PHD proposal presentation at UCT, November 2012

1. TOWARDS A CRITICAL DIGITAL
STORYTELLING MODEL FOR
ENGAGING WITH DIFFERENCE
BASED ON THE PEDAGOGY OF
DISCOMFORT – A CASE OF PRE-SERVICE
EDUCATION STUDENTS
IN SOUTH AFRICA
Daniela Gachago
Cape Peninsula University of Technology

2. Background

3. Background of the study
 Transformation in
Higher Education has
led to racially
integrated classrooms
 Social and cultural
integration are lagging
behind (Jansen 2010,
Soudien 2012)

4. Social engagements
 Pattman study 2010: Investigating 'race' and
social cohesion at the University of Kwa-Zulu
Natal
 Students identified strongly with racial background
and actively constructed entities in opposition to each
other (960)
 Schools not the melting pots one wants to see, but
where differences along race lines might even be
reinforced (964)
 Subtle everyday forms of racism ‘encoded in the
norms and behaviour of institutional cultures are
notoriously difficult to change’ (Pattman 2010: 954).

5. Explosive emotions
 Many educators shy away from difficult topics
such as race and privilege for fear of the
emotions that might come up, be it bitter
feelings, anger, resentment and real pain
(Burbules 2004)
 But also growing interest in literature around
practices that unsettle established beliefs and
assumptions

6. Emotions
 To engage in critical inquiry often means
asking students to radically re-evaluate their
world views. This process can incur feelings
of anger, grief, disappointment, and
resistance, but the process also offers
students new windows on the world: to
develop the capacity for critical inquiry
regarding the production and construction of
differences gives people a tool that will be
useful over their lifetime. In short, this
pedagogy of discomfort requires not only
cognitive but emotional labor. (Boler and
Zembylas 2003: 110)

7. Emotions in education
Megan Boler Michalinos Zembylas
A professor at the University of
Toronto, Megan Boler teaches
philosophy, cultural studies, feminist
theory, media studies, social equity
courses in the Teacher Education
program, and media studies at the
Knowledge Media Design Institute.
Dr. Michalinos Zembylas is Assistant
Professor of Education at the Open
University of Cyprus. He is
particularly interested in how
affective politics intersect with issues
of social justice pedagogies,
intercultural and peace education,
and citizenship education.

8. Politics of emotions
 Emotions are seen as relational, happening in
a shared political space, ‘in which students
and teachers interact with implications in
larger political and cultural struggles’
(Albrecht-Crane & Slack, cited in Zembylas 2007, xiii).
 ‘The social control of emotions, and emotions
as a site of resistance to oppression, are
underexplored scholarly disciplines as well as
within pedagogical practices’ (Boler 1999, xii)

9. Pedagogy of discomfort
 Stipulates that for both
educators and students to
develop a deeper
understanding for their own
and their shared past, it is
necessary to move outside
their comfort zone, to start to
unpack their understanding
of norms and differences
(Boler 1999, Boler and
Zembylas 2003).

10. Pedagogy of possibility
 Result of pedagogy of discomfort: negative
emotional labour such as vulnerability, anger,
suffering.
 Emotional labour can produce favourable
results, including self-discovery, hope, passion
an a sense of community.

11. Critical digital storytelling

12. Critical storytelling
 Way to unearth students' historically situated
and culturally mediated lived experiences is
the telling of stories (Aveling 2006)
 Critical storytelling (Solorzano & Yosso 2002)
aims at telling stories about uncomfortable
issues, stories of marginalised and often
silenced people.
 Counter vs stock stories

15. No one escapes hegemony
 A POD invites not only members of the
dominant culture but also members of the
marginalized cultures to re-examine the
hegemonic values inevitably internalized in the
process of being exposed to curriculum and
media that serve the interest of the ruling
class.

16. Sentimentality and critical
emotional reflexivity

17. Sentimentality in digital stories
 originate directly from participants lived
experiences, and often deal with significant
episodes in somebody’s lives
 tendency to be very emotional
 danger of ‘sentimentality of digital stories’,
arguing that it promotes ‘individualistic, and
naively unselfconscious accounts of personal
stories’ (Hartley and McWilliam 2009: 14)

18.  ‘Somewhat paradoxically from a critical
perspective, it is the very qualities that mark
digital stories as uncool, conservative, and
ideologically suspect – ‘stock’ tropes,
nostalgia, even sentimentality – that give them
the power of social connectivity, while the
sense of authentic self-expression that they
convey lowers the barriers to empathy.‘
(Burgess 2006:10)

19. Danger of sentimentality
 Zembylas: sentimental reaction by students
identifying with the privilege feeling guilt /
defensiveness in privileged party and anger in
the victim, leading to desensitization &
disengagement (2011: 20)

20. Critical emotional reflexivity
 ….a process of using emotions as catalysts, to
allow the questioning of beliefs and
assumptions, exposing privilege and comfort
zones, with the aim for learners to find new
ways of being with the ‘Other’, and ultimately
leading to transformed ‘relationships,
practices, and enactments that benefit
teaching and learning for peace, mutual
understanding, and reconciliation’
(Zembylas 2011: 2)

21. Aims and research questions

22. Aims of study /gaps
 Theoretical aim: to contribute critically to an
emerging body of work which theorizes difference,
education and identity in South Africa (Carrim
2000; Soudien 2001; Walker 2005b; McKinney
2007).
 Practical aim: to develop a practical model for
exploring difference based on a pedagogy of
discomfort (critical digital storytelling)
 Methodological aim: contribute to narrative
emotional inquiry approach which is
underdeveloped

23. Main research question
 Explore the potential of a critical digital
storytelling process to create a space in the
South African classroom to engage across
difference in a way that can lead to
transformation among students

24. Sub-research questions
1. What narratives do students construct in
critical digital storytelling? (product)
2. What are conditions need to be in place for
critical digital storytelling? (process)

25. Theoretical framework

26. Theoretical framework
 Critical pedagogy / Critical race theory
 Foucault’s post-structuralism (later work)
 Zembylas’ development of a politics of
emotions, genealogy of emotions

27. What is Critical Pedagogy?
 Critical pedagogy is a teaching approach
which attempts to help students question and
challenge domination, and the beliefs and
practices that dominate them.
 How do you teach critical thinking in a way
that transforms consciousness (Boler 1999,
Freire 1978)?
 Critical consciousness requires ‘knowing
thyself’ as part of the historical process’
(Fishman and McCarthy 2005)

28. Important concepts
 Show how ‘schools perpetuate or reproduce the
social relationships and attitudes needed to
sustain the existing dominant economic and class
relations of the larger society’ (McLaren 2009: 77)
 Hegemony is ‘ the maintenance of domination not
by the sheer exercise of force but primarily
through consensual social practices, social forms,
and social structures produced in specific sites
such as the church, the state, the school, the
mass media, the political system, and the family’
(McLaren 2009: 67).

29. Primacy of student experience
 Assisting students to draw on their voices and
histories as a basis for engaging and
interrogating the multiple and often
contradictory experiences that provide them
with a sense of identity, worth and presence
(Giroux 2009: 453).
 Resistance: difficulty to break out of
hegemonic discourses

30. Critical race theory
 giving voice to normally silenced people and
subjugated knowledges, to provide ‘a way to
communicate the experiences and realities of the
oppressed, a first step on the road to justice’
(Ladson-Billings & Tate 2006: 21).
 stockstories and counter-stories: ‘challenge social
and racial injustice by listening to and learning
from experiences of racism and resistance,
despair and hope at the margins of society’
(Yosso 2006: 171).
 potential of healing through the communal hearing
of counterstories (Yosso 2006; Delgado 1989).

31. Limitations
 CP takes sides
 Sides with the marginalised / oppressed party
 Alienates students of privileged status,
reaffirms established beliefs and assumptions
 Essentialises difference (Ellsworth 1989)
 Assumes a position of rationality, discards
emotions
 ‘Relation of teacher / student becomes
voyeuristic when the voice of the pedagogue
himself goes unexamined and unreflected’
(p.312)

32. Post-structuralism
 Michel Foucault
 Helps critiquing our own thinking, meta-level
 Important concepts
 Importance of history to understand the present
 Power/knowledge
 Individual agency
 Role of affective experiences
 Identity as constructed and constantly changing

33. Power / knowledge
 Intricate relationship between
power/knowledge
 People and bodies are sites where power is
enacted and resisted
 ‘Opposition leads to resistance and resistance
yields agency’
 Constantly negotiated / potential for disruption
 Power as discourse

34. Emotions
 Rejects Descartes ‘cogito ergo sum’
 Importance of affective experiences to come
close to one’s real truth
 Idea of limit experiences

35. Zembylas’ Politics of Emotions
 Aim: to ‘problematize assumptions and
expectations about emotion talk and the ways
emotions are expressed in order to reveal the
role power relations and ideology play in the
formation of emotions as discursive practices’
(2005: 29).
 Teachers need to develop a critical emotional
knowledge about pedagogies and themselves
(p.38), by exploring how emotional discourses
are constructed and how those constitute a
teacher’s subjectivity.

36. Genealogy of emotions
 a ‘form of history which can account for the
constitution of knowledges, discourses,
domains of objects etc.’ (Foucault 1980: 117)
Individual reality
(intrapersonal)
Social interactions
(Interpersonal)
Sociopolitical context
(intragroup)
The history of how
teacher emotions are
constructed
How teacher emotions
are used in teaching
and what possibilities
they open for teachers
and students
How teacher emotions
are relational, historical
and social
Zembylas 2005: 97

37. Research design
 Critical research (Carr and Kemmis 1986):
knowledge generated through this mode of
research is an ideological critique of power,
privilege and oppression (Merriam 1998)
 Qualitative research design: interested in
understanding the meaning people have
constructed, how they make sense of the
world and their experiences, meaning is
embedded in people’s experiences and
mediated through investigator’s own
perceptions

38. Characteristics of qual research
 Inductive research: finding theory to match the
data
 Sampling: usually nonrandom, purposeful and
small
 Time intensive, researcher is in close contact
with participants
 Researcher : primary instrument of data
collection and analysis
 Findings are richly descriptive
Merriam 1998

39. Case study: 4th year ISP
professional course
Cycle Students Focus of digital story
2010 29 students Reflection on 7 roles of the
teacher
2011 55 students
(4 student
facilitators)
Reflection on 1 role of teacher,
focusing on 1 critical incident on
journey to becoming teachers
(River of Life)
2012 67 students
(7 student
facilitators)
Critically reflect on 1 critical
incident on journey to becoming
teachers (Critical pedagogy and
River of Life)
2013 ????? Use emotions as catalysts to
make meaning of difference

40. Site of study
 2013 4th year ISP pre-service teacher
education students on Mowbray campus
 Snapshot, highly contextualised, but
methodologically framework can be applied to
other settings in South African HE context
 Sampling: convenience (student facilitators)
 Better relationship
 Deeper understanding
 Longer engagement
 Easier to work in small group than in large group

41. Diverse groups
 Easier to talk about trace in mono-racial focus
groups, but it is important to facilitate dialogue
in mixed race research (Pattman 2010: 967)

42. Pilot studies
 Cycle 1: focus on logistics, process of
developing digital stories
 Cycle 2: introduction of River of Life, emotions
and discomfort, nagging feeling, sentimentality
 Cycle 3: introduction of critical pedagogy,
difficulties, alienation of students, strategic
empathy, easier to work in small groups

43. Guilt
 It suddenly made me realise like - how
hard some of the people work here
and how strong some people actually
are. You’d often say like - ah you
know - look at this person they never
come to class and things - or they
don’t do their assignments but you
don’t know that they’re not doing it
because they were up working all
night until five in the morning like
trying to earn money - it’s very
emotional… I was howling yesterday
and then I - I felt bad when I got home
I felt so guilty I thought but all I had to
do was ask that person all I had to do
was take an interest in them and I
haven't for four years. (WF)

44. Anger
 Sitting there with them,
looking at the story for me the
aim was not for them to feel
pity for me, because that’s
always been an issue for me.
You don’t feel sympathy for
me. I don’t want you to feel
sorry for me. This is my story
and I’m proud of it. I’m not
ashamed of it. So for you to
feel pity it’s not going to help.
It’s not going to help me - I
don’t know if you will
understand. (BM)

45.  Now in fourth year you know they expect us
to be all integrated and be a happy family
and it’s such a false. I feel like you know
lecturers are crying we all crying but its
false because we've been with these
people for four years and we've never
bothered to ask them you know and now
we crying about their stories. (WF)

46. Critical Digital Storytelling

47. Data collection methods cycle 4
 2 phases
 4 day workshop
for student
facilitators (Aug
2013)
 Actual project
(Sept – Oct
2013)
Pre-project
workshop
Project
Recording (video
taping) of
discussions
Debriefing sessions Debriefing sessions
after workshops
Reflective journals /
free writing
Reflective journals /
free writing
Initial digital stories Final digital stories
Focus groups Focus groups
Individual interviews? Individual interviews?
Observation Observation
Field notes (blog) Field notes (blog)
Rich content with narrow
focus (Cronje 2010)

48. Data analysis
 Variety of data collection: various methods of transcription
and analysis
 Critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1992, Gee 2006)
 Describe, interpret, explain relationships between micro and
macro processes within texts and discourses
 Tracing patterning of modes within and across texts, pattern of
power
 Multimodal discourse analysis (Kress & Van Leeuwen 2001)
 More and more multimodality in students’ lives, messages
constructed with different semiotic modes
 Taking cultural, social and historical background into account
 Holistically orientated analysis of meaning, understanding the
sum of parts can derive meaning

49. Transformation?
 Set of analytical tools that allows the traceing
of resemiotization of discourse across
conversations and contexts, which signals
learning and transformation (Chouliaraki and
Fairclough 1999)

50. Validity
 Video recording of discussions (?)
 Triangulation of data
 Member checks

51. Ethical considerations
 Ethical clearance obtained from the Faculty of
Education and Social Sciences (2010-2015).
Ethics clearance from UCT to be obtained.
 Informed consent to students written reflections,
to interview them and use their videos for
research
 Release form for digital stories to be
screen/published

53. References
 Boler, M., & Zembylas, M. (2003). Discomforting Truths: The
Emotional Terrain of Understanding Difference. In P. Trifonas
(Ed.), Pedagogies of difference: Rethinking education for
social change (pp. 110-136). New York: RoutledgeFalmer.
 Bozalek, V. (2011). Acknowledging privilege through
encounters with difference: Participatory Learning and Action
techniques for decolonising methodologies in Southern
contexts. International Journal of Social Research
Methodology, 14(6), 469-484.
 Hemson, C., Moletsane, R., & Muthukrishna, N. (2001).
Transforming Racist Conditioning. Perspectives in Education,
19(2), 85-97.
 Jansen, J. (2010). Over the rainbow - race and reconciliation
on university campuses in South Africa. Discourse, 38(1).
 Lambert, J. (2010). Digital storytelling cookbook. Elements.
Berkeley, CA: Center for Digital Storytelling.

54.  Pattman, R. (2010). Investigating “race” and social cohesion
at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. South African Journal of
Higher Education, 24(6), 953-971.
 Soudien, C. (2012). Realising the dream. Cape Town: HSRC
Press. Retrieved from
http://www.hsrcpress.ac.za/product.php?productid=2291&free
download=1
 Zembylas, M. (2012). Teaching in Higher Education
Pedagogies of strategic empathy: navigating through the
emotional complexities of anti-racism in higher education.
Teaching in Higher Education, (April), 37-41.
 Zembylas, M. (2011). The politics of trauma in education.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
 Zembylas, M. (2007). Five pedagogies, a thousand
possibilities. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

55. Acknowledgement
 CPUT Research into Innovations in Teaching
and Learning Fund (RIFTAL 2011, 2012)
 CPUT University Research Fund 2012
 National research foundation 2012-2015
 Facilitators and students of 2011 ISP Digital
Storytelling project