Exploring the Potential of Visual Art in Negotiating Social Transformation at Stellenbosch University

Exploring
the
poten.al
of
Visual
Art
in
nego.a.ng

Social
Transforma.on
at
Stellenbosch
University

E
COSTANDIUS

2006-‐2014

Lecturer
in
Visual
Communica7on
Design

2013
Developed
a
MA
in
Visual
Arts
(Art
Educa7on)
with
focus
on
cri7cal
ci7zenship
and
globalisa7on.

2015
Coordinate
the
MA
course
and
supervise
MA
and
PhD
students
in
Art
Educa7on
(Cri7cal
ci7zenship).

CONTENTS
•  Introduction
•  Theoretical perspectives
•  Background, Strategies and Methodology
•  Examples of the projects
•  Reflections on the projects
•  Conclusion

CONTENTS
•  INTRODUCTION
•  Conclusion

INTRODUCTION
¡  The importance of global and local change and transformation
for constructing a socially just, sustainable and peaceful global
society is emphasised through initiatives such as the United
Nations Millennium Development Goals (2012) and the Earth
Charter Initiatives (2011).
¡  In addition to educating students in their subject disciplines,
educational institutions in many countries have accepted the
challenge to make a difference in their academic offering
towards realising a sustainable society.
¡  In South Africa tremendous progress has been made in
transformation regarding legislative policies.
¡  In 2013, the South African Department of Higher Education and
Training stated that mandatory and credit-bearing anti-racism
and citizenship education programmes should be developed in
all public colleges and state-supported universities in the future
(DHET 2014).

INTRODUCTION
¡  However, personal transformation within people (lecturers and
students) has proved to be slow.
¡  Reddy (2004:39) remarks that much progress has been made to
combat the effects of the past with legislative policies since
1994, but implementing these policies and changing actual
perceptions and attitudes in society and education have proved to
be slow at all levels.
¡  Social transformation in South Africa is a sensitive issue because
of the historical realities of segregation and past injustices.
¡  South Africans still struggle to find closure on issues relating to
the past because of what Ramphele calls the “difficulty
acknowledging the depth of our trauma” (2008:355).
¡  The Stellenbosch University Transformation Strategy and Plan
(2013a) emphasises that “[p]rogressive policies, guidelines,
approaches and objectives do however not ensure a
transformational impact”.

CONTENTS
•  Introduction
•  THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
•  Conclusion

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
¡  To help understand these complex issues in a teaching and
learning environment, I used critical citizenship and social
justice pedagogies as guidelines.
¡  I am using the following definition, based on Johnson and
Morris (2010): Critical citizenship is based on the promotion
of a common set of shared values such as tolerance,
diversity, human rights and democracy. As an educational
pedagogy, it encourages critical reflection on the past and
the imagining of a possible future shaped by social justice,
in order to prepare people in diverse societies to live
together in harmony.

¡  A framework for
critical citizenship
education (Johnson &
Morris 2010:90)

¡  Recently I also focused in greater depth on social justice
pedagogies.
¡  To unpack the social justice concept further, the three-
dimensional approach to social justice of Nancy Fraser (2008,
2009) is used. They are: distribution of resources; the politics of
recognition; and the politics of representation and belonging.
¡  According to Fraser, all three dimensions should be included to
enhance social justice. Fraser (2008:282) uses the phrase “no
redistribution or recognition without representation”.
¡  Teaching for social justice begins with the idea that every human
being is of equal value, entitled to decent standards of justice,
and violation of the standards must be acknowledged and fought
against (Ayers 2004).

¡  Critical citizenship and social justice teaching and learning
is a challenge experienced not only in writing policies or
curricula, but also in confronting what is happening in
everyday interactions.
¡  Social justice education incorporates both what is included
in the curriculum and how the lecturer practises social
justice; therefore not only what you teach but how you
teach and what the result of your teaching is (Leibowitz &
Bozalek 2015).
¡  Barnett and Coate (2008) refer to a hidden curriculum or a
curriculum within a curriculum, in which what is said on
paper and in policy documents do not necessarily
correspond with what is happening in actual educational
interaction.

THEORETICAL
PERSPECTIVES
•  At SU the Graduate Attributes initiative and my critical citizenship/social justice projects largely have
the same aims and address similar issues.
•  There may be a small difference in the approach. The critical citizenship initiative involves a bottom-
up approach, whereas the Graduate Attributes initiative may follow a more top-down approach.
•  I believe that if the lecturer is not convinced that critical citizenship or graduate attributes is
important, it will be conveyed in a superficial manner.
•  The aim of the critical citizenship/social justice projects are to “work through, rather than uncritically
with, graduate attributes” (James, etal, 2004).

CONTENTS
•  Introduction
•  BACKGROUND, STRATEGIES AND METHODOLOGY
•  Conclusion

•  Since 2006 I did community interaction art and design projects on Thursday
afternoons with students, school learners and community members
•  In 2009 I interviewed 3rd year students and Grade 11 Kayamandi learners
and I came to the following conclusions:
•  Perpetuate the concept of university as knowledgeable and community as
needy. (“White as knowledgeable and black as needy” Biko 2004:23).
•  Christian belief and hierarchy of giving and receiving.
•  Realisation - more than community interaction is needed. In reaction to this
reality, Critical Citizenship projects were introduced into the Visual
Communication Design curriculum for first to third year students, and a
research group was formed of lecturers from various departments to also
introduce Critical Citizenship at other departments on campus. I received a
Teaching Fellowship to drive this process.
BACKGROUND

DIALOGUE, ART AS MEDIUM, COMMUNITY INTERACTION & REFLECTION
Dialogue
•  Socratic learning - lecturers, students and community members
•  How can I learn from others about the obstacles they face?
•  What narratives are missing from the “official story”?
•  What is considered as the “norm”?
•  Who are considered as the “others”?
•  Safe space for dialogue
STRATEGIES

Dialogue - Safe space
•  A safe space meant a space where what was said by students and
learners during conversations in class or community interaction was not to
be held against them and did not, for instance, affect the student’s marks.
•  One has to distinguish between safe space and ‘safe speech’ (Waghid
2010). Waghid argues against ‘safe speech’ in which disruption is
avoided. A safe space does not necessarily mean safe speech. One could,
in fact, explore critical issues within a safe space.
STRATEGIES

STRATEGIES
Community interaction
•  Interacting with or exposure to various communities
•  In its “Strategic Framework for the Turn of the Century and
Beyond”, Stellenbosch University promotes the view that the task
of a University is threefold, namely a) to create knowledge
(research), b) to transfer knowledge (teaching) and c) to apply
knowledge (community interaction).
•  Braidotti (2015) argues that we are not separated from society –
we are part of society and part of the problems in society. We are
immanent to the problems.

STRATEGIES
Art as medium
•  Medium for working through sensitive issues
•  Analysing issues from different perspectives
•  Being ‘in the shoes of others’ (Nussbaum 2010) - Developing
imagination
•  Culturally inclusive content-knowledge (NRF project – Rewriting
the history of the arts in Stellenbosch archive)
•  Art to express your own identity: “You Othered me even more by
encouraging me to use my own Muslim culture as inspiration for my
designs”.

Art
as
medium
-‐
Material
thinking

¡  Material thinking involves the construction of new knowledge through
processes of making. Paul Carter poetically relates his account of creative
research through a lens of material thinking in his book Material thinking:
The theory and practice of creative research (2004). This account illustrates
how knowledge generated through processes of making is simultaneously
tacit and explicitly ‘real’; how it does not merely produce knowledge, but
becomes and embodies new ideas.
¡  Carter emphasises that any new knowledge constructed through creative
undertakings is embodied within the local, discursive and collaborative
processes that brings it to life; that materialises it. According to Carter
(2004:5) it is the acts of collaboratively engaging in discourse within the
context of a specific place that constitutes new insights.

STRATEGIES

STRATEGIES
Reflections (students, lecturers and community members)
•  Struggling with emotions
•  Difficult knowledge (Britzman 2013)
•  Knowledge in the blood (Jansen 2009)
•  Affective-Cognitive model (Du Plessis, Smith-Tolken) Emotions
and theoretical context

Illeris
(2003)
dis7nguishes
between
three

dimensions
of
learning,
namely
cogni7ve,

emo7ve
and
society

§  The
cogni7ve
dimension
is
the
knowledge
or

skill
which
informs
understanding
and

meaning
making.

§  The
emo7onal
dimension
represents

feelings
and
its
func.on
is
to
secure
mental

balance
to
enable
learning
(Illeris

2003:399).

§  He
stresses
that
“all
cogni.ve
learning
is,

so
to
speak,
‘obsessed’
by
the
emo.ons
at

stake…”
and
emo.onal
learning,
in
the

same
way,
is
always
inﬂuenced
by
cogni.ve

understandings
(2003:399)

EMOTIONS, AFFECTIVE TURN
Figure 1:
Three dimensions of learning
(from Illeris 2003b:171)

¡  This close connection of the cognitive and emotional is
thoroughly researched in the field of neurology.
¡  Research shows that the neocortex is where thinking
occurs while the amygdala is “the storehouse of
emotional memory” (Goleman 2004:15).
¡  Physical sensations are sent to the thalamus and then
transmitted to the neocortex and the amygdala. The latter
reacts more rapidly than the former, and therefore the
thinking brain often balances or corrects the emotional
brain moments later.
¡  Goleman (2004:15,78) refers to the neuroscientist
LeDoux’s research, which found that the emotional brain
can overpower the thinking brain and emotions such as
anger or emotional stress can impede rational thinking.

¡  Zembylas (2007a:355) argues for acknowledging the role of
emotional knowledge as interconnected to pedagogical content
knowledge.
¡  With acknowledging the importance of emotions, the
methodologies of studying emotions in education should,
according to Zembylas (2007c:57), also receive attention.
¡  He suggests three approaches (pp. 59-66) of theorising emotion
and their implications for educational research. He refers to
emotion as an individual experience, a sociocultural experience
and emotion as an interactional and performative experience.
The interactionist approach (term borrowed from Savage 2004)
proposes including the bodily and a sociocultural context so that
emotions are not only private or a reaction to social structures,
“but are embodied and performative; that is, the ways in which
we understand, experience, perform and talk about emotions are
highly related to our sense of body”.

•  Affective turn - reaction produced in the body and mind to
increase or decrease the capacity to act.
•  A ability to affect and be affected (Deleuze and Guattari)
•  In-between-ness or beside-ness - Gregg and Seigworth (The affect
theory reader)
•  Spinoza described it as “passion of the mind is a confused idea”

¡  Even though the emotional or affective dimensions of a
curriculum is not always considered as a type of curriculum
or as a curriculum theory, it is considered as central to my
research to emphasise the importance of taking into
consideration the being in learning (Barnett 2009) as a
thinking, feeling and acting person (Jarvis 2006).
¡  Critical Citizenship and social justice education needs to
focus on the emotions and affect, because issues such as
tolerance, diversity, reflection on the past - key factors
influencing social justice and transformation - is not only
cognitive but also a emotional bodily re/action.

METHODOLOGY
Action Learning and Action Research (ALAR) Zuber-Skerrit’s (2001)
•  Used as a guideline for the projects:
Grounded theory = raw data and contextual knowledge
Personal construct theory = active constructors of knowledge
Critical theory = self-critical attitude
Systems theory = holistic resolutions to complex problems
•  Learning from action or concrete experience
•  Aim is not generalisations, but to know, understand, improve or change a
particular social situation for the benefit of all participants.
•  Recognise that human beings, communities or organisations are difficult to
predict; their characteristics, ideas, strategies and behaviour are complex.

CONTENTS
•  Introduction
•  EXAMPLES OF THE PROJECTS
•  Conclusion

CONTENTS
SECOND
YEAR
PROJECT:
MEMORIALISE
THE
FORCED
REMOVALS

PROJECT:

MEMORIALISE
THE
FORCED
REMOVALS
¡  For
decades,
the
forced
removals
from
Die
Vlakte,
and
the
BaTle
of

Andringa
Street
were
not
part
of
the
oﬃcial
history
of
Stellenbosch.

¡  In
addi7on
to
the
3700
coloured
inhabitants,
6
schools,

4

churches,
a
mosque,
a
cinema
and
10
businesses
were
aﬀected
by
the

forced
removals.

¡  Many
buildings
on
the
current
SU
campus
are
build
where
Die
Vlakte

use
to
be
–
for
instance
the
Arts
and
Social
Sciences
building.

¡  It
was
a
two
week
project
on
how
to
memorialise
the
history
of
the
Arts
and

Social
Sciences
building.

¡  It
was
undertaken
by
Visual
Arts
students
and
English
Honours
students.

¡  The
aim
was
to
make
students
and
lecturers
aware
of
and
reﬂect
on
the

history
of
the
building
and
the
current
consequences
of
that
history
in
the

present.

¡  A
range
of
aspects
were
involved:
interdisciplinary
interac7on,
community

interac7on,
group
work,
research,
interviews
with
ASSF
students,
reﬂec7ve

wri7ng,
conceptualising
the
memorial,
visual
and
oral
presenta7ons.

THE
PROJECT:

MEMORIALISE
THE
FORCED
REMOVALS

Our design concept is an exhibition space that creates
interest in the history of the forced removals of Die
through interaction.

Flat-pack tables mounted on wall panels can be
removed to form functional work surfaces.

The putting together and packing away of the tables

Mapping Emotions
Express
Yourself
How would you feel if you were removed from your home?
Angry Confused Sympathy Hurt Reconciliation
On 25 September 1964
Die Vlakte was proclaimed
a whites only area. The
people in Die Vlakte used
to be a quiet and joyful
coloured community, but
many people were
forcefully removed from
their own homes during
apartheid on the basis of
their race.

Second year project: See Kayamandi, See yourself

Third year project: Action research, learning life skills in Kayamandi

First year project: Discussing social issues

Third year project: Design as healing

CREATING A
WELCOMING CULTURE
ON CAMPUS

WOMEN’S DAY
9 AUGUST 2013
ADDRESS THE LACK
OF THE PRESENCE OF
WOMEN IN THE VISUAL
SPACES ON CAMPUS

CELEBRATING
DIVERSITY
WEEK 2013 &
2014

CONTENTS
•  Introduction
•  REFLECTIONS ON THE PROJECTS
•  Conclusion

REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS
Themes that emerged
¡  Feeling overwhelmed and stressed
¡  Psychological unpreparedness
¡  Fear and shame
¡  Resistance
¡  Uneven hierarchies
¡  Personal growth – bodily learning
¡  Use of materials
¡  Hope

Feeling overwhelmed, unsure, stressed
“Personally I feel completely unequipped for such a task and even other older
students can’t believe we were given such a huge project. …It is a loaded topic
with months of research required to understand the full scope of emotions,
wrongs, benefits, disadvantaging and joys that all formed part of the history”.
“As soon as they get off the bus I saw difference. They have different cultural
values and issues we might not necessarily understand. How must they feel with
a bunch of white students who just want to ask them questions? Though these
school children handle themselves with pride. I find sometimes we [students]
handle ourselves with ignorance just assuming that we dominate them but they
are the one who help us in the end. Sharing experiences, talking and laughing
shows me that once that barrier is broken, issues are put aside”.

REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

Psychological unpreparedness
“It was disconcerting to meet with [the guest facilitator] after our first visit to
Kayamandi, and realising that we actually needed what seemed like at least
a week’s psychological preparation for the project. It dawned on us as a
group that we were not working with a usual source like Google for our
research, but with human beings, who have feelings, perceptions and
sensitive histories of their own”.
Britzman (1998a in Kumashiro 2000:36,37) remarks that “[d]eveloping a
critical consciousness involves not only learning about the processes of
privileging/normalizing and marginalizing/Othering, but also unlearning what
one had previously learnt is "normal" and normative.

REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

Fear and shame
•  Fear of the Other “We arrived and played soccer against the foreign people”
“I grew up with knowing there are conflicts in the world, however I was [naive] to not realise
how close to home these problems truly are”.
•  Fear of blame For Apartheid, being white.
“I experienced a lot of guilt throughout the program as there seems to be much more suffering
in their community than my own. I felt guilty being more privileged than them and conforming
to stereotypes which was discussed and which affected these learners negatively”.
“I was not expecting such optimism and positivity to come from our conversations”.
•  Fanon (1967) ‘white gaze’ and ‘fascination with the poor or exotic’
“It felt as if we were tourists exploring a foreign country …It was as if we were looking in from
the outside, observing and judging their lifestyle, without the adequate knowledge to do so”.
REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

Resistance

The entwined nature of emotional and cognitive aspects of learning,
especially relating to resistance, was demonstrated in the following
reactions of a student:
¡  ”These projects opened up the racial issues while we were perfectly
fine with each other in class … before that … the older generation
should not make their problems ours.”
¡  “I didn’t know how to feel about all of these mixed emotions that I
got from various sources. On the one hand I wanted to feel empathy
towards the community members, but on the other hand I felt as if
they were blaming most of us for what has happened to them.”
¡  “…I seriously considered leaving Stellenbosch for a week”.
¡  “I think we could appreciate it [the project] if he had enough time
but I feel we didn’t, and now I feel even more biased towards the
whole Apartheid thing”.

REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

Resistance

The following is an excerpt from the data regarding the resistance to the terms
diversity, human rights, democracy (‘R’ = respondent and ‘Int’ = interviewer):
R: “Ja all those things are just so . . . ja, . . . I don't read anything.”
Int.: Those terms are empty.
R: “Ja”.
R: “Ek dink dit is loaded.”
R: “Ja, but loaded in, I don't think a good way. It is not a set . . . it is not a
space I think we're going to reach. It is completely ideal. I don't think there
is any society that exists in complete tolerance, diversity and this and that”
R: “... democracy …“
R: “That is this whole . . . ja . . . we need to bring things down to the ground.
I think it is loaded”.
REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

¡  Experiencing mental and bodily discomfort when dealing with
sensitive issues is a good space for starting critical self-
reflection and change.
¡  Place of discomfort is the point where reflection begins (Dewey, in
Bringle & Hatcher 1999)
¡  Leibowitz et al. (2010) argue that discomfort can serve as
pedagogy for change.
¡  Although experiencing discomfort or talking about the past
may be difficult and painful for some students, Swartz et al.
(2009) argue that it is the responsibility of lecturers to
facilitate such discussions.
REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

Uneven hierarchies
Hierarchy of ‘giving and receiving’
Student: “…The interview with my project partners served in flipping this relationship
though. By asking them the research question of the day (‘What skill can you teach me?’)
the power to give was placed in their hands”.
Learners: “The project was very interesting in a way that other people around us really
want to know about how we as people in Kayamandi live our lives. It was good because I
got a chance to talk about my life without being discriminated ... hoping that they felt the
same way that we did”.
Hierarchy of ‘knowledgeable and needy’
Learner: “I have learned that that I can help someone even if I’m not educated”, “…it
shows that I’m more than I think I am – that other people [the students] can learn from,
when I didn’t even notice”, “I learned that you don’t have to be autocratic”.
These projects gave the learners an opportunity to be in the giving position.
REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

Uneven hierarchies
¡  The way in which community interactions are structured is
important: it should not be a situation that includes givers
and receivers only, but should aim at a mutual exchange of
giving and receiving.
¡  Community interaction is often connected with the ideas of
helping behaviour.
¡  Bhattacharyya (2004) argues that helping behaviour could
perpetuate relations of dependency, therefore the concept of
working with and not for communities should be considered.
REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

Uneven hierarchies in the teaching and learning situation
¡  Racial/cultural diversity in lecturing staff (Sensitivity
towards criticism)
¡  Racial/cultural diversity in class (Socailly just space)
¡  Blended learning as an alternative
¡  Assessment - medical versus socio-political issue
REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

Personal
growth

¡  “An
overwhelming
feeling
of
reconcilia6on
in
itself
struck
me,
and
even

though
I
had
to
keep
my
prospects
and
hopes
very
much
realis6c,
I
know

this
project
will
only
change
a
few
minds
if
any,
and
it,
alone,
will
make

none,
if
any,
difference
to
the
way
the
communi6es
interact
in
Stellenbosch

today,
but
I
couldn’t
shake
the
feeling
that
at
least
I
was
doing
my
part,
and

we
were
doing
our
part,
and
that
made
me
feel
good
and
contempt”.

¡  “The
effort
alone
ins6lled
in
me
a
patrio6c
glee
that
had
long
since
been
lost

in
many
of
us,
and
if
I
can
feel
it
through
such
a
seemingly
insignificant

effort,
then
it
wont
be
too
difficult
for
the
next
person
to
make
an
effort
as

well
and
feel
the
same,
and
hope
for
the
next
person
to
know
such
joy
too”.
REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

Personal growth
¡  “Having been told these stories I look on the town with new eyes. One
can take a new walk through the town and experience moments in
which the absence left by forced removals becomes visible in the
present space almost as clearly as the town is empty during the
university holidays when the students go to their family homes.”
¡  “Driving past the guesthouse at 67 Ryneveld Street, one might not
guess that this property once belonged to a ‘coloured’ family who was
forced to vacate by the Group Areas Act. The traces of history are not
just in the physical structures, but in the social movement that occurs
in these spaces. History is in the streets we walk, and the streets we
avoid. It is in the grandson of the previous owner of 67 Ryneveld
driving ‘specifically down that street, past that house,’ rolling down his
window and shouting curses.”
REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

Personal growth
Community member:
“People do not see it [the sadness and humiliation] for I have learnt, by
looking on the bright side, to joke about it; it is an escape mechanism. It
hurts, no doubt about it. I am 77 and it still hurts. It requires swallowing hard
to keep it [the sadness] back. No, people do not know what is happening
within you. It has left a wound that one cannot heal with medication.”
Student:
“… It is easy to disregard paper and to disregard things written on paper,
posters and objects but you cannot ignore stories on people’s faces and the
passion of their experience. … We were informed that “after 32 years, the hate
and the heart felt is still there” that “the moment you start talking, it starts
borrelling”…
REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

Personal
growth

“I never thought I would visit Kayamandi with the art department… which says a lot about the
current focus of the arts, and about conventional perceptions of the arts”.
Cognitive and bodily learning
“It was after these meetings that I changed my outlook on life. I realized that we lived in a
country that had faults, and that South Africa was still recovering from the awful period of
Apartheid. But it was also evident that there was a desire to overcome these hardships and
aspire to a future where everyone was equal. I therefore walk away from this experience with a
renewed understanding of my position in society as a white person, and a profound respect for
those less fortunate than I am. Thus, my feelings regarding this project are now feelings of
deep appreciation and respect, and no longer fear and uncertainty”.
“It is now that I understand the profundity in the simple research conducted at Kayamandi; it
allows for an internal inspection of your own situation through others, the people you thought
were so different from you. The knowledge shared and gained goes beyond the simple bounds
of a project or a mark…”.
How to teach the body? Actual interaction and practical art projects
REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

Art as medium
I have been teaching in the Visual Arts department since 2006 and my
experience of the department was that Critical Citizenship education implicitly
was a focus before I came here, but I have realised through my own teaching
that, even though it was a focus, it was not explicit and sufficiently
transformative. Did it really make students and myself reflect deeply about
our past and how it affects our current situation, and how subtle
discrimination can be?
“The social responsibility of being a designer is a fact that our course has
emphasised to us from the very beginning of … first year of our studies.
However, I have always battled to comprehend exactly why it is stressed so
much. It was only during this project that I have begun to understand this role”.
REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

Art as medium
A student remarked that “[a]n important element of our concept was the
mediums we chose to work with. Our packaging really captures and
communicates that. We chose to work with Perspex as it embodied three of
our main themes, truth [transparency], reflection and layering … We also
worked with newsprint in our packaging and the soft, raw, fragile and
beautiful medium embodies the way we often miss the potential of
something or someone”.
REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

Art
as
medium

¡  The arts have for long recognised the complexity of the cognitive and the
emotional.
¡  The art making process became an emotional space in which students could
explore their own feelings of discomfort, guilt or resistances. Students explored
personal issues on a deep level that allowed for self-discovery.
¡  Ilyenkov 92007) argues that the transformative power of imagination lies in its
ability to not only to make visible that which does not exist, but also to seeing and
recognising that which already exists. Without the imagination, according to
Ilyenkov, we see what we already know and not what is really there.
¡  In art, students’ imagination is developed and this could also be the reason why
students wrote expressively, positively as well as negatively, when reflecting on
the Critical Citizenship projects.
¡  We need to think beyond art in its strictly disciplined form, as creative thinking
and imagination are of crucial importance in all spheres of life and should be
developed widely in education and society.
REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

Hope
Despite the positive reactions of some students, however, one remains hesitant about whether the
actual aims of changing perceptions and attitudes were achieved. A student correctly remarked, “…
but unfortunately we also fall victim to our own human nature which is to see, to sympathize, to leave
and to forget”.
Although one realises that changing perceptions and attitudes is not facilitated easily, reading
through comments made by students and learners during the past years and analysing the data for
this research gave me a feeling of hope that these projects has shifted some perceptions and
attitudes.
However, this hope is without illusion (Carlson 2005:25) and the feeling of hope should be constantly
and realistically assessed. Zembylas (2007b:xvii) talks about critical hope – a “relational construct
that is both emotional and critical”.
The notions of hope and transformation are what “emotions are about” and it is our emotions that
“encompass hope, passion and struggle for a transformed lifeworld that rises above injustice,
discrimination and healing of past traumas” (Zembylas ibid.).
REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS

REFLECTIONS
ON
PROJECTS
The focus of critical citizenship and social justice teaching and learning is
often on students and not on lecturers.
Too infrequently are teachers in university … encouraged to confront why
they think as they do about themselves as teachers—especially in
relationship to the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical world
around them (Kincheloe 2003) .
For Tennant (2000:9) it is not for the “purpose of discovering who one is, but
for creating who one might become in a strategic, tactical and political
sense: a kind of entrepreneur of the self”.
Kincheloe (2003) argues that “[t]here is nothing profound about asserting
that the ways one teaches and the curricular purposes one pursues are tied
to the ways teachers see themselves”.

CONTENTS
•  Introduction
•  CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION
I
want
to
end
with
some
ideas
from
Braido^
(2013,
2015):

¡  Braidotti (2013, 2015) argues for developing a sense of
interconnectedness between self and others. We are all
immanent to the problems in society. Our social responsibility
as lecturers and researchers is to be critical, responsible
thinkers and citizens, but also to go into action to overturn the
negativity in society - what Braidotti calls ethical praxis.
¡  Including critical citizenship and social justice pedagogies into
your curricula is crucial. Using art praxis as a medium could be
hugely beneficial.
¡  Springgay (2002:12) argues that the processes of artmaking is
an ideal tool for constructing meaning and “art is a process
and a product”. The artmaking process could be a medium to
enhance in-between learning.

Exploring the Potential of Visual Art in Negotiating Social Transformation at Stellenbosch University

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