Photo: More than Just Books / UWC

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.

Tutorial one: Urban Stories

In 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. 

Tutorial Two: Urban Histories

Before this tutorial, students read Sindiwe Magona's short story, Leaving. In this story, the only way for a young woman to fulfil her role as 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 and ask them about their life in this place. Students learn how to consider research ethics, formulate good questions and conduct appropriate interviews. They interview their chosen person and write oral histories about the circumstances that compelled them to live in this place.

Tutorial three: Urban Spaces

In preparation, students read Koni Benson’s comic book about Crossroads, illustrated by the Trantraal brothers. We 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. Students also consider the gendered differences in the politics of struggle under apartheid, and the work of women to build new urban communities. Then, students research the specific histories of their hometown to write a "biography "of a place. 

Tutorial four: Urban Theories

Across the semester, students read and engage 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 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 style, argument, theories engaged, and evidence marshalled in each. They must also show how these works are in conversation with one another, and account for their similarities and differences. Finally, they must be able to say how each work helps illuminate their own hometown.

Tutorial five: The Right to the city

For 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.

Final Project: My Urban Portfolio

Their 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."

Responding to evaluations

The final part of this teaching portfolio asks for a reflection on how I respond to student feedback to develop my teaching.

While feedback is often conceived of as something to do once at the end of the module, in my courses, I work in several opportunities for students to engage. This usually takes three forms. First, I encourage students to come and give me feedback about the modules during my consultation hours at any time during the semester. Throughout the class, I remind them that I would like to hear from them and ask them to come for a chat. Second, I circulate a very short, two question mid-semester survey to ask students "what is going well with this module" and "what could be improved in this module"? I use these surveys to make immediate adjustments, and I talk to students about the feedback they shared and how I will address their suggestions. Students appreciate having input into module along the way, and I appreciate knowing what is working for them and what isn't. Third, I ask students to complete longer surveys at the end of the semester and reflect on different parts of the module. I use these reflections to improve the content and delivery year-on-year. 

In my "Space, Place, and Mobilities" module, I have designed a brand new block on the economic geography of livelihoods. Because this was the first time I taught such a block, student feedback was critical to improving it for next year. The primary comment I received was that students felt the reading for the module was too much and, at times, irrelevant. Each week, I had chosen to assign original source material written by Black South African authors, for example, Sol Plaatje on the Natives Land Act of 1913 or Ernest Cole's photography on mine labor. I had made these selections in an effort to decolonize the cannon and read more Black writers, artists and thinkers, who were producing work during significant historical periods. However, students felt these works were less approachable, hard to understand, and more difficult than secondary sources written with a modern day sensibility. Next year, I will take this feedback into account, not by changing the readings per say, but by doing a much better job contextualising them for my students. In each lecture, I will set aside time to discuss the following questions: Why is it important and exciting to read these things? What were these artists trying to achieve with their works and how does that influence their choice of style? Why does, for example, Sol Plaatje's writing sound like he is pandering to the British colonial government and how should we interpret this today?) If I cannot fit this into a 45-minute lecture, I will post short online videos about why I chose the readings to get students more interested and invested in them.​