scholarly journals Engaging the social: Community engaged pedagogy in the context of decolonization and transformation at the University of Cape Town

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-85
Author(s):  
Justice Chihota ◽  
Genevieve Harding ◽  
Lance Louskieter ◽  
Janice McMillan ◽  
Sizwe Mkhonta ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Students ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Engaged Pedagogy ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Social Community ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The Social ◽  
Current Context ◽  
University Of Cape Town ◽  
The University

Globally, higher education is at a crossroads on so many levels: funding, course development, who our students are, what knowledge is relevant for the world of work and beyond, what kinds of students do we want to graduate, and who are we as educators. All these questions (and more) have been around for some time; the current COVID-19 context however brings them even more sharply to the fore. This paper responds to the prompt about how we train professionals for the future so that they don’t participate in systems of oppression and inequality. It was written in 2017 in response to a conference on social and epistemic justice in the wake of the 2015 student protest movements and was written collaboratively by an intergenerational group of educators working on a course in the Engineering and Built Environment (EBE) Faculty at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. All of us have a strong commitment to social justice, and to providing engineering students with an opportunity to think about their professional identity through the lens of community engagement. While written before the onset of COVID-19, we believe that the arguments we make are pertinent to the current context. Drawing on the Honors’ thesis of one member of our group, we sought to reflect on and analyze our work in this context. In particular, the principles of multi-centricity, indigeneity and reflexivity (Dei, 2014) proved useful in making sense of our practice and our work together.

SHAPING A SETTLER ELITE: STUDENTS, COMPETITION AND LEADERSHIP AT SOUTH AFRICAN COLLEGE, 1829–95

2000 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-239 ◽  
Author(s):  
WAYNE K. DURRILL
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
The Social ◽  
Writing Class ◽  
University Of Cape Town ◽  
The University ◽  
Colonial Government ◽  
The Devil

Shortly after South African College, the predecessor of today's University of Cape Town, opened its doors in 1829 faculty members found that they had a problem. In one meeting of the Faculty Senate alone, four students were brought up on charges that one had been ‘fighting and noisy’, another ‘fighting – kicking open the door of the Messenger's Room’, another ‘writing on the Professor's desk with chalk’ the words ‘Ziervogel is a vagabond’ as well as ‘threatening the messenger with his fist’, and another ‘idle, insolent & insubordinate in writing class’ who, in replying to a reprimand from the writing master, said: ‘You may go to the Devil’. Several others were noted in the records as absent from class and lying about it. Moreover, the young college had only two dozen or so books, but already nine of them had been ‘mutilated by tearing out the leaves & c’. And virtually all the means for securing property from theft – ‘various locks, claps and staples’ – had been ‘broken in the College, apparently by some of the Students.’ So intractable had the students become, in fact, that the college authorities constructed a small one-room prison with no windows on campus, which they called the ‘Black Hole’, in which to confine offenders who could be identified and condemned. Students were regularly sentenced to terms of three or four hours per day without bread or water, usually in the early evening, the number of days depending on the severity of the offense.Students at South African College engaged in violence and intimidation of all sorts in the first half of the nineteenth century. They attacked professors and townspeople in Cape Town, preyed on each other, stole and destroyed property, and continually disrupted the operations of the college. These were not boys striving to become upstanding citizens, yet in the end they did for the most part, largely because in organizing campus violence some SAC students produced a reputation for leadership and a constituency that followed them. And that reputation proved useful later in securing positions in the city's merchant houses and in the colonial government. Later in the century, however, the violence subsided and was replaced with different means by which to produce a reputation for leadership, mainly structured competitions among students in a debating society, in sports and for high rankings in the examinations offered by the University of the Cape of Good Hope. What I wish to argue here is that the social relations created among students at South African College were important to forming elites in each successive generation. Moreover, it is important to know how these social relations were formed – mostly in competitions among students which centered around acts of violence, at first physical and later symbolic.

Double Thoughts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Dean
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
De Man ◽  
University Of Cape Town ◽  
The University

Coetzee’s interest in destabilizing the boundaries of literature and philosophy is most evident in later fictions such as Elizabeth Costello. But as Andrew Dean argues in this chapter, this interest in moving across boundaries in fact originates much earlier, in Coetzee’s quarrel with the institutions and procedures of literary criticism. Coetzee used the occasion of his inaugural professorial lecture at the University of Cape Town (Truth and Autobiography) to criticize the assumption that literary criticism can reveal truths about literature to which literary texts are themselves blind. Influenced in part by such figures as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Coetzee posed a series of challenging questions about the desires at stake in the enterprise of literary criticism. Developing these thoughts, Dean explores the way in which Coetzee’s earlier fiction, including such texts as Foe (1986), is energized by its quarrelsome relationship with literary criticism and theory, especially postcolonial theory.

Recontextualising the teaching of commercial transactions law for an African university

Acta Juridica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 275-296
Author(s):  
A Hutchison
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
First Century ◽  
Student Life ◽  
South African Council ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
African Higher Education ◽  
University Of Cape Town ◽  
The University ◽  
South African Higher Education

This article reflects on the changing political environment in South African higher education and offers one potential view of the future of contract law teaching in the twenty-first century. Specifically, the author discusses changes made to the final-level LLB course, Commercial Transactions Law, at the University of Cape Town. These changes were inspired by the #MustFall protest movements and also incorporated the requirements of the South African Council on Higher Education’s 2018 report on the LLB degree. In essence, this involved a recontextualisation of the component topics to speak to a broader range of student life experiences, as well as an attempt to incorporate more materials focused on social justice or which are characteristically ‘African’.

The Many Racial Effigies of Sara Baartman

2017 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kellen Hoxworth
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Black Paint ◽  
African Students ◽  
The Many ◽  
University Of Cape Town ◽  
The University

Six African students enact a somber, silent dance. They stage a series of striking images at the base of South African artist Willie Bester's sculptureSara Baartman, in the Chancellor Oppenheimer Library at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Their faces and bodies smeared with black paint, the students articulate their protest ofSara Baartmanin explicitly racial terms, aligning their critiques of economic, colonial, and racial oppression under the sign of blackness.

van Wyk Louw, Nicolaas Petrus (1906–1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heilna du Plooy
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Western Cape ◽  
The Family ◽  
South African Literature ◽  
Literature History ◽  
Faculty Of Education ◽  
University Of Cape Town ◽  
The University

N. P. Van Wyk Louw is regarded as the most prominent poet of the group known as the Dertigers, a group of writers who began publishing mainly in the 1930s. These writers had a vision of Afrikaans literature which included an awareness of the need of thematic inclusiveness, a more critical view of history and a greater sense of professionality and technical complexity in their work. Van Wyk Louw is even today considered one of the greatest poets, essayists and thinkers in the Afrikaans language. Nicolaas Petrus van Wyk Louw was born in 1906 in the small town of Sutherland in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. He grew up in an Afrikaans-speaking community but attended an English-medium school in Sutherland as well as in Cape Town, where the family lived later on. He studied at the University of Cape Town (UCT), majoring in German and Philosophy. He became a lecturer at UCT, teaching in the Faculty of Education until 1948. In 1949 he became Professor of South African Literature, History and Culture at the Gemeentelijke Universiteit van Amsterdam. In 1960 he returned to South Africa to become head of the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johanneshurg. He filled this post until his death in 1970.

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