Page 128 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

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Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
Related to the teacher as a playful performer role is the stand-up comedian, a deliberate professional fabrication and teaching persona (Tait et al. 2015). This persona is refined
as a result of my doctorate study about satire and parody
in 2017. Rather than telling jokes which I am not good at, I incorporate funny memes and animated gifs in my slides. Also effective are satirical cartoons and popular youth culture parodies. A favourite is trending topics on Twitter, which is
a rich source of satirical mocking and parody highlighting
the pressing issues related to social injustices such as prejudice, disinformation, unethical conduct in advertising and marketing campaigns. In other words, when taking on
a stand-up comedian persona, the use of popular culture pedagogies make a decolonised curriculum (Stein & Newfield 2007) relatable and memorable for students. In the process, satire stimulates critical thinking and reflection in highly engaged debates. Simultaneously, popular culture texts bridge our generational and cultural differences (Giroux 2018), finding common ground and relatable examples that my students enjoy.
Since much of popular culture is criticised for romanticising colonialism (Walter 2012), critical engagement around movies (Giroux 2018) such as Disney’s Aladdin are instrumental in my decolonisation pedagogies. To this end, I play video clips of seminal scholars so that students emotionally relate to them as authentic human beings instead of ‘boring’ academic texts. Likewise, playing videos of a young, local YouTube influencer talking about racism and poking fun at issues such as ‘Model C accents’ resonated with students. I also share my bizarre personal stories to bring alive the history of apartheid in an authentic manner. Students reciprocated by sharing their own touching stories about intersectional identities. The result has always been robust, noisy and fun discussions that sometimes continued in the corridor outside D Les 103, even after we had left the venue.
When educating the whole child (hooks 1994), a climate
of care extends to character education beyond curriculum outcomes to include the interrogation of difficult topics (hooks 1994; Noddings 2005; 2008). I set aside the first
day of each semester to establish a caring climate by doing a ‘survival guide’ presentation that I have developed and revised over time, based on what I hear and see students struggle with the most. Drawing from my popular culture pedagogies and my pedagogy of humour and playfulness,
I am able to establish an emotional connection with my students as we talk about difficult topics such as blessers, safe sex and discrimination. When acting out my playful performer role, I adopt a pedagogical persona that enables me to share calculated stories about topics that may otherwise be too difficult to talk about.
Constructivist pedagogical role:
Teacher as a 4IR cyborg
Considering the convergence of man and machine in the 4IR super-highway (Xing & Marwala 2017), my role as a 4IR cyborg teacher is to maintain a social presence (Whittle et al. 2020) by establishing an atmosphere of care, trust and creativity needed for our reciprocal relationship to be effective.
Tweeting in class and displaying tweets on the data projector is a lot of fun to break down fear and inclusively engage the vast majority of first-year students who have never used Twitter before. Moreover, shy students could express their thoughts and make new friends online since classes are big and socialising is often awkward in the first year. Students also enjoyed seeing their avatars ‘on the big screen’, as they call it. Twice even, we trended on Twitter. The joy and applause that erupted when we became Twitter celebrities, more aptly called Twitterati, was palpable. Correspondingly, students are intrinsically motivated to learn deeply and academically perform when they enjoy
a meaningful task and have a sense of belonging (Biggs & Tang 2011; Kember 2016: 27, 33).