Page 136 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

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Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
Our teachers used
this form of carceral punishment to communicate. The constant threat of being hit by teachers produced great anxiety and stole joy from school and learning.
Introduction
I am a daydreamer, I dissociate. It was not until reading
about trauma-informed care studies that I saw daydreaming and dissociation as a positive – in moderation. For much
of my life, my daydreaming was seen, particularly in the schooling system, as a negative. In primary school, my then Mathematics teacher caught me disassociated. Annoyed and observing me watching activities outside of the classroom, she proceeded to ask me a question I could not answer. Angry, she pinched me hard in one of my ears. I cried in front of the class. I felt shame, humiliation and embarrassment. I had recently moved to this school and the city in which it was located. Our Mathematics classroom was facing the Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth) harbour. From the classroom window, I
could see the beach, the harbour, ships and various activities. I remember daydreaming and looking at the activities and wondering where the boats were going, or coming from, what they were carrying and many other curiosities that plagued my boy mind. My teacher never asked what fascinated me about the harbour. If she had, she would have known that until my sister and I moved to Gqeberha, I had lived all my life inland, in rural Eastern Cape, and had been to the sea once.
In this new setting, everything fascinated me. But she never cared, or asked me, except to physically assault and shame me for having a wondering mind.
I open this article with this vignette from my early experiences of dehumanisation in education. This is just one story in a long line of abuse that goes back to primary school and continues in the present in higher education. I started schooling in the early 1990s in rural Eastern Cape where corporal punishment was exercised by many teachers. We were lashed for being late to school, for not doing or completing homework, for not getting specific marks in tests/assignments and many other reasons that were used to justify assaulting us. We were whipped so frequently that the question was never
if it is going to happen, but rather when. No amount of excelling or good behaviour protected one as the whole class would be whipped for being ‘loud’, or making a noise, regardless of who was speaking and who was silent.
This was one of the ways in which trauma and assault were used to drive us to compliance within educational settings. During the early years, I experienced school as a site of pleasure, but correspondingly as pain and trauma. Our teachers used this form of carceral punishment to communicate. The constant threat of being hit by teachers produced great anxiety and stole joy from school and learning.