Keywords

Introduction

In her book Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, Bell hooks (2003) presents us with possibilities and challenges of educating for transformation. She suggests that education has possibilities for opening up as well as shutting down any potential for learning and change in consciousness. In the case of the latter, she convincingly demonstrates education’s function in sustaining and reinforcing oppression and privilege. My first encounter with hooks’ writing on this subject was both an enlightening and disturbing moment. For the first time, I had to seriously consider my teaching practice as not only imbued with the capacity for opening up spaces for students to rethink and re-learn old ways of thinking about their lives and the lives of others in the social world. However, I had to also seriously consider the potential for creating the exact opposite response—how spaces for re-thinking and re-learning could also easily be shut down. Engaging pedagogy of hope remains a continuous endeavour that cannot be taken for granted whatever the teacher’s pedagogical orientation. This task then is two-fold: continuously striving towards transformative spaces in the classroom that make it possible for re-learning to occur; at the same time, continuously taking seriously and working with the impediments to re-learning that become relevant in the classroom.

In this chapter, I discuss my teaching experiences that aim to disrupt how students think through and about the social. Such an endeavour, I argue, entails engaging a pedagogy that purposefully aims to disturb how students currently think about and experience being in the world. hooks (2003) highlights the capacity for student learning and transformation to occur in the classroom. I would add that learning and transformation is equally necessary and possible for the teacher. My orientation in engaging a social just pedagogy entails thinking about the relationship between affective assemblages and the practice of teaching and learning in the classroom. The chapter discusses what it would mean to:

  • Delineate principles of a pedagogy of hope for teaching and learning in the classroom

  • Work with how students experience unsettling texts as part of their reading material

  • Think about the role of affective assemblages in students’ and teachers’ resistances and experiences in the classroom

  • Think about how the material body of the teacher and student are simultaneously inscribed as part of this affective assemblage

  • Think about how the material body of the teacher and student can be “othered” in ways that hinder possibilities for shared dialogue

Engaging a Pedagogy of Hope

As Jacobs (2005) observes, hope is so much a part of lives—whether we are educators or not. As professionals in the academy with a view to teaching for critical consciousness, we may have a hope that our students will not only succeed in their career prospects or that their (and our) social realities will change for the better, but that our practice as educators means something in bringing about this better world and critical consciousness in our students—who may be instrumental in bringing about this better world. In the words of hooks: “Educating is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know” (hooks 2003, p. xiv). We hope. And yet, hope is not a subject matter that we explicitly talk about as part of our curriculum or pedagogy. hooks (2003) further engages hope in the context of an immediate classroom as well as more broadly in thinking about the social world as classroom. Relying on Freire’s (1994) idea of change being possible via collective effort and action, she contends that such collective action includes the capacity to re-orient ourselves towards a better future, world. Freire (1994) and hooks (2003) emphasise the role of both teacher and student working in partnership towards such a future. Albrecht-Crane (2005) in thinking about the conservative classroom similarly pinpoints the need for both teacher and student to meet each other in ways that are not confrontational—however much they may disagree with each other’s worldview—that allow for new ways of relating to each other. In this sense then, confrontation is understood to be counterproductive to meaningful dialogue and shared understandings between student and teacher. Confrontation, when framed as defensive engagement with knowledge and text, shuts down meaningful possibilities for un-learning deeply entrenched ways of thinking and being as well as entering into critical awareness of alternate ways of understanding. And yet, the very nature of dialogue implies some kind of struggle towards new discursive spaces that challenge what we already know (or think we know). Defensive engagement refuses any possibility for critical self-reflection given the latter’s potential to disrupt our very sense of self. This includes not only the student’s identity (as both student and social individual) but also the identity of the teacher. Fostering classroom environments that disrupt teacher’s authoritative and comfortable position of “expert” while at the same time opening up dialogical spaces for students to challenge, question and explore how, what and why we (and they) know, remains a murky and somewhat contentious space. A different kind of conceptualisation of what an engaged pedagogy looks like is therefore useful and necessary.

Pedagogy of hope is also an engaged pedagogy. Challenging the practice of passive consumption of knowledge that is transmitted from an expert, hooks (2003) directs our attention to the function of investments made by both students and teacher when they enter a classroom. Choosing to be present and participate in a discursive space created within such a context means that the bodies present make a commitment to engage each other in a meaningful manner that facilitates understanding and change. The task then is to create a space that can allow for such engagement to occur. It is here that the role of dialogue becomes important. It is only through dialogue with the other that we are able to understand alternate worldviews, including the investments we make to particular actions and thought. It is through dialogue and engagement with the other that a shift in consciousness is made possible. Freire (1994) in Pedagogy of the Oppressed reiterates the value of dialogue for creating spaces of hope and change. Mbembe (2015) in his claim that “the self is made at the point of encounter with an Other” reminds us that any movement for social change is bound to fail in its striving towards social and personal freedom when couched exclusively via exclusionary and authoritarian constructs of group freedom. Put differently, any attempt to privilege a social group’s understanding of and navigation of the material and sociopolitical world to the detriment of dialogue with the other, implicitly shuts down possibilities for freedom. The politics of “self-enclosure” becomes dangerous when it fails to see that “what makes us human is our capacity to share our condition—including our wounds and injuries—with others” (Mbembe 2015). The relationality of pedagogy (Sellar 2009) becomes a critically reflective means of engaging this micro-politics of the everyday. And yet this relationality can be fraught with tensions that speak to the affective and emotive configurations within the classroom.

Dialogical space is not always a neutral and comfortable space, blind to the social and personal embodiments of oppression and privilege that individuals in a group possess. Through his notion of “limit-situations,” Freire urges us to consider the possibilities of transformation in relation to and in acknowledgement of our material social reality. Such a practice allows us to engage possibilities of transformation even within constraining conditions. This also us to avoid a re-enactment of violence in people’s lives that inevitably occurs when we ignore or undermine the social material conditions that act upon us and limit our actions of resistance and lived experiences. He argues:

limit-situations imply the existence of persons who are directly or indirectly served by these situations, and of those who are negated or curbed by them. (Freire 1996, p. 83)

It is in this regard that Apple (2014) notes that a critical task for the activist scholar in education must include the willingness to “bear witness to negativity”. Bearing witness here includes the willingness to shine a light on the interconnected ness between education practice and policy and relations of domination. Similarly, such endeavour must include continued reflection upon possible sites for resistance and social action and contradictions within in social practice. Elsewhere Bozalek et al. (2013a) maintain that the constant engagement with “critical hope” in education is crucial to how we respond to social inequality. Critical hope as pedagogy means the illumination of how socio-historical conditions influence the present (Bozalek et al. 2013a). Echoing Freire’s (1994) caution that we do not engage blindly with the possibility of hope for the future, Zembylas (2007) distinguishes between naïve hope and critical hope. The latter demands an attentive reflexivity that can lead to transformation that is in indirect contrast to the false optimism present in naïve hope, which fails to recognise and grapple with present material conditions for transformation. In Pedagogy of Freedom (1998), Freire returns to his belief in hope as central to challenging the fatalism inherent in much cynical and fatalistic ways of thinking about the social world, especially one characterised by inequality. It is the work of hope that enables a desire for change and a better ideal for the future that ignites passion for learning in both teacher and student to reflect on their lives and their social world with a view to making it better.

Socially Just Pedagogy: What is it and Why do We Want it in Education?

Moje’s (2007) distinction between socially just and social justice pedagogy is useful in attempting a working understanding of what principles underlie the task of critical education for transformation. Socially just pedagogy is fundamentally a call to make learning accessible and equitable for all. Such a call is not always possible to materialise given that access to resources remains fraught with broader sociopolitical constraints. Moje (2007) goes on to note that socially just pedagogy may inadvertently reinforce cultural dominance in education in its goal of teaching students conventional literacy practices. Nonetheless, socially just pedagogy is necessary to social justice pedagogy practice. Both these orientations strive to cause change in the learner. For Moje, however, social justice pedagogy’s emphasis on challenging the spaces in which we learn is fundamental.

Social justice pedagogy urges that we not only consider how access to learning can be equitable for all learners, but also that we consider how the knowledge and the contexts in which such knowledge is transmitted can be challenged and critiqued. Here students learn not only knowledge but also how to critically reflect on and critique what they learn. At the same time, social justice pedagogy draws attention to the ways that equitable access to learning can often be complex and contradictory. Equity is influenced by a myriad of issues related to the learner’s sociopolitical and material positioning. In general, it is useful to think about the interweaving of both socially just and social justice pedagogy as necessary to critical consciousness and engaging a pedagogy of hope. And yet, given social just(ice) pedagogy’s attention to disruption or disturbance as necessary to learning and un-learning, the potential productive and counterproductive hazards of such a pedagogy must be continuously questioned. Part of such questioning must include a reminder for why we must disrupt/disturb. A straightforward answer is that we hope to develop students with a capacity for reflection about their immediate and broader sociopolitical worlds.

The capacity to reflect on our society and its struggles and contradictions remains an imperative agenda for its citizens. The role and function of education in initiating such a critical reflection cannot be understated. Indeed, a fundamental responsibility of education as practice is to nurture and produce critical citizens capable of contributing to and changing their society and communities for the better. Such responsibility in turn means that as educators we continually engage in reflective processes that consider the relevance of our disciplines, the way we teach, and what we teach. Reflecting on such relevance of the discipline of Social Psychology Ratele (2003) observes that the time has come to seriously engage the discipline’s passive orientation to pertinent sociopolitical issues and its ideological function in this regard. He urges that we begin to deliberate what it would mean to engage a “social psychology of an actual, living society” (p. 12) that is immersed in the material lived realities of individuals in society. Similarly, increasing emphasis on a psychology of “relevance” (see Kiguwa 2015; Sher and Long 2012; Segalo 2016; Macleod and Howell 2013; Macleod 2004, among others) attests to the need for a re-engagement with the material and social aspects of society in a post-apartheid South African context. Current challenges and contradictions of deracialisation in South Africa today (Stevens et al. 2006) amongst other social and political complexities and struggles such as gender based violence, structural violence, xenophobia, interpersonal and intergroup racial tensions and conflict demonstrate a crisis of social cohesion that cannot be ignored (Kiguwa and Langa 2015). Conceptualizing social justice in the education terrain demands that we critically reflect on these and other global social ills of our time with a view to thinking about the “good” society. Educating students and transforming education for social justice in this sense becomes a social responsibility task that we must perform (Gewirtz 1998; Hackman 2005; Leibowitz et al. 2010; Merrett 2000, 2004).

Socially just pedagogy and teaching for social justice incorporates a wide and diverse array of teaching orientations, philosophy and practice (Gewirtz 1998). My teaching orientation incorporates five core dimensions of what I consider to be fundamental to socially just pedagogy and social justice: engaging critical literacies in the classroom (this includes engaging students in a diverse reading of the social world by providing different theoretical tools for critique and reflection). South Africa’s sociopolitical history and its resultant education inequalities raises some complex issues with regards to how critical literacies may be engaged with given the under-developed literacy of a majority of students. Perhaps it is in the context that the merging of social just and social justice pedagogies are best exemplified—i.e. creating spaces for fostering equal access to spaces of learning by developing and building the literacy skills of students that have been deprived of it. At the same time engaging critical literacy skills, that enables students to “read” their social world reflexively. This will require transforming basic undergraduate education curriculum considerably that accommodates this dual objective for developing different sets of skills. It also means critically thinking about the myriad ways that we are constrained by legacies of sociohistory to engaging social just pedagogy and how we can meet such a challenge; teaching to disrupt (working towards disturbing how students conservatively think about the social world and their place in it, with a view to challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions we make about oppression, domination and privilege); engaging affective assemblages in the classroom (the role of affect and emotions in how students respond to and resist knowledge); engaging the storied lives of the everyday (the role of narrative as a personal and political reflection in how lives are lived and experienced); engaging the psycho-social (revisiting the macro and micro-politics of power that allows for both the structural and subjective analytics of power) and engaging embodied literacies (bringing the material body back into education—thinking critically about the bodies that teach and learn and the social inscriptions that make these tasks both possible and impossible).

Introduction to the Courses

My reflections draw on my experiences of teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses in critical social psychology, gender, and critical diversity literacies, respectively. These courses engage what Boler and Zembylas (2003) describes as pedagogy of discomfort as part of teaching social justice issues. The critical social psychology course engages what hooks (2005) describes as a return to the psychopolitical. Not only is the psychological approached in terms of the political but also the political is approached via registers of the psychological. Such an orientation allows for a critically reflective analytics of power through the lens of the psycho-social. The overriding aim of the course is that students are able to re-think and re-imagine the function and possibilities of psychology as discipline and practice as more than just professional care but also as political. Incorporating postcolonial theory as critical orientation—and engaging the works of postcolonial theorists such as Biko and Fanon—the course is aimed at opening up new ways of engaging not only the psychopolitics of subjectivity but also of race and racism in particular. Zembylas (2015) has argued that race and racism may function as “technologies of affect” in which race and racialisation may be understood as affective modes of being that may come to bear in the contact moment within a classroom.

Critical diversity literacy course attempts to engage the psychosocial and social world through an interdisciplinary lens that equips the student with capacity to think through the social and engage diversity along different and intersecting matrices of power and subjectivity. The aim and emphasis here is on challenging the ways that we traditionally conceive of power. During the second half of the course, guest lecturers are invited to engage students on different areas and topics of diversity. These topics range from thinking about urban citizenship and the meanings of space photovoice methodology and social intersections of Black adolescent masculinities in the townships; Whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa; Everyday Intimacies focusing on sexuality and practice and geographies of social space and intersections of race and sexuality. As part of their practical component, students are expected to submit reflective visual essays (using photovoice methodology) with the guiding question: “what does diversity mean to me?” This exercise allowed for a personal immersion in the everyday social world and deep reflection that is put in dialogue with other narratives and theoretical analytic tools.

The gender in psychology course aims to introduce and challenge students to think critically about the theoretical, social and political issues of gender within the broader project of the psychosocial. In thinking about gender and both its psychological and social aspects, it seems important to revisit how we conceptualise and work with gender in the form of social analysis and interventions. In this regard, a specific approach to conceptualizing gender is adopted. Students are encouraged to pose and reflect on the role of psychology in theorizing and engaging gendered subjectivities and politics, conceptualise gendered rights and subjectivities within the context of the postcolonial state for example. Interrogate pertinent issues such as how we may begin to understand the claims to rights within larger claims to freedom and politics. As part of course structure, students watch the 2005 film “Water” by the Indian film director Deepa Mehta as a springboard to discuss issues of gender’s intersection with cultural, religious and other sociopolitical structures of power. In the next section, I discuss some of the problematics of teaching and learning that present themselves in these different course presentations. These problematics highlight the function of affect in how students respond to potentially disruptive course material, the body politics of whose body is presenting the course as well as the potentially productive and unproductive practice of teaching to disrupt.

Problematics of Teaching and Learning We do Not Talk About

While the practice of education is often fraught with a myriad challenges and tensions, I want to consider three core dimensions of this practice that for the most part remains unspoken in dominant discourse on teaching and learning. Here, I adopt Pratt’s (1991) idea that the (multicultural) classroom is an instance of a “contact zone” (p 6) whereby collisions of representations, cultures occur. Puwar (2004) in her work Space Invaders: Black Bodies Out of Place similarly makes the argument that the contact moment between different racialised bodies is fraught with tensions related to representations and racialised affective assemblages. These tensions to my mind encapsulate core dimensions of teaching for social justice and engaging socially just pedagogies. These are: (1) affect and emotion as part of discomfort and (2) the body of the teacher and student.

Affect and Emotion as Part of Discomfort

The terrain of teaching and learning has for a long time ignored the role of affect and emotion in how we teach and learn. Recently however, attention to teachers’ and students’ identities and embodied literacies has drawn attention to what has been described as “affective assemblages” (Cooper 1998; Mulcahy 2012; Wise 2005; Witcomb 2013; Zembylas and Bekerman 2008). This is in recognition of the fact that moments of encounter in the classroom are not only sociocognitive in nature but may also be affective and emotive for the student and the teacher. I would also argue that such affective encounter may not only occur in the form of interpersonal contact with each other, but also encounter with texts, teaching philosophies and engagement with the narrated storied lives of the other. As Lovat (2010, p. 491) argues:

Evidence is building that indicates that the potency of quality teaching is not restricted to pedagogical techniques solely concerned with subject content and academic processes, but that its efficacy also lies in attending to the affective dimension of teaching and learning.

Probyn (2004) engages emotion and affect as intimately connected, and cautions against rigid conceptualisations that undermine the potential of these two assemblages to pedagogy. Wetherell (2012) and Massumi (1995) provide a useful review of the ontological distinctions in both concepts. I am in favour of Probyn’s (2004) emphasis on engaging the possibilities of potential productive function of these assemblages for learning. For Zembylas (2007), two spectres haunt the contact zones that are classrooms—bodies and affects. For MacLure (2010, p. 284) “affect registers on the body. It is carried by facial expressions, tone of voice, breath and sounds, which do not operate as signs, yet are not mere epiphenomena.” Most importantly, “because affect ‘affects’ bodies, it can be transmitted, and is intimately social” (p 284). Thinking about the significance of what Hemmings (2005) refers to as affective racialisation, the ways in which affects may attach in gendered, racialised, classed, sexual ways that mimic broader micro-politics of power in society. The ways in which we may experience our bodies through the affective responses of the other is critical for how processes of racialisation intertwine with emotional registers. Frantz Fanon’s (1967) and Audre Lorde’s (1984) famous encounters with the (White) Other exemplify this. These scenes are worth describing at length here:

My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, re-colored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up. (Fanon’s famous train passage scene and his evocative reflection on a white child’s fascination and later fear of his black body) (Fanon 1967, p. 80)

Lorde describes a similar encounter with a White woman on a bus that initially puzzles her but then slowly transitions into awareness of her Black body as evoking affective responses of hate in the other:

When I look up the woman is still staring at me, her nose holes and eyes huge. And suddenly I realise that there is nothing crawling up the seat between us; it is me she doesn’t want her coat to touch. The fur brushes past my face as she stands with a shudder and holds on to a strap in the speeding train…Something’s going on here I do not understand, but I will never forget it. Her eyes. The fared nostrils. The hate. (Lorde 1984, pp. 147–148)

Akin to Bourdieu’s socialised habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), affect may function as political because power is intimately tied to how different social bodies may engage each other in the contact zone (Zembylas 2007). In this sense then Hickey-Moody and Crowley, 2014, p. 401) have argued that “affect maps the micro-political relations that constitute the beginnings of social change.” The idea of affective assemblages allows us to extend the concept of affect beyond mere bodies but also the constitution of social and material spaces, objects etc. that are inscribed with meaning. It is in this sense that Mulcahy (2012) argues that affect is not something that resides inside of the individual but rather circulates in (embodied) relationships. I think about how I sometimes read privilege onto particular students’ bodies and my resultant efforts to “make up for” perceived lack of similar privilege on the bodies of others. Or sometimes I may attempt to change, shift the (perceived) affective assemblages of shame, lack of confidence that I see in some students. I do this in different ways—give more of my time, put in more effort, initiate some form of mentorship and so on. Sometimes race informs how I read these affective assemblages onto these different bodies. Other times, my blinder is gender. Sometimes a student’s perceived social class. Other times, it simultaneously incorporates all of these. If I were honest, I respond to the raced, gendered, classed bodies of my students differently and in ways that may mark them in problematizing ways. I wonder: do they do the same with/to me?

Similarly, student’s affective responses to reading texts or social justice subject matter more generally are implicitly a social response that is informed by broader sociopolitical micro-politics of belonging and non-belonging. My White and Black students have responded to Fanon and Biko in emotive ways. As part of their reflection my White students predominantly describe both these theorists—Biko in particular—as “racists.” There are moments of visible upset. The Black students—perhaps it is greater familiarity with Biko’s work and concept of Black consciousness—respond less favourably to Fanon’s reading of the psychosocial configuration of race. Although less visibly upset, they are just as emotive in their denunciation of the text as a whole. One student tells me that the sentiments expressed in the text is “just too much” but is unable to elaborate. What do we do with disruptive texts? Texts that inspire strong emotive responses in ourselves that either causes us to delve deeper or to resist altogether? Can the affective responses that result be useful for un-learning and re-learning? In another instance, we watch and critically on a film viewing: Deepa Mehta’s “Water.” Set in 1940s India, the film juxtaposes the struggle and release of Gandhi with the plight of widows—as young as eight years old, the film’s protagonist—sentenced to a lifetime of poverty and isolated existence, following the deaths (and therefore expulsion from rest of society) of their husbands. The film is a critique of the dominant cultural and religious social order that is characterised by hypocrisy, greed and patriarchal configurations of a gender-normative order. Throughout the film, we follow Chuia, our young protagonist, as she navigates her new world as a young widow, forming friendships and partnerships with the rest of her community. Finally caught in the web of this insidiously violent system, young Chuia is coerced into a violent sexual transaction that leaves her broken. The end of the film is especially emotive—although Chuia is “rescued” and able to leave this violent space and society, we are left with the harsh realisation that the story remains never-ending for her, for the millions of widows still living under these conditions. Similar to Probyn’s (2004) challenge to her students to pay attention to the “goose bump effect” (p. 29)—that moment a text elicits a deep emotional response and the body responds to this. This is her starting point for thinking about embodied effects. The film has also provided a meditative starting ground in the class for critically reflexive discussion on the nuances of gender politics and intersections of the personal and the political. Over the years, my students have consistently had the same “goose bump” effect watching this film that has been deeply emotive. I agree with Probyn that emotive resonances with visual and written text are in themselves critical entry points for decentering the subject and providing an epistemological space to begin to think about why we respond to texts in the way that we do. From this first step, students are able to voice their identifications, investments and resistances to ways of thinking and being—locating these processes in their everyday existence and incrementally broader sociopolitical systems that cannot be divorced from the everyday existence. It is through disruption—taking a step out of the comfort zones of thought and being, through engagement with the affective dimension of relating to textual material in any form—that a shift begins to occur. Dell and Anderson (2005) however caution that the affective emotions unearthed in such moments must be considered and dealt with by the teacher as part of social responsibility.

The Body of the Teacher and Student

How does a Black (queer, gendered) body teach social justice to diverse composition of students? The intricate politics of who teaches and what gets taught in the classroom begs the question: does the teacher’s body matter? The following reflection from my postgraduate class on gender highlights this:…the guest lecturer that I have invited for my gender class engages the class on critical readings of sexuality and its myriad intersections. Suddenly, out of nowhere it seems, a voice belonging to one of my students denounces same-sex practice and orientation as “disgusting.” I say out of nowhere but perhaps not. Perhaps this has always been (silently) present and I have not paid attention to it. In the moment, my colleague and I are taken aback. Where did this come from? For me, I wonder: “why now”? We had engaged in different moments on this same topic with no sentiment expressed that evoked such disgust. Why now? Where did this come from? We engage with the student’s outburst as best we can. Later I wonder: “did both our bodies—mine and my colleague’s—make it im(possible) for such an emotive response to be made present? Did students’ reading of my at times androgynous, queer-presenting body shut down possibilities for particular emotive and dialogical interactions to occur? Did my colleague’s more normative presentation of femininity open up space for this dialogical space? These are questions that I am not fully able to answer but can only speculate on the meanings of mine and my colleague’s material bodily presentation and the social inscriptions that the students write on our bodies. For Zembylas (2007), emotions are central to a pedagogy of discomfort and even more when theorised as relational and political in nature. Such a conceptualisation allows us to re-think students’ emotive responses and outbursts as social and relational in nature as opposed to individual and personal responses.

Understanding students’ sociopolitical location and how this may or may not influence their responses texts and alternate storied lives that they inevitably come into contact with, is an insightful entry point to thinking about the boundaries that students create and re-create as part of learning. This capacity for one’s material body to open up as well as shut down dialogical space resurfaces in a separate reflection related to my undergraduate teaching with a colleague: Undergraduate second year social psychology lecture on race and racism. I am teaching parallel sessions with my (White female) colleague. At the end of the lecture, my colleague and I share our experiences. She has had a difficult time of it—absolute disengagement from the majority of the Black students, tentative responses from majority of White and minimal from other social groups in the class. She posits that the sensitive nature of the topic could be a key factor. I am surprised. I have had opposite experience in my lecture from across the different social groups. Active and passionate engagement on the part of the students, we almost run over time. Personality and teaching styles aside, I believe something else is happening here: ironically enough, my Black and her White body make certain interactions with the students im(possible). Bozalek et al. (2013a) argue that in such instances, engaging pedagogies of discomfort and disruption means that students must take responsibility for their sociopolitical situatedness and what this means for how they learn. Such a process implies that a pedagogy of disruption and disturbing how and what students think is by necessity a pedagogy of morality. Such a deep reflection requires a facilitative process that the teacher provides by allowing students to think about their lives in relation to others as well as in relation to their material and other forces. Using photo-voice as such a tool for reflective relational thinking that intersects with personal situatedness and structural forces, I have been able to engage students’ entrenched resistances and investments in a way that was not confrontational but allowed for dialogue and exposure to alternate social realities. Photo-voice approach has also been useful in bringing the material body into the classroom space that allows both student and teacher to acknowledge the existence of the other not as separate but interconnected. Using such a medium, we were able to bring into the classroom social stories of shame, anxiety, fear, anger that are fundamental to how we may theorise domination, oppression and power. Engaging the latter dimensions of what it means to be interpellated in particular ways and within particular systems and networks of domination and how these are imbued with affective economies of the self and being in the world.

Engaging embodied literacies as part of how students learn and respond to knowledge is made salient in the previous moments. As Felly Simmonds (1999) notes it is impossible to escape the body when we teach—even inside the “teaching machine” (p. 52). Our raced, gendered (inscribed) bodies confer specific forms of authority on us. My Black body confers on me authority to speak on blackness and oppression in society in a way that my colleague’s White body may not. Our students (unspoken) reading of the authority of both our experiences influences in part the disengagement. And yet, this is not to argue for a narrow essentialist approach to teaching whereby specific types of bodies teach specific subjects. After all, in another context my Black body may be positioned as too “emotionally involved,” not objective enough for teaching the same subject matter.

Finally, teaching for social justice and dealing with the problematic narratives emerging in the classroom must entail engaging pedagogies of discomfort that unsettle what and how students’ position themselves relative to others and the world at large (Nel 2011). The following reflection from an interaction with a group of second-years in my social psychology class reflects this urgency: We are talking on inter group conflict and violence. I present past and more recent examples of genocide as a way of thinking about the socio-historical re-imaginings of identities. The discussion is vigorous across the room. At the end of the lecture, I am met by a cohort of Black students waiting to speak with me. They tell me how insightful they found the lecture and thinking about the distinctions of repetition in inter-group conflict. This is followed by a silence from which I assume designated speaker in the group makes a request: could I not engage with the holocaust or other such similar (Western) case analyses because “this is not our story.” Although I am puzzled, I think I have an idea what they are getting at but need further clarity. “Whose story”? I probe. “This is not our story, the black story” they clarify. We discuss the implicit problem with such self-positioning and social analysis of the world. I do not know if I influenced a shift in how they reflect upon the social world but I can only hope.

Concluding Thoughts: Complexities of Teaching Social Justice

This chapter has discussed some of the tensions and challenges in my different moments of contact with my students as a way of thinking about the value of social justice teaching. I have argued that part of a pedagogy of hope entails thinking about the ways an environment of disruption or disturbance may be fostered within the classroom in a way that does not shut down possibilities for learning. Part of such a hope means fostering an engaged pedagogy that actively involves student and teacher in a practice of challenging and exploring alternate worldviews and social realities. Teaching for social justice means engaging dimensions of pedagogy that has traditionally not been acknowledged as relevant to the learning environment. This includes affective dimensions of learning, working with the teacher and students material bodies as possible “texts” that can be deployed in productive ways to challenge our situatedness in relations and structures of power. And yet, there is always a caution to engage the personal dimensions of embodiment in political ways that disturb complacency in what and how we know. Engaging social just pedagogy remains a pedagogy rooted in hope that must guard against closing down of dialogical space to question, challenge, explore and re-think our identities as teachers and as students.