Project Description
The South African teams worked across learning networks to re-imagine learning and change for the common good. These learning networks were found in rural farming communities, amongst urban youth, in local governments, and in activist movements. Nexus issues focused on included climate change and food security, democracy and social justice, well-being and decolonisation, and service delivery. Methods used included arts-based inquiry, empatheatre, cartography, change laboratories and participatory change projects.
STORY 1: DAY ONE PODCAST
Transgressing to Learn
In the T-learning project, a team of researchers, working with radio hosts and translators decided to transgress this narrative of a single story of crisis by re-framing to a complex story of crisis and hope: ‘Day One’, a home for voices across the city to come to terms with the water crisis.
Learn to Transgress
A 4 episode series capturing and unpacking the water crisis in Cape Town. These are the products of a range of conversation processes which are continuing now in various forms of audio-arts-based pedagogical modes.
DayOne Podcast: Sound social research in water-stressed Cape Town.
Anna James2019-11-15T11:16:50+00:00May 10th, 2018|
STORY 2: AMANZI FOR FOOD
Transgressing to Learn
Learn to Transgress
Three learning networks situated in the Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and North West Province.
Multiple demonstration sites in the three provinces.
Curriculum changes in agricultural training programmes,
Understanding of media platforms for agricultural learning.
A group of youth farmers who are running Training of trainers courses.
Multimedia
A Website containing downloadable resources; the WRC books on rainwater harvesting and conservation, posters by the Amanzi for Food project and learning networks, postcards and YouTube videos: amanziforfood.co.za
Publications
STORY 3: FOOD FOR US
Transgressing to Learn
Learn to Transgress
A series of workshops were used to introduce the mobile application.
The Raymond Mhlaba community was very receptive to the project and took a strong role in leading the community involvement.
Multimedia
Multimedia
Food for Us Mobile Application: For reducing food surplus on farm, and facilitating market transformations and creating local green economies.
Publications
Food for Us update: Visitors from UNEP 10YFP
Anna James2019-12-09T14:22:03+00:00November 7th, 2017|
Food For Us is on the move…
Anna James2018-07-04T08:42:07+00:00September 14th, 2017|
Food for Us: a food surplus trading mobile application
Anna James2019-12-09T14:22:33+00:00June 15th, 2017|
STORY 4: NOT YET UHURU
Transgressing to Learn
Learn to Transgress
In a residential art-based workshop that was based on the “ethics of attunement” the offerings that each Change Driver made towards this subject matter were distilled through film (Lispari, 2014, p176). These in turn were reflected using the medium of song as a pedagogical tool two years after the initial offerings were made and shared by the 21 co-conspirers. This methodology helped create another iteration of their reflections on their praxis over time. The praxis of Change Drivers in conversation with three unique reviews that chart questions around, transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis through the use of fictional texts, intergenerational analysis, political theory and poetry in order to surface resonant themes in praxis that echo across different times in history. This methodology sought to engage the question the archive in pluriversal ways that appealed to distinctive sensibilities from the hermeneutical, the rational to the gifts of the lyrical and the erotic as holding important theoretical threads needed to resource this study. The reviews additionally spanned periods in the history of the continent that hold questions around the precolonial and nascent colonial encounters, efforts to transgress within the liberatory movements and the intergenerational struggles embedded in women and queer people’s struggles.
The themes that coalesced across times were leveraged into capsules of rising cultures that form an experimental nexus for the practice of transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis that is already underway. These rising cultures were conceptualised as a meditations on what it means to live into a vision of home built on the explorations of a paradigm of peace, humanness, pluriversality and decolonial love for those like an unlike us that strive for freedom on this continent (Dlala, 2017, p52) (Ndlovu- Gatsheni, 2014, p142) & (Gqola, 2017, pp197, 199). The rising cultures were reconciled through the creation of a litany that chronicles different refrains in transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis in contemporary times. The litany is a tool that charts particular experiences that are surfacing as symptomatic.It seeks to generously surface the contradictions that we are collectively starting to see past, whilst acknowledging the tensions that we need to straddle, integrate and navigate towards greater synthesis.
The litany is an honest way of acknowledging the glimpses gained of who we are in this present moment, while we continually challenge ourselves to open up to questions about what it means to grapple towards a decolonial futures. This stance influences my role as an educator to unconditionally embrace what is already underway, and reflect it back to those that I am conspiring with in ways that promote an ethic of care and solidarity.
The study celebrates what is possible when we do not theorise ourselves away from the questions embedded in our current praxis. This is an ethic that chooses to stay close to the phenomena arriving at present, whilst acknowledging the historical experiences that echo it as a pulse for meaningful experimentation and praxis. The study believes by being faithful to ways of amplifying, integrating and reflecting what has been emerging for us over time, we build our capacity to better respond with an ethic centred on transgressive decolonial pedagogical praxis. This is the kind accompaniment and care that Change Drivers across the continent deserve as they make the way towards a future worthy of their longing (Rushdie, 1997).
Moving Through Methodologies: Fostering Decolonial Sensibilities In Our Own Rite(s)
Anna James2019-12-09T14:34:10+00:00February 16th, 2018|
Change drivers co-defining matters of concern
Anna James2019-12-09T14:34:20+00:00November 14th, 2017|