“Chapter 5. Teaching and Learning: Across the City, Back and Forth” in “High Stakes, High Hopes”
Across the City, Back and Forth
In the privileged comfort of a big blue University of Cape Town Jammie Shuttle bus, we headed down the N2, the campus receding in the distance, the mountain at our back. It was the beginning of the semester, a first class visit to Valhalla Park, the bus palpably full of nerves. Past new and old housing developments, we turned off the highway onto then–Modderdam Road, left onto Valhalla Park Drive, then down Angela Street, into the neighborhood. As we pulled into the fenced parking lot of the public library, we saw a small crowd, our partners, who had gathered to greet us.
At the small neighborhood library, then quite newly built, school kids were busy with homework while an old man read a newspaper at a small table across from the entrance. We funneled through the turnstiles into the meeting room on the side of the public area. Civic members organized the chairs, stacked up around the room’s edges, setting them out in circles. We sat, layered, knee-to-knee in this intimate, stuffy space. The Valhalla Park Civic participants introduced themselves. Some quietly nervous, others confident, some clearly curious, the forty or so students then shared where they came from, both afar and close by.
Years into our projects, my partners and I knew the orientation routine. We felt confident in the process. The frame of the course shaped the schedule and rhythm of this work, with projects organized around the thirteen or so weeks of the semester and the once-a-week afternoon block, from two to five, in which the class was scheduled. Most of the participating students were registered for a semester-long, credit-bearing course at UCT, part of a human geography curriculum in a degree in environmental and geographical science. Initially this pedagogy was part of a second-year course called Cities of the South. As the years progressed, it moved to a third-year course on urban geography, and then became part of my postgraduate teaching for fourth-year and master’s-level students. In its earlier forms, at second and third year, it was a mandatory course for students enrolled in my department. Undergraduate courses were team-taught. My component was initially the practical session, allocated to questions of method and fieldwork. Traditionally, long practical sessions were designed as laboratories. Each Science Faculty class was allocated a three-hour afternoon practicum scheduled for student lab work. This is the slot I repurposed for the partnership work. Later, I claimed a block in the course, as a way to build lectures and seminar discussion around the neighborhood work directly. In its postgraduate iteration, as a full semester-long course, I experimented most fully with mixing the research and scholarly reading with learning and teaching in collaboration with the Civic.
The curriculum included weekly journal writing and two assignments: the production of a poster and an academic paper. The posters were shared at a research party in Valhalla Park three-quarters of the way through the semester, an annual event in our partnership process. We started this tradition in the Sewende Laan research project when we invited everybody interviewed in the settlement to share the research with us, to check and celebrate their stories of pieced-together, hard-fought-for security. Research parties were bustling, positive affairs. There was something hectic, warm, urgent, and communal in this celebration of our joint work. The posters were a way of sharing a first layer of our research, our initial analysis and our interim findings. They drew on field notes and interview materials, on the conversations that brought each team together, on the layers of local interpreting and knowledge that situated the findings. They were a portal of sorts, a way of sharing our research findings, a way of building the arguments later made in publications. They included maps and photographs, a first take on the stories that each research team formulated from the detail of interviewing, observing, and interpreting neighborhood dynamics.
Following the research party, students worked on their academic papers, which they presented in a formal set of presentations in the final course session on campus. These papers were assessed by myself and our partners, as well as—in earlier years—my university-based colleagues who co-taught the undergraduate courses with me. The routine of this schedule and the imperative that it function, that the class run, offered a productive structure that shaped the process: the orientation and its prior preparatory work in the neighborhood and on campus, the intensive six weeks of research in the neighborhood, the writing and reflecting built into student work and paper development, and lastly, the sharing, assessing, and disseminating of the research at the end of each semester and project.
FIGURE 9. Teams of researchers
Intertwined in the process, in shared expertise and knowledge, our pedagogy was our compass. Our collaboration helped us to question what we knew. It challenged us. It extended university notions of critique and truth. It brought the city and ordinary people into the classroom and made their homes, streets, the neighborhood a teaching space. In building relationships, we could be adept and informed theoretically, steeped in everyday struggles, engaged in rigorous fieldwork, able to confidently build and reassemble ideas about the urban, to move back and forth between these poles. We steered literally and conceptually between the everyday and the idea of, and the necessity for, reading the field. Through this pedagogy, students were introduced to different kinds of knowledge and expertise. They became immersed in the realities and struggles of the neighborhood, realities welded with an urban geography literature and theory. This mix gave rise to new, syncretic forms of knowing and meaning making, immersed in urban praxis, in this city, fractured in its inequalities, its fraught and inspiring everyday realities. In this way we moved from learning theory to theorizing.
Teaching was the compass that set our bearings, made us oriented to and able to navigate this neighborhood, this life, this family, this home with its leaks and difficulties, this Civic struggle, these particularities. It located us: we learned and engaged the city through Valhalla Park, through intimate household struggles and inspirations. We experimented and innovated, while holding in productive tension the university and neighborhood and their competing and challenging demands and needs. The pedagogy was hard and embracing. It was rigorous and compassionate. It splintered and shattered stereotypes. It was teaching as joy and inspiration. It brought relationships and identities to the forefront and prodded and pushed, massaged their engagement. The pedagogy was political, but not preachy or didactic. Its politics were crafted and found, sought in the trajectories that the partnership brought to the fore. Felt, lived, experienced, and questioned, the partnership’s politics were found and nurtured in moments of conversation and observation, in engagement with each other.
Conspicuous was the word. One student in particular caused consternation. She had not read the syllabus or attended the introductory lecture; she did not know we were going “out” for our afternoon practical session. It was our orientation session, the first visit to Valhalla Park for this group of third-year urban geography students. The plan was to meet in the community library, share introductions by the Civic on their activism, the area’s history, then walk around the neighborhood, to take that first look and to team up students and neighborhood partners in small groups, the teams that would conduct the research together for the rest of the semester.
FIGURE 10. Running and recording fieldwork
In the preceding weeks, I had met with the Civic and those working on the project to discuss and refine the focus and our method, a strategy for the research, and to think forward through any issues that might shape or disrupt it. These conversations were logistical but, critically, also substantive. They were a process in which we reflected on what the project might mean, why it mattered, the history of the issue in the area. These preparatory meetings shaped how I shared the project in class in the initial sessions on campus, in which I explained the background to the project, the history of the Civic, and the commitment we made in our working together through the class, its varied motivations and responsibilities. Ideally, this first layer made explicit the ethos, ethics, and sensibility of the partnership and the project.
In this particular year, we headed straight off on the second Wednesday of the semester to meet the Valhalla Park partners and to get a sense of the neighborhood. In this ambitious start, I aimed for the class to engage the “field” from the get-go and to rework immediately all the messy notions that operated in classroom discussions. I was confident in the process of orienting students in this first session. It was multilayered, but comfortable; this approach usually produced good results. In retrospect, at the end of a hard day the very assumption that the orientation would flow just as planned should have been my warning sign.
We maneuvered onto the bus, which was, of course, a little bit late and not quite where I expected it to be. These banalities, though, were normal, manageable; metaphorically I tucked them under my arm. On the bus, I counted heads. I did not yet know the class. Retrospectively, it struck me this approach was a little loose and risky. As a rule of thumb, it would be best to know who needed to be back on the bus when we were done at the end of the day.
We reached Valhalla Park. The group of students was large, filling the meeting room off the library to overflowing. Students put out a circle of chairs for our introductions, but there were so many of us in the room we ended up crammed into a hodgepodge of messy rows. We introduced ourselves. Gerty introduced the Civic partners and told her story, her personal struggles with eviction. The students were captivated for the most part, though clearly eager as well to get going, to have a look “out there.” We headed out of the library off into the neighborhood as a group, a large one, trawling like a school of fish up Angela Street.
As we made our way around the neighborhood, one young woman irritatingly, constantly took photographs with a conspicuous big, long-lens camera. As she clicked photos and spoke loudly, my attention fully focused on her when I heard her exclaim, “A gangster!” I grimaced internally and wondered what my partners were feeling. In the meanwhile, setting up her “perfect photo,” she had wandered off, separated from the group. Keeping an eye on her too, Gerty moved to round her up, a stray and obnoxious sheep, hovering, not knowing her well enough to tell her to stop. Gerty confessed later that she was worried that the student and her very big, loud, and visible camera would go amiss, the camera swiped, the student mugged.
Who was this student, I wondered? How did she miss our introduction, which emphasized respect and a consciousness that we were in this place on the backs of the legitimacy of our partners, who were respectable residents and activists in this neighborhood? She clearly had not attended the introductory class, where we explicitly discussed a protocol for taking photographs only with permission and after interviews.
“What is your name?” I asked. She replied that she was another student’s friend, and “a student in the Photo School,” an institution down the road from the University of Cape Town. She continued, “I am doing a photo-essay on this class and project, and I will be here every week.” My hackles rose. I asked her to stop taking photographs, to join the group. She continued, a little more subtly. Unable to resolve this issue on the neighborhood street, we hashed it out instead on the bus back to campus, and, at the end of the afternoon, in my office, where I explained why she could not participate in the class and the project in this manner.
This orientation session was a moment where we were “at” the zoo, snapping photos of “exhibits” we had come to visit; and, at the same time, we were the zoo ourselves, a spectacle, unruly, herded, both entertained and despised, raised eyebrows following short skirts and the noisy entourage we collectively made. I was not the only one disturbed by these commotions. Other students were uncomfortable, stressed. Gerty was worried. Aunty Fadielah, a devout Muslim, was quietly unimpressed. The list went on. There was no time to engage everybody.
We headed back to campus, literally hot, utterly discomforted. Sweating and stressed I rushed to pick my daughter up from day care, following a tightly timed plan from Valhalla Park to campus on the bus, then back down the highway to get her. I bumped fortuitously into two other parents, both friends and colleagues, also researchers. Clearly flustered and out of sorts, I blurted out the way the afternoon had unraveled and my worries about the tensions we had left behind us, for our partners, in this spectacle of a start to the project.
Could I, they suggested calmly, focus on it all tomorrow? Discuss it with Gerty and in class, where I might turn the crassness of the afternoon, its spectacle and blatant othering, into a decent discussion? A discussion built not on concepts as abstractions, but on the irritation and frustration of this first, supposedly orienting, session?
That night I spoke with Gerty, who responded, “Soph, you know, they think we are making money off this project if your students come clicking photos like that. People asked me on the road later: So, what are you charging for those photos, Aunty Gerty? Where are you selling them?” She explained how problematic it made her and our Civic partners look and added, “We have to do a lot of work to make this safe for you and your students. I really was worried that the girl was going to be robbed. Everybody will think that students carry that sort of equipment.” In class the next day, I opened the discussion directly. Many students felt irate too; we were a spectacle.
This moment and its debate were productive. To address this crisis, six students—committed, concerned, and energetic—volunteered to meet me at lunchtime to figure out a more explicit protocol for our work with the Civic. From this conversation and process, we wrote out guidelines for how we could proceed as a group in the partnership work. This document outlined the principles for how we should be in Valhalla Park, to reflect our role as “collaborators,” built on the ethos that underpinned our project. The guidelines aimed to help students reflect on their roles, directed them to pay attention to our partners, the partnership and its configuration, the neighborhood context, what they might put at risk. They addressed questions of legitimacies, our ethos, and the practicalities of how we worked in this partnership and in our projects. They aimed to help us engage with respect.
The partnership, this course, and its curriculum required and demanded energy, commitment, enthusiasm, and total respect. Were we all on board? This was a question I asked literally, as we headed to and from Valhalla Park, and metaphorically, every session and week, as the projects unfolded. We had a project schedule, logistics, built into the regularity of the timing of our class sessions. Every Wednesday we arrived at 2 p.m., or thereabouts, and left promptly before 5 p.m. The schedule was banal but essential. It set the rhythm of the class and of our work in Valhalla Park.
FIGURE 11. Interviewing together
But at this initial stage, our preparation in the classroom was about respect, not logistics or method. I ran this discussion carefully, offering it as an invitation to students, as an opening frame, the ethos of our partnership. I drew annually on our “guidelines for the research,” the product of confusion and discomforts of that earlier problematic orientation session, where much went amiss.
The guide was a contract of sorts between the university and the neighborhood for this work. It articulated on paper the respect that had to be at the heart of the collaboration. We operated in this context as “learners,” as novices in so many senses, new to the neighborhood and its residents, its languages, expressions, its varied norms and protocols. In most instances we were new to the process of doing research, learning to see and hear with newly developed eyes and ears. This initial discussion helped students consider themselves as a presence in our partners’ terrain, that which we engaged when we left the classroom and moved out into the city. Our partners were responsible for us, for our safety, in very real and concrete ways. They also had their own roles, multiple ones. The guidelines offered a way to pay attention to and respect the daily hard work that our partners maintained to uphold their own legitimacy—as residents, as leaders of the Civic and community, as mothers and daughters, as neighbors—the identities and relationships that anchored them in this place. The guidelines shaped the ways in which we engaged and worked in and through the partnership.
The guide explicitly offered and challenged students to unpack the assumptions that we invariably carried with us, directing us to turn “whatever was obvious into a question.” Nothing could be obvious; if it was obvious, it meant we had too easily slipped into “us” and “them,” stuck in our own subtle and sometimes crass assumptions. In practical and straightforward ways, it gave us the tools that we used, shaping how we navigated listening, asking questions, looking, and engaging. It shaped our politics and our epistemology by recognizing our partners’ knowledge and situatedness, the solidarities in which we worked through and with them.
FIGURE 12. Guidelines for Research
As researchers and as partners in this process, our challenge was to suspect and interrogate categories, to be precise, to document and reflect on context, conversation, the nuances that helped us make meaning in this process, that helped us carefully “inhabit” and sometimes rework—we hoped—“the differences between us.” In this approach, we aimed to locate our ideas and reflections, to ground our geographies. This process helped us analyze urban concepts and the neighborhood, problematizing notions of informality, the legacies of segregation, the agency of ordinary residents, foundational building blocks that shaped our analysis and understanding of the city.
The guide was also practical and political. It specified a conversation for photographs, for explaining their purpose and use, a protocol for permission and bringing copies back to residents interviewed and engaged in the neighborhood. We brought this guide with us as we entered Valhalla Park to begin our orientation. From 2007 on, it shaped the discussion and focus of our initial classes. Every student received a copy, which we periodically returned to, discussed, and developed further as the course unfolded across the semester.
On foot, with our partners, we immersed ourselves in the research process. In teams of two or three, we began the interviewing process, building from the survey and a simple set of questions. Teams started by interviewing their neighborhood partner, piloting the questions, a way to get to know each other. A month of interviewing formed the core of each project. This process guided research teams through the fieldwork, from observing to surveying and experimenting with interviewing. Initially basing the interviews on surveys, we then developed in-depth questions to build semistructured interviews. Week after week, with the content of the interview and conversation, we worked on campus and in the neighborhood sessions to deepen the research focus. In this way the questions became more precise; they shifted. We ended the interviewing with life histories, framed around the precise research questions each group developed. These methods were increasingly qualitative, a process through which to practice and develop skills and confidence in talking to people. The tasks were designed as a process in which we took context seriously, listened carefully, observed, discussed, questioned, and reflected.
An iterative back and forth was critical to our learning and engaging, to our ethos and approach to this work. Students reflected on it in written weekly journals, which I and an assistant postgraduate student read and commented on carefully. This back and forth was a means to engage individually, to check and support student reflection and learning. Each week my postgraduate research assistant met with our partners before the students and I arrived. This meeting was a chance to touch base, to discuss how the research was going, to share and discuss what the plan was for the day, to share the weekly guide for the research session. Our partners had a chance to raise questions and engage issues they were facing in their groups and in teaching students. In turn, my assistant shared the student discussions and reflections, sharing what might need navigating, which student in each team might need some support. These sessions also worked to reorient the research and teaching process in relation to what was going on in the neighborhood, the shifting and sometimes unpredictable dynamics that shaped the research work.
Every year and every class, there were a mix of reactions that reflected the class diversity, its focus, rhythms, its occasional eruptions. Students varied widely in their point of entry into this neighborhood context. Reading the weekly journals, written following the sessions in the neighborhood, was an insight into who was in class, who I was teaching. It was a means to engage individually, with care and rigor, across the research in the weeks that followed. Experiential entry points shaped positions from which students started the project work, which they could reflect on in the initial journal writing. These were steeped in the race, class, and gendered identities we all brought with us into the project, in the experiences that shaped us and our understanding, in the inequalities in which we all lived.
A second-year student from the greater Johannesburg area, for instance, wrote appreciatively, “My first impression of Valhalla Park was in the form of a happy realization, which was that this settlement looked very much like home, where I grew up. The township I grew up in is named Katlehong . . . It is very similar . . . I even found similarity in some undesirable aspects such as the repugnant smells that grace townships across South Africa.” Not everyone exhibited this familiarity and confidence, the right this student felt to even name a smell as “repugnant.” Another young man, for example, emphasized discomfort as he reflected on his feelings of nostalgia. “We had a group of kids following us happily and chatting to some of my other classmates, some of those kids were even getting handshakes from ‘white’ students. My heart was saddened by this . . . I felt what it was like to be the ‘other’ well-off person. I mean as a child I also remember running after nice cars and ‘white’ people or township visitors with my friends wishing we could be those people.” Embodying the “university” in this project and space, he saw and felt himself critically and uncomfortably through their and his own eyes and experiences. He explained poignantly, “To be that person I must say is not as nice as I thought when I was still young.”
In contrast, another student, who grew up in a township in Gauteng, stressed dismissively, “What’s the issue here? I have seen worse. I have heard worse. I have lived in worse. In fact, on arriving . . . I was wondering exactly where the much talked about problems were.” Another young man, who grew up in a formerly segregated coloured area in Cape Town, not so far from the neighborhood, was not impressed at all. After hours, he worked as a summons server for the City of Cape Town Traffic Department, charged to deliver traffic fines and warrants of arrest in areas surrounding Valhalla Park. He made explicit in his journal that “I spend most of my working day in the company of a police officer who is stationed” in an area immediately adjacent. For this student, our research felt deeply problematic because the police officers he worked with classified Valhalla Park as a “high risk area,” an area in which they would not deliver summons because the risks of retaliation on summons servers were too high. He commented in his journal, “We are generally hated by the public in these areas.” After the first research session, he checked on his system at work on summonses in the area, noting that there were “147 unpaid speeding fines (ranging from R150 to R1,400) for 42 vehicles, 38 pending court summonses, and 22 arrest warrants for 9 people.” In short, he did not welcome his position as a partner in this project.
For other students—in many cases, white—this first session produced disorientation of various sorts. In every class the partnership provided a first in-person engagement in a township for some students, which they had more often viewed at speed, through the window of a car flying down the N2 highway. For many it was a “shocker.” One young man, a classically well-mannered product of the southern suburbs of Cape Town, wrote, “My first impression is a strange mixture of interest, inquisition, and absolute alienation. It was like entering into a new world, one that had existed on my doorstep . . . yet I had never encountered it’s [sic] like before. I was part of the same city organism as they were but felt as different from them as if I were a visitor from the moon.” For some, this dissonance proved discomforting and difficult. Another very privileged student stressed honestly, “Truthfully, I do not enjoy doing fieldwork, I don’t enjoy the objectification of people. Here I am an educated, white male doing research in a predominantly black low-income neighborhood, and the fact that we have to leave all our valuables back at UCT makes me wonder why we didn’t choose a different research project.” He reconsidered this position at the end of this journal, openly admitting that “I guess the reason I feel uneasy is also because at the end of the session I come home and it’s another world where I feel safe and comfortable.”
In contrast, another young man relished this first immersion. He had been desperate to escape, in his words, “the dreary, tiresome and often mundane process of regurgitating theory,” his summing up of his university education to date. Instead, he wrote, “at last, a chance to move away from the monotony of UCT’s lecture venue, and towards the unpredictability of the physical world. And Valhalla Park was most definitely the real world—a true product of South Africa’s sordid past, a working model, an actual community constrained by the many forces at play responsible for the forms of poverty characterized by the evening news.” At the end of the semester, he explained, “Our experience in Valhalla Park not only opened my rich white boy eyes to the world my parents had so vehemently and effectively kept me from seeing, but also allowed me to experience something no other UCT course offered—a chance to actually apply what I had spent so much time learning.” A hope that he then tailored and pared down: “Sure, we were all beginners, but regardless of that fact, we were all given the chance to meet people whom otherwise we would never have even contemplated.”
Our partners were crucial in the student engaging and learning. They helped students navigate questions and reshape their thinking from these initial starting points. Working in the areas of the neighborhood designated by Gerty and myself, research teams conducted interviews with residents and households, a process that brought challenges and opportunities. Here, the partner introduced the team to the person being interviewed, shared the purpose of the research. They helped students figure out how to negotiate interviews, introducing them to protocols for asking to speak to residents and how to enter and be in homes. It was in the interviewing that each team engaged with the lived experience of families in the neighborhood, experiences that were always personal and consequential. Mrs. Jooste, for instance, one student reflected in her journal, “was a mother of six children who were grown up now with families of their own. She had allowed two of her children to erect shacks in her backyard for their families, but the other four were still without houses.” In journals, as well as transcripts, students processed interviews, engaging with conversations, interviews, and research experiences in the days between research sessions. Another student wrote with concern and admiration how “Mrs. Abrahams was retrenched at age 40 and lived off less than R700 a month;” another reflected on “a family supporting seven children off one very small income.” Journals and transcripts were a productive space to process, to write up, to reflect on the deeply personal nature of what the research process made visible: neighborhood struggles that city statistics and processes too easily effaced. Experiences were embedded in context, specific, idiosyncratic. Yet, in so many productive ways, they were truths, experiences that shaped our city, a means to engage the lived realities of its inequalities.
It was in the interviewing process that students also worked through and confronted the ethos of research, and its politics. Most residents, for instance, were reluctant to speak to outsiders, suspicious. A student commented on this reality as “slightly skeptic [sic] looks [that] often turned into smiles, a small twinkle in the eyes, a willingness to cooperate” when the interview was facilitated by Eric, his Valhalla Park partner. Nonneighborhood people in the area were few and far between, often city officials of some sort. A young woman student reflected on her community partner Aziza and her consistent “reassurance to households that we were in no way associated with the city council.” She reflected that “people seemed threatened by us, they thought perhaps that their homes were somehow going to be jeopardized.” Negotiating this turf was not easy. Another student wrote in his journal, “A young man of about 25 years old (relatively well dressed and wearing jewelry) crossed the road in front of us. As he passed by, Mina, our research partner, asked him for a cigarette. He shook his head and turned to face us, and then he just stood and stared. His manner was very masculine, territorial, intimidating, as if to say: ‘what are you doing here?’ That—at least—was my interpretation.” Mina, he added, moved him and his group along quickly.
Through immersing ourselves on foot, in person, in conversation, in teams, we questioned what we knew. We tracked our thinking in the research rhythms and conversations of each group, with our partners, with residents, in journals. We learned to read the landscape and to listen carefully. We paid attention to the layers, the multiple registers, to the knowledge each offered and situated. The learning was rich and complex, observed in everyday interactions and in interviews. It was tacit and felt, in the reluctance and joy, in those moments of hesitation, of openness and hospitality. It was negotiated in the varied ways people sometimes welcomed research teams into homes and at other times left them outside on the other side of the gate. These crucial nuances were bound up in the partnership. We learned, we read, and we shared. Our partners situated this work in their knowledge, immediate and proximate, lived, immersed in this context, in this home, on that street, in that history and its politics. We engaged slowly, incrementally, carefully. This pedagogy helped us question what we knew, guiding an iterative process, a way to learn and interrogate patterns and meanings of inequality and difference, a way to interrogate our project and ourselves.
In Homes, Not Shacks! Interrogating Readings
In a clear voice, indignant, the student’s words rang out across Studio 5, our large classroom space in my department. “These are bungalows; homes, not shacks! This fact, the literature just failed to get.” She was frustrated with the literature, its partial slicing of the everyday complex realities we were exploring. Her analysis traced the dignity in the backyard family’s story, the reality of the family’s housing. Her team described the home, its layers and materials. They portrayed this housing option as a dignified urban form—a bungalow, a reading that ran counter to backyard “shacks” as “just put together,” remnants discarded by others, invisible, a purely makeshift urbanism. The student was positive, hopeful: a city can be so much more than its parts, the structural analysis of inequality and exclusion. Ordinary people can create change. Our partners create change every day.
My approach in this pedagogy intentionally intertwined the practice of research with reading and writing to find a point of critique carefully, that incision point in which to build theory. Consistent writing made this incremental pedagogy possible.
To deepen our engagement methodologically and analytically, we drew, for instance, on literature in which researchers shared field stories and experimentation with methods and their limits. In the interviewing weeks, I twinned together these articles with a prompt to explore the research experience and process that week. Students had a choice of prompts, questions that challenged them to link their own field experience together with the journal article, to think beyond what they saw, to conceptualize and to work between their experience and the literature and its notions of method and rigor. This interweaving of reflection on our practice through engaging with literature deepened our analysis. It thickened our reflection and helped us fine-tune methods.
The course culminated in students drawing on the weekly journal, field notes, and interview transcripts to build an empirical story for the final academic paper. This layering of different forms of writing aimed to help students build rich and precise findings. Students drew from the interviews and life histories they completed in their research teams, from observations and conversations, which proved a thick and critical foundation for writing papers and building arguments, a key goal in our curriculum.
In this research process, many students changed how they thought. They embraced the partnership’s relational mode, its epistemic challenges, its substantive richness and realities. A young woman student, for instance, recalled in her final journal,
Today I spoke to one of the cleaners in the Microbiology building at UCT. I simply asked if she was not home for the holiday, and she ended up telling me her life story. I feel that sitting and talking to the residents of Valhalla Park has changed me a little bit. I feel I’ve learnt to listen attentively, and I have also seen the very basic need of people to feel that they are being listened to. I do not know if I would have spoken to the kind lady today if I had not done this research in VP. I think that the course has affected me more deeply than many others I have done in the past . . . I would not call myself ignorant, but it can be very easy to sometimes turn a blind eye to other people’s suffering, and to think that the whole world lives in the way in which you do.
In and through this partnership, likewise, I changed the ways I taught.
The pedagogy provided a space for students to experiment with writing, building techniques for developing thick description from field notes and interview transcriptions to narratives and papers. In writing journals and field notes, students navigated the research process, stepping back, reflecting, then returning to ask more questions to engage further. Moving back and forth between the university and neighborhood built a form of accounting and sharing. The pedagogy of writing, its layers and iterative quality, fostered the layers of analysis, their substantiation. The depth of analytical questions extended, situated in an urban studies literature and rooted in conversation, in the substance of what people shared, in the research process in the neighborhood.
Back on campus, I worked with students, helping them find ways to thread the richness of interviews and field notes with their own experiential reflections and participant observation. What could be made of this mix? What were the varied ways these elements could be linked together? We worked together to develop the empirical threads in the research to weave it into a “story,” something that had a beginning, middle, and end. In helping students experiment with writing thickly, I encouraged them to share the complex struggles that shaped the neighborhood and city. I loved this part of the process. It took a certain type of energy and rigor. It took confidence and trust in the process, as well as good advice and teaching on my part. This form of writing enabled students to move between the stories and transcripts from neighborhood interviews, debates in the city, and the literature we drew on in class. This movement built a rigorous relational approach to theorizing.
I encouraged students to locate and enrich what they found expressed in the literature, in urban geography and theory, in ways that opened rather than reduced everyday lives. This was the heart of the challenge I posed: to build urban geography in and from the ethos of our project, to do justice to Valhalla Park, to the rich stories that were told to us, to the people who told them. I worked closely one-on-one on the outlines of these empirical stories. Dani’s eyes sparked, for instance; a small smile crept across her face. She got it! She could see, feel even, the story she wanted to tell, the argument that was emerging as we discussed her fieldwork, as we brainstormed on paper. She had a plan, a vision for the paper. I loved this creative moment, which helped students nurture the story from their interviews and find their own voice through it. Rich and rigorous qualitative analysis built on this thick description. It brought the reader into the context carefully. It described the place, the people, the feel; in other words, yes, that living room context was critical, the old man’s passion in telling you this; certainly, the shopkeeper’s weariness in explaining how this all worked, absolutely; and, yes, the passion and the place of your partner and your research team in this was key, too. In this process, theory could be fashioned, engendered, and crafted in particulars.
FIGURE 13. Reams of journals and reports
Students worked hard to produce research for their coursework papers and for the multiple publications that were part of every project. Close engagements with me in this process helped develop these materials, the findings and argument, in thick writing, in relation to the relevant literatures that we engaged. In the home-based businesses and the informal economy project, for instance, did you draw on the messy realities of family business strategies to complicate Christian Rogerson’s sharp distinction between survivalist and growth-orientated enterprises (1996)? Could you build your analysis on the stories of women-headed households and their struggles to put food on the table? Are you mirroring Deborah James’s (2012) notions of popular rather than informal economies, which seemed so evident in the family and street economies in the project? What was missing in this scholarly argument and in that paper? Threads of family history pride, and disappointment, that emerged from interviews on neighborhood businesses? Yes, there is the weft of your argument. With these prompts, students began to imagine placing themselves in conversation with literature and theory, making a shift from relying on others’ arguments to carefully nurturing, then asserting and building their own work in a research conversation in and beyond Valhalla Park.
Writing worked in small, incremental steps, in the layers of research notes and journals, through the poster, a draft outline, then a paper. A hundred words here, a hundred there; shifts in thinking accumulated and mattered. Analysis built from the complexity of the stories of renters, landlords, and shack dwellers, and of our partners and their families. Our writing was situated, reflective of the research practice, located in yards, on stoeps, by the front gate, behind burglar bars, on the street corner, in land occupations, on the field, in the neighborhood’s self-built homes.
We built a writing practice in which the research process, its method, conversation, dialogue, and our learning was visible. It was substantively rich and specific, infused in complex realities, in homes, learned through people’s lives, their predilections. It was deeply theoretical. The partnership held us steady to question what we knew in grounded and relational ways. It generated a body of theory that was a part of our process, its complicities and productive discomforts, its power struggles. This epistemology stretched across the partnership. It shifted the ways in which we wrote, how we accounted for and developed the work, what we knew and how, with whom we knew and why.
Studio 5 was full of people, the partners and their kids, mothers, friends, students; the buzz filled the hallways, tumbling over into the atrium below. It was a different sound than normal, not the rhythm of a lecture, a single voice, semidroning above the ambient noise, not the normal banter of a laboratory or practical session. Instead, there was a jumble, a cacophony of tones and accents, a few babies crying, some little children running at full speed in the hallway outside the classroom upstairs. A full Jammie Shuttle bus, rather than a kombi taxi, had gone to Valhalla Park to pick up our partners. They had asked earlier if others could come too. And I had said yes, of course, our only limitation is the forty-four seats in the bus. All forty-four seats, and then some, were full.
Our partners had come for the end-of-semester presentations of my students’ final papers for the course, built on our research project. This paper was the capstone piece of writing in the curriculum. The students presented it as a final part of their mark for the course. Each year our partners joined us on campus for this session, in which we assessed the students’ work together. This was an important moment for the students, for the course, and for me, a key marker of what we had learned and produced. It was a moment to return the layers of weekly hospitality and assessment that encased our project and our work together all semester long.
The campus visit was a big occasion. The first year in which we held this session, our partners dressed up, arriving awash in shades of pink, pastel, subtle, soft, and vibrant. Hair beautiful, turned out. We took a picture to mark the occasion. I felt embarrassed in the normal jeans and top I had pulled on unthinkingly that morning. For Valhalla Park participants, coming to campus meant many things: it was an event, a moment to celebrate our hard work in the partnership, a moment in which we recognized their experience and knowledge. For many, it was a rare chance to come to a privileged part of our city as invited, recognized, and celebrated guests. In an interview halfway through our decade of work together, Rosemary, for instance, reflected on her shock that first year coming to campus. When I asked why she was shocked, she explained, “Look, I brace myself when I leave Valhalla Park to go into that part of the city. I brace myself to be humiliated, and to be put in my place. I was shocked because I came to campus and I was welcomed, I was loved, I was treated like a VIP by my students.”
All went well until a dreadful presentation, in which racist stereotypes ran amuck, were said out loud under the guise of the research project. I squirmed in my seat. Right behind me there were four Valhalla Park women. I thought I felt their eyes burning into me, particularly as this young man explained “that women in Valhalla Park have children just to access the child grant.” Oh yes, of course, the then-R280 a month would set you up to live like a queen, I thought. My stomach churned—what rubbish was he talking? I could not even dream of passing him. The basics of the project were missing, the process of looking, listening, substantiating.
I tried to think on my feet. I invited Faranaaz, his research partner, to comment. Would she like to say anything first, I asked? She jumped up: yes, enthusiastically she turned to the student and to the class. “Yes, that is my story, that is the truth,” she exclaimed.
This was a moment of truth for me, too. A moment of dissonance and truth, a clash of the supposed rigors of methodology and “university” ways of knowing, with her truth, her hard-won, hard-fought, everyday experience, her way of making sense of herself and the world. I recast in my head my questions and comments for him. I also adjusted my mark. It was still a terrible presentation and a shoddy piece of work, but if it was her truth and story, he certainly could not fail.
My discomfort in this instance reflected a knee-jerk, standard academic critique: avoid essentialism at all costs; avoid naturalizing what are socially constructed notions and categories. In this instance, it was not useful. It was not enough. Much more productive was an overarching principle in our pedagogy to “take another look,” the principle that underpinned our aspiration to unpick and unpack our assumption making, our theory building. On reflection, this suggestion might have been excellent for the student as well as for Faranaaz, a suggestion for all the sides of our partnership in this moment.
Our projects were full of this back-and-forth dissonance. Instances like this one were peppered across the student presentations. They often arose for our partners, when students critically engaged with issues of gangs, gangsters, and violence in Valhalla Park. They arose for me in assessment.
In the spirit of partnership, I invited my partners to assess the students’ final presentations. I aimed to place my partners’ assessments parallel to my marking and commenting, my filling in of a presentation-grading template. I constructed a partner evaluation form, a very open-ended document with a short, and I hoped welcoming, note at the top of the page: “Please give your students comments on the presentations and your work together. Thank you!!!” The remainder of the page was left blank, with most of the page an open space for our partners to write their comments on the presentations. I included a small space at the bottom of the page for a mark, but the form didn’t emphasize this element. It was clearly optional.
I expected comments on the presentation, on the content, I expected, I now realize, some mirror of my own set of comments, my own criteria for a “good presentation,” for evidence of “good” research and hard thought and work. Not all the partners chose to write. But those who did complete assessments rarely mentioned the analysis, the substance and stories that had been told in the narration of our research.
The forms, instead, overflowed with assessment of the experience of working with each student, of being with them in the partners’ homes and neighborhood. The writers commented almost without fail on the student, on her personality, his generosity, her care and attention to them and to others in the neighborhood. In short, love jumped off these pages. Care sprang with it, heart, and emotions. A sharing on paper of what it meant to work together on the project, a mix of admiration and respect.
To say I was struck by the contrast between what I had expected and what emerged is an understatement. I smiled and had to take my own advice: Take another look. I had assumed a very particular notion and target of critique and assessment focused on the presentation, its structure, substance, argument, and the way it was conveyed and organized. These were the criteria that shaped my and the university’s notion of academic rigor. In contrast, our partners had celebrated on these forms the students’ way of being with them in their homes and neighborhood, the embodiment and relationality of the research practice in this course. The partner assessments highlighted so clearly what the course had demanded and what underlay each presentation, what it might or might not have offered in its analysis. Comments did not draw on a language of deficit, of what the student had not done, or what she could have done better. Instead, the assessments were love letters that expressed so much of the partnership and its process.
I copied each assessment together with my own presentation comments and handed them back to the students. The assessment by the research partner and mine jarred and, at the same time, worked together. They could not be reconciled. They did not need to be wiped away. Instead, our differences opened reflection. Our process offered a space to acknowledge and inhabit difference, to work to let these types of dissonance be productive, a space or moment through which we might rework our approach and understanding.
FIGURE 14. Contrasting assessments
It was precisely this mix of critique and love, academic rigor and relational embodiment, that made this partnership a compass for radical pedagogy. It made visible what was gained and what was lost in a particular mode of critique, and what might be reworked and rebuilt in combining critique and care.
In this pedagogy, students found a voice, an energy, a purpose, a way of writing; some found a passion for the field, for urban studies methods, for its questions, for city politics. The approach was methodological and epistemological. It was also ethical and political, shaping the ethos of the practice and purpose of our research. It was—for some—also ontological, a way of being in the university and academy, in the city.
Teaching repositioned expertise. It was our compass, essential for producing and nurturing the next generation of urbanists. I was one of many teachers. Partners were teachers. Students, partners, and I were learners. We shifted university practice. We worked in the disjuncture of our city, its segregation. What was normally the purview of the professor, of the university—the curriculum, its standards, and norms—was stretched and challenged. This approach to teaching brought together and juxtaposed the rigor of social science and the rigor of neighborhood partner expertise, debate, and logic. Teaching and learning thickened in these relationships, in their rigor, care, and epistemology.
In this way, the project of urban studies was intimate and concrete, embodied and located, conceptually complex, rooted in the trajectories of our city and its inequities. In this back and forth, we addressed the disjuncture of our field, its bifurcation in literatures and policies, in a dislocated view on the city. This passion and logic were the modus operandi that shaped the teaching through the partnership. At stake was the nature of our urban studies syllabi and curricula, pedagogical practices refigured in partnership.
Out of this new pedagogy, we built an archive of research, a wide array of publications for varied publics across the city.
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