press. Pavlenko, A. (2007). Autobiographic narratives as data in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics 28(2), 163–188. Peutrell, R. & M. Cooke (2019). Afterword: ESOL, citizenship and teacher professionalism. Brokering Britain, Educating Citizens, 227–234. 10.21832/9781788924634-016. Plueddemann, P. (2011). Crossing new frontiers with the translanguaging wagon. LEAP News 29 March 2011 edition. South Africa Reed-Danahay, D. (2017). Bourdieu and critical autoethnography: Implications for research, writing and teaching. International Journal of Multicultural Education 19, 144–155. Suarez-Krabbe, J. (2020). Relinking as Healing: Ruminations on crisis, and the radical transformation of an antisocial and antirelational world. www.coniv ​ialt​h ink ​i ng.org. index.php/2020/10/05?reling​i ng-as-heal​i ng/ Thomson, R., Bell, R., Holland, J., Henderson, S. McGrellis & Sharp, S. (2002) Critical moments: Choice, chance and opportunity in young people’s narratives of transition. Sociology 36, 335–354. Veltkamp, G. M, Recio, G. Jacobs, A. M. & Conrad, M. (2012) Is personality modulated by language? International Journal of Bilingualism 17(4), 496–504. Wijaya, A. R. T. & Kuswandono, P. (2018). Reflecting critical incident as a form of English Teachers’ professional development: An Indonesian narrative inquiry research. Indonesian Journal of English Education 5(2), 101–118. Zidjaly, N. (2009). Agency as an interactive achievement. Language and Society 38, 177–200.

6 The benefits of collaborative bilingual reading Thoko Batyi

Introduction and context This study is rooted in a larger study (Batyi 2014) in which the aim was to determine whether the academic literacy practices of isiXhosa-English bilinguals would improve through the use of four translanguaging strategies, namely translation and glossary development, code-switching, code-meshing, and bilingual reading strategies. This chapter focuses exclusively on an intervention in which students participated in bilingual reading strategies (a collaborative reading and interpretation process conducted bilingually). Data were collected as part of Tourism Communication tutorials in a Business Faculty of a comprehensive provincial university in South Africa. Data were also collected from questionnaires, interviews and summaries. (The data were collected by the first author, subsequently referred to as ‘the researcher’). The research aim was to ascertain whether, and in what way, the students experienced bilingual reading comprehension as beneficial to their language acquisition process in English. The quality of the student assignments provided an objective assessment, and their comments provided an affective assessment. Theoretical framework and literature review A collection of research papers reflecting experimental work on bilingual policy in higher education at several universities around South Africa was published by Hibbert and van der Walt in 2014. No case studies on bilingual pedagogy for academic literacy, with the use of translation, back translation and collaborative interpretation, appeared in this collection. The current case study was conducted in 2012 with isiXhosa-English bilinguals in a 1st-year Tourism Communication course. The case study, which has not been published before, is presented retrospectively, as reinterpreted in the light of updated theory. The bilingual pedagogy for English language acquisition for the Tourism trade entails reading bilingually, co-interpreting bilingually and writing in English. If students are allowed to express the richness of their communicative resources (for example, the multiple literacies they bring with them from other contexts), they are better able to engage as active agents in their own meaning-making and become engaged DOI: 10.4324/9781003382645-6

86  Thoko Batyi at a deeper level with their academic production (Gravett & Geyser 2009:71). That is, their academic literacies improve if they are supported by their multilingual repertoires. Also, the study confirms that, as proposed by Garcia and Leiva (2014:199), translanguaging during reading is an effective pedagogical practice. Cushman’s (2016: 238) argument in favour of pro-pluriversalism in language education is that difference in expression becomes a content for study and pedagogy. That is, students are exposed to the notion that understandings, values and practices are viewed as constantly being in flux (p. 239). Translanguaging pedagogy is useful in that students get pushed to the borders of decoloniality by being asked to critique media, analyse multiple genres and engage in different forms of meaning negotiation, expression and reflection. In this way, they develop metalinguistic and meta-rhetorical dexterity (p. 240). According to Meyer et al. (2015: 49), greater command of secondary discourses (such as subject-specific knowledges and understandings) involves self-awareness processes leading to reflexivity, as well as the practicing of plurimodal semiotics. This is done by adapting one’s language to specific purposes and specific audiences, in which culture inevitably acts as a filter for communication, content and cognition (p. 51). The essential focus in this case study which hi is on linguistic development, creative problem-solving, reflection and collaboration (pp. 52–3), is embedded in the methodology as outlined below. Methodology Case study format and rationale

According to Yin (2009:18), a case study is based on experiments or experiences that are conducted to find out about a present-time phenomenon in depth and within its real-life context: The case study enquiry copes with the technically distinctive situation in which there will be many more variables of interest than data points, and as one result relies on multiple sources of evidence, with data needing to converge in a triangulation fashion, and as another result, benefits from prior development of theoretical propositions to guide data collection and analysis. According to Yin (2009:2), case studies are the best way for studies such as this one, where the research question is ‘how’ or ‘why’, and the researcher has no control over events. Case studies contribute to the knowledge of individual, group, organisational, social, political and related phenomena (Yin 2009:4). They allow investigators to retain the holistic and meaningful characteristics of real-life cycles and small group behaviour (Yin 2009:4). As with experimental research, a case study can be generalised to theoretical propositions, but not to populations or universes (Yin 2009:15). This particular study investigates the teaching of academic literacy strategies in the tutorial classroom in a specific academic environment. The investigation and

The benefits of collaborative bilingual reading  87 understanding of academic literacies encompass important contextual conditions, as they are pertinent to the phenomenon of the study (Yin 2009:18). The inquiry in this study, as in case studies in general, relies on multiple sources of evidence (assignments, questionnaires, and interviews) that converge in a triangular fashion. This study also benefits from the prior development of theoretical propositions (of the usefulness of multiliteracies in learning academic literacies and literacies as social practices) to guide the data collection and analysis. A combination of qualitative and quantitative data was collected on assessing the process of reading comprehension tutorials conducted bilingually. A variety of student written work and student course feedback served as data. Ethnographic aspects adhered to in this study were a detailed description of the context, i.e. the university context, the course context of Tourism Communication for 1st-year students, as well as relevant aspects of the students’ linguistic and educational profiles. Participants The sample for the study was a multilingual group of 1st-year 2012 Tourism students from a Tourism tutorial at a provincial comprehensive university in South Africa. Participants were chosen because they had obtained less than 50% in the English Proficiency Assessment (EPA) (test) that they sat during placement at the beginning of the year. Initially, there were 42 students in this group (29 IsiXhosa, 9 Afrikaans, 2 IsiZulu, 2 English). The researcher decided to use the isiXhosa students as a sample and investigate whether their academic literacies could improve if the multilingual strategies were used for teaching and learning in their tutorial programme. One of the students dropped out, leaving 28 students in the study. Of the 28, 15 had been in township schools (schools in generally deprived and under-resourced urban areas) for Grade 12, seven were from rural schools (generally in deprived and under-resourced rural areas), and six were from former Model C schools (a Model C school is a school that was previously a ‘white’ school during Apartheid, but is now ‘mixed’. They are often perceived to be better (have access to better resources) than township and rural schools. The 22 students who were from township and rural schools had learned isiXhosa as a first language and as a subject up to Grade 12. Consequently, these students brought with them literacies in this language. However, of the six students from former Model C schools, four had never formally learned isiXhosa, and they reported that they could not write it. Two of the six students who attended former Model C schools could read and write isiXhosa, although not on the same level as the students who were educated at township and rural schools. One of these two students learned isiXhosa from Grade 1 to Grade 12. However, he was taught by Englishspeaking teachers in some Grades and was translanguaging at home with both his parents and siblings. The other student from a former Model C school who could read and write isiXhosa learned to read and write the language from their parents and siblings. According to this student, his family taught him isiXhosa at home because they did not want him to ‘lose’ the language, and therefore his ‘identity’, in the process of learning.

88  Thoko Batyi The tutorials Bilingual reading took place in Year 1 Tourism Communication tutorials. Rules for the tutorial were established at the beginning of the year. The participants were told that they were allowed to use their home languages to communicate and to ask questions or explain and give answers in the tutorial. They were told that this could enhance understanding and encourage participation. Because students were not forced to speak English only, the atmosphere in the tutorials was fairly relaxed. Communication in the tutorial occurred in the same way as it would socially, but under the supervision and control of a bilingual XhosaEnglish tutor. A non-coercive, relaxed atmosphere was created in tutorials, and students negotiated their interpretation of texts in groups and in pairs. Reading strategies were explained and demonstrated to the students and they were encouraged to practice them. For example, students practiced skimming and scanning texts to find out whether they covered pertinent topics, and how to infer the meaning of words by reading them in their context. They were taught to notice reference words like pronouns, which usually refer to nouns that have been already mentioned. Students were taught to utilise re-reading when they felt they did not comprehend a text, and to start from the point at which they had last understood the text. They were also taught how to answer questions and produce responses to a text they had read. It was noticed that they already used some of these strategies, but were not consciously aware of them. Therefore, in the tutorial, they were made aware of how and why they used specific reading strategies. Students were provided with English reading material. They discussed the material using their hybrid language (English and isiXhosa) and wrote summaries about the material in English. During text discussions in tutorials, translanguaging in groups was utilised in an attempt to improve understanding of the texts. Students then translated their translanguaged discussions into ‘standard’ English before writing their summaries in English. Data collection and analysis

Several data collection instruments were used during the learning intervention at the university in question. Three of these instruments selected for this study are reported on in this chapter: (i) assignments (summaries) from the Tourism tutorial; (ii) a questionnaire about the use of bilingual reading in the Tourism tutorials; and (iii) interviews (about both the students’ backgrounds and their experiences with bilingual reading in the Tourism tutorial). Tourism Communication tutorial assignments

Students were given English texts to read and discuss bilingually in the tutorials. After reading the texts, students would form groups. After discussing the texts using translanguaging, the students were required to re-read the texts and then write summaries of the texts. The length of the summaries was determined by the tutor (the

The benefits of collaborative bilingual reading  89 researcher) and informed by the length of the texts. The summaries were usually substantially shorter than the texts because students were told to only provide the gist of the texts. This indicated that the students had an understanding of the texts. After each bilingual reading of each task and the writing of the summaries, the summaries were collected for analysis. The researcher checked if the students were able to appreciate the meaning of the texts through bilingual reading. The quality of the summaries was measured by their closeness to the gist of the text, and whether this had been done within the specified word limit. What was required from the students in the summaries was a short paragraph that retold the main idea of the text in the students’ own words. Gaining marks from the summaries was not important; the main objective of this practice was the discussion through translanguaging to improve students’ reading literacies, and the opportunity to practice academic writing. Questionnaire regarding the benefits of bilingual reading in the Tourism tutorial

The questionnaire consisted of five short questions and a sixth open-ended one. Students had to answer ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ‘Sometimes’ to the five short questions, while for the sixth, they had to choose one of the multilingual strategies from the five questions and write a paragraph about it. The questions asked were: 1) Did you like it when your tutor in Tourism Communication facilitated the course in both English and isiXhosa? 2) Did it feel good when you were placed in groups of your home language to discuss both in English and isiXhosa in the tutorial? 3) The translation of terms, concepts and their meanings in the Communication tutorial helped me a lot? 4) Did you like the use of both the languages you know in the online discussions of Tourism lectures? 5) Writing the first draft of my assignment in my own language helped me with more ideas? 6) Please choose any one of the above questions and explain it in more detail (10 lines). Interviews regarding the students’ backgrounds and the benefits of bilingual reading in the Tourism tutorial

Semi-structured interviews were conducted to learn more about the students’ backgrounds and to investigate the effectiveness of the multilingual strategies. In this way, the interviewer could ‘get a deeper insight in how they think and reflect’ (Folkestad 2008:2). The questions addressed translanguaging as a whole, rather than bilingual reading specifically, i.e. the translation of terms and concepts by the tutor during teaching and learning, translation during group text discussions, and code-meshing during online discussions. However, terms such as ‘bilingual reading’, ‘code-switching’, and ‘code-meshing’ are not watertight, separate categories. There is considerable overlap, and, for example, code-switching is a key component of bilingual reading.

90  Thoko Batyi Interview questions were drafted on paper. The same sequence of questions was not followed in all the interviews all the time. However, at the end, all the questions were covered. In the interviews, the interviewer elicited information about the multilingual strategies that students were practicing in the tutorial. Some responses were brief, and the interviewer had to probe students to gain a deeper insight into the students’ thoughts, while other responses were in depth and were immediately clearer. The questions asked in the interviews were: 1) In which school were you for Matric? 2) Did you learn isiXhosa as a subject up until Grade 12? (If yes, did you learn it as 1st language or additional language?) 3) Which languages were used for teaching and learning in your high school? 4) Did you find alternation of languages during translation of Tourism terms and concepts useful or not? Explain how it was or wasn’t useful to you. 5) Do you think that terminology should be translated in all other courses as well? 6) Explain in what situations and how you use the Tourism multilingual glossary. 7) Did it help you to understand when your tutor in the Tourism Communication tutorial used isiXhosa and English to explain the work and concepts? 8) Would you like lectures in other courses to use the same strategy to explain difficult work in two languages? Explain how this would help you. 9) Would you like isiXhosa to be used with English when referencing in essay writing is taught? 10) Do you find code-meshing useful for learning new content in Tourism? Explain your answer. 11) Do you think students can learn from each other’s answers when codemeshing? Explain how and why this works or doesn’t work for you. 12) Do you find reading in English, discussing in isiXhosa and summarising of Tourism texts in English in the tutorial useful? Explain why it made or did not make a difference to your understanding. These semi-structured interviews had been pre-tested in the 2011 Tourism Communication group and followed a standardised procedure (Folkestad 2008:3) for obtaining facts about the world (Silverman 2001:86). The conversations between the interviewer and the interviewees provided a social reality because they were more like informal conversations. The interviews took place in one venue. This meant that there was consistency in the interview setting for all students. Differences were apparent in the participants’ level of anxiety because of their differing levels of English proficiency. The analysis of the interviews in this study is based on the process suggested by Erlandson, Harris, Skipper and Allen (1993:116). It has four elements: • unitising data, • emergent category designation,

The benefits of collaborative bilingual reading  91 • negative case analysis, and • bridging, extending and surfacing data (Erlandson et al. 1993:116). The process was adapted to suit the analysis used in the present study. Results Tourism Communication tutorial assignments

The core aim of this instrument was to ascertain whether bilingual reading, explanation, and discussion could improve the meaning and understanding demonstrated in student summaries written in English of English tutorial texts. Examples of the summaries are given below in Figures 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3: The summaries show that the students had grasped the gist of the texts they were given to read and could competently convey the meaning of the texts.

Figure 6.1 Sample student responses.

92  Thoko Batyi

Figure 6.2 Sample student response.

Questionnaire regarding the benefits of bilingual reading in the Tourism tutorial

In total, 26 students responded to the questionnaire. These respondents answered all the questions. Table 6.1 below shows the responses to the five questions: Detailed responses (Question 6) Of the 26 students, twelve chose Question 2, six chose Question 3, five chose Question 1, two chose Question 5, and one chose Question 4. Sample responses showed that students from rural areas and townships were accustomed to translanguaging during teaching and learning because it had been used in their schools. They appreciated the approach to teaching and learning because they did not have to guess, for example, what a tutor had said or what a question required of them. This attitude was in contrast to the other students who attended Model C schools and had not been taught isiXhosa, and gave negative responses in the Questionnaire. They were not able to understand the disciplinary concepts in

The benefits of collaborative bilingual reading  93

Figure 6.3 Sample student response (Xhama’s script). Table 6.1 Questionnaire results [Summarised] Question 1. Did you like translanguaging by your tutor?

Yes (%)

16 (62%) 2. Did you like being placed in a group where both 20 English isiXhosa were used? (77%) 3. Did the translation of terms and concepts help you? 21 (81%) 4. Did you like translanguaging in the online 18 discussions? (69%) 5. Was it helpful to write the first of your assignment in 16 your own language? (62%) 6. Please discuss one of the above questions in more detail

No (%)

Sometimes (%)

2 (8%) 4 (15%) 3 (11%) 3 (11%) 8 (31%)

8 (31%) 2 (8%) 2 (8%) 5 (19%) 2 (8%)

94  Thoko Batyi

Figure 6.4 Sample student response (Kule’s script).

Xhosa at all, even if they were fluent in Conversational Xhosa and accustomed to translanguaging socially. The students from rural areas and townships, in contrast, could not function without the bilingual process and had to guess what the questions meant, when they were asked only in English. Nonji wrote the following about translanguaging in the tutorials (Figure 6.4): Interviews regarding the students’ backgrounds and the benefits of bilingual reading in the Tourism tutorial

Students were asked twelve questions during the interviews and had to respond to all of them. The questions required answers about their linguistic backgrounds, the languages of teaching and learning at the schools they attended, their opinions about the use of multilingual strategies during teaching and learning, and whether or not they would like their other lecturers in other classes to use the same strategies. Eleven of the group of 28 students were interviewed. The results are presented in Table 6.2 below: Questions 1 to 3 are factual. The remaining questions are opinion based. The vast majority of responses to the opinion-based questions were positive. The one negative response in Question 9 appears to be related to the student not having been taught isiXhosa while at school. The one negative response in Question 10 was caused by the student not having time to go to the computer labs because of the time pressure she was under. It is particularly noteworthy that all students wanted the multilingual strategies to be used by other lecturers. Discussion The results from the three research instruments have been described in Chapter 4. The discussion below attempts to elucidate the meaning of the results and their implications.

The benefits of collaborative bilingual reading  95 Table 6.2 Interview results Question No.

Question

Number of students

1)

In which school were you for Matric?

2)

Did you learn isiXhosa as a subject up until Grade 12? (as 1st language or additional language?) Which languages were used for teaching and learning in your high school? Did you find alternation of languages during translation of Tourism terms and concepts useful or not? Explain how it was or wasn’t useful to you. Do you think that terminology should be translated in all other courses as well? Explain your answer. Explain in what situations and how you use the Tourism multilingual glossary.

6 = Rural schools 4 = Township schools 1 = NQF level 10 = Yes 1 = No

3) 4)

5) 6) 7)

8)

9) 10) 11)

12)

Did it help you to understand when your tutor in the Tourism Communication tutorial used isiXhosa and English to explain the work and concepts? Would you like lecturers in other courses to use the same strategy to explain difficult work in two languages? Explain how this would help you. Would you like isiXhosa to be used with English when referencing in essay writing is taught? Explain why. Do you find code-meshing useful for learning new content in Tourism? Explain your answer. Do you think students can learn from each other’s answers when code-meshing? Explain how and why this works, or doesn’t work for you. Do you find the reading in English, discussing in isiXhosa and summarising of Tourism texts in the tutorial in English useful? Explain why or why it did not make a difference to your understanding.

3 = English only 8 = English and isiXhosa 11 = Useful

11 = Yes 11 = In writing assignments, studying and preparing for tests 11 = Yes

11 = Yes

10 = Yes 1 = No 10 = Yes 1 = No 11 = Yes

11 = Yes

96  Thoko Batyi Tourism Communication tutorial assignments

Students’ summaries showed a satisfactory understanding of the gist of the prescribed Tourism readings. This process was scaffolded by the students being given a global understanding of the texts before reading them. Furthermore, the terms and concepts translated in the tutorial and checked by the researcher in the texts were correctly used in relevant sentences and contexts within appropriate paragraphs. Students showed understanding of the meanings of the terms and concepts. This was confirmed by the Tourism lecturer, who reported that the translation of terms enabled students to apply the concepts more accurately and in context in the Tourism class. Although students were asked to use their own words, they seemed to be motivated by the opportunity to use the terms and concepts they had learned, wanted to use them as they appeared in the texts, and did not want to interpret them. However, from their summaries, it was clear that they understood the meanings of the terms and concepts and therefore, had understood the texts. This is confirmed in the sample summary in Figure 6.5 below: In Ngeza’s summary above, the terms ‘infrastructure’, ‘GDP’, ‘tourists attractions’, ‘[cultural] diversity’, ‘tourism’, ‘communities’, ‘improved economy’ (which also means ‘economic growth’), were all learned during translation. The reading, discussion, and summarising activities provided an opportunity to use them in context in the tutorial. In the bilingual learning process, students were provided with the opportunity to discuss the general meaning of the passage or paragraph so that all of them would be on par regarding their understanding of the text before writing their summaries. This not only motivated them to read more but also scaffolded their understanding of difficult texts. The use of translanguaging during the discussion of texts read in the tutorial opened up opportunities for multilingualism and confirmed that translanguaging is ecological and situated (i.e. it happens in a particular space and time (Lewis et al. 2012:659)). By the end of the academic year, students were no longer learning to read, but reading to learn. The students’ learning and reading endeavours confirmed Bharuthram’s (2012:205) observation that reading comprehension at the tertiary level ‘requires more than just the ability… to identify written words in a text…but is critical as it fosters analysis, critique, evaluation and synthesis of information from various sources’. Bharuthram and Pretorius (2002:169) note that a lack of comprehension can affect academic performance. In the present study, comprehension was clearly improved by the use of bilingualism. Reading texts in the students’ second language and without discussing them with a group of other students does not make reading a social practice and can delay improvement in the reading ability of students who already read at the ‘frustration level’. The ‘frustration level’ refers to reading with 90% decoding accuracy and 60% or less comprehension (Pretorius 2002:92). Bilingual learning helped overcome this and the students acquired the skill of reading to learn. The tutor (the researcher) focused on how they read, while the Tourism lecturer paid attention to what they read

The benefits of collaborative bilingual reading  97

Figure 6.5 Sample student summary.

(Gravett & Geyser 2009:79). Thus, both the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of their reading practice were improved Reading independently was done when students had been taught the reading strategies and had increased their understanding by sharing what they had read with others. This improvement of students’ reading literacies and other skills as a result of multilingual practices in tutorials (in which students learnt by sharing ideas through translanguaging) confirmed Barton and Hamilton’s (2005:7) opinion that learning literacies is a social practice, which is situated in social and cultural contexts. The multi-literacy approach applied gave students the opportunity to draw knowledge from their cultural and linguistic repertoires and link these to newly acquired ways of thinking and ways of reading and writing.

98  Thoko Batyi Questionnaire regarding the benefits of bilingual reading in the Tourism tutorial Students were asked in the interviews whether or not they found it useful to read Tourism texts in English, discuss them using both their languages and then write a summary in English. All students reported finding this strategy useful. They added that they also encountered the information in the texts they read in the Tourism tutorial class. Students stated that they learned how to summarise because of the strategy in the tutorial. What they enjoyed most was discussing the text in isiXhosa and English in groups of isiXhosa-speaking students. Before being exposed to this strategy, students admitted that they had previously rewritten all the material when writing summaries. They confirmed that their writing literacies had improved and they were grateful for the provision of space and time to use multilingualism. However, there were students who reported that they had a problem restricting themselves to the number of words given for a summary. If, for example, they had to write a summary of 100 words, they would go up to 110 or more on occasion. Reading and discussing in English and their own language improved their reading comprehension. For example, one student wrote: ‘…isincedile lanto (that has helped us) because we were able to…to rate ourselves…how do we understand something after we have read…’. Also, what some students liked was that what they were reading, discussing and summarising in the tutorial class was encountered again in the Tourism class: ‘Yho…but you find it useful, you just cannot explain how it was useful because some of the things enizifundayo mhlawumbi eclasssini uphinda udibane nazo kwa Tourism (some of the things you read in the tutorial class, you encounter them in the Tourism class)’. [Ngulo] From the students’ answers, the researcher focused on how the students perceive the use of multilingual strategies during teaching and learning, particularly reading bilingually. Interviews regarding the students’ backgrounds and the benefits of bilingual reading in the Tourism tutorial All 11 students interviewed reported having been helped by the process of reading English Tourism texts, discussing them through translanguaging, and then writing summaries in English. Nonji explained that after reading and discussing the texts in isiXhosa and English, and then writing English summaries, she was better able to summarise. She reported that before this practice she had simply repeated the text and had regarded that as a summary. Zwezwe told the interviewer that he was glad that they were given an opportunity to learn how to summarise. He used these reading, discussing, and summarising literacies when studying. Other illuminating responses were: It was kind of difficult to me but I did it and it was kuba kwi class zetutorials xa ungayi (because in tutorials when you do not) understand into iye yenziwe uba

The benefits of collaborative bilingual reading  99 mawuyi (something they make you) understand itrayishwe uba mawuyiunderstand then ndikwazile ukuyenza (they try to make you understand and I could do it) but it was difficult because bendinengxaki ye,ye, yamanani when xa kusithiwa mandingagqithi ku -50 umhlawumbi ndigqithisele or (I had a problem with the number of words, when it was said we should not exceed 50) i-ideas zam ndikwazi ukuzi explainer xa ndizibekile i-ideas ndiphelelwe ziwords.(be able to explain my ideas when I wrote them I would run short of words). (Ntamo) The response above could mean the student had difficulty identifying and extracting the main ideas. Also, the student lacked an adequate English vocabulary and would sometimes run short of words. But exposure to Tourism texts increased the student’s vocabulary and, through practice, the student acquired the ability to identify the main ideas in texts. Poor reading ability appears to have been a pervasive issue. What made students copy the texts or exceed the allocated number of words when trying to write summaries was their poor reading skills and their inability to separate the main ideas from the supporting ideas and examples. Translanguaging after reading the texts helped, as the main ideas were discussed and included in summaries. In students’ answers in the interview, a theme of enthusiasm emerged. Students were enthusiastic about this multilingual reading strategy and proud of their summaries. They had not envisioned themselves writing more competently about Tourism. Students reported liking reading Tourism texts and discussing them by shuttling between their languages before writing their summaries. According to Miles and Huberman (1994) in Folkestad (2008:8), to analyse interview data, one has to inductively identify a theme in the data, and then attempt to verify or confirm the finding, which gives an inductive loop. Miles and Huberman find categorisation of the data useful before a theme is inductively identified. The theme of enthusiasm towards multilingualism during teaching and learning can inductively be identified in the interviews. Additionally, the enthusiasm the students felt in the tutorial in response to the bilingual approach, increased their motivation to read in general. A large part of this enthusiasm stemmed from the excitement they felt when provided with the opportunity to use their home language for academic purposes. Concluding remarks The results point to a number of factors that students perceived as important in influencing their learning in other classes. For example, all those interviewed said that they would like multilingual strategies to be used by other lecturers in other courses. They also expressed the wish to learn concepts in other classes in both English and isiXhosa. Reading in English and discussing in English and Xhosa, and then backtranslating in order to write summaries and interpretive responses, helped with deep processing of content knowledge, provided the two languages were put on an equal footing, i.e. English and Xhosa were used in equal amounts and were

100  Thoko Batyi allocated equal status in the eyes of the students. This was important to students. They mentioned the desire to transfer this strategic reading practice to other subjects they were studying. Many students use Xhosa as their primary home language resource in oral practice, but never learnt to write it, which is why the written work which was handed in for assessment at the time was only permitted in English. However, the process of re-learning or learning concepts and expressing interpretations in Xhosa was also a very beneficial empowerment tool for the students. Additionally, the students found that the process of reading in English, discussing in Xhosa and English, and re-reading strategically in English, was beneficial for building vocabulary and terminology as well as deep processing of concepts and general knowledge for tourism as a field of study. The tutor (researcher) noted that the students’ summary writing had improved significantly after the translanguaging exercise. Students found that shuffling between languages by translating worked well for them and heightened their enthusiasm for bilingual practice. Tutors noted dramatic increases in motivation among students. Because of the combination of deep processing of information in two languages, higher student motivation, and collaborative engagement, the student’s writing improved dramatically. References Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. (2005) Situated literacies. Routledge. Batyi, T. T. (2014). Development of Tourism Diploma isiXhosa-Speaking Students’ Academic Literacies: A Multilingual Intervention. PhD Thesis, Port Elizabeth: Nelson Mandela University Library. Bharuthram, S. (2012). Making a case for teaching of reading across the curriculum in higher education. South African Journal of Education 32, 205–214. Cushman, E. (2016). Translingual and decolonial approaches to meaning making. special issue: Translingual work in composition. College English 78(3), 234–242. Erlandson, D. A., Harris, E. L., Skipper, B. L. & Allen, S. D. (1993). Doing naturalistic inquiry: A guide to methods. Sage: Newbury Park. Folkestad, B. (2008). Analysing interview data: Possibilities and challenges. Eurosphere Working Paper Series, Online Working Paper No. 13, 2008. Garcia, O. & Leiva, C. (2014). Theorising and enacting translanguaging for social justice. New York: City University. Gravett, S. & Geyser, H. (2009). Teaching and learning in higher education. Pretoria, RSA: Van Schaik. Hibbert, L. & Van der Walt, C. (2014). Multilingual Universities in South Africa. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Lewis, G., Jones, B. & Baker, C. (2012). Translanguaging: developing its conceptualisation and contextualisation. Educational Research and Evaluation: An International Journal on Theory and Practice 18(7), 655–670. Meyer, O., Coyle, D., Halback, A. Schuck, K. and Ting, T. (2015). A pluriliteracies approach to content and language integrated learning – mapping learner progressions in knowledge construction and meaning-making. Language, Culture and Curriculum 28(1), 41–57.

The benefits of collaborative bilingual reading  101 Miles, M. B. & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Pretorius, E. J. (2002). Reading ability and academic performance in South Africa: Are we fiddling while Rome is burning? Language Matters: Studies in the Language of Africa 33(1), 169–196. doi:10. 1080/10228190208566183. Silverman, D. (2001). Interpreting Qualitative Date-Analysing talk, text and interaction. London: Sage. Silverman, A. (2009). The dialectic of essence. In The Dialectic of Essence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Yin, R. K. (2009). Case study research: Design and methods. Sage.

7 The film Black Panther as catalyst for changing perceptions of Africa and/or ‘being African’ among students in South Africa and the UK Liesel Hibbert and Roberta Piazza

Introduction and background This article reports on a language curriculum project designed to interrupt and destabilise the entrenched grammar of acritical pedagogy, which persists in the practice of tertiary educational staff in South Africa, a country still bonded to pre-liberation modes of obedience to colonialist legitimacy, race characterisation, and textbook authority. This project consciously extended the investigation of researchers such as Mistry and Andrew (2017), who regard the arts school, and film-as-pedagogy in it, as a possible space for open debate, resistance, and active questioning in order to cultivate awareness of social justice at a pre-service teacher level. An English language component was designed to determine whether 3rd-year pre-service teachers responded critically to the film Black Panther, and whether they found the film suitable for use in their own future Grade 7–12 classrooms for raising awareness of social justice. The aim was to create a forum for discussion along the lines of other South African academics: ‘It is significant for institutions on the African continent and in the global South to create an interventionist space that might provide an enabling environment that is both reflective and reflexive of knowledge production’ (Mistry & Andrew 2017:119). Simultaneously, at a university in the UK, a 3rd-year group of 13 English students in an undergraduate course in English Language and Linguistics who were attending a module on Stylistics with a focus on film and theatre were also included in project. The goal of the inclusion of the British students was to capture the response to the film outside South Africa by adults who are mostly white but very sensitive to issues of discrimination and inequality. The film Black Panther (2018), by Ryan Coogler, is the first Hollywood film in which black Africans are superheroes, technologically superior, and globally influential. After his father’s death, protagonist T’Challa makes his return to Wakanda expecting to rightfully replace him as king. However, he is opposed by a strong enemy and his ability as king, and Black Panther is put to the test. In a dramatic moment, when the life of the entire Wakanda nation is at risk, young T’Challa must resort to using all his powers to defeat his enemies. The film is based on characters from the American Marvel comics. In Black Panther, citizens of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003382645-7

Black Panther as catalyst for changing perceptions of Africa  103 idealised fictional, technically advanced, African country Wakanda, are a highly principled tribe, depicted by means of a mixture of historical, contemporary, and futuristic tropes of different aspects of their culture scattered throughout the movie. The king, T’Challa, portrayed as a man of moral rectitude and goodness, firmly believing in safeguarding his principles, is under the guidance of his father, T’Chaka, who is now in the realm of the ancestors. In the film, African and non-Western mythology is used to uncover present-day issues faced by people of colour. By so doing, Black Panther makes a contribution to Afrofuturism, as the cultural experiment in the area of science fiction. By merging fantasy and the history of the African continent, the cultural-philosophical trend aims to put the black diaspora back in touch with its roots. The blurb accompanying the exhibition of Afrofuturism at the Tate Modern in London, UK (1 May–1 Sep 2013), highlights its varied influences: The term Afrofuturism has its origins in African-American science fiction. Today it is generally used to refer to literature, music, and visual art that explores the American experience, and, in particular, the role of slavery in that experience. Central figures in the creation of Afrofuturism are the science fiction writers Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany, and the jazz musician Sun Ra, who created a mythical persona that merged science fiction with Egyptian mysticism. It is this otherness that is at the heart of Afrofuturism. Those inspired by Afrofuturism include the musician George Clinton, the artist Ellen Gallagher, and the film director Wanuri Kahiu. Afrofuturism lies at the intersection of black cultures, imagination, liberation, and technology, and is evident in the Black Panther movie. Afrofuturism is therefore a way of re-contextualising and reassessing history (through various interpretive modes), and imagining the future of the African diaspora differently from past traditional representations associated with colonialism. Afrofuturism is an aesthetic and philosophy of science with enhanced inclusion and empathy in connection with technology at its core. Human Centred Design (HCD) makes technology user-friendly by focusing on the users’ human needs at the centre of Afrofuturism is in sharp opposition to African ‘tribal’ power. Biases and privilege, as well as unjustifiable power relations are part of the uncovering of the blind spots regarding the current perceived status quo in Africa. Tropes of science fiction are germane to this aesthetic, and HCD is seen as delivering solutions to the benefit of all. Within this framework, in the film Black Panther the African voice becomes central in the design narrative. The goal is human improvement, which raises the notion that the movie links in with the current global trend towards steering youth into thinking of careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). These disciplines are generally regarded as essential for a better future. Finally, the film raises the issue of whether forces such as those embodied by Killmonger (who harbours the destructive and negative impact of obsessions with the past, anger, and vengeance) can obstruct and sabotage the aims of the ‘power of Wakanda’. Adéẹ̀kọ ́ (2020) identifies a sad facet of the film encoded in the character of Killmonger, who is convinced that there was a time when his maternal ancestors were free beings, and when enslavement came, they preferred death to it. For Adéẹ̀kọ́ (p. 104) Killmonger

104  Liesel Hibbert and Roberta Piazza expresses ‘some unresolved melancholy lurk[ing] in a pivotal narrative moment that is justly celebrated for its resolute optimism’. The papers in Adéẹ̀kọ ’́ s (2020) collection, all centred around Coogler’s Black Panther, interrogate in different ways and from different approaches, the way the film deals with ‘conflicts of dominion – individual and collective – and how these relate to the exercise of freedom’ (p. 106). Against this cultural background of decolonisation, the focus of the present article is the reaction of a group of South African pre-service educators, who are predominantly black South Africans, to the film Black Panther. To provide additional insights, the responses of a group of mostly white students in the UK were also obtained and compared with the South African responses. The general research question that we tried to answer by working with the South African students can be phrased as follows: ‘In what way did the film change student perceptions and ideas, belief systems, and what did they become aware of, in terms of conceptions of Africa as part of a world system, and themselves as Africans living in Africa today?’ However, culturally and socially, the South African students are an expression of the superdiversity that has enriched the concept of migrants and migration (Vertovec 2007 in Blommaert and Rampton 2012:1) by bringing attention to the reasons for people’s movement, to the patterns and journeys of migration, and to the processes of inclusion in, and exclusion from, the labour market. Within a context of superdiversity, the notion of language and speech as the product of a single speaker is challenged and replaced by constructs that view texts as the results of cumulative voices (Bakhtin 1981). In these constructs, speakers are viewed as alternating between different speaking positions and voices (Goffman 1981). The African diasporic identity, especially within the context of Afrofuturism, combines the cultural and linguistic multilayers associated with diversity. In line with this, therefore, the focus on Black Panther is intended to bring to the fore the lost sedimentation that is germane to diasporic African identity. For this study, both groups of students were prompted to reflect on gender issues, personal and group identification processes, enactment of identity, educational backgrounds and status, as well as the ecological location created in the film. Through the responses of this group as consumers of this fantasy/science fiction film, a three-part process or exploration was put in place. The aim was to determine whether, how, and to what extent Black Panther could move students beyond the pleasure and fantasy aspects portrayed, to raise their social awareness/ consciousness, and encourage engagement with issues of social justice as a form of resistance to coloniality and oppression. It was expected that the film would prompt critical responses to what some critics have called an idealised, simplistic cinematographic depiction of African men and women in Black Panther as a fantasy narrative of resistance in a context of African agency. In conclusion, the present study focuses on a particular artefact, its reception, and the question of whether an example of popular culture can trigger different sensitivities and encourage novel ways of thinking outside colonialism. Obviously, one isolated episode can be limiting. We are aware that decolonising a curriculum is a complex process requiring a continuous emphasis on post-colonial texts and a

Black Panther as catalyst for changing perceptions of Africa  105 post-colonial lens to look at texts, thereby unpacking colonial history as a necessary aspect of teaching literature, cinema, and the humanities in general. The context Against a background of widespread South African student anger over the last decade, centred on such anti-establishment slogans as ‘Fees must fall’ and ‘Rhodes must fall’, a critical narrative has turned into a global response to anti-black violence and capitalist coloniality echoed by the Black Lives Matter movement worldwide. In addition to significantly raising awareness of the issue of a lack of social justice, and the dystopic features in South African national politics and social and student life, Black Panther offers emotional respite from hard-core South African realities such as government corruption and escalating racist sentiments at all levels and in all sectors of society. The film engages with such questions as how to imagine severing ties with the past in order to move into an imagined more peaceful, pro-topic future, often referred to in South African academia as the search for social cohesion. Furthermore, within a frame of science fiction, the film also proposes heroic, and hence positive, identities, which the viewers can easily identify with, or aspire to, and a move away from more common African narratives associated with victimisation and suffering. Simplistic portrayals such as this, however, have limitations. One plausible critique of the presentation of the mythical Wakanda is that it conflates an over-simplified conglomeration of African features, languages, and styles of dress as if presenting Africa as a country, and not a dispersed, super-diverse, disconnected people on one whole continent. In a world that is replete with difference, there is still likely to be intolerance and fear of the other. Because difference is structured in relation to power, unequal access to resources based on gender, race, ethnicity, language, ability, sexuality, nationality, and class continues to produce privilege and thus resentment as to how curricula reinforce principles of equality and non-discrimination at all levels of education. Such complexities tend to be underrepresented in Black Panther because of the fictional nature of the film. Theoretical orientation This section presents the pedagogical underpinnings of the study against which the responses of the South African student teachers and the UK students will be interpreted. The main constructs of the study are defamiliarisation, visual impact on the audience, and social responsibility-based curriculum with globally pertinent subject matter. In the following subsections, we discuss each of these constructs individually, together with the rationale behind their choice. Defamiliarisation

Teaching is a pedagogic activity that can easily turn into an authoritarian practice involving modes of unreflective activities and perpetuating, sometimes consciously

106  Liesel Hibbert and Roberta Piazza but too often unconsciously, stereotypical and racist assumptions in students’ minds. To break this constellation of non-Freirean acritical priorities, students need to be alienated from an old and conservative model of information and presentation; they need to be defamilarised from the familiar, which is so often tainted with pre-liberation ideology, prejudice, and paradigms of obedience. The concept of ‘defamiliarisation’ has its origin in the Russian formalist school and Viktor Shklovsky (1998) in particular, who believed in the power of language – especially literary language – to make unfamiliar and unautomatic what is usually perceived as usual and familiar. The concept has later travelled to the domain of Critical Discourse Analysis, where scholars such as Fairclough (1992) insist on the capacity of the researcher to question and critique what powerful agents, e.g. the press or the establishment, present as obvious, natural and broadly accepted. The present project adopted ‘defamiliarization’ to transform the automatic perception of reality and encourage a critical approach. This was interpreted both as a device for text interpretation as well as a pedagogy that, following Freire (1970), questions shared ideas and values. Defamiliarisation invites critical literacy and enhances the ability of young citizens to become responsible agents of change. According to Shklovsky (1965), perceptions of modernity become habitualised to the extent that an individual’s actions become ‘unconsciously automatic’, preventing a delinking away from fossilised thinking. This is similar to what Mistry and Andrew (2017:123) term ‘unlearning’. In this process, a socially responsible academic space in South Africa in 2020 becomes a ‘space that might, in the end, be one of the few spaces to turn the institution in on, and out of, itself in an attempt to generate unlearnings that might insert themselves in the world’ (ibid.: 23). It is therefore important to assist students to unlearn the invisible structures of privilege that form the social context of so much of their formal, visible learning, which too often goes unquestioned and unexamined. As an interpretive methodology that makes the familiar strange (Waghid & Hibbert 2018), defamiliarisation critically examines and uncovers the hidden meanings of students’ and lecturers’ social and cultural experiences in their particular contexts. It also functions as a means to enable students and educators to look beyond dominant narratives by cultivating critical reflection in themselves and others, and by encouraging deconstruction of taken-for-granted perspectives. Defamiliarisation as a transformative pedagogy and research method (Waghid & Hibbert 2018) means disrupting the places that exist in contemporary society in South Africa that seem untransformed, such as rote learning methods. Visual impact for emotional appeal and for raising social responsibility issues

Black Panther becomes a kind of visual textbook that students are encouraged to interrogate in order to teach how to analyse complex texts at secondary school level. Critical Language Awareness and transpersonal growth have become essential skills, particularly for post-school youth living in an age of uncertainty where the ways they live, learn, work, and interact, are rapidly changing. The achievement of Critical Language Awareness (Hibbert 2018) through the encouragement of question asking (Piazza 2007) and critical reflection on how they act

Black Panther as catalyst for changing perceptions of Africa  107 upon and ‘live’ their new perspectives, is designed in this case, to foster critical social justice awareness that future teachers may transfer to their learners. Film studies as a discipline provides a useful approach for practicing critical pedagogy, unlearning the habits and assumptions so often perpetuated without unthinking by tutors who thus preserve privilege and neo-liberal conditioning. The transformative potential of film literacy can help construct critical citizenship (Costandius et al. 2018; Johnson & Morris 2010; Waghid 2009 and 2021). Pedagogy and practices of disaffection affect film programmes in arts schools in times of revolution, and challenge established canons: The challenge posed is how to show the potential of the medium as a mode for knowledge production rather than simply as a medium for content. Thus, it is opportune to consider film programmes in arts schools as privileged opportunities since it shifts the emphasis away from the vocational to attend to the more pressing political position attributed in knowledge production. (Mistry & Andrew 2017:123) Such films as Black Panther are therefore the means to encourage the reconsideration, reactivation, or reconstruction of existing ‘schemas’ or ‘schemata’. A schema is organised knowledge about concepts, e.g. a service encounter at a restaurant (the idea that someone serves or at least cooks for you and you pay for that pleasure) or more complex constructs such as parenthood (centred on the notion of care and responsibility for younger humans). We all have culturally constructed schemas on which basis new information is processed. Simply put, in schema theory (Langacker 2008 and 2009), knowledge is organised into chunks or units, and stored logically. As Rumelhart (1980: 41) comments, ‘our schemata are our knowledge. All of our generic knowledge is embedded in schemata’. However, the process through which people take in new information through schemas is dynamic. A new concept or idea can be easily absorbed if it doesn’t clash with pre-existing schemas, or the schemas can be slightly adapted to fit the new item. Yet in some cases, new information clashes dramatically with what a person has assumed as consolidated schemas, in which case a total rupture between the old and the new may occur, and this may necessitate a new way of conceptualising the new information. Although this is not the right forum to discuss Langacker’s cognitive theory in detail, it seems important to reflect on the intrinsic potentials that a film like Black Panther, if used in a sensitive and constructive way, can have on transforming old colonialist schemas and helping students to conceptualise ideas in a different guise. This, of course, does not apply solely to the overall plot in which black Africans have supremacy over Whites, which in itself requires a totally new schema, but it may refer to many other moments in the film, from the fight for justice to the lack of resentment against the colonialists. An important moment in the film in this regard is the scene at the museum where the hint at the fact that objects may have been taken away from a community by another is grappled with in a light fashion without animosity or indignation.

108  Liesel Hibbert and Roberta Piazza Methodology and data collection procedure A mixed-method approach (Mehdi Riazi & Candlin 2014) was used for collecting the data to ensure students’ in-depth engagement and motivation to express reasonably ‘informed’ views of Black Panther and what it represents in the history of American cinema, as well as what it may mean to Africans. While the pedagogical context of the UK group was different from the students in South Africa (the UK students did not work specifically on general issues of discrimination, unlike their South African counterparts), the module that they were taking, and of which Black Panther was a part, focused on the identification of ideology and the acquisition of critical skills in the analysis of cinematic, dramatic, and televisual products (Piazza, Haarman & Caborn 2016; Hoffman & Kirner-Ludwig 2020; Piazza 2017; Piazza & Lashmar 2017). Therefore, it can be argued that in both cases the goal was to empower the students by encouraging them to abandon their automatised perceptions. The data collection procedure with the South African 3rd-year pre-service English teachers

The research question the researchers focused on was: ‘In what way did the film change student perceptions and ideas, belief systems, and what did they become aware of, in terms of conceptions of Africa as part of a world system, and themselves as Africans living in Africa today?’ In South Africa, the project had five main stages: Stage 1

Students were initially asked to partake in a class discussion after viewing the film. The goal was to obtain a scaffolded and mediated class discussion as the first primer to the data collection. A seven-week teaching module around the themes of gender awareness and feminism was underway at the time, which rendered Black Panther an ideal catalyst to raise issues of sexism and more generally, discrimination. In addition, students were prompted to examine highly contestable and simplistic conceptions of ‘African identity’, which they are exposed to daily in South Africa. Students were asked to read a number of reviews and academic articles, randomly selected, sometimes representing conflicting views, from around the time that the film was launched in South African mainstream cinemas. Class discussions proceeded as follows. First, students were invited to view the film and do the readings. This stage was followed by a class discussion stimulated by the readings where students were helped to formulate their own ideas while prompted to enter the debate. Stage 2

The students were then asked to draft an essay in response to a range of questions and instructions, which included: Does the movie suggest a clear break from past

Black Panther as catalyst for changing perceptions of Africa  109 dystopic histories of people of colour? Compare the women characters. To what extent are they similar or different? Discuss your favourite character. Compare the main characters. Choose one character to analyse. Can this film be used for teaching social justice? Stage 3

The students were then asked to respond to a formally prescribed essay topic: ‘Analyse the characters portrayed in the film. Is the film suitable as material for instilling awareness of social justice among your learners?’ This data set was meant to be a preliminary priming for more in-depth discussions on the movie and original interpretations in voluntary focus group interviews at a later date. Stage 4

The essays were then ‘mined’ for more in-depth responses. Thereafter, the fourth and main step was to choose those who were willing to participate and those who had shown deep insight in their essays and attained high marks. These students were invited to participate in focus group discussions. Stage 5

Finally, the film was screened again and selected students, as well as some volunteers who wanted to join in, were asked to respond to the three questions below, which were specifically designed towards unlearning automated responses: • To what degree has the film impacted on your conceptions and views of Africa, and feelings about Africa? • What social justice issues arose for you in this film? • Would you use this film in your own English classroom with high school learners? Why and how would you use it? In addition to eliciting interesting responses and views, the essays facilitated identifying those students who were critical at a deeper level. Those students were able to see beyond the science fiction and fantasy presentation. They were also able to speculate about Hollywood agendas in producing the script. Those students who seemed to understand the wider dimensions, invited to volunteer as respondents in focus interviews. At this point, my colleague and I decided to interpret the recorded and transcribed interviews and analyse them separately so that we could compare our individual interpretations of the students’ responses to each other’s responses. Because my colleague is situated in a different discipline, and because he analysed the data digitally, some interesting overlaps and differences occurred, which cannot be included here but can be accessed in Waghid and Ontong (2021).

110  Liesel Hibbert and Roberta Piazza The data collection procedure with UK students

The 13 British students in their early 20s were finalists of an undergraduate course in English Language and Linguistics or English Language and Literature and were attending a module on Stylistics with a focus on the language of film and theatre. The students (11 women and 2 men) were asked to watch the film before the seminar and very similar guidelines and questions to those used to elicit responses from the South African groups were employed in this case. The class was divided into small groups with students choosing their partners and this was followed by a whole group discussion in the second part of the seminar. The students were mostly white British, with two exceptions of mixed-race individuals. When the study was carried out, Sussex University had a limited non-white population so it can be said that these students experienced a similarly ethnic and race-wise imbalanced context as the students in South Africa. However, they had taken modules on discourse and ideology, on discrimination through language, and through the University’s attention to equality and diversity, the students had been sensitised to issues of race and gender representation and topics of postcolonialism and diversity. In a not dissimilar way, the UK students watched Black Panther before the seminar; largely the same guidelines and questions that were used to elicit responses from the South African students were employed with them. However, less scaffolding was used in the UK data collection, and some questions were omitted because they were not applicable. For example, the UK students clearly could not answer the question regarding how they see themselves as Africans living in Africa today. The aim of eliciting opinions from the UK students was to be able to contrast the emotional and intellectual impact the film has on African individuals in a South African context where the racial issue is dominant with the response of young individuals in a different (predominately White) environment, where the racial element is less pressing. The UK students were asked to discuss the film with their colleagues in small groups of their choice, and then report to the whole class. This was followed by a whole group discussion in the second part of the meeting, which, with the students’ permission, was recorded by the lecturer/researcher and then critically analysed. The UK students’ responses were a complex mixture of desire for decolonisation, identification (of a fantasised, futuristically projected kind) with the positive, morally correct, and idealistic characters, or a mixture of fantasy/desire to move on to the future. The responses were encouraged by the scaffolding procedure of the seminar whereby each group’s report linked up with, and built on, the others as a web of comments – based on deep questioning, reflection, and identifying with fairy-like characters and imagining a better, more just, future for South African and/or people of colour globally, especially youth – that formed a final commentary on the film. With the above in mind, three questions were used to guide the UK students’ observations. It should be noted that these questions were primarily intended to trigger discussion, rather than constitute definite topics for analysis by the

Black Panther as catalyst for changing perceptions of Africa  111 researchers. Hence, these questions do not link directly to the results presented in the Findings section. The questions asked were: • What do you think of the overall representation of African people in this film? Is it new? Is it balanced and/or neutral? • What features can you identify in the representation? Is the language of the characters an element you based your evaluation on? If so, what features of that language do you think are relevant? Is it the accent? The choice of lexis? The syntax? The way people engage in conversations? • What elements in the plot of Black Panther suggest a post-colonial, non-racist representation? Are there any scenes that are more or less important in the story development? Are there any references to African traditions and rituals and if so, how do they co-exist with the film’s futuristic story world? The film signalled to all the students engaged with it in a form of an oral (but also written, in the case of the South African students) argumentation task that they themselves could empathise or identify with the tone of the general film or a number of main characters. It is important to note that both in South Africa and the UK, the participants were equally engaged in a learning context in which the film received attention as a potential object to disseminate new ideas and beliefs outside a dominant and stereotyped perception of race. The UK students had received training on how characters talk in fictional artefacts, how fictional language differs from real life, how images relate to language, and how ideology can be identified in representations in film and TV programmes or what the choice of language attributed to particular characters can indicate about the author/script writer’s stance. Analysis and findings The analysis of responses of the South African students appears first, followed by the analysis of responses of the UK students. Significant lexical choices and other linguistic indicators have been highlighted in the excerpts for easier identification. Analysis of responses from the South African students

To recap, the general question posed to the South African students was: ‘In what way did the film change your perceptions and ideas, belief systems, and what did they become aware of, in terms of conceptions of Africa as part of a world system, and themselves as Africans living in Africa today?’ The final stage for the South African students was to address the general question using the following questions: Question 1: To what degree has the film impacted on your conceptions and views of Africa, and feelings about Africa? Question 2: What social justice issues arose for you in this film? Question 3: Would you use this film in your own English classroom with high school learners? Question 4: Why and how would you use it?

112  Liesel Hibbert and Roberta Piazza The responses to the above three questions are summarised below. These include selected quotations from the focus group and class discussion as well as quotations from essays which correlate well with the questions. Themes that emerged were broadly grouped within three categories, namely heightened awareness of persistent prejudices and stereotyping particularly with regard to race and gender, the merits of inclusivity, and the value of enhanced critical skills through discussions and reflection. Summaries and analysis of replies to Question 1: To what degree has the film impacted on your conceptions and views of Africa, and feelings about Africa?

The majority of students indicated that they had developed a heightened awareness of persistent stereotypes and prejudices in South Africa, particularly with reference to race and gender. The following responses incorporated many of the key terms highlighted in the theory section of this paper: ‘stereotypes’, ‘decolonized’, ‘oppressed’. When I first saw the film, I was in shock uhm because usually when we watch African films it’s very geared to rural culture and like their clothing are very traditional and how they go about their daily lifestyle etc… It turned stereotypes of what we think an African country is, on its head. It interrupted our negative views of Africa. The film has decolonised my mind. It has empowered me a lot. We are not oppressed, it’s a state of mind. The students’ choice of an emotional term ‘in shock’ is a humble admission of how the film revolutionised their perceptions and required a totally new schema. From the representation of African culture as ‘rural’ and ‘traditional’ (see also the other excerpt below) to a new non-oppressed technologically sophisticated ideological construction, the film has done a series of things, all expressed by ‘transitive processes’ (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014) that produce a visible result: ‘turned stereotypes, interrupted, empowered’. Similarly, in the comment below, the group noticed how the rural essentialism that Africa consists of mountains, jungles, huts, villages, and the practice of stick throwing and lions in the street, is challenged. The film showed us that it is not like that. We have our own style of building our countries. Africa is not poor, it’s rich in tradition and culture … and its very rich: So as much as you’d like to say oh there’s a scarcity of food, you need culture, you need things like traditions well in place otherwise you just have in a sense an empty vessel of a person walking around. The film dispelled the overriding negative views of Africa held by most students. This attitude towards the mother continent was particularly germane to the present

Black Panther as catalyst for changing perceptions of Africa  113 investigation into students’ received mindsets and their newly developed schemas and critical points of view. Examples of this are contained in the following: It creates a positive view of Africa; it almost changes your mindset about it because this is what Africa can be like. It creates a positive view of Africa; it almost gives you a little bit of hope as to what Africa can be like. Students commented that the film depicts ‘Africa’ as becoming more independent and protecting itself better. Marginalised African communities all around the world have had the opportunity to idolize the characters and identify themselves in a positive light. In terms of social awareness instilled through the film, one of the male students continued: Another positive portrayal of African heritage that this movie explores is the importance of culture and Ubuntu against the backdrop of innovative technology. T’Challa’s Black Panther suit has technological powers, yet at the same time a traditional necklace compliments his suit. Many historical cultural rituals are presented in combination with very technologically superior aspects. If the above comments refer to the theme of heightened awareness of persistent prejudices and stereotyping, particularly with regard to race and gender, others pointed to the benefits of inclusivity and respect for all as in the comment below: Everyone needs to be treated with respect. Teachers nowadays really need to be educated to portray a certain understanding, a certain respect towards everybody equally. That should be your main priority. Young and old should be respected and this should be conveyed in your classroom. We can’t speak Xhosa, so we should try because we speculate and assume things. Worthy of note in these excerpts is the use of deontic modals (needs to/should) encoding the students’ desire that African people be treated in an inclusive manner, away from a vision reminiscent of the apartheid era. The above comments show an awakening awareness of empathy and of humility. The notion of keeping knowledge to oneself to the exclusion of others, in the way that the Nationalists did during the apartheid era, is strongly criticised as in the words of a student who noted that ‘The Wakandans never did that’. In general, engaging with each other about the film, expanded student’s critical skills to the point that they felt: ...the walls of judgment have been broken down. I thought okay, this is just going to be one of those African movies, but then I was shocked and surprised.

114  Liesel Hibbert and Roberta Piazza In their reflections on the cognitive process the students went through both individually and as a group, most students mentioned the value of enhanced critical skills (a category that emerged from the comments) through the focus group discussion. They were surprisingly critical (a shocker) of the way in which the movie was produced: Shouldn’t they be using us? But then you can look at it from another point of view where they need to sell the movie… …by the international talent and also local talent, both of whom spoke Xhosa. Ok, so I think it was a shocker for most of us. In addition, the students were ready to interrogate issues of gender, which becomes apparent in the extract below from one of the essays: The film Black Panther is praised for its strong feminist characters, Black Panther is described as a post-gender films for depicting the women of Wakanda as savvy warriors who are conscious of their power and know how to use it. We the audience get to witness an all-female protections squad and this displayed that women are seen as powerful in contrast to Macbeth, where Lady Macbeth had to wish she was a man in order to take brave and violent actions. From the start of the film, the women’s bodies are revealed, however their personalities and skill are what is most exceptional. The women are equally trusted to protect the nation as men are and they do not need to be rescued by men. The women who are Nakia and Okoye are also seen saving King T’Challa’s life on several occasions. For example, when Killmonger battles T’Challa off a cliff which could’ve resulted in his death. But, luckily Nakia came to his rescue and did not give up trying to find him. This also illustrates the fact that even though the women in Black Panther are powerful and they are able to do anything that men can do and they still have compassion. In the extract, the student veers towards a classic female figure, who albeit symbolising powerfulness, is insensitive and greedy. By contrast, the feminine ideal proposed in Back Panther is a figure that combines strength, autonomy, and compassion. These women are active and agentive, they don’t need to be the recipients of someone else’s action, and ‘be rescued’. In fact, they ‘rescue’ men’s lives. Issues of ethics unconsciously rose to the surface. One student provided an interesting analysis of the ambiguities around the moral and value systems of Killmonger and showed appreciation for his personal trauma following his father’s death: Killmonger is a hero but he succumbed to the dark side and he only saw the violent path towards justice. Of course he is a man with a tragic backstory: After the murder of this father he was never right. Everything he does is for the right reasons, but now he is deep in vengeance. He does not see anything else but blood. One could assert that Killmonger is an anti-hero, but leads T’Challa to be the hero

Black Panther as catalyst for changing perceptions of Africa  115 that the world needs, not just for Wakanda. Killmonger is not the hero that the world needs, but an anti-hero that T’Challa deserves to wake him up from selfishness. In general, the students seem to show a clear awareness of the social values and morals endorsed in the film. In the above excerpt, the definition of Killmonger as a selfish anti-hero is indicative of the student’s strong evaluation attuned to the film’s emphasis on values of moral rectitude and straightforwardness. Similarly, the excerpts below from three different essays are very sensitive to the moral and emotional issues that the protagonists T’Challa and Erik Killmonger continuously face. This is evidenced by the choice of such lexical items in the area of evaluation as ‘capable, caring and strong’, ‘ fair’, and ‘good’ all showing a positive semantic prosody, and, on the contrary, ‘greedy’ indexing moral condemnation. T’Challa is a proud prince and when he is challenged for his right to the thrones at the coronation ceremony, he accepts the challenge without hesitation. This shows confidence in his own abilities as he is also temporarily cut off from his Black Panther powers (24:25–24:42). T’Challa is also loved by his people and this can be seen through their chants of his name during the coronation duel (27:00–28.00). His people see him as a very capable, caring and strong leader. The good, is that both T’Challa and Erik Killmonger try to remain just and fair, try to maintain or implement peace everywhere. The bad is that Erik Killmonger killed and burnt /his claim to the throne. The pretty ugly is the cause that Erik Killmonger fought for, the mercy that was also overthrown by rage when Black Panther caught Klaue and that tribe fought against tribe for peace and defeat. The movie has a rich background of history and even though it is portrayed as a fictional place (Wakanda), the movie is more than just about superhuman creatures. It conveys a very important message namely ‘never turn your back to those who need your help, or display greed, when you have the power to help’. Once again, here the mixture of moral evaluation with regard to the main characters and general critical sensitivity to cinematic issues is quite visible. The students don’t hesitate to appraise positively and negatively the choices of both T’Challa and Erik Killmonger, while they are able to categorise the film as going beyond what it appears to be and not just dealing with superhuman creatures. Summary and analysis of findings regarding Question 2: Can the film be used in Grade 7–12 English classes to raise awareness of social justice, and would the student be inclined to do this, prompted by this intervention?

Commentary on prejudices and stereotyping were most prevalent, with comments mainly on the women characters, indicating renewed gender awareness in general. For instance, a male student writes: Traditionally Hollywood has always portrayed males as owning physical power, yet this film introduces women as equally agile to me.

116  Liesel Hibbert and Roberta Piazza Responses from a group of mostly female students (pre-service educators) showed their interest in the feminist issue and related strongly to how the African women are portrayed in the film. This identical view is strongly represented in the review literature on the movie in the local press, such as that of the reviewer Morake (2018:10) who commented that women were depicted as strong, liberated and independent, and powerful: I lost my mind over the three-dimensional women, particularly Nakia and Okoye, who did not lose their femininity in order to assert their agency and strength. Women’s ability to love, to adore and be loyal were represented as strengths, not weaknesses. They were not qualities that blinded judgement, but rather fueled these women’s actions. A female student alludes to Okoye describing her as a loyal citizen/warrior and looks up to her as a role model who gets her priorities right, and for whom the nation comes first and before her own relations: Okoye, played by Danai Gurira, is the general to the Wakanda army. She is a very powerful independent woman who puts the needs of her homeland before her own loved one’s. It is shown that she is willing to kill her lover for Wakanda, but her lays down his weapon and surrenders to her. This shows that amount of loyalty she must have towards Wakanda and whoever oversees it. This character is not driven by greed but rather by doing what is right and serving her nation, even if it means serving an unfit king. For example, Okoye realizes that Killmonger is an unfit king and attacks him. Killmonger and Okoye engage in a battle and this is a clear indication that the new kind does not care about Wakanda but rather it’s resources. This type of selfishness shows that Killmonger has greed for power. Another student makes a similar observation about Nakia: She tried everything she could to save Wakanda. She is the most influential woman in Wakanda. She is King T’Challa’s right hand and protects her country at all costs. This is evident when T’Challa is overthrown by another king and she stays to serve that king, irrespective of the fact that she knows that he was not the right king for the Wakandan people. A heightened awareness of sexism seems to emerge from these reflections. Several students commented on the fact that they became aware of there being no balance of power between the sexes, e.g. You wouldn’t expect females to have such power within them! Isn’t it quite ironic… then here, its completely different, where women have such a big role in the country.

Black Panther as catalyst for changing perceptions of Africa  117 Likewise, the next quotation shows that the film created awareness of the plight of women. The student made intertexual references to texts with which she established analogies, and which helped her construct a cogent narrative of female liberation: In the Ellen Plaatjies movie, she murders her son. So it’s in a coloured context. So bringing these thing into the curriculum enables learners to broaden their minds. Also the novel we studied, Purple Hibiscus, taught me how oppressed women really are, and not just in certain religions, certain cultures … Several female students observed that women were still subservient to men in Wakanda: …because in the film, whenever two females are speaking in a scene, it’s about a male, it’s never about themselves, their personal issues, it’s about a male. So, they don’t completely take away from the power of the man in the film. Asked to compare the subject matter of Macbeth, which the students studied, as a text portraying a very strong woman to that of Black Panther, this interesting comment emerged, showing a heightened awareness of the need to stay informed of political issues in South Africa: Based on the research done I would say these dramas (meaning the Shakespeare play Macbeth and the film Black Panther) can be taught in South African schools, as most people should know that no matter in which country you are, there is always, and has been a very recent thing, whereby politicians are fighting for the high positions and for presidency. These dramas are relevant for learners to understand the fight and measures to which people go for power. Summary of responses to Question 3: To what extent do you find Black Panther a good catalyst for the teaching of English in a justice awareness-based curriculum?

The student quotation below represents the view of most students who are totally convinced of the film’s suitability, especially in relation to more traditional texts: When analysing both stories I do personally feel that although the plot and story lines of both Black Panther and Shakespeare’s play Macbeth are similar, Black Panther is much more teachable than Macbeth. The language use in Macbeth can cause learners to become uninterested and constantly having to translate would take from them being able to enjoy the book. Black Panther, the film, however makes use of easier language use. This makes it more relatable and easier to teach. The inference is that the student is referring to the ease with which students can relate to contemporary American English in particular, as preferable to

118  Liesel Hibbert and Roberta Piazza something from a different era, in a historical dialect. Most of the students have grown up watching American television programmes, which are prevalent in the South African milieu. These influences are what young South Africans are mostly exposed to in the media. Consequently, young South Africans often emulate the behaviour, identity features, and accents of American youth. We should tell the parents they should empower their children, not demotivate them. The film was an eye-opener, in that it set the record straight. There’s a lot I can do to decolonise the minds of the young learners. The learners are very timid. They are scared to speak up. I would say ‘You have an opinion. Don’t be scared. Speak up!’ The film highlighted prevalent mono-conceptions of Africa and Africans, and how the students see themselves as Africans: We didn’t understand the symbolism behind, for instance, people wearing blankets in Pick ’n Pay. We didn’t know the significance of it. E.g Regarding seeing the ‘hut’ as ancestral birthplace, I realised that ‘It’s not just a hut’. The film exposed the meanings of African symbols. Also: …everyone assumes Africans are disorganised, poor and uneducated. One student relates a story of racism as a global phenomenon: In Australia, my sister who is a black nurse was addressed as ‘you animal’, go back to where you came from by a white patient. The movie inverts this image of Africans conceived of as ‘animals’, by presenting the Wakandans as a sophisticated tech-savvy nation. And another stated that: You can’t just call every white person a coloniser. It’s nonsense. It doesn’t make sense as all! …Also, white people hug. We were not raised like that. The film created a heightened awareness of stereotypes ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover./The walls of judgement have been broken’. While in some cases, comments were shaped as a small narrative: ‘I told a boy to keep quiet and he told me I’m a racist, but I told that I told everyone to keep quiet’. This alludes to the generalisation that African people are often stigmatised for being noisy or reprimanded at school for being loud and disruptive. The students were asked how they would use this film to address coloniality in the classroom, i.e. disempowering fossilised ideas as well as automated thinking.

Black Panther as catalyst for changing perceptions of Africa  119 In the focus group discussion, the film was praised for broadening the students’ minds (not to play the race card/I think I would teach my learners to stop cry victim all the time). Responses to Question 4: Personally, what would you do in your classroom?

The students greatly engaged with this question suggesting various modalities of intervention (In the classroom, I would use poetry, draw similarities in themes. I would introduce topics on superdiversity) and commenting of the power of language: Okay, so it improved your understanding of superdiversity, not just such uhm random accent and random cultural goods thrown together, but it’s a very strategic way of speaking. It’s a very, it’s a powerful way of speaking and it’s an acquired skill, the skill of conversing across cultures and diverse accents, dialects etc. Even if it sounds, to an outsider, as a mess and it doesn’t make sense but it is, superdiversity is very strategic for power of identity, right? In general, students considered the film a good (teachable) text to work on a number of issues: Yes, in my personal opinion, it is indeed a teachable film. These are examples of propaganda, ruling, power, violence, love, culture, technology, justice, ego pride and so many more. There are so many elements to study and discuss. Black Panther is one of my ultimate favorite movies, whether the film will be part of the curriculum or not, I cannot wait to get my hands dirty when doing a fun activity with the learners about Black Panther and its elements, during teaching practice, if I manage to get permission. Finally, the film’s agentive representation of Africans refutes Black passivity and lack of self-respect. ‘I think I would just ask learners to stop being victims, to stop laying around, to disrespect people, to use violence every time just because we have been colonised …’ Analysis of responses from the UK students

Similar to the discussion with the South African group, the responses by the UK cohort were lively and showed a high level of engagement. The overall reaction was that the film is a valuable contribution to African history and a very welcome tool to use in schools that want to implement a decolonising curriculum, because it is ‘not offensive’ in its message, and because ‘it’s an action-packed film that young viewers will enjoy’. Some consensus was reached that Black Panther can be considered an example of necessary ‘positive discrimination’, because of the role reversal between African and White characters and the superiority attributed to the African people. Some students suggested that it overturns cinematic stereotypes of exceptional African presence amongst Whites. For this reason, the film could be one of a series of artefacts to raise awareness among young learners of the possibility of improved

120  Liesel Hibbert and Roberta Piazza relationships between White and African people. The students referred to District 9 (2009, by Neill Blomkamp, a co-production of USA, New Zealand, and South Africa), another science fiction film set in Johannesburg and inspired by events during the apartheid era in Cape Town’s District Six, as another good example of a film that subverts traditional canons of blackness. The students proposed to show these movies as an ensemble in a decolonising curriculum. What follows is a summary of some of the main points the students raised. The points have been organised in a relatively coherent way according to the emerging themes, even though they come from different small groups. Black Panther as an echo of African history

Some of the comments established an intertextual comparison with other African history films. It was suggested, for instance, that Black Panther is not explicitly a film that, like 12 Years a Slave, revisits the history of slavery and discrimination against African people. It therefore doesn’t revive the memory of black Africans and the responsibility that White people have in their racialisation. However, within the science fiction frame of the film, a few discreet hints are interspersed as reminders of a more realistic historical context. One of these is the Museum scene. The protagonist seems to be foreign to the idea of a museum as storage of past knowledge and experience and perceives the items on display as marketable. The students were not completely sure about this moment in the plot and took into account the possibility that the man’s unfamiliarity with the concept of ‘museum’ could be ironic or that he could just be pretending he is not familiar with such an institution to reach a specific objective. Whether genuine or pretend, the important scene affords the protagonist the opportunity to hint at the cultural appropriation by the White man of the Black African artefacts and the history of colonialism. When the woman curator clarifies that items on display in a museum are not commercial commodities, ‘These items are not on sale’, his reply ‘How do you think your ancestors got them?’ is a clear condemnation of the historical theft suffered by African people. The students appreciated this comment and said that for them this is a token of ‘agency’ on the part of the African character and a sense of historical awareness at the same time. They noted that the subtle and witty comment does not convey anger. About this scene, one further point raised by another group seems important. Black Panther is a science fiction story set in a futuristic world and, because of its unreal nature, the temporal references are fluid and less solidly anchored to events. The students commented that, within the temporal frame set by the film, references to the past can be taken as deictic, indicating a ‘timeless’ frame and can be interpreted as referring to the present context that the viewers inhabit. If that is the case, then the students noted that the reference to the cultural appropriation in the museum scene is not a reminder of past history but a critical comment on what is still occurring in today’s reality. A case in point is the reference to colonialism when the sister calls the White American man a ‘colonialist’. This is a very rare clear reference to White supremacy,

Black Panther as catalyst for changing perceptions of Africa  121 and a reminder of discrimination against African people; other references are instead more implicit. A student brought the attention of the class to the scene of the three suits that a man has to choose from and has to hit. ‘This is a metaphor’, it was commented, ‘a metaphor of the struggle for civil rights’. The student explained that as the suit bounces back in spite of being hit repeatedly, the scene works as a reminder of the ordeal African people have always had to go through and the resilience they have developed over the centuries; they have had to bounce back when defeated, and made subservient, by the Whites. Representation of the African continent in Black Panther

The students observed that the representation of the African continent was relatively ‘balanced and positive’ and not condescending. Wakanda is advanced, and there is a great sense of pride among its people who believe they live in paradise. Such a positive and romanticised representation triggered a comment by a mixed-race student in the group. She compared Wakanda to the place in the Seychelles where her relatives come from. Although they have lived in the UK for several decades, her parents’ attachment to their motherland is still very strong as is evident in their insistent praise of it as a land of natural beauty and peace. Similarly, when referring to her relatives who still live in the Seychelles, she said, ‘when they visit, they feel sorry for those who live in England who lead a grim life compared to their paradisiac life at home’. A discussion ensued from the scene of the tribal dance on water. For some students, this was a commodification of African customs and an exoticisation of their rituals, albeit within a futuristic context. In spite of the sophisticated technology and advancement, in spite of the African people financially supporting the underdeveloped White west, ‘Black Africans still dance in a tribal manner. This is not in tune with the rest of the film, really’. This point, which conjures up a vision of black Africans as backwards, was perceived as contradictory and ideological, and not consistent with the futuristic and progressive environment of the film. To other students, however, this reference to African tribal customs was a welcome moment to inform the viewers about African culture. ‘People must know about them as they know about Western traditions for instance the change of Guards, which is no less ritualistic and exotic’ one of the students commented. They appreciated that, in the film, Africa is represented through a juxtaposition between modern and traditional customs and values. Expression of emotions in Black Panther

In the UK students’ view, the ‘healthy’ expression of emotions adds to the realistic representation of the film characters. Even in this case, however, it is a feature with a clearly educational valence. According to one student, T’Challa expresses: frustration and anger, which echoes sentiments in real life in response to a situation of social injustice; however, he is not perceived as a bad person because his anger is explained and rationalised.

122  Liesel Hibbert and Roberta Piazza Therefore, the viewers can understand the protagonist’s predicament and can be enticed to side with him. Some students understood T’Chaka and Killmonger as reminders of Malcolm X in the sense that they all struggled to achieve their goals. The film, therefore, also shows a balance between aggression and peace to obtain equality. Africa as an example of race equality in the film

According to the UK students, except for very occasional moments, the film shows no tension between African and White western people. An example is that the American man accepts without any difficulty that Africa is much more developed than his country. This proves that there is ‘respect’ on both sides and no power play or attempt to establish supremacy between White and African people. Evidence of this is the fact that the main character and the villain both belong to the same race. This is crucial as the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ opposition is constructed only in terms of objective positive and negative values, without any reference to skin colour. In addition, as some students pointed out, this adds ‘a layer of realism to the film’ because it represents the African people as realistically imperfect although the film belongs to the science fiction genre. Some students also commented that the film also challenges viewers’ expectations in its portrayal of the villain who is ‘fighting for social justice and yet is portrayed as evil’. The usual binary between good and bad is therefore problematised when a character is depicted as doing the right thing in the wrong way. Some final considerations and conclusions

From reading the comments by the South African and the UK cohorts, it is clear how much both sets of students agreed upon and how much of their reflections showed analogies and similarities. In particular, the stress on the agentive representation of the people in Wakanda was a recurring comment in both groups, as was the attention to how characters in Black Panther are portrayed as morally honourable. In line with this, both groups of students generally did not comment on the negative ‘unresolved melancholy’ that Adéẹ̀kọ ́ (2020) identifies in the film in association with Killmonger. The attention was centred on the morally balanced agency of the people of Wakanda and the power of Black Panther to invert old colonialist conceptualisations of black Africans. The absence of a desire for retaliation and anger or frustration was also commented on positively by both groups. Some small differences were noticeable. For instance, the attention to gender representation by the South African students was not paralleled with the same intensity by the UK group, while the identification of references to Africans’ exploitation was more evident among the UK students. Overall, the film created hope for the future, as well as awareness of what the different levels and meanings of ‘being oppressed’ might be. Most South African students said they realised that they are not, in fact, oppressed. The film therefore instilled confidence. It prompted them to see themselves more positively.

Black Panther as catalyst for changing perceptions of Africa  123 Practicing self-awareness and self-consciousness, i.e. reflexivity, as a habitual activity created a stronger sense of agency for South African students, and one of whom said representatively: ‘I am talking about your persona, how you see yourself, how you perceive yourself, and that is going to change the world around you’. The South African students’ reaction was expectedly different from that of the UK students who, being predominately White, focused on the element of role reversal between the West and Africa and the novel spatial allocation of technological innovation. In the South African class discussion, students’ responses to the film were overwhelmingly positive. As people of colour, they all found the film empowering and felt that the story was about them. The South African students presented some good ideas in their essays regarding how and why they would teach the film in an English class in order to heighten awareness of social justice. The data taken from the follow-up focus discussion, which took place some weeks later, elicited more in-depth critical responses and observations. In summary, South African students were motivated to participate fully, and responded well to the critical part of the project, especially given the fact that it fitted into the general theme of the semester, namely, ‘Should we all be feminists?’ The South African student feedback suggests they delinked from previous perceptions and conceptions they had held. The South African students expressed heightened awareness of a US agenda for portraying an African country this particular way for the first time. They understood the significance of this in terms of world politics and expressed a heightened awareness of their own conceptions of Africans and of themselves as Africans. In general, these students expressed a heightened awareness of sexism and other prejudices. These prejudices included their own as well as those generated by the US-dominated Western media in general. Many South African students mentioned that they gained first-hand experience on how to provide beneficial out-of-the-box, in-classroom, social justice awareness tasks for disengaged high school learners. These learners often crave participation in a wider, debating forum, and entering the realm of global concerns. Some of the more interesting and idiosyncratic cinematographic comments warrant mentioning. Some South African students who watched the movie reacted on ‘gut’ feelings (in the essay and the focus groups) that the women in the film were depicted as dependent, reactive, and under the rule of male power. This differing viewpoint (other South African students saw the women in the film as powerful) raised an interesting point to pursue with the students. What kinds of women are possible and imagined as future African women of status, according to how African women are depicted in the movie, which was very unmediated, general, and void of class, socio-economic status, and culture and demographics. For instance, the backdrop was taken from one part of the country that did not match the simultaneous sound/speech dubbing in Xhosa, which means that status, cultural groups’ attire, and language affiliations of current and past African cultural groups were meshed in the film. This very odd mixture of disparate, occasionally opposing, sometimes concordant responses created a textured semblance and meaningful resemblance to

124  Liesel Hibbert and Roberta Piazza the plurality, discord, and agreements of society as a whole in post-liberation South Africa; this strongly mirrored the findings of Mistry and Andrew (2017:125) who observed that: ‘This agglutinative way of teaching and research also encourages a rethinking of the arts school as a space of acquiring a particular set of techniques and skills that locate themselves in practices such as painting and sculpture – or those that are more particular to other disciplines’. South African student teachers were given the opportunity to put their own identity formations under the lens, individually and as a group. They interrogated their own relations with ‘Africa’ and to what degree they view themselves as empowered from a global perspective. Conclusion Delinking from fossilised thinking about Africa and African selves was successfully accomplished by creating awareness of the possibilities for students to reimagine their own identities. The authors are convinced that the defamiliarisation pedagogy and research tasks, linked to the exposure to Afrofuturism in film and literature, helped to disrupt students’ previous negative views of Africa. Introducing Afrofuturism alerted the students to the dangers of dominant and/or hegemonic cultures and the adverse effects thereof. We conclude that the film was a useful catalyst for introducing awareness of social justice as a curriculum framework in any discipline, particularly where there is a mix of marginalised and privileged students. The community in the classroom becomes a lived experience of negotiating equitable space for intellectual growth across difference. References Adéẹ̀kọ́, A. (2020). Introduction to Special Issue Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 7(2), 103–106. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Blommaert, J. & Rampton, B. (2012). Language and Superdiversity MMG Working Paper 12-09 ISSN 2192-2357. Costandius, E., Nell, I., Alexander, N., McKay, M., Blackie, M., Malgas, R. & Setati, E. (2018). # FeesMustFall and decolonising the curriculum: Stellenbosch University students’ and lecturers’ reactions. South African Journal of Higher Education 32(2), 65–85. Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and text: Linguistic and intertextual analysis within discourse analysis. Discourse & Society 3(2), 193–217. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Halliday, M. & Matthiessen, C. (2014) Halliday’s introduction to functional grammar. London: Routledge. Hibbert, L. (2018). Critical language awareness as decolonising tool for a unifying ecology in teacher education in South Africa. Journal for Language Teaching= Ijenali Yekufundzisa Lulwimi= Tydskrif vir Taalonderrig 52(2), 78–98. Hoffman, C. & Kirner-Ludwig, M. (eds.) (2020). Telecinematic discourse. London: Bloomsbury.

Black Panther as catalyst for changing perceptions of Africa  125 Johnson, L. & Morris, P. (2010). Towards a framework for critical citizenship education. The Curriculum Journal 21(1), 77–96. Langacker, R. (2008). Cognitive grammar: A basic introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Langacker, R. (2009). Cognitive grammar. In Sandra, D., Ostman, J-O. & Verschueren, J. (eds.), Cognition and pragmatics (pp. 78–86). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Mehdi Riazi, A. & Candlin, C. N. (2014). Mixed-methods research in language teaching and learning: Opportunities, issue and challenges. Language Teaching 47(2), 135–173. Mistry, J. & Andrew, D. (2017). Pedagogies and practices of disaffection: Film programmes in arts schools in a time of revolution. Journal of African Cinemas 9(2, 3), 119–32. Morake, T. (2018). ‘Black Panther’ is our moment. Feb 24th Saturday Argus, 10. Piazza, R. (2007). Questioning and politeness strategies in the construction of students’ identity in English and Italian academic seminars. In A. Rubino (ed.) Lingua, identità e comunicazione in contesti anglofoni e italiani. Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata, 3, SILTA Rome. Piazza, R. (2017). Ideology in the multimodal discourse of television documentaries on Irish travellers’ and gypsies’ communities in the UK. Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 9(1), 63–90. Piazza, R., Haarman. L. & Caborn, A. (eds.) (2016). Values and choices in television discourse: A view from both sides of the screen. London: Palgrave. Piazza. R. & Lashmar, P. (2017). Jeremy Corbyn according to the BBC: Ideological representation and identity construction of the Labour Party leader. In R. Piazza & C. Taylor (eds.), CADAAD Special Issue on Identity and Interdisciplinarity 9(2), 120–141. Rumelhart, D. E. (1980). Schemata: The building blocks of cognition. In R. J. Spiro, B. C Bruce & W. Brewer (eds.), Theoretical issues in reading comprehension (pp. 33–58). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Shklovsky, V. (1965). Art as technique. In L. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis (eds. and trans.), Russian formalist criticism: Four essays (pp. 3–24). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. (Original work published 1917). Shklovsky, V. (1998). Art as technique. In J. Rivkin & M. Ryan (eds.), Literary theory: An anthology. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and racial studies 30(6), 1024–1054. Waghid, Z. & Hibbert, L. (2018). Advancing border thinking through defamiliarisation in uncovering the darker side of coloniality and modernity in South African higher education. South African Journal of Higher Education 32(4), 263–283. https://pure.mpg.de/rest/ items/ite​m _16​1514​4 _3/compon​ent/file_​1615​143/cont​ent Waghid, Z. (2009). Examining an education for decoloniality and implication for higher education in South Africa. In C. H. Mantaulu, J. J. K. Divala & Y. Waghid (eds.), Education for decoloniality and decolonisation in Africa (pp. 155–73). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Waghid, Z. & Ontong, K. (2021). Exploring the phenomenon of Afrofuturism in film in decolonizing the university curriculum: A case study of a South African university. Citizenship Teaching & Learning 17(1), 27–48.

8 Developing a transformative Critical Language Awarenessfocused curriculum Liesel Hibbert

Introduction This chapter focuses on the question of what kind of language awareness can be brought to bear to transform the perpetual, and self-perpetuating, stand-off on race/ethnicity and separatist discourses in South African pre-teacher education. Collaborative tasks were provided to students, together with opportunities for guided reflection on these tasks. The language awareness tasks were distributed to a class of student teachers at a university of technology in the Cape Province of South Africa. A process of recognition, identification, interrogation and selfreflection was undertaken by strategically creating discursive spaces in the classroom and introducing Critical Language Awareness-earning tools. The tasks were found to enhance the critical thinking of student teachers. The aim of this intervention was to model a particular interpretation of the new Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) curriculum (SAQA 2010), which, through the process of students working collaboratively in a series of activities, was intended to provide a sense of agency to pre-service teachers and their learners. This kind of intervention shifts the emphasis away from traditionally quantitatively measured student performance in English. The focus is upon less tangible yet essential skills which develop students into critical and empathetic thinkers, and ultimately create social cohesion – one of the millennial goals of the South African education system. Non-transformative procedures have, however, become calcified in the education system at present so that it is necessary to kickstart transformation within classroom structures and to devise ways of collaboratively and innovatively engaging students and staff as partners in learning. The research paradigm in which this investigation is situated is interventionist, transformative and qualitative. The project described here sets out to build reflective processes and critical awareness of constructions of power and identity in texts in the curriculum in order to prompt awareness of the ways in which decolonising processes could be implemented. This is particularly important in South Africa, where the linguistic- and socioeconomic divide between white English and Afrikaans speakers, African language speakers and speakers of other languages groups such as Hindu and Gujarati speakers of whom there are many, and cultural groups such as Muslims, of whom there DOI: 10.4324/9781003382645-8

Transformative Critical Language Awareness-focused curriculum  127 are many, is huge. In most ways, the schism between these groups is not visibly narrowing but seems in some ways to be amplified as a result of what has become a despotic one-party political system in South Africa, ruled by a majority neo-Zulu tribal ethos. Students were still entering higher education from divided systems of education in 2018, or from socially and/or culturally homogeneous student bodies in a few large groups, e.g. those from privileged schools, those from township schools, and those from rote learning poorly resourced urban or inner city non-transformed schools. In only some of these schools do learners develop a strong sense of belonging and voice. They also do not automatically develop community-building expertise, empathy, reciprocity, creativity and reflexivity for self-awareness due to feelings of inadequacy in the face of unfamiliar ways of speaking. These attributes are taught in expensive private schools or in small private community-based e.g. Muslim schools. Many students who will take up their teaching careers in a range of schools report that they feel that they will have no say, and no power to implement changes when they arrive as teachers in those schools. This project has therefore explored some of the possible ways and means of empowering future teachers to face and overcome intimidation in the outdated, stifling, established and automated rote learning system. Research questions which guided this study were thus: • How can a learning space be turned into a collaborative space of enquiry? • Can Critical Language Awareness practices instil creative patterns of interpretation, positive senses of agency and an integrated community of practice? Socio-historical context Since the beginning of the South African democratic political transformation process, more than 20 years ago, racism and stereotyping, contrary to expectations, has not noticeably diminished but seems instead to have become more overt, almost to the degree of having changed into a form of symbolic violence. This kind of racial stereotyping remains highly visible in pre-service teacher education, and for pre-service teachers of English in particular, where students from different ethnic groups with differing competences in English appear in the main not ready to deal with difference or to communicate freely with what or whom is still largely regarded as the ‘other’. From the classroom evidence of this research, students continue to live and act in separatist groups from each other within the classroom. They often appear to operate socially, and in the institution, as separate racialised ‘tribes’. This situation persists even though they have spent several years together in a classroom as a supposed learning community. Horsthemke (2017: 6) issues a clear warning against this kind of ‘transcultural’ situation: ‘the depiction of cultures as separate, distinct islands or self-contained spheres is both unrealistic and normatively dangerous’. In the context of this discussion, coloniality is sustained in a Gramscian sense of hegemonic supervision of a willing and unwilling oppressed majority which derogates the colonised as objects of production; preventing the majority from becoming critical and autonomous agents.

128  Liesel Hibbert In terms of higher education in South Africa, Luckett (2016: 10) states that ‘it is ethically imperative to recuperate, and in the process, to build black student agency for integrated identity formation, deep learning, and academic achievement’ through ‘dialogic engagement, a commitment to building a community on campus and knowledge production that expands the archive and re-reads the canon in new ways’. Luckett’s argument encodes an ethos of inclusivity, of restoring agency among black students, of the re-reading of the canon of English literature, as well as the introduction of globally relevant texts, particularly African literatures and texts. Luckett (2016) describes higher institutions of learning in the country as reactive sites of extreme contention in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, economics, and equity issues, particularly regarding curriculum content based on and informed by African views and perspectives which to date remain neglected in the education system. Luckett thus regards the institutional and socio-political landscape within which teacher education in South Africa is poised to transform itself as potentially toxic, static and destructive. This negative landscape could, however, itself be transformed by embarking on a pedagogical experimental tour. The aim of such a transformative excursion is for higher education institutions to respond more appropriately to a student body for whom language alternation and superdiversity (Blommaert 2017) are the norm in student interaction. This reality ought to be taken into account in addressing inequality within and outside formal learning spaces. The curriculum intervention described here prompts students to share learning across cultures, to expand their existing repertoires, and to acquire critical tools for reflection and reflexivity. Lillis and Scott (2007: 13) distinguish between students who gain knowledge and those who gain voice. By ‘voice’ is meant the active participation of students in critiques of perspectives on those taken-for-granted knowledges which have become fossilised within curricula in South Africa nationally. For example, African literatures as part of World Literatures in English are still being implemented in ways that resemble tokenism in that they are regarded as rarefied texts. Luckett (2016) and Lillis and Scott (2007) argue that little attention has so far been paid to the incorporation of indigenous African knowledges in English language education. If these knowledges and literatures are acknowledged in higher education curricula, they comprise the knowledges of the majority, who essentially remain marginal and relatively disempowered people of colour. These knowledges should be included and prominently highlighted in the curriculum. This particular study is transformative by nature and draws a distinction between normative and transformative approaches to curriculum. This has been extensively discussed by Lillis and Scott (2007) and by Jacobs (2013) among many other curriculum researchers in South Africa who describe how the curriculum for English teacher training has solidified largely in favour of one canon which is broadly the Western canon, founded on the prioritisation of modern Western knowledge over ‘non-western’ knowledges. This ossified canon is based on an assumption that ‘modern’ knowledge, and its transfer via educational institutions, would naturally instantiate modern subjects. Yet an exclusive emphasis on African

Transformative Critical Language Awareness-focused curriculum  129 writing and on an African literary canon has skewed some curricula interpretations towards parochial and essentialist knowledges and views minimally connected or related to ‘modern’ knowledge. The more appropriate term ‘World Literatures in English’ has not as yet entered the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) curriculum for teacher education. One of the ways in which curricula may be transformed is through mobilising the use of multiple languages in the co-interpretation and co-construction of knowledge. The issue of including African language-speaking students from currently and previously marginalised groups is neither acknowledged nor adequately addressed by lecturing/knowledge transmission-only methods (with no prompts for critical engagement). For the purposes of the decolonising of a curriculum project, this meant including the teaching of interlingual awareness, discourse awareness, interpretive skills, and the development of voice. One of the motivations for the project was based on the long-term observation that students view English as the language for ‘getting ahead’ economically. However, they needed to be more critically aware of what their choices are in terms of linguistic repertoires, and, in using this knowledge, make realistic choices which work for them. They also needed to be self-reflexive in terms of the consequences of their choices. To reiterate, what I did was to devise a classroom strategy which is designed to promote confidence and a sense of belonging, and thereby voice, based on the theoretical constructs outlined in the next section. Theoretical underpinnings According to Wertsch (2000: 335), cultures have always overlapped and been mutually constituting, characterised by mixtures and permutations. In this age of globalisation, this kind of crossing and mixing has become amplified in socioeconomic terms, with the global poor being ever further marginalised in terms of access to education and technology. The primary role of transformative education should be to counteract both colonisation and an apartheid/separatist kind of ‘indigenization’ by local authorities and to work towards transculturality. This project suggests ways in which lecturers and teachers can transform preservice teacher education based on the recognition of language alternation, i.e. transliteracies, languaging and transculturality. The strategies suggested prompt facilitators to recognise and affirm student identity and develop voice, rather than constructing serial deficit models as has been done in the past by separating second language speakers out into formulaic-style additional and add-on language development courses and additional years of study. This is still an ongoing custom at some South African institutions, perpetuating the stigmatised separate development policy of the apartheid era. Stornaiuolo, Smith and Phillips (2016: 4) suggest that ‘literacy is the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media, from signing and orality, through handwriting, print, TV, radio and films, to digital social networks’. This definition frames literacy as part of ‘a unifying ecology, not just of media, but of all literacies relevant to reading, writing, interaction

130  Liesel Hibbert and culture’. Other researchers have named these rather ambiguous, unpredictable crossings between and through discourse communities, which they conceive of as unbounded systems constantly in flux in time and space. Crossings (Rampton 1995) such as these are variably known as trajectories, re-semiotisations or interactions in third space. One of the key questions regarding learner uptake of literacies posed by Stornaiuolo et al. (2016) is directly relevant to the quest for decolonising higher education curricula: ‘How do people take each other into account and signal their understandings to one another, and what resources do they make use of, out of those which they have at their disposal?’ (Stornaiuolo et al. 2016: 13). From this arises another question: ‘How can knee-jerk culturallybiased responses be recognised, interrupted and interrogated in order to reveal the ways in which they perpetuate or counter social inequality?’ (17). These questions are closely linked to the kinds of collaborative language activities and critical reading across disciplines in higher education which is illustrated in this chapter. Kaschula (2016: 210) poses this problem statement as follows: ‘… the power imbalances that hold the normative in place, prevent genuine dialogue between traditions…’. A transliteracies pedagogy creates a learning community which establishes common understandings of how interactions are framed for inclusivity and mutual benefit of all parties, expanding reflective practices, teamwork repertoires, and repertoires of accountability, ethics and human rights agendas. A range of additional resources, technological and methodological, allow for alternative manners of expression and the possibility of minimising the disadvantages that additional-language users face. Multimodal engagement requires a curriculum focus on student-generated texts, using a variety of, and innovative combinations of, web-based tools. Text production should offer the opportunity for students to work in a variety of genres. In this study, the texts produced by student teachers were used as a basis from which to conduct collaborative class discussions and critique on the assumption that students are regarded as future catalysts of change. This implies that negotiation for meaning is required by interlocutors in order to bring their interpretive frames into alignment with each other. The challenge was for students to acquire interpretive repertoires and a sense of voice with which to brave cross-lingual and cross-cultural group discussions. The ways in which face-to-face interactions in this study were tailored to each situation and the diverse cultural mix of the participants, yielded positive feedback from the students. The curriculum design suggested by Lave and Wenger (1991) prioritises the creation of functional sites of equitable transactions in the classroom as a research forum and a close-knit learning community with a common discourse. The tasks outlined are simulations of ‘real-life’ contexts in which individuals perform as agentive selves. This classroom-based experimentation presents an opportunity for each student, or group of students, to develop different types of flexible language and discourse awareness as well as to develop the key graduate attributes relating to strong community-building value systems in the classroom as outlined in the universities’ Education Graduate Attributes document of 2016. Practically

Transformative Critical Language Awareness-focused curriculum  131 speaking, a series of workshops were conducted to reconstitute the class as a research forum and a close-knit learning community. In this study, a simulated functional site of diversity within the student group/class community was constituted and intended to act as a model for reallife interaction. A series of workshops were conducted at the onset of the course to establish such an ethos. Ideally, in this, a flexible pro-active learning organisation is created, in which the teaching agenda includes team processes, facilitation, mandating and leading with each student having the opportunity to experience all of these aspects of participation. This project used both Barton’s (1994: 68) ‘communities of practice’ lens, which views language in teaching and learning as socially situated, and the multiliteracies framework for language development (Gee 2008: 72; Cope & Kalantzis 2000: 5). The framework views any communicative situation in an institutionalised learning context as a coming together of multiple discourses around a specific task. According to the framework, learning communities are communities in which certain practices originate, are developed, perpetuated, and discarded, or adapted with the intention of moving them forward. This raises the question of what definitions there might be of ‘moving forward’. To some educationists and education policymakers, this kind of progression means education for economic gain. From a more comprehensive, inclusive and human rights perspective, performance and ‘progress’ in complex literacy performance are ideally measured by a cluster of variables which do not exclude the economic well-being of members of such communities of practice but do include such variables as the social wellbeing, strong senses of agency, and voices of members. A community of practice is defined as ‘an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavour’ (Eckert & McConnellGinet 2003: 464). Ellsworth (1989), an early conceptualiser of the idea of mutual engagement between students and educators for social justice, is cited by Freedman (2007): Grounded in a clearly articulated political agenda and her experience as a feminist teacher, Ellsworth provides a critique of ‘empowerment’, ‘student voice’ ‘dialogue’ and ‘critical reflection’ and raises provocative issues about the nature of action for social change and knowledge. (Ellsworth 1989 in Freedman 2007: 443) Ellsworth and Freedman, therefore, suggest that the nature of what is generally regarded as ‘empowering’ needs to be carefully deconstructed, and cannot be taken at face value. Kirkham (2015: 630) suggests examining intersections between class and ethnicity in order to gain a more refined picture of linguistic variation within communities and the ways in which both class and ethnicity index social categories and ideological orientations and attitudes. This approach shows how linguistic features overlap with demographic categories and distinctive styles of habitus and discourses. Lave and Wenger (1991), who first conceptualised communities of practice, describe their relation to the concept of ubuntu:

132  Liesel Hibbert … there is a commitment to reciprocity and reciprocal learning relationships, and a deepening participatory process, related to ubuntu. A different commitment is required from pre-service educators where they learn to value the learning of others as much as their own. The aim is not just to develop one’s own reflection skills but to facilitate the development of others’ reflection skills. (Lave & Wenger 1991 in Kirkham 2015) Critical Discourse Analysis (Pennycook 1994: 130) is an ideology-based notion of language. Language is seen to embody specific views. Language variations reflect and express the social differences that give rise to them. The notion of ‘disadvantage’ as a construct falls into this category. Language usage is seen as part of a social process that advantages some and disadvantages others in terms of political power. Analysis here is based on relationships drawn between ideological constructs and texts. In this view, language is the site of struggle (Graddol and Swann (1989: 165), whereas in a Foucauldian view, discourse is seen as the site of struggle. But then, how is discourse defined as distinct from language? One needs to look at definitions of texts for this answer. In a Foucauldian view, the definition of text is everything or anything which is given meaning through discourse (Pennycook 1994: 130). Foucault’s definition of discourse as expressed by Pennycook (1994: 128), refers to ‘ways of organising meaning that are often, though not exclusively realised through language’. This I take to mean that language is part of the order or disorder of discourse, one of the properties through which discourses are manifested. Discourses (Pennycook 1994: 128) are said to ‘map out’ what can be said and thought about what they define as their respective domains. Two kinds of language awareness are needed for addressing superdiversity (Blommaert 2017) in the classroom and strengthening interlingual awareness. One is related to interlingual communication, that is, communication between speakers of different languages, with all participants using English or any other common language. The second is discourse awareness, in the comprehensive ways that Gee (1996) defines it, as being composed of ways of talking, listening, reading, writing, acting, interacting, believing, valuing and using tools and objects, in particular settings and at specific times, so as to display or recognise a particular social identity (Gee 1996: 10). The higher education curriculum needs to afford students the opportunity for critical reflection and critical reading, and writing. These practices should be based on a discourse analysis framework, in particular on nexus analysis. The nexus is where and how different cultural, religious, regional, and gender discourses intersect, and how that intersection may be interpreted by the various stakeholders/participants in the conversation. Students’ critical reflection on various discourses as used by themselves and others both within and outside the classroom and institution needs to be developed. A point of entry into discourse analysis is a task in which students are asked to critique their own discourse resource-bases and to identify ‘foreign’ discourses embedded in their own language, for example American-speak, with which all

Transformative Critical Language Awareness-focused curriculum  133 South Africans are exposed to on the media. The curriculum therefore needs to afford the opportunity for the development of these critical practices by means of student production and analysis of case studies and/or literatures which centre around issues of race, culture, gender, and religion. The development of this kind of critical reflection and analysis is particularly important in South Africa where, in many cases, students embody outdated value systems, many of which are evidence of the long-term effects of apartheid. Pillay and Wassermann (2017: 29) provide clear evidence that the overt critical analysis of literature and/or other texts which address issues of race, culture, religion, and gender directly do not of themselves address the discrepancies and contradictions between students espoused and enacted values, and the prejudices in themselves and in their own lives. Critical Discourse Analysis of their own and each other’s discourses is crucial to their awareness of this, and to students’ development and use of these practices, and in turn, to develop conviction in them, and a motivation to develop these skills in their future learners. Understanding the concept of identity and how it articulates with class is central to Critical Language Awareness and intersectionality, and to students’ own lives and experiences, particularly in the context of a socially unequal society and history. Studying instances of intersectionality forms is a suitable basis for the development of Critical Language Awareness because it presupposes the ongoing development of nuanced views of the concept of identity. Because students viewing identity as intersectional indicates to them that the meanings of social categories such as gender may vary as a function of how they intersect with other aspects of a person’s identity, including ethnicity/culture, sexuality, religion, and aspects of material life other than money, such as lifestyle, educational experiences, and patterns of residence. All of these factors affect conceptions of ‘class’. Block and Corona (2014: 29–35) regard social class as a key construct and mediator of our life experience: …class always intersects with a long list of identity dimensions, such as gender, ethnicity, race, nationality, language and so forth. Indeed, it is one of the challenges of class-based research today to work out exactly how these different identity inscriptions interact with class. (Block & Corona 2014: 35) The explanation by Block and Corona (2014) of how this mediation can occur serves as a useful guide: ‘Taking on board inter-categorical and intra-categorical complexity allows us to see beyond the cardboard cut-out identities ascribed’, to more nuanced conceptions of identity through nexus analysis (Block & Corona 2014: 39). Nexus (derived from ‘nectere’ in Latin, meaning to bind or connect) in this context refers to a means of connection between members of a group or things in a series, a link or a bond (Benvanot 2015: 19). The term nexus is useful in relation to literacy and learning in that it indicates how strategically well-planned and implemented literacy activities can together act as a social nexus for developing a tight web of social relationships in the classroom: ‘Literacy thrives when a state of connectedness – or nexus – of

134  Liesel Hibbert social relations among individuals, households, communities and social institutions is forged, nurtured and sustained’ (Benvanot 2015: 12). Based on Benvanot’s (2015) concept of connectedness in the development of literacy/ies, some generic guidelines were provided (see Appendix) to students to assist them in developing the metalanguage for more nuanced critical textual interpretation. Research methodology The approach used for this exploratory project was post-qualitative, also termed non-representational. According to Ingold (2017: vii), it is ‘a correspondence, in the sense of not coming up with some exact match or simulacrum for what we find in the things and happenings going on around us, but of answering them with interventions, questions, and responses of our own’. The advantage of this method is that semi-structured course feedback from students allows for flexible responses and free expression. Students can ‘elaborate on experiences they consider relevant or discuss personally significant issues’. (Kurian & Kester 2019: 29). This method decentres hegemonies and includes a range of voices and perspectives (Kurian & Kester 2019: 42). The intervention consisted of three steps. Firstly, the facilitator created a discursive space. Secondly, the group activities facilitated were designed to interrupt coloniality through Critical Language Awareness tools provided (see Appendix). Thirdly, the facilitator combed through the student course feedback to see to what extent students had been empowered by the experience. Written assignments were designed with the specific purpose of encouraging students to: • interact with texts and a range of ideas and propositions. • critically evaluate texts/discourses, both their own as writers and the texts of other writers. • develop an interest in and understanding of the opinions and ideas of others, and develop their own voice. All written tasks were pre-empted by small group discussions and class discussions. An example of an essay question set for third-year students, and relating to the critical skills provided, is: Do you think it is important for school learners and university students to read and study Shakespeare in South Africa, or do you think Shakespeare is irrelevant in our education context? Give clear reasons for your view and support your argument with three recent online articles on the issue and from your own experience. The students were studying Macbeth under the theme of ‘greed and power’. As a complementary text, the film Black Panther (see Chapter 7 for details of student responses to the film) was prescribed. The idea was for students to pick up parallel themes in the two texts. This was successful in that they related to the dramatic

Transformative Critical Language Awareness-focused curriculum  135 elements in both. Although the language of Shakespearian drama was not easy for them to interpret. Eventually, the students came to enjoy it, once they had ‘cracked the code’ in key soliloquies and dialogues. In a second example, students were given a task in which they had to translate a scene from Shakespeare’s Macbeth into Kaaps (a dialect/mixed patois consisting of mainly English and Afrikaans enmeshed with many community discourses spoken on the Cape Flats outside of Cape Town, a vast working-class residential area). The aim was for students to first understand the meaning of the action before they could translate it, or the words accompanying it. Part of the mark was allocated for an enactment of the scene, with costumes and pop-up stage props. Through this process, students became curious about varieties and dialects of English and enjoyed the spontaneous translanguaging Which emerged. They also came to love the playwright, Shakespeare, for his engagement with real-life issues. A discussion on translanguaging in the classroom and its uses as a strategy followed the task. The course feedback form designed for this project was given to students at the end of the module. The questions were simply: 1. What did you experience as most beneficial to you in this module, in terms of the development of your English? 2. What did you experience as least beneficial to you? Explain. 3. What suggestions do you have for a course of this nature in future? One of the many aims of this project was to create a participatory framework, mediated through the differences of perspective amongst co-participants. What emerged was as follows. Innovative student expression was facilitated through creative text production such as activities involving creative problem-solving and production of ideas, interacting with texts and communicative artefacts in a variety of media, through a variety of modes. Essential to the project, were collaborative tasks, in which different participants brought varied expertise to the table and played a range of different group roles such as scribe, monitor, speaker and timekeeper. This practice facilitated the inclusion of indigenous knowledge structures and practices and built-in ethical ways of social networking within the classroom. This was done by creating equitable space for difficult conversations, and by creating awareness of the power dynamics inherent in these exchanges. In a transliteracies framework, particularly in the context of a diverse student body, the institutional/traditional rationality/objectivity, impersonal discourse excludes newcomers, as they are not familiar with the received normative conventions which have solidified in most institutions. However, interaction in a transliteracies framework breaches the divide between institutional and individual voices, and highlights difference and struggles for power and position. This is why this was foregrounded for students: it helped students find their feet within a range of perspectives. Further comments from students are discussed below.

136  Liesel Hibbert Student feedback regarding the benefits of discursive spaces for cross-cultural and cross-lingual interaction To the question: ‘Did we teach or develop in students the abilities to critically analyse their taken-for-granted perspectives through this intervention?’, there was overwhelmingly positive feedback. For instance: ‘You get to see the other person’s perspective in the drawing, how they see things and how they think about something’. Students indicated the reinforcement of agency by making references to ‘footprints’, ‘journeys’, ‘spaces’, ‘places’, all of which attest to an awareness of significant ‘mind travels’, for which the task provided a catalyst. Some students found it surprising that the purpose of the task was to express personal views: ‘A lot of emotion went into it, as is not the norm to be asked about your own views’. Students reported on enhanced engagement and the notion of the development of a voice. They also reported that the content linked to their lives. For this purpose, Soudien (2009: 92) suggests that it is ‘the local context’ that ‘must become the point of departure for knowledge-building in universities’ across Africa and, indeed, ‘the world’. To quote one student verbatum: ‘It nurtures our other intelligences and skills’. The fact that these students experienced defamiliarisation as a complex and challenging process was pointed out by another student: ‘I first started off with, like a place or what I thought, okay, this is what I am starting with, my starting point. And then it just started flowing into different places basically. So, I started to see a bigger picture after a while’. Context was communicated and reflected on in this transformative curriculum project: context was mutually constituted by the interlocutors through their emerging commonality of discourse. Thus, students needed to be made aware of and be able to identify the use of contextualisation cues which signalled contextual information. This required reliance on knowledge of interpretive frames. The curriculum needs to facilitate the sharpening of interpretive skills, the acquisition of skills to interpret contextual cues, the understanding and interpreting of non-standard styles, and the refining of listening strategies. Central to the project was translating unfamiliar and ‘foreign’ messages into local/own discourses/other contexts and developing a spontaneous and confident sense of agency. The comment, ‘You are actually doing your own work’, one of the students indicated a marked shift in his perception of what teaching means, or had hitherto meant, to him. Hitherto, the student had seen the teachers/ lecturers as the primary agents doing the work. He now realised that each student, through enhanced tools of language awareness, can be prompted, and ought to be prompted, to engage and to produce their own ideas, opinions, and artefacts. The student realised that meaningful contributions to the group or class discussion are reliant on student and lecturer collaborative critical engagement. Student feedback regarding the usefulness of the Critical Discourse Analysis toolbox The students highlighted specific breakthroughs throughout the eight-week module. They acknowledged a heightened awareness of the uses of critical

Transformative Critical Language Awareness-focused curriculum  137 language awareness in interpretive processes: ‘The brain has the opportunity to do something different’. They started understanding the notion of ‘no one correct answer’ to any question relating to perspectives: ‘People looking at the same picture may have completely different interpretations’. This indicated an expanded consciousness of the difference between the uni-dimensional concept of ‘learning’, and learning as located in the individual, albeit within a broad critical framework. Students expressed an awareness of the global power of English and a shift away from thinking of English as representing only one ancient culture. This shows thoughtful insight into the non-static nature of language and identity: ‘I am turning the page’. This metaphor indicates an expansion of perceptual capacity and a sense of moving forward. A further interesting and valid observation was: ‘Content should relate and be linked to family history and oral history’. Some argued essentially in favour of an interpretation of decolonisation which focused only on local content, on things ‘closer to home’. In this regard, the Kaaps translation task outlined in this article is a good example of how this can be done without sacrificing what is known as the entire ‘English canon’. By being prompted to see things through a different lens, one student remarked: ‘The content was more vibrant in my head’. All these observations testify to forms of decolonisation. In addition, the course feedback showed strong evidence of students’ senses of ownership of their views, through the use of ‘I’ as opposed to the passive voice. Students reported having learnt to take ownership and responsibility for their perspectives, deepened their understanding of power struggles inherent in group processes and learnt to manage those through role rotation. They learnt to become more discerning and respectful listeners and to tolerate a wide range of perspectives. A common discourse started emerging through the extensive discussions, questioning for clarity and through translation and back-translation within the group. More equitable communication systems emerged within the group, as a result of the role rotation. No one could be silenced due to the equal time limit put on each person’s contribution. Conclusion The cross-lingual and cross-cultural discussions linked to the Critical Language Awareness ‘toolbox’ helped students to bridge the divide between institutional and individual voices. Evidence from student course feedback at the end of the term suggested that these strategies went a long way towards addressing coloniality within teachers’, and potential teachers’ minds. Some student collaborative tasks were successful in facilitating a shift in their thinking and awareness, but some elicited negative feedback. Students often felt that they would rather stick to the official curriculum that they are expected to teach at school level, to ensure high pass marks. This is precisely the kind of entrenched ethos/comfort zone thinking that the project tried to address. Awareness of the origins of ‘ways of speaking’ of the other communicative participants in a learning community places divergent forms of speech at the centre of both learning about language and about each other. Time was allocated in the

138  Liesel Hibbert curriculum in order to negotiate these, though this was not officially sanctioned. It was important for students to investigate the conditions of their own linguistic practices and the linguistic practices of their classmates, given the endemic alienation of, albeit superdiverse, cultural, religious and language groupings from each other, exaccerbated by marginalisation of economically less powerful groups.. The linguistic capital of these students should not be marginalised. Measures of success, alongside student performance in assignments, would be the degree, strength and quality of student and staff responsiveness. In addition (as mentioned by Bozalek & Dison 2013: 385 and also Walker 2015: 291), marked changes in feelings, attitudes and beliefs about language and learning which all participants show, the quality of staff and student cross-cultural interactions, and the degree to which participants feel part of a learning community, are all indicators of success or failure. The course feedback prompted student self-reflection on the impact of the method on them as individuals. ‘A change of heart’, ‘different feelings about myself ’, and ‘…my changing attitudes towards the activities provided by the lecturer’, indicate positive delinking from textbook-based, or lecturer-dependent learning. This provides evidence for what was observed when the students started behaving like a support group to one another. With reference to the above observations, some recommendations are shared in the last section. Recommendations Implementing an interactive curriculum which stimulates critical interpretation and self-reflection, and builds confidence and voice, entails staff across departments jointly designing an accountability structure with maintenance measures for intergroup and interpersonal interactions. Practically speaking this requires establishing, with shared frameworks for modus operandi, shared norms, values and understandings, as well as buy-in and recorded agreements. Secondly, it includes language awareness informed by interpretive and self-reflective practices as well as gender sensitivity and awareness of ecological principles. An ecological model (Barton 1994) of communication implies integrated, collaborative practices which address power relations between the interlocutors. Le Cornu and Ewing (2008) provide examples such as co-mentoring, peer and mutual mentoring, collaborative mentoring, and critical constructivist mentoring for staff and students. Hibbert and Dippenaar (2017) provide another recent South African-based example. The Appendix lists some of the critical vocabulary/phrases and ways of approaching reading and writing, which have been found to be extremely useful to students once they have become used to applying them practically and consistently over a number of years. The responsiveness of students to the attached guidelines has been noted in the process of constituting a shift in the reading and writing culture of individuals. Students realised that reading is by definition deep processing and that writing is by definition a very time-consuming and evolutionary and fluid process, in which perspectives on a single issue may change rapidly. The process of engaging in academic reading and writing culminated in a visible degree of sustained critical engagement and commitment.

Transformative Critical Language Awareness-focused curriculum  139 Some pilot work now needs to be done with all official stakeholders within the faculty, which would hopefully widen the scope of the impact of language awareness on systemic change. Buy-in needs to be attained from staff, as well as from students, both separately and together, as a platform for anticipated and ongoing sustainable community-building. This project has addressed, to some degree, the question of what constitutes quality provision of professional literacy development in the medium of instruction and how one may measure this. Finally, the ultimate objective of this kind of wide-angle lens data is to lay some foundation towards work which assists students in acquiring appropriate graduate attributes i.e. employability, technological adeptness, ability to apply disciplinary knowledge, social responsiveness, innovatory and critical thinking and actions, and environmental consciousness. References Barton, D. (1994). Literacy – An introduction to the ecology of written language. Oxford: Blackwell. Benvanot, A. (2015). Literacy in the 21st century: Towards a dynamic nexus of social relations. International Review of Education 61(3), 273–294. Block, D. & Corona, V. (2014). Exploring class-based intersectionality. Language, Culture and Curriculum 27(1), 27–42. Blommaert, J. (2017). Society through the lens of language: A new look at Social Group and Intergration. Tilburg Papers in Cultural Studies 178, 1–26. Bozalek, V. & Dison, A. (2013). Using the human capabilities approach as a normative framework to evaluate institutional teaching and learning interventions at UWC. South African Journal of Higher Education 27(2), 383–400. Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M. Eds. (2000). Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. London and New York: Routledge. Eckert, P. & McConnell-Ginet, S. (2003). Langauge and gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering: Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review 59(3), 297–325. Freedman, E. (2007). Is teaching for social justice undemocratic? Harvard Educational Review 77(4), 442–473. Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and literacy: Ideology in discourse. London: Routledge. Gee, J. P. (2008). Learning in semiotic domains. In Prinsloo, M. & Baynam, M.(eds.) Literacies, global and local (pp. 137–149). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graddol, D. & Swann, J. (1989). Gender voices. London: Blackwell. Hibbert. L. & Dippenaar, H. (2017). Communities of practice in the design of a curriculum for student teachers of English. Per Linguam 33(2), 63–75. Horsthemke, K. (2017). Transmission in higher education, Indigenization, Internationalism and Transculturality. Journal of Phliosophy (2). https://doi.org/10.4 102/the v210.12. Ingold, T. (2017). Anthropology and/as Education. London: Routledge Jacobs, C. (2013). Academic literacies and the question of knowledge. Journal for Language Teaching 47(2), 127–140. Kaschula, R. (2016). In search of the African voice in higher education: the language question. SPILPlus 49, 199–214.

140  Liesel Hibbert Kirkham, S. (2015). Intersectionality and the social meaning of variation: Class, ethnicity and social practice. Language and Society 44, 629–652. Kurian, N. & Kester, K. (2019) Southern voices in peace education: interrogating race, marginalization and cultural violence in the field. Journal of Peace Education 16(1), 21–48. Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. ideology and strategy. Journal of Applied Linguistics 4(1), 5–32. Le Cornu, R. & Ewing, R. (2008). Reconceptualising professional experiences in preservice teacher education: reconstructing the past to embrace the future. Teaching and Teacher Education 24, 1799–1812. Lillis, T. & Scott, M. (2007). Defining academic literacies research: Issues of epistemology. Oxford: Blackwell. Luckett, K. (2016). Curriculum contestation in a post-colonial context: A view from the South. Teaching in Higher Education 21(4), 415–428. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562​ 517.2016.1155​547. Pennycook, A. (1994). Incommensurable discourses? Applied Linguistics 15(2), 115–138. Pillay, A. & Wassermann, J. (2017). Espoused and enacted values of student teachers interrogating race, class, and gender in literary texts. Education Research for Social Change (ERSC) 6(2), 29–44. Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Routledge. SAQA (South African Qualifications Association). (2010). Implementation of the higher education qualifications framework and related matters. Communique. Soudien, C. (2009). Report of the Ministerial Committee on transformation and social cohesion and the elimination of discrimination in South Africa’s public higher education institutions. Pretoria: Department of Education. Stornaiuolo, A., Smith, A. and Phillips, N.C. (2016). Developing a transliteracies framework for a connected world. Journal of Literacy Research, 49(10), 1–24. Walker, M. (2015). Advancing student well-being and agency: Outline of a ‘capabilitiesfriendly’ approach. South African Journal of Higher Education 29(5), 279–296. Wertsch, W. (2000). Transkulturalitat: Zwischen Glabalieserung und Partikularisung. In A. Cesana & D. Eggers (eds.) Thematischer Teil 11 – Theoriebildung und Philosophie des Interkulturellen Jahrbuchs Deutsch als Fremsprache 26, 327–351. Munich: Iudicium Verlag. Appendix Critical reading guidelines Questions to ask before you start reading: Why am I reading this? Have l skimmed and scanned everything (headings, subheadings, paragraph markers, last lines, first lines, date of publication, name and affiliation of the author)? What perspective on the issue at hand, is the author likely to express? What can I predict about the writer’s point of view/stance? You need to identify the difference between statements, assumptions, opinions, facts, points of view, perspective, common sense, logical arguments (a consistent argument versus a number of internal contradictions) and fallacy

Transformative Critical Language Awareness-focused curriculum  141 NOW, TRY OUT THE ABOVE. CLASSIFY THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS AS WEAK, STRONG, FALSE OR VALID ARGUMENTS: Statement

Weak, strong? Explain

It is a well-known fact that … . Everybody knows that … Statistics have shown that … . Scientistsallovertheworldhave demonstrated… . All women are bad drivers. Men make good managers. Things to do while you read: Underline and make notes, write down questions, summaries and mindmaps of all connected concepts or ideas or words and phrases, while reading. FIND PATTERNS IN THE TEXT, such as: Repetitions of phrases Words with similar connotations Evidence of a suggestive or persuasive tone Emotional appeal Ambiguity Vagueness Evasion Emphasis Opinions couched as facts Questions to ask while you read: Look for clues regarding the following, in the choice of words and language used: HOW and WHY was this text produced? How is it intended to be interpreted? (refer to political, social and historical, institutional location, time, context and conditions). In what context and from what perspective are YOU interpreting this text? Point of view Where does the writer get his information from? Who is the writer quoting? To whom, or what audience is the text addressed? In order to answer the question, you need to look closely at the language used and at the textual organisation for clues. Whose point of view, or which sector of society is he not acknowledging? Why? How does the writer construct a certain representation of selected facts, so called ‘facts’ and ideas? How does the writer introduce his/her OWN point of view? What genre is the text written in? Look at the heading and try to guess who this text is directed at?

142  Liesel Hibbert What is the status of the text? How was this text produced? Who would read this text? Why do you think they would read it? What are the readers looking for in this text? What are our expectations of this text when we first see it? What is your reaction to the challenge posed in the heading, if any? Questions to ask in order to identify the intended audience? Who is being addressed? How do you know this? What techniques are used? By whom? Why? Where? When? What relationship is set up between the writer and the reader? Find some of the answers to the above, in the next section. How does the author deliberately position the reader? INFERENCING AND PREDICTING BY USING CONTEXTUAL CLUES: e.g. Layout, choice, choice and size of font. Positioning of picture in relation to text. Paragraph markers to steer the reader into a certain way of thinking.

9 Cross-disciplinary learning Radical defamiliarisation in art teaching Liesel Hibbert and Gregory Kerr

Introduction This chapter introduces the reader to some aspects of the experiential dynamics that arise when an art teacher (facilitator) uses a variety of instructive and heuristic devices to guide students through a process that is intended to liberate them from stereotypes and to assist in their access to their own resources as self-actualising art practitioners. Among the theories that inform the approach are those of Arthur C. Danto, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer and James Elkins, explained in detail in the next section. Parallels will be drawn between the ideas of their philosophies and defamiliarisation in language teaching, from personal experience, in conversation with the oil painting facilitator/artist/co-author. Philosophical underpinnings To quote Greg, the art teacher: ‘I believe that good art teaching (good any teaching probably) involves a subversion of accepted or cliche d́ responses’. This can be directly related to language teaching as an art, that of making the familiar strange (as Shlovsky says), by creating classroom situations in which students are confounded by task complexities which call for creative responses and questioning which leads to further expansion and deepening of reading and writing experiences. To put the oil-painting teaching and learning experience in an aesthetic context, into a philosophical perspective, we briefly refer to the influence of philosophical hermeneutics on approaches to critical explication and interpretation in the late 20th Century. The movement arose from the writing of a number of philosophers, including Heidegger, but found its most articulate voice in Heidegger’s pupil, Hans-Georg Gadamer – most specifically in his Truth and Method (1960). Essentially a theory of interpretation offered as a useful alternative to the epistemological tradition of description and analysis (cf. Feldman 1967), philosophical hermeneutics rejects the notion of an absolute truth in favour of an unfolding of interconnecting personal histories. Gadamer’s phrase, ‘the rehabilitation of prejudice’ emphasises that both the receiver and the expresser of ideas are inseparable from their own histories, predilections and prejudices and any convincing critique must include recognition of these. Heidegger (1962) anticipated this DOI: 10.4324/9781003382645-9

144  Liesel Hibbert and Gregory Kerr position with his famous notion of In-der-Welt-sein, or ‘being in the world’ – which argues that the human condition is one of ‘belonging’. From this, Gadamer’s hermeneutics and the relativist critical theories of Danto (1964, 1973, 1981, 1983) and Dickie (1983), for example, suggest that analytic objectification – as in, for example, Modernist formalism – is both sterile and alienating. The pursuit of a defining limitation for ‘art’, for example, is a futile one as meaning and significance can be located only in a continually unfolding and mutating discourse. The link between freedom of choice and understanding (‘insight’) in the hermeneutical tradition was first stressed by Heidegger (1962: 12/13). He argues that reality is ‘always already’ interpreted. We approach nothing with a blank mind, so one’s pre-understanding of such things as texts, discourse, art and their related concepts is an already fertile arena that can be exploited by the teacher tasked with facilitating engagement in the always recondite business of making art – in this case, painting. That any kind of interpretive activity is necessarily more than a rational process, but primarily an emotional one, is stressed by Heidegger (1962: 1), but in order to make sense of the novelties that original art must contain, the interpreter must oscillate between two essential perspectives, namely that of one’s known world and the unfamiliar world one aims to understand. Only in this way, by alternating one’s perspective continuously between the known and the unknown, can one hope to avoid the vicious cycle of ‘imposing’ unjustified meaning. Only by shifting one’s perspective from the known to the unknown world patiently and continuously, claims Gadamer (1989: 306–307), can one hope for a ‘fusion of horizons’. In this way, one is able to enrich one’s world meaningfully by activities of understanding and thus appreciating. The proficient art teacher is engaged in a constant war against stereotyping, i.e. the cliche d́ assumptions of how things ought to be – with ‘proper’ perspective, acceptable iconography, familiar style, well-worn sentiments and so on. The teacher needs to assist his students in pursuit of self-confidence in exploring areas, attitudes and visual language that allows maximum latitude for the personal – even if such responses turn out to be arcane, obscure, implacable or even ugly. However, in keeping with Gadamer’s cautionary tale of reconciliation between the known and the unknown, the outcome must not be so out of touch with the experienced world that it becomes entirely opaque. On that basis, the teacher might do worse than engage his students in a careful study of the historical language of art, in real things, in certain means of technical communication – in short, in the disciplines of the art world – in order to prepare the student with a frame of reference that can be challenged, questioned, overturned or validated from a position of competency. The teacher in the present dialogue makes use of the principles of understanding as described by Gadamer and as opposed to the traditional assumptions of knowing to apply this open-textured approach to the other side of the interpretive coin: the genesis of the art work. If one’s primary response to understanding art works is characterised by a need for a reflexive engagement, that is, one that shuns epistemological certainties in favour of what Gadamer called ‘horizons of meaning’, then it would seem sensible to premise the approach to the interventions of teaching on the same principles.

Cross-disciplinary learning  145 This brief foray into the history of hermeneutics and some of its implications for an emancipated approach to the teaching of painting is intended to set the stage for a discussion of the teaching strategies and how a competent student has experienced them. Secondly, the question raised, as mentioned before, was, to what extent does the art teaching technique described here, translate into the teaching of English? Duo-ethnography as research methodology Duo-ethnography, according to Norris, Sawyer, Lund and Creek (2012), is rooted in narrative research, the writing or analysis of stories to understand a phenomenon: Two researchers agree on a topic and then perform simultaneous research around that topic. They trade their findings back and forth, write in response to another and then write up their findings in dialogue form (Chappell 2012: 87). Furthermore, ethnography engages with larger cultural analysis by going backwards and forwards between particular personal experiences and the systemic. By reflecting in this way, both the student and the facilitator play the role of ethnographers and their reflexive practices keep the specific relationship between the experiences central. Of course, the interface of teacher and learner is a perfect one for the qualitative nature of such a dialectical response. (see Berniker & McNabb 2006). Collaborative discussions between art makers and facilitators tend to democratise art practice, while also getting the participants closer to the ever-changing trends in visual culture. This connection is important both for the art maker’s understanding of artistic authority (cf. Danto’s 1983 ‘Artworld’) and art-making as a potentially professional and even economic activity (Desai, D. 2002) The strategy was to write the two parts independently of each other as a means for highlighting some of the ways in which the dynamics of induction into Artworld impacted on one particular respondent. We expected to get some interesting, even disturbing results, and we did. The two narratives describe the experience from within different roles. Greg and Liesel’s stories In this section, Greg, the teacher, explains some of his strategies for teaching painting in a theoretical context and then, in the second section, Liesel, the student/participant, describes some of her experiences and responses. Finally, these experiences are linked to the theoretical and philosophical constructs that provide an explication of our experience of art-making. Greg’s story

... like hedgehogs which lie tumbling in my barefoot way and mount their pricks at my footfall (The Tempest, II, ii)

146  Liesel Hibbert and Gregory Kerr I make a living teaching painting to adult students. The students are mostly independent of formal art institutions and tend to be professional people with time to devote to a serious pursuit of the avocation of professional painter. The broad aim of the programmes I offer is to equip the student with the means to become selfactualising, self-motivating and productive as a protagonist in the community of artists – in other words, Artworld.1 I wanted to postpone using the term ‘art’ because, while the business of teaching painting in the context of Artworld is a reasonably straightforward one, the corollary – teaching Art in the context of painting – is much more elusive. So, I like to stick to the description, Painting Teacher. However, it is clear to me that the moment that one embarks on the journey of painting (leaving behind the safe shores of basic design, basic technique and the reliable housekeeping of stilllife and transcription) the open seas are Artworld. At this point of departure, it is the teacher’s responsibility to make both an acquisition of visual skills and insight into the philosophical matrix of Artworld as easy as possible, because, without the philosophical underwriting that ultimately informs the status and validity of the generative activity, the artefact can have but little expressive or ontological weight. To do this double-deed, I plan programmes that start the student in some fairly unproblematic research into art history, personal anecdote, visual note taking and some basic design. To illustrate, I’ll use the 2012 programme entitled The Dinner Party. At the beginning of the programme, students are asked to find five guests to invite to a dinner party. The student is added to the group. In four cases, the guest is an artist from any period or place in art history and the fifth is a free choice (and here I have had a pretty wide range of guests, ranging from aunts to God). The student must then research the guests from as many points of view as possible: visually, historically and stylistically, iconographically, technically – and document this research in notebooks and sketchbooks preliminary to the design and execution of some invitations. Because this part of the programme happens around February, I ask the students to invite their guests to the dinner party by way of making a personalised Valentine’s Day card for each one, and one for themselves. The Valentine must include something iconographical about the guest, something about the symbolism of a Valentine, and something anecdotal or symbolical about the student. This all means a great deal of hunter-gathering, design and introspection. One must be able to develop coherent means for creating metonyms for all the protagonists and to arrange these images in a group of coherent designs. All this happens before the first workshop project and students arrive with their cards. Some of these are already generating highly complex and idiosyncratic images, but this is not a realistic expectation in all cases. In the first workshop, the student has to use the Valentine card as a source for the development and design of a Place Setting for each of the guests. The settings are particular to the guest but also include elements derived from the symbology or iconography of the other guests. At this stage it is worth mentioning that the process is already throwing the student into the evolutionary world of art-making;

Cross-disciplinary learning  147 first assumptions give way to conflicting or elaborated ideas, symbol and metaphor take the place of illustration and the pieces start to become reflexive (in the sense that they talk back to the artist, suggesting further elaboration). Once the drawing and designing is underway in class, I throw in my first intervention – a curved ball intended to further upset the logic or presuppositions being developed. In this case, I allocate a random guest from another student’s list and tell each student to include something of this outsider (or Gatecrasher) in her own piece. These gatecrashers have to appear in at least three of the place settings. To get the imagery for the gatecrasher, the student has to tap the resources of the original chooser and to then make her own decisions regarding coherence. Of course, the Gatecrasher has a profound and unpremeditated effect on the coherence of the pieces, forcing change and accommodation. The intentions of this convoluted process can be explained as follows. The title of the article is ‘Hedgehogs in their Barefoot Way’ and that is a phrase I use to describe the business of disruption of stereotype. I believe that good art teaching (good any teaching probably) involves a subversion of accepted or cliche d́ responses. By obliging the student to accommodate the maverick element, the random processes of common studio practice – that is, the lived experience of disruption, novelty, caprice, doubt and re-thinking that are normal – can be mimicked in the studio classroom. The student is simply landed with a capricious notion and has to invent ways of accommodating and (most importantly) exploiting that intervention. I use a wide variety of these interventions, such as suggesting that found objects or photographs or tromp l’oeil effects be arbitrarily inserted. Careful underpainting is overglazed with black paint and then wiped back to reveal novelties and surprises, the deliciously named Decalcomania process can be used to literally turn the images around. Once all the generative processes and interventions have done their work (sometimes leading to rather odd results), the student is encouraged to distil some of the imagery and to make separate paintings that derive from the intense resourcing, but are no longer totally dependent on it. As a stepping-stone, a radical change of medium is introduced. The students make clay sculptures of their dinner tables with the protagonists sitting or standing around. Symbolic or naturalistic forms are allowed, as are combinations of naturalism and abstraction. Lighting is then used as another layer of dislocation as cigarette lighters, cell phones, torches, candles and other sources are used to create interesting variations of form and composition. ‘Painting with Light’ is the phrase. The novel images are photographed and prints of the most interesting images made. These are then used as the basis for the next phase of paintings. Formats can change in shape and scale, protagonists can be emphasised or downplayed. Other concerns such as environments, scale, details, decoration, historical allusion for example, can be exploited by individuals to arrive at a body of work that is ultimately and necessarily the result of a personal journey: no corporate identity, no institutional nostalgia except that all will have elements of the Dinner Party somewhere evident in their history. The final examples arrive out of the last workshop in which the role of the instructor completes the shift from Prescriber to Receiver/ Critic (see photograph 1 below):

148  Liesel Hibbert and Gregory Kerr I say, ‘In the beginning I will surprise and shock you; at the end you must return the favour’. While it should be noted that the process takes the better part of a year, I consider the aims achieved if the student shows a clear shift from habitual patterns of image-making to innovative and maverick strategies before six months have elapsed from the last workshop, during which time the student has been involved in solitary studio praxis. At that point, I usually arrange a public exhibition of work produced. Photograph 2 shows a preliminary criticism session at the end of a weeklong programme, where the group does a joint evaluation of ‘products’: Questions posed by Greg, the facilitator to the students, are usually something like this:

• To what extent does your understanding of yourself as an art protagonist shifted as a result of this process? • To what extent do you feel that the techniques used by the mediator/facilitator, i.e. the experience of choices and the use of interventions (red herrings, gate crashers, hedgehogs etc.), has helped you to understand yourself as a protagonist in the art world? • What do you feel would make you more energised, more cutting edge, more of a protagonist in the art world? The second part of the duo-ethnographic research process entails a critical look at how the student experiences the process from the point of an amateur learning to paint in oils. Liesel’s story: ‘Tiptoeing over the hedgehogs’

I imagine I am a typical student in Greg’s workshops. I am a professional person working in an academic area removed from the visual arts but have from a very young age wanted to pursue at least a parallel life as an artist. In other words, I am a serious amateur with ambitions of success in the art market. Over the last fifteen years, I have attended evening classes and kept myself involved as far as an academic career allows. When I was given the opportunity to attend one of the extended workshop programmes Greg was offering in Port Elizabeth, I used sabbatical time to allow myself a serious engagement. I suppose I am what the art magazines call a ‘Sunday painter’ and as such unlikely to become famous. However, I decided that I would follow my compulsion and also to paint with the serious intention of selling everything I paint. To do this I needed to use the best equipment and to work with the best teachers. Remarkably, I have sold all my work so far (which could be beginner's luck), except some thirty or so half-finished paintings produced during my year in the four sequential workshops. There are two possible explanations for this. Firstly, whenever I got seriously stuck/unstuck, I escaped into the realm of the familiar i.e. the skies and seascapes I used to paint. What I noticed though, is that I could

Cross-disciplinary learning  149 no longer replicate these, but started doing much more complex compositions and played around with different techniques, especially the layering technique. I had more technical resources at my fingertips and could therefore enjoy these diversions enormously, never knowing what I would end up with, but simply carrying on a lot more experimentally. Clearly, the intervention of the workshops has added significantly to my resources, but ironically decreased the salability of the work – at least in my usual markets. I suppose the paradox here lies in the nature of the work produced and not necessarily in some perceived element of facility or craftsmanship. By this I mean that at a certain level of acceptance, it is enough for art works to simply endorse established expectations (the familiar scene, the bowl of fruit) but once that level is transcended, the characteristics that make for significance become far less bonded to concerns of nostalgia and far more intrusive on the conceptual and intellectual responses of the receiver. Is it then so surprising that one should lose a loyal market used to easy things? So, having moved on from the easy-viewing market into another arena, I am faced with the challenge of developing my novel resources into a body of work that both confronts expectations and is worthwhile having for its own sake. In order to get to the point where such a development became possible, I had to subject myself to a range of novel and often-oracular notions. From the basic concerns of ordinary vocabulary ( filbert, scraffito, intaglio, pure hues, glazes and washes) to the verbal gymnastics that accompanied the basic instructions, I struggled to find a perfect and reliable coherence. I realised that I had no shared linguistic tools for expressing what I was doing or seeing, or for asking what I did not know. I had to keep going to my neighbour in the studio to ask what had been said and what we should do. Also, I had to observe others and do some complex mental somersaults before approaching my own canvas. This sounds like the most absurd and inefficient way to apply the principles of pedagogy, but it is strangely and progressively effective, not to mention highly entertaining. On my first day in Greg’s studio, I had the impression that he was on stage, playing multiple roles; of instructor, court jester, sports commentator, stand-up comedian, reporter, agony aunt, cheerleader and very serious and cogent art critic. This is not to say that I could respond to every tip or suggestion. I simply grabbed from the barrage of information what I could use at that moment. No one person can ever respond to the multitude and multimodally presented prompts of this teacher, yet everyone found something that led them forward. Prompts came in the form of written tutorial briefs by email, constant verbal coaching during studio painting sessions, individual ‘agony aunt-style’ questions and answers going backwards and forwards on email and being circulated among the group, as well as one-to-one conversations in the studio relating to dialectical interpretations of what was happening on the canvas. (As a joke, I would turn the question on him: Now tell me where are you going with this? His answer: I’m not going anywhere, but you are!) The tutorial material and commentary sent to us is a remarkable mix of earnest instruction and sheer comedy. As he says, ‘If it is all comedy then I must change my job description. The humour is intended to reinforce very serious concerns for

150  Liesel Hibbert and Gregory Kerr the artist. I simply use my own vernacular and rely on the poetic power of humour to put things in the mind’. Extracts from the tutorial material illustrate this point: Dear Students ...This is my Reassurance Letter and it is intended to put all things in place, make the crooked straight and the rough places plain. Some of you have been confused by my Byzantine meanderings and want only a small dram of hemlock to ease your mortal way Another: It is important that you do not panic about getting these first works ‘finished’. I have plans for them later in the year and need them to be at least a bit raw and unconsummated. Put them under your bed or somewhere equally obscure. Before you do, though, please send me pics so I can get a record of process going. Thus endeth the First Six Formats (at least for now). But now you have nothing to do except stare out of the window or read YOU Magazine. Thank Heavens that Help is at Hand! Your next tasks involve getting yourself degged with the chthonic clod. You are about to do some sculpture. Likewise funny: I don’t know for sure if this answers all your questions but will wait for the big, stunned? ? ? which will surely arrive. In preparation for my first week of activity in the studio, I created sets of iconography for each of the five artists and for myself, based on art history research. For the second workshop, I spent one whole week making clay figures and constructed a doll’s house dining room around the figures sitting at a table. This was a great learning curve in terms of observing how the light falls in the doll’s house dining room. We were told to take photographs with light coming from different sources (candles, torches) and different angles. It certainly helped me to become more sensitive to lights and darks on canvas and to understanding 3D, for instance. Although it was as fun as being a pre-schooler making a Mother’s Day card, it also provoked intense anxiety: What if my stuff looks different or worse, less accomplished than that of the other participants? To the question ‘What did you experience as supportive?’ my answer is, oddly, everything. Even answers to questions posed by the student which may have been construed as dismissive in other contexts, such as ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ or sequences such as: Me: Don’t you think this is a beautiful watermelon I painted? Greg: Well, I’ve seen worse watermelons, but not sure if I’ve seen worse paintings of watermelons. Make up your mind about what you want ... Me: huh?? (end of conversation)

Cross-disciplinary learning  151 I would never just leave it at that. I would always say why I wasn’t in favour and suggest ways of improving. I can’t see how this remark could be enormously constructive except that it is made in the context of a range of simultaneous decisions from the student. Asked whether he could help with painting a face, he simply says, ‘have you tried leaving it alone?’ Dismissive, but also very useful because hitherto the conversation had been about what I like or don’t like and what expectations I have. By throwing in a maverick alternative, he forces me to abandon a certain predictable and perhaps undo-able path and to come to terms with the piece in a broader context. He will answer some questions, but not others. ‘What colour should I paint this?’ will usually evoke a blank and infuriating stare or something sarcastic such as, ‘I think you should paint it a happy colour!’ This confoundedness has been discussed by Elkins (2001: 9) who raises the point that the experiences of art students, ‘from enthusiasm to boredom to exasperation to fascination’, constitute an ‘arc of responses that is not replicated elsewhere …’ (p. 147) which would suggest that the kinds of interaction necessary to provoke and extend would have to be intensely heuristic. Elkins touches on this when he refers to the significance of non-verbal, and gestural aspects of studio instruction and its relation to performativity. Greg’s linguistic strategies reinforce this notion of instruction coming from a wide range of illocutions. To make sure you quickly learn to dislike (and never forget) an unfortunate part of your painting, he will characterise it in insulting (and often hilarious) terms. A poor piece of green surface might be described as ‘a necrotic cytoplast’. Whatever that may mean, it certainly suggests that the offending piece has been noted and not appreciated. It is not possible to retain a necrotic cytoplast in one’s painting. Some reflections Through the experiential learning curve, as described, the art student in Greg’s courses learns to critique her own work and also becomes knowledgeable and increasingly astute in critiquing the art of others. As Hanson (2007: 9) points out: ‘Art practice is successful and valid if it offers possibilities that force us to extend our frame of reference’. Furthermore, Hanson describes the ‘we see what we know’ phenomenon according to Bloomer’s (1976) Principles of Visual Perceptions, which is: ‘You see what you think you see’). The trained artistic vision differs significantly from the everyday perception. Mental operations compensate for missing information. This explains why it is so important, as artist in training, to build up a vocabulary of criticism, which goes hand in hand with learning to assess a work of art in the making or in its final state, from multiple perspectives. O’Toole (2011:130) argues that the modest aim of semiotics (i.e. assessing the representational, compositional and modal functions of the work or art/text), is: to erode the certainty with which this [art history] discourse is enunciated and received, to show that it is a cultural practice that is politically and economically

152  Liesel Hibbert and Gregory Kerr determined, and to offer an alternative discourse: a new stance informing of the individual work and a new way of traversing a gallery: some new systematic and replicable methods for analysing what one sees in the individual work, and hence for comparing it with others: above all, a new vocabulary that anyone can learn to use and that will empower us to express our own insights about a work and compare them confidently and courteously with others. The narrative of the art student provides evidence how the four philosophical constructs which underpin the teaching methodology, namely that interpretation is not merely a rational activity but primarily an emotional engagement, that the only way to do justice to a ‘new text’ is to oscillate between the known and the unknown, that knowledge is in fact perspective, and that the truth is only ever partially available, have been successfully applied.2 The art student has undergone a huge learning curve and had to rethink a number of previous preconceptions about the processes of art-making. As Lindström’s hypothesis (2006: 11) states: a participant’s creative ability can only be fostered under the following conditions: • ‘Students are given assignments that extend over a significant period of time and address central themes in the domain. • The teacher emphasises the process as well as the product and provides ample opportunity for research, experimentation and revision. • Students are encouraged to integrate production with perception and reflection. • Students are given many opportunities to assess their own performance and to get feedback from peers and teachers’. The above narratives are a lived example of how important it is to constantly infuse our perspective with new ideas, and that it is new ideas that extend knowledge. Based on well-known Vygotskyan principles, a combination of physical, mental and language-based tools are essential in order to go the full defamilarisation learning curve through mediation. Conclusion English language development case studies described in the previous chapters are echoed in the experiences of the two art-making participants, and these in turn reflect directly on the experiences of university students finding their feet in new disciplinary discourses. The following examples illustrate the positive outcomes of defamiliarisation techniques which the students reported in the language development case studies, and which resonate with the art experience described. The comparison has only been made possible through ethnography, that is by recording every aspect of the process from as many points of view as possible. In relation to this, Chapter 8, which describes what a Critical Language Awarenessfocused curriculum looks like, has provided the background to the pedagogy applied in this chapter. Likewise, in Chapter 3, which described the importance of exposing students to a combination of intensive and extensive writing tasks,

Cross-disciplinary learning  153 the student finds him/herself ‘tiptoeing over the hedgehogs’ and having to deal with ‘gatecrashers’ which open up ‘horizons of meaning’. In Chapter 3 these are experiences are described by the student as negotiating ‘a tangled situation’ and having ‘to be very careful on both sides of the argument…’ The aspects of the instructive technique of defamiliarsation reported as most beneficial are the experience of all participants in structured collaborative discussions; the focus on linguistic aspects of disciplinary discourses; and lastly, the resultant reflexivity. Peer and expert feedback has reportedly led to increased confidence and good performance in self-criticism, owing to the group discussions in which students and staff express personal responses and practice critical competencies in art and writing using multiple perspectives. Competence in self-criticism allows insights gained through collaborative interaction to be applied reflexively to whatever output they have made – in writing or art. In addition to the apprentice-practitioner being able to go process and apply new knowledges to their own practice, the linguistic pedagogical strategies, such as mastering the reception and generation of art discourse provides a necessary metalinguistic knowledge that has significant implications for the student’s development as a competent practitioner. Notes 1 This is Arthur C. Danto’s term to describe the institution or consensus that determines the status of objects or ideas in the context of Art. See The Transfiguration of the Commonplace for a lengthy discussion of the notion. 2 Veblin’s evolutionary economics springs to mind here; the inevitable conflict between innovation and the old (Veblin 1934).

References Berniker, E. & McNabb, D. E. (2006). Dialectical inquiry: A structured qualitative research method. The Qualitative Report, 11(4): 642–664. Bloomer, C.M. (1976). Principles of visual perceptions. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Chappell, D (2012). In ethnographic research, might two heads be better than one? A book review of duo-ethnography: Dialogic methods for social, health and educational research, ed by Joe Norris, Richard D. Sawyer, and Darren Lund. Youth Theatre Journal, 27, 87–89. Danto, C. A. (1981). The transfiguration of the commonplace. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Desai, D. (2002). The ethnographic move in contemporary art: What does it mean for art education? Studies in Art Education: Summer 2002. 43(4) New York University Research Library, 307–323. Dickie, G. (1983). Perceiving art. Visual Arts Research: Fall 1983. 66–70. Elkins, J. (2001). Why art historians should learn to paint: The case for studio experience. Unpublished Conference Paper. Richmond, Virginia. www.jame​selk ​i ns.com/index. php/ess​ays/222 Feldman, E. B. (1967). Varieties of visual experience. Basic ed. New York: Harry N Abrams, Inc. Gadamer, H. G. (1989). Truth and method. Second revised edition. London: Sheed and Ward.

154  Liesel Hibbert and Gregory Kerr Hanson, C. (2007). Understanding materiality and hum an experience through creative artistic exploration. Journal of Iberian Archeology 1–15. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. Oxford: Blackwell. Lindström, L. (2006). Creativity: What is it? Can you assess it? Can it be taught? International Journal of Art & Design Education, 25, 53–66. O’Toole, M. (2011). The language of displayed art. London: Routledge. Veblin, T. (1934). The theory of the leisure class: An economic study of institutions. New York: Modern Library.

10 Reflections on teaching for social justice at a South African University of Technology Zayd Waghid

Introduction Despite the fact that educational technology is not a panacea for preparing graduates for the local and global environment, we live in an age in which students should be able to function effectively in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Essential skills such as creativity, critical thinking, self-reflexivity, cooperation, and communication need to be better linked with educational technology. In order to build technology from an African point of view, one must first engage in conversations about what technology means to Africans through the lens of their Indigenous Knowledge Systems. I have come to the realisation that the lack of ubuntu in African society is the single most fundamental barrier that Africa faces as a continent (Waghid, Waghid & Waghid 2018). People will make judgments that are responsible and ethical if they are given the opportunity to speak their opinions. Therefore, it is the responsibility of academics to do research or collaborate on the development of alternative methods in order to ensure that language does not construct or maintain uneven power relations in a classroom, but rather causes disruptions in these relationships (Waghid & Ontong 2022). I am of the view that language is a crucial aspect in all areas of research, regardless of whether one takes a translanguaging or bilingual approach to the problem. In addition to giving students a significant amount of freedom and flexibility, the most important aspects of designing a curriculum are putting an emphasis on the creative potential of students, allowing them the freedom to re-imagine their own futures, and giving students a substantial amount of autonomy (Waghid & Hibbert 2018; Waghid 2022). To assist educational institutions in functioning cohesively throughout the ongoing industrial revolution and beyond, I propose that students be recognised as key components in the restructuring of educational curricula. This would help educational institutions prepare students for careers of the future. [Liesel]: This chapter is based on a transcript of an interview of Liesel Hibbert with Dr Zayd Waghid conducted on Teams, 16 October 2021. The aim was to get commentary on the content of this book from a reader/co-researcher who also practices defamiliarisation in his own classroom, and who is familiar with the theory underpinning the case studies displayed here. The interview method DOI: 10.4324/9781003382645-10

156  Zayd Waghid used here adds value to the volume as a whole in that it is a personal account of long-term experience in the South African education sector. Acknowledging interviews as a valid research method leads to a better understanding of how power dynamics and exclusion impact on people’s actual lives and senses of well-being. Question 1: Welcome to this session Zayd. Could you please tell us a bit about your background and experience in education? Zayd: Over the course of the last six years, I have been working as a teacher educator in the Faculty of Education at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. My pedagogical and research philosophies are both underpinned by the need of fostering socially just interactions in the classroom as well as in society at large, with the aid of technological innovations in education. My belief is that the primary goals of this book and my interest in critical pedagogy and educational technology are congruent with one another. Before I started my career at my current institution, I worked as a teacher in Cape Town for almost six and a half years in a local secondary school that has a long history of serving underprivileged students. It turned out to be a school where I had previously been a learner, and I found the atmosphere to be first unsettling due to the fact that I was now working alongside teachers who had taught me in the past when I was in school. Prompt: Is it a public or private school? It was a public school. I was a teacher at the time, and I was able to connect many of my experiences to the learners I was teaching at the time. I came to the realisation based on my own experiences with them, that it was necessary for me to advance my teaching and learning methods in order to benefit both my students and myself. Because of this, when I was still teaching at the school while I was pursuing my doctoral degree, I investigated the possibility of using film to transfer learners into unfamiliar environments. The reason for this is that, in my opinion, the curriculum that is taught in schools still discourages students from thinking critically and creatively, despite the fact that the outcomes that are supposed to result from studying that curriculum make it abundantly clear that these are important skills that students should acquire. And the use of film as a pedagogical tool was essential because it permitted or allowed the students I had at the time to think more deeply about their own sociocultural circumstances in relation to what these specific films were about. After that, I came to the realisation that when I joined higher education and was exposed to the idea of defamiliarisation, I had already put into practice this pedagogical approach during my time spent teaching at the secondary school level.

Teaching for social justice  157 Question 2: I know that you’ve published a lot in this line of stuff on high education pedagogy and philosophy and there seems to be a new world order emerging now with COVID and technological advances in distance teaching and so on. What is your impression of how this book links with these things? Zayd: The pandemic has, without a doubt, had a substantial impact on a variety of aspects of society, including the social, economic, and cultural spheres. The pandemic has somewhat accelerated this progress, with many universities being forced to adapt to the status quo. This is significant when taking into consideration the fact that higher education in South Africa has frequently been criticised for its slow progress concerning curriculum transformation. I believe that this is significant to the call towards decolonising one’s pedagogical practices, particularly with the need to disrupt the asymmetrical power relations that typically exist in a classroom between a university educator and students (Waghid 2019). I believe that this is significant to the call towards decolonising one’s pedagogical practices because of the following reasons: However, I feel compelled to share my worry for the period after COVID-19. If we as university educators fall back on obsolete pedagogical approaches, we will in some way be working against the progress that has been done regarding the renovation of the curriculum. In higher education in South Africa, I have the sense that this has additional ramifications on the need of making a seamless transition towards Education 4.0, which is the educational system’s response to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. On a related issue, while I agree that students need to do well in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, I do not believe that educational technology can be regarded as the panacea for educating prospective graduates for the local and global environment. I am convinced that there needs to be greater integration of educational technology with specific fundamental competencies, which are clearly highlighted by the World Economic Forum, such as creativity, critical thinking, self-reflexivity, collaboration, and communication. This is something that I believe needs to happen. Students need to master these fundamental skills in order to be able to adapt to a shifting environment. This is true despite the fact that technological advances will undoubtedly occur on a continuous basis. Regarding this book specifically, I consider it to be an important addition to the ongoing conversation about the most applicable and applicable situations revolving around the most effective and best practice educational methods to attaining cognitive and inevitably social justice. Uncovering the lived experiences and identities of students within an African environment is, without a question, something that has to be done. This is something that I feel needs to be done if we are going to develop a curriculum that is much more cosmopolitan and inclusive. I believe that one of the goals of the book should be to delink and investigate alternative knowledge paradigms to the conventional hierarchical knowledge that

158  Zayd Waghid is popular in the Global North/South. It goes without saying that this does not imply that we should erase the knowledge of the West or Europe and instead work toward developing a shared understanding of the ways in which information may assist both the Global North and South. If we are going to elaborate on the process of developing technology from an African viewpoint, we need to carefully investigate what technology means to Africans by way of their Indigenous Knowledge Systems, while at the same time ensuring that we don’t lose sight of how significant this is in the larger context of the world. Question 3: Now we are aware that everyone is trying to get away from generalisations about Africa and being an African and the status of Africa in the world economy. Um, and there’s a lot changing and it’s a minefield about uh, African, you know identity? So now we’ve written a chapter about Black Panther and how students responded to it and you know that my data was purely qualitative and explorative. What were the students’ changing perceptions, and were they changed about Africa or your perceptions? Zayd: Before we get started talking about Africa, the first thing we need to do is investigate the students’ perspectives of how they perceive themselves within the framework of their own lives right currently. My initial impression was associated with the interactions that I had with a few of my students when I first began working at CPUT around six years ago. When I was teaching for the first time, I remember having the impression that some of my students were emotionally disconnected from one another. It’s possible that this was due to the fact that these students were not used to being taught at a higher level of education and were not comfortable with the need to express oneself in a classroom setting. They were not able to articulate themselves coherently, and perhaps this was because of the schools that they emanated from; they were very much, I won’t say programmed, but they were very much accustomed not to question, not to critique, and not to necessarily provide opinions or perspectives, as a result of a rigid school curriculum that has had a rather negative implication concerning how students are fundamentally prepared for higher education. And I thought it was rather fascinating that despite students all around South Africa demonstrating during the #feesmustfall movement and for the decolonisation, it made me realise that the students I engaged with, it is almost as if they functioned as part of a micro-community or micro-communities and not necessarily as part of this large nationwide student wide protest (Waghid 2019). And then, it also made me understand that maybe a few students were more worried instead about their individual grades and about making further progress in their tertiary studies. This was another thing that I learned as a result of what happened. As a result, I am certain that there was a sense of disconnection from the large-scale student protest, and perhaps as a result of that, I also encountered a sense of disconnection among the students in the classroom, which

Teaching for social justice  159 they demonstrated through the establishment of smaller communities within the classroom. It’s possible that this has anything to do with culture as much as identification. Because of the significance of the manner in which students saw themselves, it was necessary for me to investigate the means by which I might create the circumstances necessary for them to experience a disruption in their mentality and the way in which they thought about how they viewed themselves. It is quite interesting that in South Africa, we always talk about ubuntu, we talk about communitarianism, but in reality, it’s not always an act since, in some instances, we are very much consumed about progressing further without really taking into account the influence of our own communities and something that I did pick up was the lack of communitarianism amongst some of the students through my own observations. Because of this, I felt the need to investigate how I, as an educator at a university, can establish an atmosphere that is democratic and welcoming to all, so that my students are more willing to engage in conversation with me and with each other in a way that allows them to act as co-creators of knowledge. Therefore, in this respect, when we investigated the teaching practices of defamiliarisation, it did, of course, generate the essential spaces for the students to express themselves via creative pictures. My observations revealed a number of students’ attitudes toward defamiliarisation that were, to put it mildly, less than enthusiastic (Waghid & Hibbert 2018; Waghid 2022). This was another aspect of my findings that I thought to be rather fascinating. This, I feel, is connected to the fact that even drawing was not something they were used to doing when they were in school. They were very comfortable to be taught in a traditional ‘chalk and talk’ style, and this is, of course, linked to the fact that the school curriculum, in my opinion, stifled their level of creativity. Defamiliarisation, on the other hand, created a sense of discomfort amongst several of them because they had become attuned to an unfamiliar environment (Waghid & Hibbert 2018; Waghid 2022). Question 4: OK, so how does that link to one of your very big topics which is social justice, and can you link South African social justice issues to other places in the world? I mean is there, are there other places? Do you know of other places where there’s a big issue like we have here? Zayd: There are, without a doubt, problems in other regions of the globe that are comparable to those that are encountered in South Africa. I believe that perhaps the most significant problem that Africa is facing is the fact that there is a fundamental lack of ubuntu among Africans with the need to establish a holistic community. If one looks at some of the other African countries, there is social injustice throughout the continent. It is possible that this is the reason why we, as a continent, have not been able to make significant headway as a sovereign state. Africa, on the other hand, is not a unified continent but rather one that is fractured and

160  Zayd Waghid faces numerous issues, such as extreme poverty, inequality, starvation, unemployment, and corruption at the government level. When one takes into consideration what Amartya Sen calls the capabilities that are essential for individuals to have a decent life, one can see how these variables have a negative effect on people’s ability to experience development and freedom. Prompt: Are there any other places in the world where this is comparable? It is presumably comparable to situations involving minority populations in wealthy nations like the United States or in various countries in Europe. Minority groups, despite the fact that they may, on the whole, enjoy a number of advantages, such as access to the internet, a solid infrastructure, and educational opportunities at public universities and colleges, however, these groups are confronted with significant challenges. Despite the fact that the United States minority groups have a better quality of life than those in South Africa, let us assume for the sake of argument that one wishes to compare a historically disadvantaged population in South Africa to minority groups in the United States. In this scenario, members of these minority groups are subject to a wide range of additional obstacles, including being victimised, being marginalised, and being subject to prejudice. The Black Lives Matter movement is a testimony of the injustices faced by the minority groups in the United States, which I believe is very much similar to what was experienced in South Africa around the recent fallist movements calling for a disruption of the status quo around the power imbalances and social injustices in universities. In both the South African and the American settings, social media played an essential part in the development of this awareness about the need to challenge the status quo regarding social injustice. Question 5: And do you think, some people might think care, mindfulness, inclusivity, science of happiness, positive psychology and higher education as a social support, some people think it’s just buzzwords and it’s soft stuff and it’s not going to change anything. What’s your take on that cluster of concepts which basically come from psychology, but I just want a short response to that? Zayd: I don’t think it makes sense to leave the social sciences out of the conversation about education. We will be missing out on the benefits of an education that takes an interdisciplinary approach if we limit our attention to certain subject fields, such as the natural sciences, mathematics, and technology, without also taking into account the humanities. I am of the opinion that there are certain ethical principles that every person should uphold, such as having compassion, being honest, having a kind heart, being responsible to others and taking responsibility for one’s actions in regard to others, and so on. I feel that these are some of the

Teaching for social justice  161 moral ideals that need to be included as a component of a comprehensive curriculum in order for students to be prepared for a changing and dynamic setting as responsible citizens of the world. The influence of global capitalism may be seen in many aspects of society, including the cultural, social, and political spheres. Therefore, if students have a tendency to think primarily on an individualistic attitude toward a society in which there is a major focus on the individual benefit in the form of profits, then this has implications for the larger global community. We have seen how the pandemic brought to light in the global context the lack of solidarity shown towards poorer developing nations through vaccine hoarding, vaccines produced locally in South Africa for Europe, which were largely criticised by the global community as instances of colonialism, and travel bans on South Africa for the government’s level of transparency in its operations. I am attempting to make the point that the social sciences and the humanities are relevant if people are to be given a voice and invariably make responsible and ethical decisions that would significantly benefit the larger community in regard to achieving environmental sustainability, transforming poverty, and achieving equity. I say this because I believe that if people are given a voice, they will make responsible and ethical decisions. Question 6: Right, and in terms of research, there’s this word I came across which I like, mosaic epistemologies, which means all kinds of mixed and mushed up ‘gemengde’ ways of doing research? And because I’ve been working with you, I know that you have a very scientific brain but also a philosophical brain? Do you think in the future this is how it’s going to be? Maybe because you know people are coming from different cultures and becoming so close to each other there has to be a change in how one approaches research that’s straight down the line, a Western way. It doesn’t seem to be appropriate. How do you feel about taking on new ways of researching? Zayd: I have no doubt in my mind that there has already been a step toward increasing the amount of interdisciplinary research that is done. When we do this, we are drawing from a variety of scientific disciplines, and this is precisely what I was referring to when I discussed the concept of incorporating the arts and humanities into the work of researchers in other professions. If we want to transition successfully or more effectively within the Fourth Industrial Revolution, then there should be this development of ecology of knowledge so that we can share what is fundamentally happening in various contexts. This is why when we talk about decolonisation, we don’t specifically talk about eradicating certain knowledge (Waghid, Waghid & Waghid 2018). I am of the opinion that the moment we engage in debates around eradicating certain knowledge paradigms, we run the danger of making the topic of reverse colonisation a possible reality, and I feel that this is something that must certainly be avoided. Discussions on decolonising

162  Zayd Waghid one’s research methods need to be participated in on a far more active level by us. For example, what does it mean for one’s research activities to be decolonised in relation to the settings of the Global North and the Global South? How do we get started with the process of delinking ourselves from the prevailing hierarchical research paradigms that are being used when there is a renewed focus on the research paradigms used by African philosophers? How can the African ideology of ubuntu be incorporated into the research procedures that are already in place? In light of the 4iR, how can we make technological contributions to the advancement of research on Indigenous Knowledge Systems? What kinds of effects do you think greater study that is influenced by Africa will have on artefacts that are important in a (g)local context? Question 7: OK, so would you say that the narrative sections, even if you haven’t read them, but I’ve included letters that I wrote to other colleagues like 30 years ago, and I’m making comments on that and we interviewed students about their language history, and we’ve included stories and now this interview. Do you think there’s a future in this kind of patchwork mosaic research presentation? Zayd: It is without a doubt my opinion that the manner in which academics have been pressured to present their research and the programmatic automated manner in which we have been forced to write in order to get published, in particular as outsiders to journals located in the northern hemisphere, need to be questioned and investigated. Given the proximity of our audience to us, academics working on the topic of educational reform who are based in the southern hemisphere and, more specifically, in sub-Saharan Africa, need inclusion in the global ‘in-group’. It is thus vital to make meaningful inroads into our discourse in order to make them accessible if we want to communicate with everyone. Prompt: We were talking about, you know, having letters as data, having interviews as data and stuff. Yeah, so, would you agree that this is there’s a future for this and that this is the way to go? Zayd: Because publication is the name of the game in South African higher education, I believe that we have gotten maybe a little bit too absorbed with it. Because we can write about social justice, decolonisation, or the effect of educational technology on one’s pedagogical practices, we don’t necessarily realise that maybe our research isn’t always applied in many situations. This is because we can write about these topics. However, if we do not participate in more in-depth conversation about the ramifications of this kind of study on the communities that we serve as university educators, then we will fail to see the significance of this kind of research.

Teaching for social justice  163 Question 8: OK, so you would agree with me that this book should ideally be able to be read by anyone who teaches through the medium of English and it doesn’t matter where they come from, but they’ll be able to relate to the way the genres that I’m using and also the kind of things that people are saying from on the ground and in the classroom and that’s important that the book has a wider audience? ‘Yeah, I agree. What would be the point of changing theory if it’s sitting on a library shelf? So that’s, uh, where, we agree’. OK, so, uh, you’re not a linguist, as a non-linguist, what is your take on this emphasis that you’ve come across in my writing on bilingual and translingual pedagogy? And yeah, in a university context, do you think… What is your take on it? Zayd: For any educator working in a university setting, I believe the most difficult problem to solve is figuring out how to communicate in a certain way in order to get a certain message over to my students. I believe that we become very consumed without generalising, we are very much tied down to a particular subject discipline, we become consumed about relaying course content without considering the influence that language can have on our course content. This is probably the case because, as a university educator, if one does not take into account the lived experiences of one’s students and how they can, of course, take into account what they are being taught, how they are being taught, and how they can actually apply what they have been taught concerning their own societal contexts, then I contend that one teaches with an absence of an ethics of care. As academics need to explore or collaborate on alternative approaches towards ensuring that language is positioned to such an extent that it does not create or exacerbate the unequal power relations that are typically present in a classroom, but that it disrupts those relations instead. So, I think the influence of language is important, whether it is through a bilingual or translanguaging approach; I believe that language is essentially what is significant across various disciplines. Question 9: I’m just going to give you a brief overview now of the latest draft of the chapters and how they might sequence, and what I was trying to do in this book. Then I’d like you to tell me whether there is anything here that you haven’t seen before. I mean, we want to not repeat what other people have said. You know I want you to pinpoint things that are perhaps innovative. I’d like you to comment on whether there is anything new in terms of theory or practice or perspective. So: The book starts with the history of English in South Africa. You know people always say that English started with the missionaries, but of course, language in

164  Zayd Waghid Africa didn’t start with the missionaries, but to trace that history. Uh, I thought it was important because there are residues of that whole colonisation trend that English presented are still in the language. And it’s important for people who teach English to know how the language came in so powerful, whether they can benefit from it and how they did benefit or not benefit in the past from having the language under the belt, so to speak. Then I go on to the history of English teaching methodologies and the reason why this is important because South Africa, for many decades has ignored the American influence. It’s a very new thing that anyone that teaches English is looking at theory from America. We always looked at Britain and it’s not really, wasn’t really, a good idea because in Britain you’re talking about assimilating people into English whereas here you’re talking about a multilingual population, which is getting more cross-lingual as we go along. So, it’s an overview of that and where we stand now. And I thought that was important for anyone to know why, again, English and textbooks, English textbooks and all of that became so big over here and it has to do with economic links of South Africa with Britain. Then I’m looking at the student narratives and what we can learn from them, so again, I’m trying to flip, Uh, flip the normal narrative and say put the students under the microscope, let’s see what is going on in their lives so that we can understand better how to teach them and actually the two people who edited it actually cried when they read it couldn’t believe, hardly anyone knows what kind of lives some students have, so and then comes the one chapter on trans languaging explaining how they do it in the classroom and why it works. Then the one about Africa turning over and flipping over the whole general view of Africa as the cesspool of the world. Turning it over and saying and using the black path as a catalyst. Then again, English as a language of learning how one can use it among other languages and then Critical Language Awareness, which is the chapter that you showed an interest in. Obviously, that also comes up everywhere, but I’m hoping that my take on it is not only for English teachers but is actually for anyone. I think Critical Language Awareness can be part of any curriculum. And then I added a chapter on how I myself learned to paint and reflect on it and asked the teacher to say what he was doing and what I was experiencing. Just as an experiment to try and record what it feels like to learn something new and what the benefit of that experience is. And that links with the theory of the rest of the book. And then comes our chapter with the interview so I’m just hoping that maybe you can pinpoint anything here which is unique, which you would like to read, or which you find particularly compelling for people like us in the future where things are going. I think that the chapters look quite appropriate for the book and I think of course the context, the history and so forth. But I think in terms of moving on forward, I do think there needs to be perhaps a discussion concerning where language, or rather how language, can perhaps be foregrounded within the next industrial revolution to the benefit of African students and students globally who have migrated into essentially English contexts for higher education.

Teaching for social justice  165 I think there needs to be a discussion in that regard and in terms of how it could influence policy, how it can influence leadership, and more importantly, how it can influence our students so that they as change agents within the 5th, 6th or 7th Industrial Revolutions are able to be cognizant and aware of the need to always cultivate this idea of societal justice. I think that that to me is an important discussion. So, I would like you to comment on the above. Zayd: I want to elaborate a little more on what was spoken briefly about Education 4.0. It will be necessary to rethink how educational institutions operate in the postCOVID-19 age in order for them to continue to be sustainable. Although most people would agree that the restricted access to technology that the majority of students in historically underserved regions presents an opportunity for stronger cooperation between institutions and industry. I think the online high school offered by the University of Cape Town is an innovative way to tackle the problem of digital disparity. They are testing out an online learning pilot programme at a satellite campus located in a Cape Town that has a long history of being on the bottom socioeconomically. Despite the fact that sceptics would argue against the viability of such an approach given the amount of financial support an online high school with accompanying satellite sites is challenged with, the opportunities presented to government, private organisations, or other larger institutes would reap the benefits of capable, responsible, and potential digital citizens. Despite the fact that many people would argue otherwise, I am of the opinion that online learning in schools and universities is subject to certain constraints. One of these constraints is insufficient access to the internet. Education of this kind provides opportunity for educational institutions to further modify the existing educational system, which many people believe has failed to produce the objectives that were intended for it. I also believe that such an approach provides universities with the capability of playing a more active role in reshaping the curriculum to develop students’ cognitive and social capabilities. This would be essential for the students’ preparation for both the context of higher education as well as their roles as active digital citizens in both the local and global community. I believe that a substantial focus on students’ creative potential and the capacity to re-imagine their own futures, together with great flexibility to a shifting and dynamic setting, are essential components of the process of redesigning the curriculum. I think that students should be seen as essential components in the process of reforming the curriculum in order for educational institutions to continue functioning cohesively in the midst of the ongoing industrial revolution and beyond. Critics would undoubtedly argue that students do not have the ability to build a curriculum when one considers the quantity of resources and amount of time necessary to properly execute such a programme. The point that I am saying is that the first point of departure around decolonising the curriculum and one’s practices is, I think, with more autonomy

166  Zayd Waghid and flexibility where students are participating in co-constructing a curriculum. The students need to determine which technologies are the most relevant to their situations and best meet their requirements. However, in order to do this, I think it is necessary to negotiate and disrupt the power structure that often governs how classroom instruction is delivered. In addition to this, I want to bring out the need of decolonising one’s assessment practices as a separate argument. Too often, as university educators, we allow ourselves to get preoccupied with fundamental assessment techniques about performativity and subsequent moderation, without first determining whether or not such procedures are relevant to the students we teach. In order for assessment methods to be reformed in Education 4.0, it is necessary to re-imagine what the new practices may look like for assessment. Students will be required to think more creatively about how to address complex societal problems using digital tools such as Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, coding, and robotics. Also, in the not-too-distant future when universities and schools will be required to move away from traditional assessment practices and towards more inclusive and innovative methods. This would include accepting different mix-genre written texts as well as innovative ways of presenting research in more visual and audio-friendly ways. This volume is an example of how academic writing can be varied to make the reading of it more pleasurable through the inclusion of a lot more authentic narratives. Conclusion There is a need to take on the academic project that underpins addressing social inequality and frozen systems in higher education that obstruct progress toward epistemic justice and the eradication of solidified disempowering structures that originated with colonialism and continue to replicate themselves. It is clearly the educator’s role at the lecturer-student interface to effect radical change and increase consciousness of coloniality in the face of large-scale systemic passivity and opposition to reform. Senses of physical and mental well-being, as well as a sense of belonging, can only become a reality as a result of the curriculum disruptions outlined in this volume. The most essential outcome of the intended transformation in higher education settings, as outlined in this volume, is a reconnection with oneself and the formation of community configurations. Curricula across all disciplines, using English as a Medium of Instruction, may make this happen through strategic transculturality and transliteracy approaches, as exemplified in the several scenarios provided in this chapter. References Waghid, Y., Waghid, F. & Waghid, Z. (2018). Rupturing African Philosophy of Teaching and Learning: Ubuntu Justice and Education. Palgrave-MacMillan. Waghid, Z. (2019). Examining an education for decoloniality and its implication for higher education in South Africa. In: Mantalu, C. H & Waghid, Y. (eds.) Education for Decoloniality and Decolonisation in Africa. Palgrave-MacMillan.

Teaching for social justice  167 Waghid, Z. (2022). Reflections on defamiliarisation as a critical pedagogical practice among pre-service teachers at a university of technology in South Africa. In: Bosio, E. & Waghid, Y. (eds.) Global Citizenship Education in the Global South: Educators’ Perceptions and Practices (pp. 223–246). Brill. Waghid, Z., & Hibbert, L. (2018). Decolonising preservice teachers’ colonialist thoughts in higher education through defamiliarisation as a pedagogy. Educational Research for Social Change, 7(SPE), 60–77. Waghid, Z., & Ontong, K. (2022). Exploring the phenomenon of Afrofuturism in film in decolonising the university curriculum: A case study of a South African University. Citizenship, Teaching and Learning, 17(1), 27–48.

11 Postscript Liesel Hibbert

Macro- and micro-migrations have resulted in major changes to global populations in recent decades. These population changes have occurred in both the Global North and the Global South and have led to complex language and teaching issues. Research and literature on English as a medium of instruction in higher education has largely been the province of Global North academes. The authors’ knowledge of the Southern environment in general, and the South African environment in particular, has made them aware of how much academics in the Global South lean to research and writing from the Global North. In South Africa, poverty, linguistic oppression, minority-based governments, and racism have dictated how English has been used as a medium of instruction in higher education. Not much has changed since the inception of the democratic government in 1994, largely as a result of corruption loop-holes, greed, and populism. These issues have contributed to the current crisis in higher education in South Africa, as has the resistance to acknowledge the value of African languages. This resistance manifests itself as a reluctance to acknowledge the importance of translanguaging practices, and in the degradation of speakers of English who do not express themselves in ‘standardised’ versions of English. This non-standard English is characterised by heavy overlays in idiom and phraseology as well as accents impacted by African languages, or by regional varieties, all of which are not necessarily mutually understood in the geographic space of South Africa. Other factors contributing to the crisis in higher education in South Africa include a lack of funding, lack of government commitment to development of the poor, and the recycling of apartheid education and unequal resources, and the continuing resistance to transcultural power sharing. We hope that this damage is not permanent, and that some of the positive contributions of willing activists are retrievable, albeit in an updated format. This includes things such as community education initiatives, more emphasis on cross-disciplinary education, including art, multimodal learning, and creative writing. This volume attempts to generate Southern-, principally South African-based, ethnographies and conclusions regarding English as a medium of instruction in higher education. We believe that these ethnographies and conclusions are not only relevant to South Africa and the Global South but also to the Global North DOI: 10.4324/9781003382645-11

Postscript  169 because economic and safety-seeking migration is a global phenomenon. Our work does not attempt to address overriding systemic, societal, and institutional issues in South Africa and elsewhere, but rather considers ways to improve the use of English as a medium of instruction in higher education within the limitations of these broader issues. This volume showcases a variety of strategies for using English as a medium of instruction in higher education The focus is on linguistic, social, emotional, and epistemic inclusion. This focus is based on the belief that inclusion fosters senses of belonging. The mixed-genre method (including stories, letters, interviews, verbatim quotations from student work and oral lectures) was used in order to create easy access for readers whose academic English is not that of an English-speaking mono-lingual researcher. Hopefully the case studies are also relatable. We believe they are; two of our main readers of drafts told us that they had both been moved to tears when editing the chapter containing the student linguistic self-narratives. They were oblivious of the deep distress experienced by African-languagespeaking students at university when trying to cope with English as a medium of instruction, and the feeling the students experience of being disregarded aliens on campus. What we have done in this volume is create imaginings for the future of higher education so that the needs and hopes of students can be better met, by working collaboratively with them, particularly on curriculum development relevant to their futures. Our own experience of this has been overwhelmingly encouraging. English as a major medium of instruction is here to stay, in Africa as elsewhere, but needs to be developed in a way that is workable for all. This volume is designed to support social justice education and to instil courage, confidence, know-how, and hope, and prompt those who read it to further action. This volume also incorporates the results of Liesel Hibbert’s personal development as a language practitioner/EMI facilitator while trying to keep abreast of the language acquisition theories from the 1960s to the present. Narratives from the past have been melded with the current case studies and will, hopefully, trigger practitioners to reflect on their own track of theoretical attachments and classroom experimentation, and to realise that the journey will never be over. New theories are needed to address online language teaching, student collaboration within distant learning, and superdiverse community education needs, among other issues that have recently become pertinent. The thread that runs through all the chapters is that of creating inclusivity across disciplines through English as a medium of instruction. The main argument is that creating inclusivity is best done by disrupting automated outdated pedagogies through defamiliarisation, relinking differently, instilling a sense of well-being from competent performance, and participation in critical analysis. Reflective habits may then hopefully result in reflexive action, such as speaking up confidently and acting upon that which has shifted in the mind to more useful patterns, rather than taking knee-jerk habits forward. Academics from the Global South are more accustomed to quoting Northern Theory than to trusting the validity of their own judgment and intuition. This volume therefore attempts to find

170  Liesel Hibbert a Southern voice, linked to real people and communities and to the real language issues that are currently holding education systems back. It is hoped that this volume will prompt readers to rethink their attitudes to their practices. Although the cases cited are based largely on South African data, we believe they are also strongly relevant to the rest of Africa, the rest of the Global South, and to the Global North, and to diverse readers across many disciplines. The function of the mixed-genre presentation in this volume is to help break down the patterning of Northern epistemologies in order to couch narratives in local speak/vernacular, so as to show the heart-felt urgency, validity, and situatedness of voices who speak for themselves, in relation to their own experiences, without any bowing to foreign formulaic expressions or recycling old ideas on the bandwagon of research-speak. We hope that schoolteachers and university staff alike will find the writing accessible and inspiring. We have attempted to be reflective and are hopeful that the cases presented will help transform thinking and provide hope for the future.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italic refers to figures. accountability structure 138 Acts of Identity 65 African agency 104 African diaspora 103; and identity 104 African discourses 14, 57 African environment: lived experiences and identities of students 157; research and writing from the Global North 168 African heritage see ubuntu African identity, simplistic conceptions of 108 African intellectuals, trained at mission schools 27 African knowledges, indigenous 128 African language: in hospitals 19; textbooks 20 African language speakers: culture of silence 75; ‘Englishification’ 14; enrichment of personal space 64; job reserved for 26; linguistic- and socio-economic divide 126; Teacher Training 18 African literatures 128 African literary canon 129 African narratives 105 African stories, language histories and experiences of students 61 African traditions: oral 62; and rituals 111 African voice 103 African women, and power 116 Afrofuturism 103–4, 124 Alexander, N. 19, 24 alienation 46, 71, 138 analytic objectification 144 Andrew, D. 102, 106, 107, 124 art-making 145–6, 152

assessment: criteria 4; methods 166; of student performance 30; tasks 40; techniques 166; of written work 38 Bakhtin, M. M. 32 Bell, R. 61, 63, 66, 83 bilingual: approach 155; pedagogy 85; policy 85; reading comprehension 9, 85; reading strategies 85 Black Lives Matter 8, 30, 105, 160 case study 4, 86 collaboration 2, 4, 57, 58, 62, 86, 157 collaborative: class discussions 130; critical engagement 136; engagement 100; facilitator guidance 39; interaction 153; interpretation 85; language activities 130; mentoring 138; practices 138; reading 9, 85; space of enquiry 127; tasks 10, 126, 145, 137, 126 coloniality 2–3, 11, 20, 45–6, 61–2, 77, 80, 104–5, 134, 137, 166 COVID 3, 7, 38, 83, 157, 165 critical: enquiry 68; meta-discourse 57, 58; practices 133; reading 130, 132; skills 62 critical analysis 31, 133, 169 critical discourse analysis 31, 106, 132, 133, 136 critical engagement 41, 136, 138 critical literacy 8, 49, 56, 106 critical reflection 2, 39, 49, 56, 106 critical moments 66; see also Thomson, R.; Bell, R.; Holland, J.; Henderson, S.; McGrellis & Sharp, S.; Wijaya, A. R. T.; Kuswandono, P. cross-cultural group discussions 130

172 Index curricula 3, 5–7, 44, 49, 56, 63, 105, 128–30, 155 curriculum: Africa-centric 40; co-constructing 166; content 128; decolonizing 104, 119, 120, 165; design 8, 130, 155; development 8, 169; disruptions 166; enquiry-based 49; framework 124; inclusive 48; interactive 138; intervention 128; renewal 8, 61; responsibility-based 49, 105; task-based 4; transformation 157 Curriculum Assessment Planning Statement (CAPS) 23, 126, 129 decoloniality 1, 3, 9, 11, 48, 86 decolonisation 40, 104, 137, 158, 161, 162 defamiliarisation 2, 4, 8–11, 49, 61, 62, 81, 82, 105, 106, 124, 136, 143, 152, 155, 156, 159, 169 delinking 1–3, 28, 49, 63, 66, 106, 124, 138, 162 Derrida’s ‘Of Grammatology’ 32 dialectical response 145 disciplinary 39, 40, 41 discourse analysis 8, 33, 132 discourses: contextual 81; disciplinary 152, 153; empowerment 62; secondary 33, 36, 86 ecology, unifying 129 Ellsworth, E. 131 English across the curriculum 44, 47 English as Language of Learning and Teaching (LOLT) 8 enquiry-based learning 8, 56, 58 ethnography 152; duo- 11, 145; linguistic 64 extensive writing 38, 39 facilitator 10, 11, 28, 38, 42, 44, 50, 52, 53, 55, 66, 134, 143, 145, 148, 169 facilitator guidance see collaborative facilitator guidance facilitators 1, 2, 4, 39, 40, 42, 58, 61, 62, 82, 129, 145 facilitatory pedagogy 40 Fairclough, N. 8, 10, 31, 106 fantasy 103, 104, 109, 110 Fees Must Fall 2, 8, 30, 45, 105, 158 Foucault, M. 34, 132 Freedman, E.131 Freire, P. 106; see also non-Freirean

Gee, J. P. 31, 131, 132 genderlect 73, 74 Geyser, A. S. 17 Gumperz, J. 32, 67, 71 Heath, S. B. 33; see also literacy event Heidegger, M. 143, 144 Henderson, S. 61, 63, 66, 83 heuristic 10, 143, 151 Hibbert, L. 106, 159 Holland, J. 61, 63, 66, 83 Human Rights Charter 4 identity 64, 70, 75, 79, 80, 82, 87, 126, 133; choices 66; enactment of 104; features 118; formation 10, 63, 65, 124; group 73; integration 70; language and 137; linguistic 63; loss of 78; marker 73, 74; -marking activities 70; migration 8, 77; national 69; self-narratives and 62; shifts in 68, 81; social 132; student 33, 82, 129; struggles 68; trajectory 81; transformation 69; under construction 64 immigrants 20, 22, 65, 79 inclusivity 11, 22, 38, 56–8, 67, 71, 73, 112, 113, 128, 130, 160, 169 intensive writing 8, 38, 39 interdisciplinary 160, 161 Janks, H. 31, 32, 66, 68, 76, 79 Kuswandono, P. 66 Le Grange, L. 6, 45 Le Page, R. 65, 68, 69, 71, 74, 78; see also Acts of Identity Lillis, T. 128 lingua franca 1, 2, 4, 8, 13, 21, 46, 58, 62, 64, 65, 67 linguistic diversity 2 literacy event 33 literacy practices 33, 37, 38, 40, 58, 85; see also transliteracy practices LOLT (language of learning and teaching) 8, 44, 46, 47, 49, 50, 56, 57, 58, 62 Luckett, K. 45, 128 marginalisation 66, 74, 138 McGrellis & Sharp, S. 61, 63, 66, 83 mediation 38, 133, 152 mediators 4, 34, 39, 42 metalinguistic skills 63, 82

Index  173 Mignolo, W. D. 2, 11, 46, 49 migrants 51, 104 migration 1, 8, 21, 28, 32, 104, 169; from one group to another 70; identity 8, 77; linguistic 7, 8, 31 mindfulness 4, 71, 160 Mistry, J. 102, 106, 107, 124 mixed genre writing 3 mosaic epistemologies 3, 161 multilingual practices 97 narrative 3, 11, 41, 68, 152; agency 47; constructions 63; critical 105; design 103; fantasy of resistance 104; of female liberation 117; inquiry 65; linguistic 66; pivotal moment 104; project 81; research 62, 145 narratives 8, 9, 11, 64, 66, 67, 77, 105, 106, 152; dominant 48, 49, 106; of exclusion 62; grand 49; linguisticautobiographical 65; of transition 82; student 1, 8, 164; self- 169 nexus analysis 132, 133 non-Freirean 106 ‘only one story’, discounting 9, 62, 81 pedagogies 1, 5, 44, 169 Phillips, N. C. 10, 48, 129, 130 philosophical hermeneutics 143 pluriversal understandings 48 reflexivity 2, 8, 9, 11, 46, 47, 55, 56, 66, 86, 123, 127, 128, 153; self- 155, 157 relinking: 3, 7, 11, 28, 65, 66, 68, 72, 83, 169 Rhodes Must Fall 2, 45, 105

Scott, M. 128 Shklovsky, V. 106 Smith, A. 10, 48, 129, 130 social justice 2, 8, 10, 55, 58, 102, 104, 105, 107, 109, 111, 115, 122–4, 131, 169 social justice awareness 10, 107, 123 Soudien, C. 136 South African Constitution 5, 21, 44 South African English 31, 32 Stornaiuolo, A. 10, 48, 129, 130 Street, B. 31, 33 student teachers 9, 10, 105, 117, 124, 126, 130 superdiversity 1, 5, 8, 104, 119, 128, 132 Tabouret-Keller, A. 65, 68, 69, 71, 74, 78 teacher education: 5, 8, 9, 49, 59, 126–9; pre- 10 Thomson, R. 61, 63, 66, 83 transculturality 2, 11, 62, 63, 82, 129, 166 translanguaging 7–9, 11, 27, 48, 67, 72, 73, 77, 82, 85–9, 92, 98, 99, 135, 155, 163, 168 transliteracies 1, 10, 48, 129, 130, 135 transliteracy practices 9, 10 turning points 66; see also critical moments ubuntu 113, 131, 155, 159, 162 unlearning 106, 107, 109 Waghid, Z. 106, 159 well-being 2, 48, 71, 131, 156, 166, 169 Wijaya, A. R. T. 66