Transformative Teaching

Abstract

Taking the lead from Goodson and Gills’ (2011) narrative pedagogy, this paper is contextualised within the notion that “learning encompasses meaning-making, connecting to what is valuable and worthwhile” for human action, existence and “becoming”. We reflect on an attempt to transform the first-year architectural design course – University of the Free State, South Africa – prior, during and after the national COVID19 lock-down. Responding to the notions of relational learning and care through dialogic intertwinement, our preparation for the 2020 curriculum was dependent on in-person experiential and narrative exchange between the different role-players in the classroom with environments outside the design studio. In-person contact, and traditional methods of phenomenological engagement, was discontinued less than six weeks after the start of the teaching year. We refigured the design module to introduce students to the unfamiliar act of place-making through the familiar act of story-writing. Student projects introduced the fundamentals of narrativity: different characters (selves) entangled with each other in different places and times. Re-imagined as five story-based projects, the curriculum focussed on experiences between students, teachers, with real or fictional non-relational others and spatiotemporal events. Through autobiographies, dissonant biographies, biographical fictions, poetic translations, and dialectic narratives, we attempted to navigate uncertainty. We argue that conceptual tools of narrative methodology and ethic-onto-epistemology may provide creative ways to strengthen and foster values of care, solicitude for other humans and non-humans, and the cultivation of just environments, which “concerns the flourishing of individual human beings” towards “the realisation of capacities” (2011), vulnerabilities, and aims.