Teaching Context
As part of the promotion process for the University of the Western Cape, we are asked to build a teaching portfolio about our teaching context, philosophy, practice, assessment and evaluation. The following pages comprise my teaching portfolio in fulfilment of these requirements.
Just as I began to do this work, I made a helpful discovery at my local used book store: Pramesh Lala and Noleen Murray's Becoming UWC. I am beginning this portfolio with this work because the authors ask us to take a good hard look at the way narratives about UWC are often told. And, importantly, they warn us to be wary of the ways in which such narratives re-entrench notions of racial difference.
There is a common story told about the University of the Western Cape (UWC) of how people’s power triumphed over state power at a feisty university campus in “the bush” in the dark days of apartheid. It is a story about how racist planners built a segregated university for “Coloured” students to elaborate its project of separate development, and how those same students defied the disciplinary aspirations of the institution and challenged apartheid from their campus. And it is a story about how in the wake of apartheid, the UWC has overcome its deeply racialized history to become a site of theory-making and knowledge production on its own terms.
In Becoming UWC, Pramesh Lalu and Noleen Murray problematize how this story is told. They see that for the storytellers, the “problem” was a university geared toward producing racialized subjects, and the “answer” was the incredible efforts to overcome such differentiation through anti-apartheid struggle. But Lalu and Murray argue that romantic tales of overcoming are as problematic to the university as to the nation as a whole, and that changing historical conditions necessitate new understandings of the university in the past and present. They argue that desegregating the university and fighting apartheid racial categorisation was not enough because the modern university is predicated on Enlightenment knowledge projects which have been entangled with racism, civilisational imperatives, and notions of progress. UWC has thus been caught in a conundrum: even as it aspires to overcome its racialised past, it continues to be constrained by forms of knowledge that are implicated in the production of racialised categories of difference.
In the post-apartheid present, Lalu and Murray are concerned with the subtle ways South African universities continue to be built upon disciplinary knowledges articulated with race and difference. They describe how this plays out in the ongoing of description of UWC, and similarly situated institutions, as “historically Black universities.” Such labels ensure UWC continues to be positioned as a space of need or deficit, perpetually behind the historically white institutions, and waiting to progress or catch up. Similarly, UWC is still described as place of access, inclusion, and representation for “historically disadvantaged students.” But this raises the questions: what are students accessing? What are they being included into? And how are they are being represented? The ways universities are discursively produced, ranked and funded can reinforce the very same racialised and classed concepts they are fighting against. This reinscription of difference can deny UWC an opportunity to create new post-disciplinary knowledges with more ethical orientations. In the Geography department, for example, this often comes up in debates about whether our mission is to teach trainee teachers about the secondary school curriculum or to push boundaries of geographical theory from the UWC. If Lalu and Murray are issuing a call to arms, it is this: they advise us to challenge the foundations of universal reason itself, and the institutional context in which we purvey it. At UWC, we must continue to think beyond Enlightenment reason and toward an elaboration of deracialised, non-hierarchical knowledges that have significance for the university and the world.
I think Lalu and Murray’s argument is an important provocation from which to begin this teaching portfolio: How does a new lecturer describe UWC’s “teaching context” without reinscribing notions of a community defined by difference? The assignment itself (and examples on Ikamva) seem to invite a litany of demographic data. But Lalu and Murray invite us to think beyond the constant definition and redefinition of UWC as a service institution for a “community” imagined to be relatively homogenous by race, class, and geography. This is not always born out in practice. Many (though not all) of our students are economically disadvantaged and have been “breadwinners” for their families through their child support grants and now their NSFAS bursaries. Many (though not all) would have been racialized as “Black” or “Coloured” under apartheid, and their lived experiences continue to be influenced by such categories. Many (though not all) are first generation university students. Many (though not all) belong to religious communities. Some of our students are from the Cape Flats and others are from cities, towns or rural areas throughout South Africa and the continent. Some of our students had family members involved in the struggle, who were part of UWC’s “intellectual left.” But political sensibility cannot be read off structural location in the past or the present. Our students today are progressive, conservative, and everything in between. The point here, I think, is to resist the trap of recognition, where our students can be included in the university project only via their presumed differences – and rather to appreciate the heterogeneity of our student body. What if UWC was not assumed to be a differentiated outlier in a global hierarchy that can only ever catch up – but was actually more of the norm, creating cutting-edge knowledge in and through place.
This is not to say UWC and its students are not impacted and disadvantaged by structural forces, which actively continue to divide. Lalu and Murray’s arguments resonate with David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity, which is a critique of post-colonial nation-building projects in general, rather than post-colonial universities specifically. David Scott has famously called into question the romantic structure of post-colonial narratives: where good strives to overcome evil, suffering is temporary and justifiable, and change is driven by the actions of heroic individuals. Scott compares two versions of CLR James’ The Black Jacobins -- a history of Toussaint L’ouverture and the Haitian Revolution -- to demonstrate how James shifts from a romantic story structure to a tragic one. In the earlier version, L’ouverture appears as a romantic hero and agent of change, but in the later version, he appears as a tragic hero caught between the need to demand freedom from colonial oppression but unable to give voice to that freedom in categories outside of colonial modernity. This, suggests Scott, enables a new reading of the postcolonial present not as an either/or question – accept Enlightenment or reject it – but rather as a both/and proposition. Scott shows how and why colonial modernity has worked productively to structure our ways of being in the world such that even a desire to overcome it is shaped by it.
This is a familiar challenge to those of us living and working in South Africa today. Born into the world after the collapse of the communist project and the rise of neoliberal structural adjustment, South Africa became a democratic nation only after the era of utopian social, political and economic possibilities had ended. No longer was there an anti-colonial struggle that could lead to some sort of revolutionary overcoming of oppression and a liberated future outside of capitalism and modernity -- but the post-colonial or post-apartheid was already structured by these global forces. South Africa was absorbed into a global economic hierarchy, where possibilities for “progress” were already circumscribed by global capitalism. White and Black capitalists have continued to protect elite accumulation at the expense of poor racialized populations. This has made it incredibly hard to undo the structural disadvantages inherited from apartheid, despite fairly sizeable state investment in social welfare programs, including education at all levels. At the same time, however, investment size is not everything. The way delivery happens and the quality of that delivery matters immensely. The state has broadly followed capitalist prescriptions to slim, privatise and financialise the very things need to survive and flourish. Academics increasingly must raise money for the university through grants, and students must raise their fees through debts. As such, even as we must challenge the discursive formulation of the UWC as a place of racialised lack, we must recognise that many (though not all) of our students and the UWC itself continues to be on the lean end of these global hierarchies.
As university educators at UWC, a useful goal is to teach students about these contradictions to show how our spaces of teaching and learning (and the nation itself) have been circumscribed by the racialised and colonial inheritances of the past. These younger generations inherit the memories of past struggles from their parents and grandparents – without ever having experienced them. As instructors of an older generation, we cannot rely on shared memories or shared assumptions about the past. This is an opportunity. Younger generations can hold their inherited memories in productive relationship with their present experiences and contradictions. In so doing, they may generate new ideas that are not bound by enlightenment narratives of progress or revolutionary overcoming. They are not bound by certain disciplinary notions of history or, in my case, geography. And, they might be able to open up new possibilities for action, and new ideas about “other universals,” beyond hierarchies inherited from colonial modernity and global capitalism.
It is our great privilege then to try to build a new university with our students – one that interrogates the very premises upon which it was established and attempts to move productively within and beyond these. This would give rise to appropriately ethical, cutting-edge scholarship that South Africa (and the world) vitally needs.
Just as I began to do this work, I made a helpful discovery at my local used book store: Pramesh Lala and Noleen Murray's Becoming UWC. I am beginning this portfolio with this work because the authors ask us to take a good hard look at the way narratives about UWC are often told. And, importantly, they warn us to be wary of the ways in which such narratives re-entrench notions of racial difference.
There is a common story told about the University of the Western Cape (UWC) of how people’s power triumphed over state power at a feisty university campus in “the bush” in the dark days of apartheid. It is a story about how racist planners built a segregated university for “Coloured” students to elaborate its project of separate development, and how those same students defied the disciplinary aspirations of the institution and challenged apartheid from their campus. And it is a story about how in the wake of apartheid, the UWC has overcome its deeply racialized history to become a site of theory-making and knowledge production on its own terms.
In Becoming UWC, Pramesh Lalu and Noleen Murray problematize how this story is told. They see that for the storytellers, the “problem” was a university geared toward producing racialized subjects, and the “answer” was the incredible efforts to overcome such differentiation through anti-apartheid struggle. But Lalu and Murray argue that romantic tales of overcoming are as problematic to the university as to the nation as a whole, and that changing historical conditions necessitate new understandings of the university in the past and present. They argue that desegregating the university and fighting apartheid racial categorisation was not enough because the modern university is predicated on Enlightenment knowledge projects which have been entangled with racism, civilisational imperatives, and notions of progress. UWC has thus been caught in a conundrum: even as it aspires to overcome its racialised past, it continues to be constrained by forms of knowledge that are implicated in the production of racialised categories of difference.
In the post-apartheid present, Lalu and Murray are concerned with the subtle ways South African universities continue to be built upon disciplinary knowledges articulated with race and difference. They describe how this plays out in the ongoing of description of UWC, and similarly situated institutions, as “historically Black universities.” Such labels ensure UWC continues to be positioned as a space of need or deficit, perpetually behind the historically white institutions, and waiting to progress or catch up. Similarly, UWC is still described as place of access, inclusion, and representation for “historically disadvantaged students.” But this raises the questions: what are students accessing? What are they being included into? And how are they are being represented? The ways universities are discursively produced, ranked and funded can reinforce the very same racialised and classed concepts they are fighting against. This reinscription of difference can deny UWC an opportunity to create new post-disciplinary knowledges with more ethical orientations. In the Geography department, for example, this often comes up in debates about whether our mission is to teach trainee teachers about the secondary school curriculum or to push boundaries of geographical theory from the UWC. If Lalu and Murray are issuing a call to arms, it is this: they advise us to challenge the foundations of universal reason itself, and the institutional context in which we purvey it. At UWC, we must continue to think beyond Enlightenment reason and toward an elaboration of deracialised, non-hierarchical knowledges that have significance for the university and the world.
I think Lalu and Murray’s argument is an important provocation from which to begin this teaching portfolio: How does a new lecturer describe UWC’s “teaching context” without reinscribing notions of a community defined by difference? The assignment itself (and examples on Ikamva) seem to invite a litany of demographic data. But Lalu and Murray invite us to think beyond the constant definition and redefinition of UWC as a service institution for a “community” imagined to be relatively homogenous by race, class, and geography. This is not always born out in practice. Many (though not all) of our students are economically disadvantaged and have been “breadwinners” for their families through their child support grants and now their NSFAS bursaries. Many (though not all) would have been racialized as “Black” or “Coloured” under apartheid, and their lived experiences continue to be influenced by such categories. Many (though not all) are first generation university students. Many (though not all) belong to religious communities. Some of our students are from the Cape Flats and others are from cities, towns or rural areas throughout South Africa and the continent. Some of our students had family members involved in the struggle, who were part of UWC’s “intellectual left.” But political sensibility cannot be read off structural location in the past or the present. Our students today are progressive, conservative, and everything in between. The point here, I think, is to resist the trap of recognition, where our students can be included in the university project only via their presumed differences – and rather to appreciate the heterogeneity of our student body. What if UWC was not assumed to be a differentiated outlier in a global hierarchy that can only ever catch up – but was actually more of the norm, creating cutting-edge knowledge in and through place.
This is not to say UWC and its students are not impacted and disadvantaged by structural forces, which actively continue to divide. Lalu and Murray’s arguments resonate with David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity, which is a critique of post-colonial nation-building projects in general, rather than post-colonial universities specifically. David Scott has famously called into question the romantic structure of post-colonial narratives: where good strives to overcome evil, suffering is temporary and justifiable, and change is driven by the actions of heroic individuals. Scott compares two versions of CLR James’ The Black Jacobins -- a history of Toussaint L’ouverture and the Haitian Revolution -- to demonstrate how James shifts from a romantic story structure to a tragic one. In the earlier version, L’ouverture appears as a romantic hero and agent of change, but in the later version, he appears as a tragic hero caught between the need to demand freedom from colonial oppression but unable to give voice to that freedom in categories outside of colonial modernity. This, suggests Scott, enables a new reading of the postcolonial present not as an either/or question – accept Enlightenment or reject it – but rather as a both/and proposition. Scott shows how and why colonial modernity has worked productively to structure our ways of being in the world such that even a desire to overcome it is shaped by it.
This is a familiar challenge to those of us living and working in South Africa today. Born into the world after the collapse of the communist project and the rise of neoliberal structural adjustment, South Africa became a democratic nation only after the era of utopian social, political and economic possibilities had ended. No longer was there an anti-colonial struggle that could lead to some sort of revolutionary overcoming of oppression and a liberated future outside of capitalism and modernity -- but the post-colonial or post-apartheid was already structured by these global forces. South Africa was absorbed into a global economic hierarchy, where possibilities for “progress” were already circumscribed by global capitalism. White and Black capitalists have continued to protect elite accumulation at the expense of poor racialized populations. This has made it incredibly hard to undo the structural disadvantages inherited from apartheid, despite fairly sizeable state investment in social welfare programs, including education at all levels. At the same time, however, investment size is not everything. The way delivery happens and the quality of that delivery matters immensely. The state has broadly followed capitalist prescriptions to slim, privatise and financialise the very things need to survive and flourish. Academics increasingly must raise money for the university through grants, and students must raise their fees through debts. As such, even as we must challenge the discursive formulation of the UWC as a place of racialised lack, we must recognise that many (though not all) of our students and the UWC itself continues to be on the lean end of these global hierarchies.
As university educators at UWC, a useful goal is to teach students about these contradictions to show how our spaces of teaching and learning (and the nation itself) have been circumscribed by the racialised and colonial inheritances of the past. These younger generations inherit the memories of past struggles from their parents and grandparents – without ever having experienced them. As instructors of an older generation, we cannot rely on shared memories or shared assumptions about the past. This is an opportunity. Younger generations can hold their inherited memories in productive relationship with their present experiences and contradictions. In so doing, they may generate new ideas that are not bound by enlightenment narratives of progress or revolutionary overcoming. They are not bound by certain disciplinary notions of history or, in my case, geography. And, they might be able to open up new possibilities for action, and new ideas about “other universals,” beyond hierarchies inherited from colonial modernity and global capitalism.
It is our great privilege then to try to build a new university with our students – one that interrogates the very premises upon which it was established and attempts to move productively within and beyond these. This would give rise to appropriately ethical, cutting-edge scholarship that South Africa (and the world) vitally needs.