Cubist Principle: Spatial ambiguity and multiple spaces.
We cannot always be sure whether they are concave or convex, some look like chunks of solidified space, others like fragments of translucent bodies. The figures are essentially indistinguishable from comparable planes composing the environment in which they existed.
(" Culture Shock: Flashpoints" 2002)
Employing the cubist principle of spatial ambiguity and multiple viewpoints, I have sub-titled this chapter "Fluid images and potential spaces". This chapter written as storied vignettes, is my attempt to seek out an alternate way to work with, but not romanticise, subjugated voices searching for moments of social change through the creation of alternate strategies for qualitative analysis.
Chapter Four served to foreground the consciously articulated discourses in/through which the private/public discourse is constructed in teachers' lives. However, still intent on meaning, and entertaining the possibility that all might not be what I have been led to believe, this chapter attends to the gaps, the evaded and the absences in local discourse, as a strategy for conceptualising the limits of conscious articulation. The process of identity-construction is one upon which the contradictions and dispositions of the surrounding socio-cultural environment have a powerful impact. And while teachers' subjectivities are constructed within relations that are situated within discourse and cultural practice, they find it difficult to describe the sources and nature of his or her various identities.
The important fact that the experiences of teachers in South Africa are different, contradictory and complex needs to be considered in our account of teachers' identities. The purpose of this chapter is to open up the category teacher to understand the other identity categories for our understanding of the complex set of interrelationships that exist across other identity categories, for example race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity in specific socio- cultural contexts. Such specificities are important to consider in order to understand how they have constrained as well as enabled teachers and their performance of success.
CHAPTER FIVE STORIED VIGNETIES
Apartheid education, as a framework, has impacted on the making of teacher. It is impossible to understand the making of teacher (identity) without understanding class and race codes that are constitutive to teacher identities. In poststructural theories, identity (teacher) is presumed to be created in the ongoing effects of relations and in response to society's codes. Defined as a function of society's codes or statements, and as an effect of practice, I want to show how power exists within and among discourse and practice and how the teacher is subjected to the effects of that power (Foucault 1980).
This macro layer highlights the blurring of boundaries between the individual and the social context. This is the spatial ambiguity that I will show in this chapter. By focusing on particular discourses and critical moments in the lives of these teachers, these vignettes serve to foreground or highlight selected positions of power (selected from the storied narratives) that these teachers occupy, inherent in the specific discursive positionings (codes) relevant to the description of the formation of subjectivities. The argument in this thesis is that teachers create the potential for performing their success but always within "concrete social circumstances" (Connell 1995, 86). Examining the ongoing effects of other cultural categories, including race, class, sexual orientation, I want to understand its impact on the creation of teacher and teaching as a discourse. I will also show how teachers invest in particular subject positionings rather than another in a different discourse.
Teacher discourses influences what happens outside the school and feed on broader national discourses of race, gender and class equality. The coalescence of outside dynamics and those within is taken into consideration in each of the storied lives. Written as vignettes, these stories offer a dramatic yet elusive discussion of particular positionings, (like a portrait with only the head and shoulders showing while the background is shaded off), the six teachers take up in these uncertain, and challenging times. Within these ongoing shifts between the individual and society, potential spaces open new ways for what there might be. Unlike the stories which were produced by the researched (the teachers in this study), these narrative vignettes are produced by myself, as the researcher. I must admit that searching for this data was a seductive process. However, as I began to understand this unidentified and unnamed data, I also needed to address my role - as the cubist artist would describe the moment of reconfiguration of space when:
Background and foreground shapes integrate, blurring outlines, with the edges looser and opened . . . and a moment of final liberation from the imitation of visual reality that challenged the Renaissance world of nature observed by means of the arbitrary principle of geometric perspective. (Arnason 1969, 129)
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This chapter presents storied vignettes of six teachers written up as thematic ensembles to highlight selected and specific discourses and positions of enabling and constraining moments that have ongoing effects on teachers' lives. These vignettes provide the platform for me to ask significant questions about teachers who are being regulated and inscribed by discourse and cultural practices, and are able to simultaneously resist them to some extent and practice power in productive ways.
In developing these thematic ensembles in the form of storied vignettes, I was able to firstly shift my stance as narrator to another layer of making meaning in which I critically explore the effects of particular relations and teachers' response to society's codes.
VIGNETTE ONE: COLLECTIVE SPACES
Hlo's personal history intersects with broader cultural changes, the challenges and choices she makes reflect the impact and radical shift in her views about gender and the social positing of women in the family, work and society. Up until the early 80s, woman, especially those living in rural areas Ca context which generally lacks material resources and has limited access to schools), spent a life dominated by a privileged male hierarchy exerting authoritarian control.
Hlo's life was no different. Although many households were financially supported by women who were engaged in unskilled, semi-skilled and professional vocations, women within the household and in the workplace were relegated to the powerless periphery.
As Hlo extended her personal account of her life, larger contexts became more apparent.
Growing up in a African rural community, within a specific time and place, has made available to Hlo a limited range of meanings of what it is to be woman. Like many precocious girls growing up in a male-dominated household, she experienced and understood the significance of gender inequality at an early age. A central issue here is her discussion of specific cultural forms that contribute to asymmetrical relations of power. Her daily life was full of patriarchal drama: "Father drank a lot . .. he was very violent with us, he would hit all
of us. " The use of violent punishment, coercion and verbal harassment was a daily occurrence
to maintain male domination.
While she constructs the culture that exists as static and unchanging, Hlo invests her ability to resist these cultural definitions that are placed on her. Although she comments on her admiration for her mother and the unbounded love and care she afforded them as a family and a good serving wife, she takes on a questioning position with regard to these core values, marking the onset of her resistance to being treated differently. Her experiences of physical and emotional abuse from her father, her sense of admiration for her mother, a professional
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nurse, who managed to remain strong and determined throughout the abuse, set her apart from her father whom she describes as irresponsible: "/ never really looked up to father in that sense of being a parent. Mother was the one who provided for us. " This knowledge of male dominance was further exacerbated by her father's discriminatory treatment of her brother and herself. She says, "being upset for being treated differently, created in me that constant pressure of having to prove that / am female and / can do anything." As a young girl, as schoolteacher and as member of the management team, she lives through the battle of the sexes.
As an African, Hlo's experience in the world of education, her racial identity and gender were crucial in shaping access to and success as an academic. She went to an African rural primary school where she excelled in her school work, an experience that provided her the space to challenge, disrupt and defy those dominant powers that marginalised her.
Faced with enormous unfairness and exclusion as an African and as a woman, Hlo found very little to lose when she attended "one of the best Catholic boarding schools" staffed by White nuns and one Zulu teacher. At this early stage of her life, her questioning position of the hegemonic values of that culture and her resistance to the identity made available to her by the apartheid state were evident. Hlo succeeded in reworking an alternate identity, one of resistance and rebellion.
Accounting for the multiple dimensions of Hlo's life in her desire for change, also maximises the multiple and potentially contradictory constructions in the discourses she sets up for herself. Perming her hair, which was against the school rules, and questioning the indoctrination of Christian values, were some of the more overt struggles Hlo engaged with.
She described:
There were no excursions and even the movies that we watched were about David and some story from the Bible. / was the first person to object to this. Why should we come to a place that was just showing something that we know and read in the Bible?
If it is entertainment they should get us movies that we could identify with.
This contradicted the dominant views that positioned girls as quiet and obedient. Being meted out severe physical and emotional abuse and being treated differently from the boys, created in her the desire to challenge and disrupt these brutalities. A central issue here is how boys, girls and teachers engage and which contribute to the assymmetrical relations of power.
However, the potential to threaten them exists. Positions favourable to gender equality are
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occupied in contradictory ways. She explained, "/ managed to mobilise the female students against this violation of individual rights." Her resistance to these gendered steretyopes is enabled because she is educated.
This position Hlo takes up in the future as well as teacher and as member of the school management team. As much as they threatened to summon her parents to complain about her
"political activities", she realised that "being intelligent" gave her added protection because,
"they wanted people like me for their marketing strategy." Hlo invests in her ability to resist the fixed definitions that are placed on her as Black, woman and learner, and this resistance is enabled because she is intelligent. Her intellectual capacities provide her with the experience to question and resist forms of power to subvert the dominance of oppressive reason and (re)engage her with desire for different ways.
Within the oppositional discourses in which she locates herself, Hlo continually shifts in the significance of the stances she adopts. She admits, "By the time / reached standard nine, / was the cream of the crop and / decided to concentrate on schoolwork andforget the hard life we were experiencing at boarding school." While she seems to be keen on taking on a more
"conservative" position as a learner, this is based on her need to progress academically, thus limiting the threat of being suspended like her friends. Within these discursive spaces that she creates for herself, she explaines, "/ became close to my teachers and they also understood me for who / really am." Aligning herself with the teachers also meant that she needed to adopt a more passive stereotypical role of learner. Despite this, her position offers her a sense of pleasure and moments to threaten the dominant forms of reason that articulate gender and race and class as a fixed and regulatory position. In this transgression, her resistance takes on a more self-reflexive and introspective stance and a more acceptable position as a learner.
Hlo shows how dominant and authoritative discourses, which restrict the move towards race, gender and class equality, are not immovable. In the English class, she successfully manages to exert her resistance to the cultural values underpinning education at boarding school. In an essay she was asked to write, she remembered with fondness her mentor Mrs V, the lady who taught her what it means to teach and respect the rights of learners. Being asked to read out the composition in the assembly reinforces her sense of who she is and what she wants to be, and confirms her academic identity as a site in which her identity as a African woman can be foregrounded. Rebelling against and resisting the core values within this apartheid construction foregrounded her potential for change and the potentiality for success.
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Her decision to leave Edendale, "because I don't want my life to end here", marks a powerful moment in her life for which she now claims personal agency. At university, pursuing Human Movement Studies (HMS) was something she "liked because it was physical", but more important was the fact that it was different: "there wasn't a single Black woman pursuing HMS. I felt strongly about this and I think that pressure of proving that I'm female, that I can do anything, made me realise that HMS is exactly what I needed." Her need to be seen as different locates her contradictorily to the identities made available to African women by the apartheid state, identities of exclusion and inaccessibility to certain careers and opportunities.
These ambiguities and contradictions create in Hlo the desire for change, for possibilities of new ways of knowing and being.
Through individual challenge, Hlo constructs a life with a potentiality for change, not only for herself but for her community: "Where I grew up people are very poor and they were always saying to me, 'Hey Hlo, we depend on you. Go out there and do your best. '" While it placed her in a position of power, the deep sense of connectedness she shared with the women aroused in her a deep sense of commitment to her responsibility as teacher. This is captured in this statement she makes: "So there was always that pressure of having to do things not just for me but also for the community because they had this trust in me. "
Hlo reiterates how social context is integral to gender relations and moving out of a material reality that limits the articulation of positions creates the position for doing gender differently. Leaving the rural community of Edendale created possibilities for better ways. The teacher position offers her the space for possibilities to perform her success as an African woman.
In fashioning her academic identity, Hlo is also able to successfully negotiate her power as woman and as an agent for change: " I got into a lot of trouble with the White lecturers because they could not identify with Black females who were as confident and direct as I was." However, within such educational institutions involved in the propagation and selective dissemination of discourses, Hlo felt "proud to have part been of the committee which was instrumental in bringing about change in the curriculum and assessment procedures. I managed two distinctions in my first year at Unizul and I ended up being one of the top students in the HMS classes". Constructing herself as agent, she locates herself in discourses that constitute and give form to her different subjective selves.
In her desire to change and the pressure to prove, she also manages to construct other related identities. Hlo describes how as "head" of the hostel, she had the opportunity to start a gym and aerobics class for her floor mates and the closeness she managed to forge later developed
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