Last year, when I joined
the SoTL@UJ group, I was bowled over by the "theory speak". Although many
of the ideas were familiar I did not recognise a single
"theorist". Clearly behind, you could say.
I’m an anthropologist
and it is not that anthropologists don’t have theory. Quite the contrary. Maybe
obscure to outsiders, but there are Boas, Kroeber, Radcliff-Brown, Malinowski,
Benedict, Mead, Turner, Douglas, Harris, Levi-Strauss and the rest… In fact, most
anthropologists trace their lineage to one of the early theorists.
After the heavy dose of
theory in graduate school—my bookshelves are still sagging under Marx, Gramsci,
the Latin American radicals, the American feminists, and the French theorists—I
decided, particularly after the postmodern turn, the only way out of theory is to
focus on “real world” or applied issues. And, I thought that I could do without
“fashionable nonsense” (Sokal and Brickmont 2013). However, I soon realised
that theory is important, helping to frame answers to complex questions about
those “real life” issues; that theory is key to organise and make sense of the data
we collect; and, that using specific authors reflects particular political
positions. Theory “produces perspectives” and “more or less useful ways of
seeing the world” as Wenger-Trayner says (2013).
Kibbie Naidoo’s SoTL
seminar on 19 February (What will the world look like if we were not working
with Archer?) made me think. In
fact, I have started to look for theory/ies that could frame my small project
that will be part of the UJ SoTL for Social Justice project. The SoTL seminar
series with its wide range of presentations and conversations about possible
theories turned out to be very helpful. At the end the question is not if
we need theory, but rather which theory do we need? I’m suggesting a
reread of Hutchings and Huber’s 2008 article Placing Theory in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.
I
agree with Kibbie’s key point that scholars of teaching and learning should
look for theories that are contextually sensitive and relevant to South Africa,
and not merely follow theoretical trends in an uncritical way. Kibbie’s challenge
is: “How do we shape theory so that it can speak more powerfully to data and
context?” She argues for a fresh look when examining the relationship between
the individual and wider society, using multiple perspectives—the idea of the Sociological
Imagination described by C Wright Mills (2000) as “the vivid awareness of the
relationship between experience and the wider society”.
Dialogue is at the heart
of research with a Sociological Imagination. This, Kibbie says, should be more
daring and include conversations with academics from many different
perspectives, embrace more than one methodology and theory, and “enter into
dialogue with the research context (the actual experience of the participants
and the socio-cultural and historical contexts)”.
Finally, theorising is process rather than product (Clegg 2012).
How that process works is opaque to most of us, so we fall back on theories that
are popular, talked about, frequently referenced, but also mostly from the Global North and decontextualised. We should actively seek out theorists from Africa, India
and Latin America, where many social justice challenges in teaching and learning
are similar to ours. And, we need to be more daring in our own attempts to
theorise as Kibbie suggested in her seminar.
Kibbie's slides:
Kibbie's slides:
