‘Ah, but the whiteys love to talk about themselves’: discomfort as a pedagogy for change

Abstract

This article reports on an interdisciplinary and collaborative educational module prepared for fourth‐year Psychology and Social Work students at two higher education institutions in the Western Cape, South Africa. The aim of the module was to provide students with the opportunity to experience learning across the boundaries of institution, discipline, language, race and class, and to provide the team with data to enhance understanding of how students grapple with issues of difference. The study was based on data obtained from student texts produced in response to the final reflective essay assignment. The texts provided valuable insights into how students, some of whom appeared to come into contact with peers from different socioeconomic backgrounds for the first time, grappled with themselves in relation to ‘the other’. A theoretical framework based on the notion of a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ and the complementary relationship of recognition and distribution, was used to explicate the data. The data revealed that there are cognitive as well as affective dimensions in learning about difference. It suggested that a pedagogical intervention can enhance what students learn about difference, but that this depends on various factors: pedagogical factors, and factors pertaining to the students’ own prior experience and cultural capital. The analysis of the assignments suggested that power differentials and inequality in terms of material and cultural resources can limit the transformational character of such initiatives.

Keywords:

• pedagogy of discomfort, higher education
• South Africa
• identity
• difference

Notes

1. In this article we use the word ‘race’ as it is a category that intersects with other identity categories, often with lived and material consequences, although we are mindful that it is rather a constructed, than biological concept. For the same reason, we use the South African racial classification of ‘white’, ‘coloured’ and ‘African’, as these are used in common sense as well as official documentation. Despite the demise of apartheid, these classifications are still indices of class, power and privilege in many cases.

2. The students were required to depict the high and low points in their life graphically, as a river. The endpoint of the river was their arrival in their fourth year at university.

3. See authors’ explanation of the word ‘race’ in footnote 1.