Teacher Education for Diversity

Conversations from the Global South

Elizabeth Walton, Ruksana Osman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351806572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Foregrounding the diversity that characterises various educational settings, this book discusses how histories and geographies of oppression, exclusion and marginalisation have impacted on teacher education. Contributors draw on first-hand experiences of living and working in countries including Brazil, China, South Africa, New Zealand and Malawi.

Positioned in a geographical and metaphorical 'Global South', the book draws critical attention to debates which have been otherwise marginalised in relation to those conducted in the 'Global North'. Chapters address difference and diversity on both a conceptual and empirical level, acknowledging the significance of various global trends including increased migration and urbanisation; and broadening understandings of race, religion, gender, sexuality and dis/ability. Taken together, these chapters reveal the extent of the work which still remains to be done in the field of teacher education for diversity.

The issues discussed are of global significance, making this text key reading for teachers, teacher educators, and those concerned with the advancement of social justice and reduction of inequality through education.

1

Assimilation and celebration?

Discourses of difference and the application of Critical Diversity Literacy in education

Finn Reygan, Elizabeth Walton and Ruksana Osman

Introduction

Globally, classrooms have become more complex and more demanding spaces for teaching and learning in recent years. This is the result of the interplay of numerous factors, which include the demands of late capitalism and the impact of social media.¹ In addition, diversity in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, dis/ability, age, ethnicity, and language, among other identity markers, has become a defining feature of schools. As a result, teachers need to be increasingly ‘diversity literate’ to negotiate the demands of the classroom. The challenge teacher educators now face is to determine how best to educate a generation of teachers with a sophisticated understanding of the diverse identities of their learners, as well as how these identities intersect. This is important because not all identities are equally valorised in schools and society, and oppression is experienced by those whose identities are not valued. Indeed, multiple axes of oppression converge to determine the scholastic outcomes – and life courses – of particular groups of learners. Grant and Zwier (2011, p. 182) contend that there is a “need for theory and practice that would consider the intersection of multiple identities and how these [produce] lived experiences of oppression and privilege”. This leads us to ask: What are the determining discourses around difference that pervade school settings and what is both foregrounded and repressed in these discourses? And: How can teachers be equipped to move beyond outmoded ways of thinking about difference and diversity² so as to create genuinely inclusive school spaces?

Despite the need to complexify education spaces, given that issues of diversity and inclusion have come to the fore in recent years as evidenced by a range of frameworks and approaches to education, discourses of diversity in education seem to remain largely uninterrogated in classrooms. The frameworks and approaches include the impetus towards Education for All and inclusive education, which foreground the necessity to enable teachers to engage with issues of diversity. Our experience in schools and universities suggests that responses to diversity have been somewhat limited, and are often characterised by discourses of ‘assimilation’ and ‘celebration’. These discourses work to elide, dehistoricise and decontextualise difference, and largely obscure the deeper workings of power. This chapter offers a critical engagement with these discourses, specifically as they manifest in education, and the discussion draws on some recent South African events. We then propose the development of a Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL; Steyn, 2015) among pre-service teachers to enable them to trouble these prevailing discourses, and ultimately to foster more nuanced understandings of power, privilege and difference within school communities.

Discourses of power, privilege and difference

We recognise two common discourses of diversity – assimilation and celebration. These discourses can be found in South Africa and elsewhere, both societally and in education. We understand assimilation to refer to a process whereby people from diverse backgrounds and identities come to participate in the life of a broader community. Complete assimilation hypothetically creates a situation in which there are no separate social structures based on differences such as those related to class, race, gender, dis/ability or sexual orientation. There are various forms of assimilation, including limited desegregation, pluralism, purported integration, and assimilation that can be partial, individual or group based. Assimilation aims to negate difference and co-opt it into the norm, thereby eliding the salience of difference and perpetuating hegemonic norms. The celebration approach to diversity – what Banks, Cochran-Smith, Moll, Richert, Zeichner, LePage and McDonald (2005) call the ‘Heroes and Holidays’ approach – is one in which minority content is limited to special days, weeks, months and related celebrations. In this approach, learners coming from cultures other than the historically dominant group are accommodated by the tokenistic inclusion of some aspect of their culture. As Vandeyar (2006) points out, the notion of the ‘culture day’, with an array of attire, food and dance, is little more than an add-on to an unchanged school culture and curriculum. There is therefore little space for critical engagement on equality of access to knowledge, on whose voice and perspective are being privileged, and whose cultural values and histories are being acknowledged. The discourse of celebration tokenistically recognises difference, but only in a superficial way, thereby denuding difference of its substance. We will present examples of the ways in which these two discourses might shape the educational space and show some of the ways in which these discourses are being resisted by students.

Discourse 1: Assimilation and limited notions of hospitality

The presumption of the assimilation of the other has a lot in common with the view that inclusion hinges on hospitality. Hospitality is usually based on the assumption of a prior claim to or ownership of a space into which the gracious host ‘welcomes’ the outsider. But this welcome is usually conditional on the guest’s compliance with the host’s wishes and conventions, and is intended to “preserve the world of the host” (Dass, 2015, p. 104). Dass describes the workings of such limited and conditional notions of hospitality as designating:

… a kind of violence because they all work by prescribing, determining and knowing the guest in terms of the host. What is established in the process is a diminished form of the guest, a limiting of the other, which allows for disregard, abuse and harm.

(Dass, 2015, p. 105)

Educational institutions at various levels have adopted the language of hospitality as they have sought to ‘include’ those previously excluded. Hospitality metaphors abound in inclusive education discourses (Walton, 2016), as schools ‘welcome’ learners with disabilities, strive to ‘accommodate’ them and ‘cater’ for their needs. This hospitality is, however, premised on the convenience and capacity of the host school, which typically reserves the right to set “clauses of conditionality” (Slee, 1996, p. 107) that regulate the limits of inclusion. Byrne (2013), in an article that explores the contradictions and conditionalities of the inclusion of people with disabilities, notes that “practices of ‘inclusion’ are grounded in the taken for granted rules of a non-disabled arbitrary for whom the phrase ‘Welcome into my world’ is intransigent” (emphasis in the original) (p. 234). In higher education institutions, staff (Dass, 2015) and students (Njovane, 2015) have also experienced the expectation to assimilate to an environment governed by limited notions of hospitality, as they have been ‘included’ into what have remained essentially untransformed institutional spaces, replete with many reminders of the elitism, whiteness, patriarchy and heteronormativity on which these institutions were established. Njovane (2015, p. 128), for example, explains how the success of a student’s academic endeavour “depends on whether or not she is willing to part with who she is in order to pander to what she is expected to be”. Donaldson (2015, p. 144) contends that universities have an obligation to go beyond making queer students and staff feel “included and comfortable”, and to challenge and disrupt heteronormativity. The elitism of university spaces is perpetuated by entrenched notions of ‘academic excellence’.

Notions of ‘support’ tend to be evoked in the assimilation/hospitality discourses of difference, as the ‘other’ is offered assistance to meet the requirements and expectations of the dominant order. Support is usually predicated on an assumption of deficit, and is framed as a compensatory measure. Often, the personal, cultural and additional resources the ‘other’ brings are negated, or simply disregarded. Consider, for example, the ‘refugee’ learners who were ‘included’ in a school in Durban, South Africa. Here, “learners of war and flight” (Sookraj, Gopal & Maharaj, 2005, p. 1) were ‘included’ and ‘supported’ through measures like the provision of food parcels and extra English lessons. These gestures were seen by the learners as paternalistic, and a response to an exotic perception of them amidst a “miraculous synergy of violent battle and escapade imagery” (Sookraj et al., 2005, p. 11). The curriculum remained unresponsive to these learners and did not include them in any substantive way. There was little recognition of their linguistic aptitude, their positive attributes and the potential contribution of their stories. This led the authors to speak of a form of inclusion “that alienates in a context where the persons that symbolically exclude do so without the specific intention of excluding” (p. 11). In other schools, learners who experience learning difficulties or disabilities may be provided with modifications to the curriculum or assessment, or with personal learning facilitators (Walton, Nel, Hugo & Muller, 2009) to ‘support’ them and to compensate for their ‘deficiencies’. While we do not deny the importance of assistive devices and other arrangements that secure access, we maintain that there is a danger that certain measures become assimilationist – if not in intention, then in effect. This may occur if such measures are constructed on restricted, ableist assumptions of normality, when they limit learner participation in the learning activities of their peers, and when they prevent conventional, exclusionary curricula, and ways of teaching, from being challenged (Booth & Ainscow, 1998).

Resistance to an assimilationist approach to diversity is well illustrated by the student protests at South African universities in 2015 and 2016. The movement started at the University of Cape Town with the #RhodesMustFall protests, and was followed by the #FeesMustFall protests across higher education in South Africa. The discourse emerging from the movement has been a rejection of the assimilation of black students into the relatively unreconstructed white space of the academy. In short, the movement is pushing back against an education system that prioritises the assimilation of black students while remaining ideologically, philosophically and pedagogically unchanged. The #FeesMustFall movement is articulating a politics of presence, which is the political importance of having marginalised voices and bodies present in a space so as to stake a claim on that space. The movement is also naming racist, sexist and – at least in 2015 – cisnormative ideologies³ that continue to find expression in curricula, as well as exclusionary pedagogies, and what remains a largely untransformed academic body. The alienation and sense of dislocation experienced by many black students in institutions of higher learning has been the catalyst to push back against a model of assimilation that in many ways leaves white privilege unchallenged.

Discourse 2: Celebration, understanding and sympathy

An approach to diversity that purports to ‘celebrate’ difference can be found in various discourses that promote inclusivity in education and society at large. Engelbrecht (2006, p. 254) suggests that democracy in South Africa is premised on “acknowledging the rights of all previously marginalized communities and individuals as full members of society, and requires the recognition and celebration of diversity” (italics ours). Prerequisites for inclusive schools comprise having institutional cultures that celebrate difference (Corbett, 2001). These celebratory discourses can be seen as a response to the pathologisation of difference and views of the other as abnormal and an aberration, which consign such individuals to segregated spaces (Baglieri, Bejoian, Broderick, Connor & Valle, 2011). Efforts to establish superficial understandings of difference and empathy towards the other are often embedded in celebratory approaches to diversity. We critically explore this phenomenon, employing two reference points. The first is the ‘celebration’ of the heritage of South Africans as presented in a local newspaper, and the second is disability ‘awareness’, which is attempted through the media, literature and textbooks.

‘Heritage Day’, which is celebrated on 24 September in South Africa, ostensibly encourages South Africans to celebrate their cultures and their diversity in terms of beliefs and traditions, in the broader context of nation building. However, iterations of this public holiday have the potential to perpetuate outmoded and simplistic understandings of difference among South Africa’s peoples, thereby preserving hierarchies of privilege and marginalisation. A Heritage Day article from a local ‘free-to-read’ newspaper (The Randburg Sun, 22 September, 2016) exemplifies the celebration approach to Heritage Day, enjoining readers to “celebrate their culture and the diversity of their beliefs and traditions”. Permission to reproduce the article was refused, so a brief description is given in Figure 1.1 below, along with limited extracts from the article.

Figure 1.1 Heritage Day article from The Randburg Sun, 22 September, 2016

In the article, ethnic groups are reduced to clichéd monikers that perpetuate the trope of the simplicity of Africa as opposed to the sophistication of Europe. For example, the Swazi people are ‘traditional’, the Venda are ‘spiritual leaders’, the Xhosa are ‘extremely proud’, the Pedi are all about ‘dance and song’, whereas the English ‘brought civilization’.⁴ The normative whiteness of this construction of South African diversity is apparent in the invisibility of whiteness in the article. The semiotics of the article foreground the ways in which privilege (in this case whiteness) does not need to name or show itself. As a result, while there are visual representations of black African ethnic diversity, with photographs of people in traditional attire, there is no apparent need to display whiteness (in this case Englishness). This romanticisation and simplification of black African identity is juxtaposed with the cohering and organising impetus of whiteness, which ‘brought civilisation’ to underdeveloped peoples.

Casual Day is not an official public holiday in South Africa. It is, however, a day when South Africans are encouraged to ‘dress down’, donate to disability charities, and become more aware of people with disabilities (www.casualday.co.za). The South African government also marks an annual National Disability Rights Awareness Month. The awareness generated through these initiatives may be valuable, but it also risks slipping into the celebratory discourses in which ableism is invisible, and people with disabilities become the objects of ‘understanding’ and are characterised as the exotic other. McRuer (2010, p. 386) maintains that in response to the disability rights movement:

the dutiful (or docile) able-bodied subject now recognizes that some groups of people have chosen to adjust to or even take pride in their “condition”, but that recognition, and the tolerance that undergirds it, covers over the compulsory nature of the able-bodied subject’s own identity.

Recognition (or tolerance) of some groups within a celebratory discourse fails to acknowledge what McRuer (2010, p. 385) calls “compulsory able-bodiednes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction: (Re)considering teacher education and/for diversity
• 1. Assimilation and celebration?: Discourses of difference and the application of Critical Diversity Literacy in education
• 2. Engaging forced introspection: Teaching social justice in Critical Diversity Literacy
• 3. Deconstructing heteronormativity and hegemonic gender orders through critical literacy and materials design: A case in a South African school of education
• 4. The role of developing pre-service teachers’ pedagogical reasoning to support contextually responsive teaching
• 5. Diversity of teacher autonomy in response to curriculum reform: Towards a humanistic focus on teacher education
• 6. Educating in diverse worlds: The immigrant Somali parent as a strategic partner of South African education
• 7. Equity through individualised and interconnected teacher education
• 8. Teacher education and notions of diversity in Malawi
• 9. Teacher education for diversity in Brazil: Perspectives from the National Observatory on Special Education
• 10. Difference in current postapartheid education
• About the contributors
• Index