Despite improvements in educational provision in South Africa since 1994, the opportunities for learners from historically under-resourced schools to gain access to powerful English resources remain limited and unequal (Prinsloo
The access to and acquisition of English are complex and uneven endeavours. Prinsloo’s research (
This ongoing marked inequity requires researchers interested in language and learning to ask why that inequity persists and to develop a detailed description of how English is being taught and learnt. Research on classroom literacy practices in these contexts has, however, been limited, as Kapp (
Recent classroom research in South Africa (Kapp
In the context of township schools, where learners study English as a first additional language, dynamics and divisions within the social fabric of the township inform and construct the ways in which learners position themselves in relation to English, as Kapp (
The focus of the research presented below is an investigation of the way in which learners in a historically disadvantaged school are oriented to text in their English lessons. The question that guided the study is: What orientations to text are learners afforded in a typical urban township Grade 11 class and how do those orientations construct the subject positions that learners take up? For a more detailed account of the research, see Lloyd (
Poststructuralist theorists such as Stuart Hall challenge the humanist conception of the fixed, unitary subject, positing instead a subject that is non-unitary and fluid. This subject, according to Hall (
Central to this understanding of how subjectivity is constructed and how change might come about, is the role of language in defining who we are and who we could be. Language, according to Weedon (
If language and subjectivity are located within particular social and historical contexts, analysing those contexts and in particular their discursive features enables us to uncover the way power works to create or deny opportunities for learners to engage in a range of readings and in so doing, for their meaning making to be heard in the classroom.
Fairclough (
Discourse, as used here, is understood to provide us with subject positions. Through discourse we come to be ‘constituted’ as female, black, a reader, and so on and, as Weedon (
The reading of and writing about text are discursive practices in which learners are apprenticed as readers. Through these practices, teachers model different kinds of readings and authorise what they deem a ‘successful’ reading. The curriculum (Department of Basic Education
How then do classroom discursive practices construct learners through the reading of text? How are learners positioned to read and which of the multiple ways of reading a text are made available to them? Janks (
The central concern of this research is with the way in which orientations to text produce particular kinds of learning, gendered and racialised subjectivities. The analysis of the orientations to text observed during the course of the study draws on the view that texts are ‘constructions rather than reflections of meaning’ (Weedon
Fiction has long been seen as a powerful form of education in social meanings and values, as an effective purveyor of beliefs about gender, race and class. Yet if it is this, then it is also a powerful resource for those interests which to date had been marginalised, excluded or silenced by the dominant culture. The effectivity of fiction lies in the reading process itself.
In this study, a single case, namely, a Grade 11 English class, was used to explore the orientations to reading constructed for learners. The case study design enabled observation in one class over a period of 5 weeks and facilitated a focus on the ‘particularity and complexity’ (Stake
Data were collected employing a number of tools: participant observation and audio recording of 15 lessons; field notes taken during the lessons; a semi-structured interview with four learners; informal discussions with the teacher; and artefact collection, in the form of learners’ written work.
In analysing the data, critical discourse analysis (CDA) and poststructuralist discourse analysis (PDA) were drawn on. Critical discourse analysis (Janks
In the next section of this article, data from observed literature lessons are presented, and the reading process, as it unfolded in a classroom while reading a short story, is analysed.
During two of the observed lessons, the Grade 11 class read a short story
The teacher read the story aloud to the class, adding her own commentary as she read. This was followed by a writing task, in which learners had to write answers to a set of 16 ‘contextual’ questions.
The story, set during the height of apartheid, is about a young black woman who is secretly and illegally staying in her sister’s domestic quarters in white suburban Johannesburg. The young woman has rejected the idea of becoming a nurse or teacher – the only two professions open to black women at the time – and is trying to find a way to become a writer. ‘People thought that these professions were respectable, but I knew I wanted to do something different…’ (Mhlophe
The teacher introduced the story with a long commentary about literary features: the setting, the plot, the themes and the characters. She described the impact of the pass laws on black women, how this creates the backdrop to the themes of isolation and separateness in the story, yet how the main character ‘makes the best of her situation’ and the story ends on a positive note.
As part of her commentary before she read the story, the teacher constructed a reading that privileged a particular idea of black subjectivity:
‘Because during apartheid, when you were addressing a person who employed you - a white person, you called them “Madam”.’ ‘Yes, Miss.’ ‘They were not calling them by their first names or by their surnames. They called them “Madam”.’ ‘They respect them.’ ‘This shows the way they were respecting the people that employed them…’.
In this reading, all black people are characterised as respectful, a reading that serves to limit how the actions of the main character, who challenges dominant ideas of ‘good black women’, can be read. In line 49, the learner accepts this positioning in this limited reading, as do the rest of the class, who remain quiet and attentive throughout the lesson:
… [reading] ‘Sometimes I wanted to give up and be a good girl who listened to her elders’. [Teacher commenting]: ‘You know
Both the story ‘… a good girl…’ and the teacher’s commentary set up an idea of goodness that means obeying elders. The teacher extends this idea to mean accepting rules and showing respect, ‘no matter what’. Yet by choosing to focus on the main character’s choices: staying illegally in her sister’s quarters and exploring alternative careers, the story can be read as a celebration of resistance to the constructions of black women subjects during apartheid. The teacher’s commentary, though, does not allow for an exploration of the way in which black women challenged their limited career options. Rather, the teacher emphasises the main character’s loneliness and isolation. In her repeated use of the pronoun ‘we’, for example, in ‘… we black people’, she positions the learners as respectful black people and instructs them ‘you’ to be respectful, ‘no matter what’. This injunction denies the learners an opportunity to explore ideas of resistance – both on the part of women to their very constricted lives and on the part of black people in general to apartheid. There is also evidence here of a confusion between subservience and respect that reveals a strong ideological orientation of acceptance of unequal power relations, and a reluctance to interrogate the ways in which the character’s experiences as a young woman challenged power relations between powerful privileged white people and their black servants.
Neither the teacher’s commentary nor the questions that were set afforded the learners an opportunity to explore these power relations. The 16 questions showed little variety in the cognitive demands that were made of the learners and privileged an orientation to the text characterised by limited engagement with its possible meanings: nine of the questions required factual recall from the text (e.g. ‘Where does the story take place?’). One of them, Question 3, asked, ‘Which two professions were regarded as respectable by people?’ which underlines the idea that ‘respectable’ women were nurses or teachers, professions that extend the work of women as carers and nurturers. Three of the questions tested vocabulary and punctuation knowledge (e.g. ‘Give the opposite of the word temporary’); three of the questions required a level of inference (e.g. ‘How did she feel about staying with her sister?’); and just one question, Question 6, ‘What do you think would have happened if the “Madam” had seen her?’, opened the possibility for an engagement with the relationship between the white madam and her employee’s sister, and an investigation of how power worked (and still works) between black and white women in domestic contexts.
In the short story, the main character manages to get a job in a factory and in the extract below, she recounts a conversation she has with another worker, about going out with a ‘lunch boy’ – a city boy who could buy her lunch:
[reading] ‘She told me it was wise not to sleep with him because then I could dump him any time I wanted to. I was very nervous about such things.’ [Teacher commenting]: ‘Why she was nervous? It’s because she was coming from upcountry.’ [Teacher reading]: ‘In city life I thought it was better to be a ‘Yes!’ ‘
Here the girls identify with the narrator’s resistance to the sexual demands made of them by city boys, retreating into the relative safety of the unsophisticated position of country girls. The learners understand the sexual threat from powerful city boys, even though the teacher has (mis)directed them in turn 54, choosing to focus on the narrator’s rural background (she had explained earlier in the turn that a
A few days after this lesson, I interviewed four of the learners in the class. In the interview, one of the female students showed a thoughtful and considered response to the story, in which she explored in a more nuanced way than had been possible during the reading or in the classwork, what the story meant for her:
‘I felt the pain that the people were in, in that time because the lady couldn’t stay with her sister at that moment because her sister was employed. So I felt the pain she had to go through. Early in the morning, she had to wake, go and stay in the toilet, wait there for her time for her to go to work. So it was very painful but it showed that black people are very strong. What she believed in, she do what she believed in. She wanted to help her family, she went to find work. Even though she had to wake up early, she did wake up early.’ ‘And does it make you think about your life?’ ‘Yes. It shows us that we as young children take things easily. The stories tell us that if you believe in something you have to work for it. We as young children give up easily. If we want something and we don’t get it we just quit. It shows us that there are people who do things that they believe in. They are our mentors. We look to them.’
In her response, what is significant is her use in turn 198, of the word ‘pain’, which she uses three times, an indication of the strong identification she felt with the character. She also identifies with the character’s strength and emphasised that the character did what she believed in, that she showed discipline. She identifies here with someone who has overcome tremendous adversity and when she says ‘black people are very strong’, her use of the present tense signals her membership in that collective.
Yet there is a shift in her response in turn 200, where she distances her peer group from the oppressed of the past. In making an explicit connection with her life, she elevates the character in the story and describes herself and her peers as those who ‘take things easily’. ‘We as young people give up easily’. Her use of first person plural pronouns: ‘They are
What she says here in turn 200 echoes the moralistic overtones in the discourse and the orientation to reading that requires that learners find a message in the text. Once again the authority of the text is paramount and Y in her reading is shifting in and out of the position of obedient and respectful black person. While she can feel the character’s pain, the dominant ideology that paints young people as spoilt and ‘giving up easily’ has overtaken and disrupted her identification and ruptured her attempt to link the character’s struggles as a black woman, with her own. The classroom discourse has constituted her as a particular kind of reader, who can find surface meaning in the story. But it has not given her the language to talk about the underlying power relations that the story is all about.
During the teacher’s reading of this story in class, the learners were very attentive. They clearly enjoyed and were gripped by it. The issues it raised about professions and identities available to black women, sexual exploitation by sophisticated urban men and the complexity of racial relations all afford great potential for learners to connect with their lives. But neither the reading and discussion of the text nor the questions in the writing task afforded the learners the opportunity to explore those aspects of the text that could have been meaningful for them, especially in ways that could develop them as critical readers who are learning how to challenge dominant power relations.
In the lesson observations and in the interview with four of the learners in the class, this researcher encountered young people who were able to draw on a range of resources to complete the tasks set for them in their English lessons. The class were in the commerce stream, studying Accounting, Business Economics and Economics, and in a group of lessons on advertising, a number of learners were able to draw on their understanding of commercial practices, in creative ways, to realise the production of an advertisement. Yet those resources were not explicitly recognised by the teacher. In the interview, the four learners (two men and two women), when asked about their future career hopes, said, ‘My goal is to become an economist, like in statistics…’, , ‘… after Grade 12 I will go into university where I will do sales marketing or accounting’; ‘I also want to be an entrepreneur. There are so many things, but that is one of my biggest goals’; ‘I want to be a sound engineer. So that’s my career field’. In the expression of these desires, we see learners who are looking way beyond the constraints of their gender (in the case of the two women) and class positions towards a future that holds a wide range of potential for them and they tell a story about themselves that challenges and contradicts the subject positions made available in the classroom discourse and reading orientations, of knowing their place. These learners are drawing on political narratives of freedom and equality, in which black youth are told they can strive for and achieve the academic success previously denied to their parents. In telling the story of their career ambitions, these learners have drawn on multiple sources, including their positions as commerce students, as members of ‘a new generation’ and on their imagined future selves. These future selves contradict the positions of ‘respectful’ young people afforded them by the classroom discourse in their lessons in the previous week.
The literacy practices and discursive positions described and analysed in this study can be situated in a long history of unequal access to resources, including access that has been denied to generations of teachers in their schooling and teacher training. How then can the resources afforded by critical orientations be made available to all schools? One focus has to be on teacher training and within that attention needs to be paid to the curriculum – to developing understandings of what it means to do critical literacy and of why it is important. Secondly, teacher training needs to take into consideration the way in which our apartheid past continues to speak through teachers in the present: how their discursive practices are contingent upon their own subject positioning during apartheid as non-critical consumers of text. Petersen (
A second focus requires a shift in the way in which learners are constructed, about the subject positions they are able to take up, or desire to take up, and about the resources those positions afford them, so that much more can be made of those resources in the classroom. Alternative models of teaching and learning, in which learners’ knowledge, history and experience of the world are centrally placed in their engagement with texts, must be developed.
In this case study, learners displayed a strong investment in their future, drawn from their desire for an improvement in their personal and social circumstances. What they and all learners need are opportunities for engaging with texts that position them as critical thinkers who can understand and challenge the way texts work to reproduce or undo relations of domination, and in doing so can acquire the resources they need for academic success.
The author declares that she has no financial or personal relationships which may have inappropriately influenced her in writing this article.