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Abstract
This article explores the ways in which western modernity, as Boaventura De Sousa Santos suggests, can play tricks on intellectuals when we try to teach revolutionary ideas in reactionary institutions. I reflect on my efforts to use Post-Development (PD) as a tool to engage students in critical reflections on development in a post graduate course in 2015/2016. One of their assignments was to create an International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) Development Dictionary emulating the Sachs’s collection. The results were mixed. On the one hand, they produced wonderful digital collations of concepts, ideas and critiques, but on the other hand, many felt that learning about PD had turned their world upside down. Given the strong reactions of the students, and also my colleagues, I reflect on the possibilities and also the problems of using PD as a tool to teach development studies to international students (most of whom are from the Global South). My experiment in asking students to engage in their own ‘unmaking of development’ recorded in their evaluations, a series of interviews, and my own and other colleagues’ reflections sets out the difficulty of unsettling apparent truths of development processes even in progressive institutes at the interface of activism and academe.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge and thank the students and staff of this 'experimental' year of the general course and in particular those who read this in draft form. I take full responsibility for the text.
Notes
1. De Sousa Santos, Epistemologies from the South, 3.
2. Taken from the Facebook Page ‘Arturito Escobar’ set up by Group B1 with pseudo-names Arturito Escobar, Gender Gender, Em Powerment and Parti Cipation as part of the group assignment in the 2015–2016 General Course, December 2015 https://wwwfacebookcom/profilephp?id=100010721888584 accessed 5 November 2016.
3. Sachs, Development Dictionary.
4. The course aimed to give students a first step into a process of unlearning or ‘unmaking’ of development, aiming at pedagogy of positionality and transition. My understanding of critical pedagogy comes from Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, who argues for pedagogy to treat students as co-creators of knowledge.
5. Hooks, Teaching to Trangress.
6. I use ethnography as a qualitative research method to reflect on my personal experience and connect these self-reflections on teaching to wider political and social understandings of education.
7. I see development as having many definitions; one of the concepts underlying the course was Phil McMichael’s analysis of the different historical moments of the global ‘development project’ – McMichael, Development and Social Change.
8. There is some quantitative information about the students. In terms of nationality and gender of the students: 19.5% of the students were from Latin America, 29% from Africa, 40% from Asia, 7.6% from Europe, 2.6% from the Middle East and 1.3% from North America; 39% were men and 61% were women (no other gender identity was registered). The majority of the students were in their 30s (53%), with 20% in their 20s and the rest over 40. There was one student with disabilities.
9. The quotes from students come from a detailed Final Course Evaluation held 1 February 2016 before the grades were released, organised by one of the ISS staff using a computer generated EvaSys package. The evaluation is compulsory and grades are withheld if the student does not answer; 126 students answered the survey. I designed the questionnaire with the staff member. There were seven questions with several sub-questions, making a total of 22 questions. There were 16 questions that involved giving a rating of 1–5, and six questions that asked for written responses (of the 34-page survey report, 31 of the pages are written responses; the staff member commented that this amount of written feedback was highly unusual). The section with quotes is from a study of all 31 pages as well as online written reports. As the entry is a personal, anonymous reflection it was not possible to differentiate which students said what. I selected the most articulate comments.
10. Drafts of the article were shared with a selection of 152 students and 16 teaching staff and facilitators involved. A short version of the piece was also presented at the Development Studies Association Conference in Oxford September 2016. I take full responsibility for the views expressed here. Note that most of the material I quote is only available on institutional servers or social media that cannot be accessed by the public.
11. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges.”
12. Ziai, Exploring Post Development Theory.
13. Icaza and Vazquez, “Coloniality of Gender.”
14. Kobayashi, “GPC Ten Years On.”
15. Icaza, “Testimony of a Pilgrimage.”
16. Throughout the essay I refer to many of the students’ comments from the evaluation, as explained above. As all comments were anonymous I refer to them by a question number (Q), and a number (S) that refers to the location of the student answer in the list of answers to that particular question.
17. For more on the ISS visit its website at http://www.iss.nl/about_iss/
18. Escobar, Encountering Development.
19. Sachs, Development Dictionary.
20. McMichael, Development and Social Change.
21. Ziai, “Concluding the Exploration,” 226.
22. Escobar, Encountering Development, 9.
23. Harcourt and Escobar, Women and the Politics of Place.
24. McKinnon, Development Professionals in Northern Thailand, 14.
25. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en, accessed 5 November 2016.
26. We had a hard time grading them, our first impulse being to give them all distinctions.
27. In the final evaluation, 71% gave it 3.5/5 or more, with 15% giving it 5, though it should be noted that ISS students tend to score quite high and in ISS it is expected to have 3.5 overall.
28. In the final evaluation, 10% gave 1 to the question ‘In general I appreciated this course favourably’ and 5% gave 1 to the question ‘During the course I could usefully reflect on my own life and work experience’.
29. As one of my female colleagues commented, I was the first woman to be given the leadership of the course, due to my personal trajectory, whiteness, age, experience, etc.; as she noted, prior to me, men had led the course.
30. Personal correspondence with student from 2015–2016 Course, 11 November 2016.
31. Currently, one-third of the fellowships at ISS come from the Dutch government. ISS is now getting more and more students with fellowships (or study loans) from governments located in the South. Every year ISS has seven fellowships from the World Bank.
32. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 34.
33. E-mail correspondence with colleague, 30 November 2016.
34. De Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South.
35. McKinnon, Development Professionals in Northern Thailand, 3.