Using memory as a resource for pedagogy: fashioning a ‘bridging pedagogical moment’ Murthee Maistry Abstract In post-conflict societies teaching and learning happens in contexts that are heavily influenced by incidents and atrocities of the past. In higher education, such pedagogical contexts are fraught with tensions and contradictions. These tensions and contradictions are in a sense unavoidable as they reflect what happens when multiple memories are brought to bear in a pedagogical space. In this article, I problematise my practice as a teacher educator as I work with pre-service teachers of Business Education. In my attempt to trouble my pedagogic practice, I reflect critically on how I use memory as a pedagogic trigger in preparing my students for the world of teaching. In particular, I reflect on how multiple memories (mine included) intersect in a sensitive, dynamic and scaffold pedagogic space, a ‘bridging pedagogical moment’. Drawing on elements of self-study methodology, I attempt to interrogate my practice with a view to refining and exploring new possibilities for engaging with painful memories of the past that threaten to disrupt our future. Drawing on hooks’ (1994) “Engaged pedagogy” I explore how memory can be harnessed as a pedagogical resource in the teaching of Business Education pedagogy. I explore how students, dehumanised and objectified by hegemonic race, class and gender regimes, can use memory to decentre powerful social constructions and reposition themselves as ethical subjects in the social realm. As with any pedagogical strategy, there will be several tensions that are likely to emerge that the teacher education pedagogue has to manage. Introduction After a mere seventeen years into its young democracy, one can expect that memories of the past remain fresh in the cognitive frames of South Africans, especially those who personally experienced various traumas under the apartheid order. New post-apartheid memories have also been created. Perpetrators and ‘bystanders’ (Murphy and Gallagher, 2009) who had to forego privileges have also had to deal with a different kind of trauma, namely that of having to inhabit a world where the fundamentals have altered radically. It is clear that there are distinctively different memories simultaneously at play in South African society. How then can these different memories be brought into productive dialogue? How does a society in a post- 66 Journal of Education, No. 54, 2012 trauma era heal itself? As the national euphoria of the new rainbow nation dissipates, the hope of any immediate, automatic and harmonious co-existence dangles precariously at the precipice of a South African society that is competing aggressively for the continuation and restoration of particular memories. Anderson cautions that, in a quest for a new nationalism, societies undergo a process of selective memory and forgetting (Anderson, 1991). Essentialised notions of nationalism and sameness have inherent fractures and have potential to rupture and reveal the fragility of a false nationalism, especially in contexts emerging from decades of relentless trauma. Post-apartheid South Africa continues to be plagued by a deeply entrenched patriarchal value system that finds misguided rationale in religion, tradition and culture. In nations like South Africa where the tapestry of poverty, violence and oppression are indelible design features that have fashioned the fabric of society in last century, it can be expected that memories of this tapestry are deep in the sub-conscious and affect the way we currently act. Rothenberg reminds us that, as much as we have tried to change the world in which we live, poverty, violence and oppression continue to plague humanity – if anything we have been woeful at making any kind of impression on altering the condition of those marginalised by society (Rothenberg, 2010). This is particularly true in a young democracy like South Africa, where evidence of our failed attempts is starkly overt. How then does the ordinary citizen deal with such issues and how does schooling equip individuals with tools for dealing with such issues? Given that individual views on an issue are immanently linked to their historicities and memories in particular, how then can such memory data bases be utilised and exploited as a pedagogic resource? How can teacher education harness such contrasting and contradictory memories? How do we move beyond the rhetoric of nationalism, towards theoretically informed pedagogic practice in a South African context; towards a ‘pedagogy of discomfort’, one that troubles learned beliefs and habits and emotionally charged nationalism and blind patriotism (Zembylas and Boler, 2002). These are indeed weighty questions, the answers to which have remained largely elusive. In this article, I present an account of how I attempt to trouble my intellectual project as teacher educator. I reflect on how I use memory as a powerful resource in the pedagogy programme I design for teacher trainees in Business Education. In the last decade of my teaching of pedagogy as it relates to Business Education, I have engaged elements of memory work in my practice. However, these efforts were driven by my personal intuition and as such were Maistry: Using memory as a resource for pedagogy. . . 67 not substantively theoretically informed. In recent years, however, I have drawn on a body of critical scholarship (Bourdieu, 1986; Freire, 1998; Giroux, 2004; hooks, 1994, 2009; Lebaron, 2003; McLaren, 2003; Peterson, 2009) and on what is emerging as a powerful and influential field namely that of reconciliation pedagogies and pedagogies in post-trauma contexts (Elbaz- Luwisch, 2009; Jansen, 2009; Jansen and Weldon, 2009; Waghid, 2005). From an Economics disciplinary perspective, I draw inspiration from theory that disrupts canonical neoclassical and neoliberal economic thinking and explanations of the economic world (Bauman and Rovirosa-Madrazo, 2010; Harvey, 2006, 2007, 2010a, 2010b; Leander, 2001; Pogge, 2010). Methodological orientation: a brief note. . . In an attempt to trouble and reflect on my own practice in a rigorous and systematic way, I engage the tenets of ‘self-study’ as I research my enterprise as a teacher educator (Kosnick, Freese, Samaras, and Beck, 2006; LaBoskey, 2004; Lassonde, Galman, and Kosnick, 2009). My objective is to improve on my practice. In this article, I reflect on how particular kinds of improvements are likely to manifest as I engage the critical curriculum spaces that present themselves in the pedagogy courses I teach in a teacher education programme. Self-study as field of study and methodological approach is at an embryonic stage in its development and as such needs to be embraced with circumspection and caution. While I am mindful of this, I also view this as an immensely liberating opportunity to indulge in this creative enterprise of problematising myself in practice “. . .with the goal of reframing . . .” my practice (Lassonde, Galman and Kosnik 2009, p.5) for the advancement of student learning. I firmly subscribe to the self-study tenet that the self is implicated and complexly connected to the research process and educational practice, allowing me to examine myself from the perspectives of ‘the self in teaching’, ‘the self as teacher’ and ‘the self as researcher of my teaching’ (ibid.). Drawing on Feldman’s work, I value the position that self-study posits, namely, that of making the“. . .experience of the teacher educators a resource for research. . .” (Feldman, 2009, p.37). Data for self-study research can be generated from diverse sources, including curriculum documents, student reflections, interview transcripts and personal reflections. For this article, I draw on thoughts captured in my reflective journal in which I document my experiences with my pedagogy classes; critical incidents in my 68 Journal of Education, No. 54, 2012 teaching and learning experiences with my students as we engage a social justice agenda. Arguably, the most endearing feature of self-study research is the potential it offers for developing a constantly evolving personal living pedagogical theory (Whitehead, 1998). I am of the view that self-study has enormous potential to constantly produce new theory and as such is consonant with the work of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic theorising – a kind of production of the new that disrupts, and discourages thinking and theorising that defaults to existing pedagogical canons (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Using memory as a resource in a pedagogy class While there is some value in working intuitively with memory as a resource in teaching, it is imperative that a pedagogue understands the theoretical foundations that inform the pedagogical strategy that she applies. Theoretically informed pedagogy has potential for offering conceptual tools for making sense of particularly fraught and complex teaching and learning contexts and content. To this end, I draw on the principles of critical pedagogy (Darder, Baltodano, and Torres, 2009), reconciliation pedagogies (Jansen, 2009; Jansen and Weldon, 2009) and hooks (hooks, 1994, 2009) and the philosophical influences of Martha Nussbaum (Nussbaum, 2006, 2010, 2011) and Hannah Arendt (Arendt, 1998, 2006). These perspectives have particular resonance with the objective of my teacher education pedagogy programme that is to create spaces for Business Education teacher trainees to critically explore the contested nature of the disciplines they have consciously selected to teach and the pedagogical approaches that may apply. These perspectives also offer rich theoretical insights into memory as a phenomenon and its potential for creative and imaginative use. While Arendt and Nussbaum do not allude directly to pedagogy per se, insights from their sophisticated expositions on human capacity for action, human plurality and capabilities, faith and hope have immense potential for pedagogy. In the discussion that follows, I present instances where I have attempted to use memory as a resource in my pedagogy classes. Historically class sizes in these programmes have averaged between 15 and 20 students and comprise a racial and gender mix of graduate students whose ages range from 25 to 50 and older. In introductory lectures, I apply activities that require students to reflect on memories of personal school and life experience, including teaching Maistry: Using memory as a resource for pedagogy. . . 69 and learning and resource contexts. While this first exercise may appear as a strategy to simply reflect on memories of being taught in schools with the view to reflecting on such practices, this somewhat innocuous delving into the past (retrieval from memory) has enormous potential for flagging a wide- ranging social justice issues, which are then infused into the teaching programme. Given the diversity of the student sample signalled above, one can expect that recollections of school experiences were textured by histories as they unfolded in the decades or eras within which each student personally experienced schooling. As students tell their stories, differences in memory accounts as they relate to school and life experiences become stark. These have been fashioned into two narrative vignettes presented below. While the vignettes below may appear to essentialise the affluent class and poor and indolent class, and may represent a polarised dichotomy of the context of student experiences, I acknowledge that several blends of experience are real on the advantage-disadvantage continuum. In a country like South Africa where the Gini coefficient is 0,67, it is not unreasonable to infer that in the main student experiences are likely to be closer to that portrayed in the latter vignette, namely, one of disadvantage. The vignettes do, however, attempt to capture powerful contrasts in schooling that past and present day South African schoolchildren experience. It provides a useful resource from which to launch the pedagogy programme as it starts with an acknowledgement of difference. Below are two narrative vignettes constructed from students’ descriptions of their personal schooling experiences over the last decade that I have taught pedagogy courses in Business Education. The storied accounts of students have been classified into two main broad descriptive categories, namely, memories of advantage and memories of disadvantage. Vignette 1: Memories of advantage Business Education students from affluent, middle class contexts describe, for example, being taught by competent, qualified teachers, class sizes of under thirty learners, having access to four to five different textbooks, reams of worksheets, model answers, a data bank of past examination articles from their school as well as from other high performing schools, structured assessment and feedback regimes, extra tuition after school, the ability to purchase study guides, three to four-day excursions to the business capital of country (the Johannesburg Securities Exchange and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry) and importantly, socioeconomic security provided by stable family and community structures. In the main, these students would have been taught in their mother-tongue in racially homogenous classes where their home languages and cultures would have been affirmed. 70 Journal of Education, No. 54, 2012 Vignette 2: Memories of disadvantage In contrast, poor and working class students describe a different picture. I describe the experiences of African students in particular as the Indian and Coloured communities, while politically disenfranchised under apartheid, did in fact enjoy significantly better educational resource contexts (both physical and human) than their African counterparts but not quite at the level of lavishness of the White community. Business Education students typically recall being taught by under and unqualified teachers who were frequently absent, class sizes that exceeded sixty, limited access to textbooks (often just a single textbook kept by the teacher), limited print materials like worksheets and other study materials, school developed assessment protocols that did not prepare learners for the high stakes matric examination, reliance on peer study groups to master requisite disciplinary knowledge and skills without the certainty of the accuracy of peer generated understandings, limited external stimuli like excursions or guest speakers, being taught in mother tongue indigenous language but assessed in English, having to live with the instability and vulnerability that poverty brings. A striking feature across the memory accounts presented above is the way patriarchy is tightly woven into the fabric of education in both contexts. The memories presented are rich with potential and possibility for creative and imaginative use in a pedagogy classroom. For many students, especially those who have completed their undergraduate degrees at racially homogenous tertiary institutions or who reside in racially homogenous areas (still a significant feature of South African society as reflected in the mono- racial populations particularly of poor townships in South Africa), this is often their first close interpersonal encounter with the other. The challenge then for me as teacher education pedagogue is to harness these memories in particular ways to achieve the objectives of the pedagogy programme I teach. An important starting point is the development of relational empathy through the facilitation of shared meanings through interpersonal engagements. This entails reconceptualising how students see each other, how they communicate and how they feel. The reconceived vision must be different to what it was in the past and requires an understanding that trauma has been experienced on both sides and that all are in search of security and basic rights in the new framework. Empathetic communication that encourages dissent is a necessary precondition. (Broome, 2004). In an attempt to infuse memory accounts into my teaching, basic principles of critical pedagogy and engaged pedagogy have particular appeal. Historicity of Maistry: Using memory as a resource for pedagogy. . . 71 knowledge as a principle alludes to the notion that the creation of knowledge happens within a particular historical context (Darder et al., 2009). The knowledge that students own and their being at a particular point in time is product of historical events that were shaped by past human action. In the very same vein, such knowledge and personal self conceptions have potential for change. This principle speaks strongly to the power of human agency to disrupt historical continuities, and foregrounds historical contradictions and tensions. Dialectical theory as a principle foregrounds human activity and human knowledge as powerful determinants of the social order. From a critical pedagogy perspective, human activity is dynamic and fluid and as such, it is necessarily uncertain, contradictory. It therefore implies a scrutiny of how traditional theories of knowledge are presented especially since knowledge is associated with a diversity of human conditions that is culture, norms and values and as such cannot be objective. Yet, historically particular forms of knowledge have been packaged and served as objective and neutral. In the discussions that follow, I illustrate the troubling of disciplinary knowledge in Business Education. Critical pedagogy argues for the use of ideology as a pedagogical tool to trouble what looks normal and commonsense, to identify the dislocation of dominant ideology in education and the lived experiences and knowledge of those exposed to this contradiction. Ideology can therefore be used as a tool for critical self reflection by pedagogues with regard to how personal ideological positions play themselves out in pedagogic practices and how such practices are likely to reinforce dominant race and class ideologies (Darder et al., 2009). hooks’ re-conceptualisation of knowledge has particular resonance with my work as teacher education pedagogue working in disciplines that have been shaped by a canonical neo-classical world view (Florence, 1998). hooks’ engaged pedagogy urges us to question the legitimacy of the knowledge that is prescribed. This prescribed knowledge is predominantly middle class knowledge and privileges certain memories. As such, we must contest the notion of knowledge as established facts to be mastered and not to give authority to the knowledge but to the nature of the teaching and learning relationship as a process. This kind of orientation opens the door to sharing of experience and of memory on the phenomenon being studied. Although hooks theorises in an American context, her insights have profound resonance with the South African context. In the discussion that follows, I present an account of how capitalist ideology through decades has been reified into the psyche of human beings and how such ideology has come to 72 Journal of Education, No. 54, 2012 shape economic knowledge (Harvey, 2007). Of importance is the manner in which the memories we create as human beings are shaped by the market, by economic rationality, self-interest, profit maximisation and the survival of the fittest. As Bauman aptly reminds us, the capitalist system has created what he terms ‘a race of debtors’ (Bauman and Rovirosa-Madrazo, 2010). With regard to the disciplines within Business Education (Economics, Accounting and Business Management), there is little debate that neo-classical thinking has strongly influenced the nature of knowledge that has accumulated over time in these disciplines. Neo-classical economics is so deeply entrenched and institutionalised that society has come to accept it as the norm. A capitalist, market oriented social order is a given, something that we have to live with, something that governments of the world encourage, support and perpetuate in active ways (Bauman and Rovirosa-Madrazo, 2010; Harvey, 2006, 2007, 2010b; Pogge, 2010). The mantra in the neo-liberal world is, how do we create the climate or the conditions for business to thrive, prosper and grow? In other words, what should we do to ensure that the capitalist class is able to accumulate more profits and become stronger? The discourse and neo-liberal ideological stance is unambiguous (Harvey, 2007). With regard to the poor and working class, it is hoped that some of this capitalist income and wealth will trickle down to these marginalised classes. From a South African perspective, evidence from the last decade indicates that the proportion of the nation’s national income that accrues to the capital has in fact increased. In other words, the poor and working class now earn or enjoy a smaller percentage of the country’s income. Wealth accumulation by the capitalist class has made little impact on poverty and employment levels in South Africa, with current unemployment in excess of 30% in the last decade. We also have to remember that, while apartheid had a dehumanising racial element to it, it also created conditions for the advancement of capital. In particular, apartheid manipulated the South African economic context for the advancement of capital. Capital was allowed to grow and flourish. A reflection of who really owns the wealth of a nation is not to be found in the number of small street traders and corner shops; it is to be found on its stock market. In South Africa, this would be the Johannesburg Securities Exchange. While media makes a meal of newly listed black companies that make it onto the JSE, it does not draw attention to the miniscule fraction that black capital represents on the JSE. More importantly, there is a silence and acceptance of the disproportionate ownership of wealth by a small capital class. What then are the implications for the Economics pedagogy classes I teach and what does this have to do with memory? Postgraduate students that enroll Maistry: Using memory as a resource for pedagogy. . . 73 for the Business Education pedagogy modules, join the programme having completed an undergraduate commerce degree. These students would have been subjected to a particular economic knowledge. In the main students would have been presented with this knowledge as uncontested and would have internalised it as such. They may also have had mentors who were disciples of neo-classical economics. In a cohort of mixed race, class and gender, it is clear that students would have experienced the social order differently. Some would have fond memories of how their families, friends and communities may have thrived under such an order, others have memories and current lived experiences that tell the stories of deprivation, inhumanity, and suffering. Poverty remains a huge challenge for many South African higher education students; a recent study reminds us about the vulnerability of our students and the strategies they employ to as they attempt to mask their poverty (Firfirey and Carolissen, 2010). These are heart- wrenching experiences – experiences which I know my own students endure on a daily basis. These very same students will become specialist commerce teachers expected to teach a given body of economic knowledge that is likely to perpetuate and reinforce the existing economic order. In order to disrupt this cycle, I turn to political economy as a principle of critical pedagogy which contends that we need to contest the manner in which education serves the economic imperatives of the market. Vulnerability caused by economic and political disenfranchisement is perpetuated in subtle ways by the schooling system and the knowledge domains schools advance (Darder et al., 2009). The challenge then in my pedagogy class is to create spaces to examine how the values and aspirations of dominant classes are upheld and how dominant groups continue to enjoy the privileges that come with asymmetrical power relations. The enormity of the social justice project in my Economics Education pedagogy programme is daunting and often overwhelming and I sometimes doubt whether my efforts in a year-long pedagogy programme will make any significant impact on the unflinching canons that can go unnoticed. Arguably, the most challenging aspect of my work as teacher education pedagogue is helping student teachers deconstruct the normalcy of the social order that the canon has created, to interrogate dominant knowledge and the memories that they have created. Again I draw inspiration from hooks (1994, p.202) who urges that we have to “choose between a memory that justifies and privileges domination, oppression, and exploitation and one that exalts and affirms reciprocity, community, and mutuality” University academics have to take necessary risks in order to transgress and contest the canonicity of existing 74 Journal of Education, No. 54, 2012 knowledge and approaches to curriculum. Knowledge transfer through transmission stifles creativity and the ability to challenge existing power relations in society (Florence, 1998), especially as it relates to a dominant curriculum that foregrounds patriarchy and capitalism. hooks implores us to challenge middle class male experiences and cultural histories that remain unnoticed in the school curriculum. It is not unusual to find that masculine traits, for example, are portrayed as the norm in economics texts and curricula. School knowledge is likely to favour a bourgeois value system and perpetuate a western women’s value system. In a South African context, school knowledge as it relates to economics is not neutral or objective; if anything it is value laden (Maistry and David, 2011). Troubling the epistemological foundations of the discipline and how this facilitates a particular social order that manifests in rampant capitalism, asymmetrical power relations in society, poverty and unemployment, necessarily requires that we challenge institutionalised memories that signal what the world should look like. hooks suggests that a problem-solving methodology that encourages dialogue and a healthy balance between content and process is a useful way to proceed with this kind of troubling. The economics pedagogy course provides a rich and dynamic space where attempts at such reconceptualisations are possible. As teacher education pedagogue involved in preparing teachers of Economics I recognise the importance of modelling pedagogical strategies that I would want my students to become competent at. Complex processes are simultaneously at work in my pedagogy courses. Students learn pedagogic skills related to the teaching of the discipline of Economics, that is, to develop pedagogic content knowledge in Economics. At the same time, they undertake a complex process of deconstructing canonical economic thinking that they have acquired in their undergraduate degrees and demonstrating evidence of this competence in the development of learning programmes for high school economics. Such evidence is reflected in the way lessons plans and teaching resources reflect a social justice orientated agenda. The challenge I encounter as a teacher education pedagogue is to provide spaces for students to develop dispositions towards social justice as it applies to race, gender and class oppression. What kinds of tools can they be equipped with? Is there a vocabulary or a language that they could use as they plan and prepare for their enterprise as teachers? As self-study researcher, I am acutely aware of the central role I play in both the pedagogic spaces I develop and the research into my practice I undertake. This necessarily requires pedagogical processes that diminish my positional Maistry: Using memory as a resource for pedagogy. . . 75 authority as academic and lecturer. In as much as I wish to draw on my students’ memories to help make meaning of our social world, I have to share and expose my own memories and how these have come to shape my thinking. Just as students share memories (painful and pleasant), I too engage the sharing process. I find dealing with issues of racial prejudice and economic oppression in a cohort of diverse students as described earlier extremely traumatic and emotionally taxing. Several sensitivities are at play. I need to create safe spaces for students to articulate memories, as well as to develop the conditions for what I term ‘compassionate listening’. Compassionate listening here is a special kind of listening, a kind that necessarily requires the delaying of judgment and hasty formation of opinions and views on others’ perspectives. It is a high-level meta-cognitive competence that demands restraint and temporary suspension of opinion formation. This is an inherently difficult skill to learn, believe in and to practice, because it entails standing outside of oneself to be able to ‘see’ and ‘remind’ oneself of the act of undertaking compassionate listening. Once teacher educators and student teachers begin to understand and practice this skill, it explodes the possibilities for unrestrained memory sharing. How then can we harness the memories described in the vignettes above in ways that contribute to the objectives of this special Economics pedagogy course and at the same time bring to the fore, in constructive ways, issues of social justice. Pertinent issues of race, class and gender oppression are complexly connected to Economics and are implicated in almost every facet of neo-classical economic theory. In my early days of teaching Economics pedagogy, I learnt that a head-long plunge into these sensitive social issues created much discomfort and at times a genuine reluctance by students to engage constructively. In recent years, I have been guided by writers like Murphy and Gallagher (2009), who argue that the use of cases outside of the students’ lived experience (the experience of another country or community for example) can be a useful way to approach the teaching of these issues. The idea then is to use material that is real, but not South African – material that is historically and psychologically removed from the immediate cognitive frames of students. This strategy may eliminate defensiveness and allow for communication in a fairly safe space. It allows for and facilitates confident participation. Examples of materials I employ include case studies that bring to the fore tensions and contradictions as they apply to women in business, values and beliefs about gender equality in other countries, globalisation and its effects on marginalised communities of the world, dehumanising labelling of people who cannot find jobs as ‘unemployed ‘ and ‘human waste’ (Bauman and Rovirosa-Madrazo, 2010; Pogge, 2010), child labour, the exploitation of 76 Journal of Education, No. 54, 2012 migrant workers, xenophobic attacks on refugees across the world, natural resource exploitation by multi-national corporations and its effects on indigenous populations of less-developed countries and affirmative action policies in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, the United States and Zimbabwe. It is not possible to provide an analysis of how I engage all these stimulus materials in this current article. However, in the discussion that follows, I illustrate how I have used and reflected on the concept ‘affirmative action’ in my pedagogy classes over the years. Affirmative action as policy is a germane subject and has particular currency in a South African context. It is a highly contested policy and has potential to generate heated debate. As such, it presents with enormous possibilities as a ‘site’ for dialogue. In the cases of Malaysia and Singapore, affirmative action policies were adopted to address economic imbalances that were created by prejudicial policies that disadvantaged certain ethnic communities. The histories of such prejudice are varied and often related to the policies of the regimes that occupied these countries. Capitalist classes came into being as a result of privilege and artificially construed enabling economic mechanisms. As can be expected, this kind of ‘neutral’, non-threatening context is easier to discuss than the current South African context. It is however necessary that the stark and painful realities of the South African context has to be dealt with at some point. As teacher education pedagogue, I attempt to use the material to develop what I refer to as a set of consensus principles that a typical teacher of Economics may have to consider when teaching such a topic. These would be basic pedagogic principles that are likely to guide the teaching of controversial subject matter. Such a set of principles have to come about through a deductive process that entails student engagement and dialogue. The challenge then is to move the debate closer to home. The ‘ideal type’ vignettes (Weber, 1949) that capture the contrasting memories that prevail in South Africa are lucid representations of the effects of race gender and class prejudice that continue to strangle South African society. Over the last decade that I have worked with the topic of affirmative action in my pedagogy programme, I have had varying experiences with different cohorts of students. The extremely contentious nature of the topic and the changing cohort of students make each encounter with this topic a unique one. I have found that sharing of my memories (personal and family experiences) as they relate to this topic is what I coin as a powerful ‘bridging pedagogical moment’ as I move students from the ‘abstract’ and somewhat ‘distant’ cases on affirmative action to South African cases. This imagined Maistry: Using memory as a resource for pedagogy. . . 77 ‘bridging pedagogical moment’ is what I describe as a sensitive, scaffolded teaching and learning space in which the pedagogue infuses her personal memories as a resource for making meaning. This bridging pedagogical moment has a twofold effect. Firstly, it serves as a vanguard to access and surpass the threshold phenomenon being addressed. Secondly, it reorientates and reinterprets power relations between pedagogues and their students, a principle advocated by hooks’ engaged pedagogy; a breaking down of the power relations between pedagogues and their students. This kind of dissolving of power can only happen if pedagogues create spaces for their students to empower themselves in a classroom context and if pedagogues themselves adopt approaches that require the exposure of personal experiences and vulnerabilities (Keet, Zinn, and Porteus, 2009). As teacher education pedagogue, I draw on a wide range of memories and experiences, which I selectively bring into my class as I attempt to strengthen the meaning making of particular aspects of the course. In my early days of working with pedagogy courses, I did in fact make use of several personal experiences (anecdotal reflections) in my teaching. However, in recent years, I consciously select particular personal memories in planning for teaching. I present below an account of the personal memories I share with my students to scaffold a bridging pedagogical moment when dealing with affirmative action as a content topic in my pedagogy class. As a self-study scholar, I start from the premise that the self is complicit in educational practice, that is it is not possible to separate the self from one’s practice. As such, the nature of the (my) self, my value system, aspirations, memory and theoretical orientation infuse and permeate every aspect of my practice. Having been schooled in resistance politics as a youth activist and as a teacher activist, issues of equity, redress and transformation are central to the work I now do as a teacher educator. Vignette 3: Sharing personal memories As a non-white male growing up under apartheid, I attended school in a homogenous Indian only school, and attended an Indian university. I was aware that the resource context of my school was different to that of other races, that Indian schools were better resourced than African schools, but not as well resourced as white schools. I hail from a working class family that was displaced by the notorious Group Areas Act. My father worked as a garbage sorter on a municipal dump site in Pietermaritzburg. He later sold ice cream on a bicycle and in the last 15 years of his working life, he held the job of driver of a light delivery vehicle for a local manufacturing business. He often related incidents of abuse and racial discrimination at his place of 78 Journal of Education, No. 54, 2012 work, incidents which riled me and developed in me over the years a deep sense of resentment and antagonism towards white people. My Mom worked as a ‘tea girl’ (making tea for staff) for a large department store and in the last 15 or so years of her working life, she remained a low-level sales assistant in the same department store. Her rank was not related to her lack of competence, but to the fact that she was not ‘allowed’ to apply for senior positions. These were exclusively reserved for whites. As with my Dad, my Mom also experienced similar experiences of prejudice; in her case, both race and gender. In recent years, I have become more aware of my own prejudices and the extent of my distorted socialisation. I also struggle to understand and not judge the raced memories that several other close relatives articulate. Ironically though, these relatives yearn for the times when we were ruled by a white minority government and are simultaneously vehemently critical of current affirmative action policies. For inspiration on how to deal with the demons I carry, I draw on the work of Hannah Arendt. Arendt rejects both revenge and forgiveness as proper responses to crimes of the past. Revenge is premised on natural law, that is, the natural equality of pain and suffering. It assumes that a person is able to feel the same degree of pain and suffering if revenge is meted out - based on animal-like tendencies and therefore has no currency in human society Arendt, 1998). Similarly forgiveness, also rooted in human equality ‘destroys the relationship between the forgiver and the forgiven and therefore is based on a negative solidarity (Lavi, 2010). Arendt suggests reconciliation as a response to wrongful deeds. “Reconciliation entails a willingness on the part of the wronged to carry the burden together with the wrongdoer” (Lavi, 2010, p.231). “To become reconciled with a wrong does not unburden the wrongdoer. Instead of attempting to undo the past , reconciliation encourages the acceptance of the past as given . . . harbours an element of renewal and spontaneity . . . reconciliation is an active gesture of acceptance that must be regenerated anew each time” (ibid.). Reconciliation as a phenomenon is powerful when dealing with memory because it assumes the premise that the past is exactly that, an era that has in fact passed by and beyond the powers of present human control. A pedagogy of reconciliation opens up spaces for multiple memories to be acknowledged and validated. It is about imagining spaces where healing is infused as a productive outcome in the pedagogy programme I fashion for my students. Again, I turn hooks’ insights. Drawing on the teachings of Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, hooks suggests that pedagogues (like me) have to look to themselves first and focus on personal well-being and personal peace and contentment before they can effectively Maistry: Using memory as a resource for pedagogy. . . 79 present as healers and or create classroom conditions that are likely to therapeutic for their students. This is a profound insight as it suggests deep inner peace as a pre-requisite for a healing pedagogy (hooks, 1994). Teacher educators have to exercise self-reflexivity. Teaching for self-actualisation requires sharing one’s own stories with students. It is about creating classroom environments where this might happen. It has to be more than simply searching for bland commonalities. The challenge is to harness diverse memories with a productive intent. The outcomes are that students get to explore their own memories and how they are likely to influence their understandings and practice of teaching economics. They also engage with the memory accounts of their fellow students and that of their mentor (me). Importantly, they get to experience firsthand a pedagogic encounter in Economics pedagogy where memory is used as a resource for teaching. This kind of pedagogic modelling is particularly useful to apprentice teachers. Equipped with this experience and a discourse of reconciliation, students are then encouraged to explore how such strategies could be applied to school contexts. I am acutely aware of not falling into the trap of romanticizing and celebrating my own practice. Such precocious self-aggrandising is furthest from the social justice enterprise I infuse into my teacher education programme. I am also loath to attempt to measure and quantify the impact of my attempts at improving my practice. I can, however, reflect on how self-study as a methodology has heightened my awareness of my pedagogic interventions. It has propelled me to search for a theoretical and philosophical rationale for my actions and to refine my social justice agenda with greater care and sensitivity. More importantly, I am beginning to understand in profound ways how my personal reflective writing activity can be therapeutic in helping me deal with my own distorted socialisation as I continue my journey as a developing teacher education pedagogue. Conclusion In this article, I shared the experiences of my work as a teacher education pedagogue as I attempted to harness memory as a resource for teaching and learning in my pedagogy courses. I argued for how students and societies, previously dehumanised and objectified by hegemonic race, class and gender regimes, can use memory to decentre powerful social constructions and 80 Journal of Education, No. 54, 2012 reposition themselves as society’s subjects. I drew attention to the contested nature of the knowledge that presides with clandestine neutrality in Business Education subjects in schools and how such knowledge is a source rich with pedagogical potential. Teacher education pedagogy courses present as opportune spaces for the troubling of administered knowledges and the creation of alternate ways of thinking about the economic world. I outlined the theoretical influences that shape my classroom interventions and how these particular appropriations have potential to unearth the subtext of the normal and taken for granted. I make no claim to grand accomplishments of my pedagogic interventions and am mindful that I have limited control over the effects of my actions. I do however introduce two exploratory constructs (‘bridging pedagogical moment’ and ‘compassionate listening’) as exploratory tools for pedagogy that have potential for further research and development. Given that each new pedagogical encounter is different and that I cannot foresee the effects of my actions, I reflected on how theory has helped me learn to become more comfortable with plurality and my own personal troubled disposition. Finally, I signaled the enormous potential of self-study as research methodology for the continuous theorisation of personal pedagogical theories and the production of the ‘new’. References Anderson, B. 1991. 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Murthee Maistry School of Education University of Kwazulu-Natal maistrys@ukzn.ac.za mailto:maistrys@ukzn.ac.za