Academic Wits Research Outputs (All submissions)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10539/36827
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Item Reconciliation pedagogy, identity and community funds of knowledge: Border work in South African classrooms.(2007) Janks, Hilary; Ferreira, AnaThis article is based on a South African research project in which teachers and educational researchers pool their resources to explore ways of teaching reconciliation in desegregated English and Art classrooms ten years after independence. One of significant findings of this research was that positioning students as agentive researchers of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission served as a catalyst for their engagement with their histories. There is evidence that for some of the students their investigations of their varied communities’ funds of knowledge had effects on their own identity locations in relation to those of their classmates. Bringing their different knowledges into the classroom created spaces for borderwork (G. Anzaldúa, 1999. Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza) and the remapping of their identities in relation to one another.Item Doves, rainbows and an uneasy peace: Student images of reconciliation in a post-conflict society(2009-06) Ferreira, Ana; Janks, HilaryIn this article we draw on data from a two cycle action research project, in which ways of teaching reconciliation in post-apartheid secondary school classrooms are explored. We undertake a detailed analysis of a selection of artefacts produced by South African students representing their understandings of reconciliation. Initially students’ work conceived of reconciliation either interpersonally or intrapersonal. Subsequently work related to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) resulted in a more socio historical engagement with the idea of reconciliation. An analysis of the visual and verbal messages on postcards designed by students suggests that they experience our ostensibly post conflict society as one of unstable peace. We argue that for a society with a violent past, reconciliation work needs to find ways of confronting the powerful discourses of the past that continue to circulate and to shape our identities and those of our students.