The classic films involving learners and teachers tend to take place against a backdrop of urban poverty, where the dominant forces are drugs and gangs rather than a more commonly accepted image of the healthy social environment.
The protagonist teacher, often a relentless idealist from a privileged background, typically pursues unorthodox methods to reach their otherwise disinterested students. These range from using the immediate reality as an educational reference or in more extreme cases, staging interventions in the lives of promising students constrained by dysfunctional homes. Many variations exist but this general narrative dominates the cinematic portrayal of what the transformative learning and teaching experience entails.
Day to day life however, is neither Gangster’s Paradise nor Sarafina. I think it’s more realistic to grapple with the fact that teachers feel overwhelmed enough by the demands of the standard curriculum to even consider creative re-interpretations; that they, like the rest of us, are often so deeply mired in their own domestic issues that intervening elsewhere is unfeasible; and that given the historical realities of our country and the rapid changes of the globalised world, teachers like many born before the proliferation of television, are struggling to simply remain relevant and in-touch.
Indeed, when I think back to my recent past as a student, I’m struck by the fact the most memorable teachers were the ones who were simply consistent in their mix of pedagogical strategies. Unsurprisingly, these didn’t involve the use of musical instruments in geography or regular visits to my home to pep-talk my dad into doing my science homework with me. Rather, their strategy involved two mutually reinforcing strands: effectively imparting the core lesson and secondly, encouraging us to challenge the very things they’d just taught us.
It seems paradoxical that effective learning might be a function of scepticism or outright rejection, but if we can live with the paradox that unity is constituted upon diversity, then I beg your attention for a little longer. It is my contention that a successful teacher is one who does more than just convey the curriculum. Many teachers are incredibly adept at doing so and yet their A students would struggle to recognise bias in a newspaper article. This occurs as a result of an oppressive system of learning. There’s probably a term for it in Pedagogy 101 but the best I can do as a non-expert is define oppressive education as the kind that presents knowledge as an incontestable gospel. This is oppressive because it removes knowledge from its social, economic, political and historical context. By doing so, its creators miraculously escape the realities to which the rest of us are bound, making them…superhuman? Not true.
How often for example, do we consider the motivations behind our built environment? Langdon Winner, a professor in science and technology studies, argued that one of the reasons that certain bridges in New York are low is because at the time of their construction, it was considered politically acceptable to exclude poor people who inevitably travelled on buses from posh neighbourhoods through such means. Who would have guessed? As blind believers in knowledge and science, we are more likely to assume that there’s some engineering reason to explain this incidence.
However, politicising knowledge is about emphasising the fact that the world as we know it is not an organic function of fate but rather quite deeply contingent on choices and interests at certain points in time. The thrust of such teaching is to inculcate within the student the notion that society is not on a pre-determined path, but that they too can know, that they can know differently and that as such, they can transform society. Whether or not I can actually change society is another question, but I can assure you that my belief in myself as a knowledge agent and as such, as a change agent, was enough to pull me out of teenage existentialism and remains enough to motivate me when nihilism seeks the better of me. I therefore vote for the more realistic narrative about teaching- one that recognises Mr Mabuyangwe who challenged my std 4 class to question the realism of the Bible’s 7 day creation narrative and Mrs Jarvis who snuck in an Achebe reference to teach our public speaking team about alternative conceptions of African manhood.
Neither of these teachers and the many others who inspired me ever dragged marimbas into class to teach about continental drift. However, by insisting on the contextual nature of knowledge, they gave us the desire to ‘know our stuff’ in order to effectively contest knowledge and by so doing, contribute to the transformation of society.
Fumani Mthembi is a researcher specialising in child, youth, family and social development at the Human Sciences Research Council