Invisible landscapes: students’ constructions of the social and the natural in an engineering course in South Africa

Abstract

This paper examines the discourses that students draw on and propagate in a course on rural development in a first‐year engineering foundation programme. It looks at the way ‘rural’ is often constructed as ‘lack’ and therefore ‘other’, the dangers of constructing development as linear, the ways nostalgia and utopianism feed into discourses of development and how ‘propriety’ serves to maintain boundaries between nature and people, society and individuals. Different modes and media, coupled with the degree of regulation in the classroom, may enable alternate discourses to emerge or to be suppressed. This paper argues that the curriculum needs to engage with students’ views in order to understand, interrogate and critique the kinds of realities they feed into.

Keywords:

• discourse
• narrative
• rural development
• multimodal pedagogy
• social semiotics

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa and the University of Cape Town Research Committee.

Notes

1. It is perhaps interesting to explore the relation between the concept of ‘invisible landscapes’ and that of the ‘hidden curriculum’, which has been deployed in discussions of pedagogy. ‘Invisible landscapes’ refers to certain discursive practices constrained by dominant discursive spaces in the curriculum, whereas the term ‘hidden curriculum’ (Seaton 2002) is used to refer to the entire socialisation process of schooling, where students learn values and behaviours through the experience of being in school, not just from what is explicitly taught. In both cases, the curriculum determines what students can and cannot experience, and the ways in which they can and cannot act. However, each concept offers a slightly different point of focus. The concept of ‘invisible landscapes’ focuses on the students’ resources, on their discourses and constructions of reality, whereas the concept of ‘hidden curriculum’ focuses more on the curriculum, on the forms of socialisation implicated in schooling.

2. When quoting from students’ writing or interviews, I have not altered their grammar and spelling and have not used their real names.

3. The RDP was a social and political policy developed in 1994 by the elected African National Congress government with the aim of addressing inequities in South African society through sustainable development.