The Faculty of Education’s Prof Janet Condy says Digital Storytelling is more than just an ice-breaker, instead it can make a real impact in breaking racial barriers. As transformation in the Higher Education sphere continues to dominate headlines she says students should be encouraged to unite through common stories and not race.
The current focus on the statue of Cecil Rhodes at UCT is emblematic of much bigger questions – questions about race and social transformation. These are questions that are central to the work we do in the Faculty of Education at CPUT.
This was underlined last year when a past student from our faculty shared an experience. Committed to giving back to community – he had chosen a school in a poor area as his first teaching post. There was even a rubbish dump next door, and through his classroom window he could see people scratching through the rubbish. He told me how surprised he was when one of his students, a little girl said “Sir you see that lady digging in the rubbish dump – she’s my mother!”
He understood immediately how important it was to listen to what this little girl had to say, that while her story of growing up in poverty might not be particularly unusual in terms of the bigger picture, it was at the same time utterly unique to her, and it mattered. His response mattered just as much.
We all have stories, stories of hope and joy as well as stories of pain and despair. These stories speak to ways in which our common humanity is divided by race and class, as well as by gender and other forms of social inequality. I believe that if we can find ways to share our stories perhaps we can find ways to rediscover ourselves and others as ‘being human’.
For the past five years, students in the Faculty of Education have shared their stories. The storytelling began when I noticed how seldom students mixed across race groups. Two decades after apartheid, born frees seemed to be perpetuating the very racial divisions the anti apartheid struggle had fought against.
I wondered if we could find ways of connecting across these divisions, and so Daniela Gachago (from the Fundani Unit) and I developed the Digital Storytelling project. Students are provided with skills and expertise to make a digital story about a social issue close to their hearts. This year 76 stories were made by 4th year Faculty of Education students. They were divided into small groups, each with a peer facilitator – students from their own class who had undergone additional training at the beginning of this year. We used participatory learning activities to help develop the trust needed to share the stories close to their hearts and employed a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ to challenge students to tell the stories that really mattered to them.
Once made, stories were shared with other students, and often with family and friends as well. Some students have even given us permission to put their stories onto YouTube. Less than 500 words long the stories are very powerful, and this is amplified by the way they are crafted with visuals and audio.
We hope that by sharing their stories, our students – the teachers of tomorrow – will be better able to help their own students connect across racial divides and be more human.
By Prof Janet Condy
