Assessment Design
The third part of the teaching portfolio asks that I describe my approach assessment.
The capstone assignment for my "Problematising the City in Africa" course is modular and uses small tutorial tasks to progressively build toward a large online portfolio. The final portfolio is meant to answer the question: "How has your hometown been produced in relation to South African history, geography and theory." Each week, the students are asked to address this question from a different angle (a personal perspective, a relative's perspective, an academic perspective) and using a different style of writing (map, short story, business letter, academic essay). For their final project, they upload each of these pieces to a personal website with pictures, maps and other visual elements. Students in this course can go on to work for municipalities in urban planning, NGOs on spatial justice, or newspapers covering local issues. As such, this capstone assignment gives them a way of displaying various reading, writing and mapping skills to future employers.
Although building a portfolio might sound daunting at first, students have many chances to submit their tutorial tasks, receive feedback and improve each element. Since some students struggle with basic computer skills, I co-host a session with the Center for Education, Information and Technology in a computer lab, where they can build their website with assistance. Below I describe how each of the five tutorials builds up to a capstone portfolio project.
The capstone assignment for my "Problematising the City in Africa" course is modular and uses small tutorial tasks to progressively build toward a large online portfolio. The final portfolio is meant to answer the question: "How has your hometown been produced in relation to South African history, geography and theory." Each week, the students are asked to address this question from a different angle (a personal perspective, a relative's perspective, an academic perspective) and using a different style of writing (map, short story, business letter, academic essay). For their final project, they upload each of these pieces to a personal website with pictures, maps and other visual elements. Students in this course can go on to work for municipalities in urban planning, NGOs on spatial justice, or newspapers covering local issues. As such, this capstone assignment gives them a way of displaying various reading, writing and mapping skills to future employers.
Although building a portfolio might sound daunting at first, students have many chances to submit their tutorial tasks, receive feedback and improve each element. Since some students struggle with basic computer skills, I co-host a session with the Center for Education, Information and Technology in a computer lab, where they can build their website with assistance. Below I describe how each of the five tutorials builds up to a capstone portfolio project.
Tutorial one: Urban StoriesIn this tutorial, students read and translate Nathan Trantraal's short story, Umbrella. Written in Kapse and set near UWC, this story traces a young man's journey back home from his girlfriend’s house. Much like the Illiad, after confronting a slew urban obstacles, the main character is relieved when he finally tucks himself up in bed. Using this as an example, students discuss how the story uses language, urban markers and emotional affect to produce a sense of place. Then, they write short stories about their own urban experiences with attention to all of these ways of writing geographical worlds.
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Tutorial Two: Urban HistoriesBefore this tutorial, students read Sindiwe Magona's short story, Leaving. In this story, the only way for a young woman to be a "mother" is to leave her children with their grandmother in the Eastern Cape and move to Cape Town to find work. The students discuss how apartheid legislation forced families to live spatially-extended lives between the Eastern and Western Cape and changed social and familial relations. With this story as a guide, students choose a family member or community elder to interview, who lives in their hometown. I encourage them to pick someone who has migrated within the city or between cities. Students learn how to consider research ethics, formulate good questions and conduct appropriate interviews. They, then, interview their chosen person and write oral histories about the circumstances that compelled their migration.
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Tutorial three: Urban SpacesIn preparation, students read Koni Benson’s comic book about Crossroads, illustrated by the Trantraal brothers. We will use this as a guide for thinking about how every part of the city has a multi-layered history. Students discuss how Crossroads was shaped by security forces, municipal officials, civic organisations, political parties, and people themselves, who organised to assert power and claim land. Students learn how places are not homogenous, and stories of places can be told by learning about the various entangled political forces which created them. Then, students research the specific histories of their hometown to write a "biography "of a place.
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Tutorial four: Urban TheoriesAcross the semester, students will have read and engaged with a number of different theories of how urban development is shaped by colonialism, capitalism, racism, neoliberalism, informalisation, securitisation, and other social and economic forces. They will have also read literatures about how, even amid these oppressive forces, people make their own lives and homes under conditions not of their own making. For this tutorial, students have to take their top five favourite (and most relevant) resources and write an annotated bibliography of each. They must consider the authorship, style, argument, theories engaged, and evidence marshalled in each work. They must also show how these works are in conversation with one another, and their account for their similarities and differences. Finally, they must be able to say how each work helps illuminate their own hometown.
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Tutorial five: The Right to the cityFor the final tutorial, students read David Harvey’s famous essay on the “Right to the City” and discuss how the "right to the city" is a collective right that should account for the needs of all the people who live in it. They then examine Ndifuna Ukwazi’s map of under-utilised, government-owned land in the City of Cape Town. While cities seem fully formed and difficult to change, they use the Ndifuna Ukwazi map to consider just how much space is actually available to build different, more socially just cities. They, then, create a map of the type of city they want to live in on one of the available parcels of land and write letters to Mayor Gordon Hill Lewis offering their more egalitarian uses for urban land.
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Final Project: My Urban PortfolioTheir final assignment combines all of these elements into an online portfolio that showcases their thinking about South Africa's urban issues. They upload their five tutorials to five different pages, and create an "about me" landing page. They also write a short essay based on their tutorials that answers the question: "How has your hometown been produced in relation to South African history, geography and theory."
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