Application of The Pedagogy of Discomfort in Teaching

During the discussion with my group, I had many emotions and thoughts that ran though my head. Most of these feelings were negative feelings like anger, isolation, disgust, and the fact that what we saw during the film blew my mind as the things that the students went though was exactly like what I went though, broke and dilapidated school grounds which get broken down by the gangsters in the community, and unsanitary bathrooms which would have broken doors, toilets and so forth. The pedagogy which we used was very affected in bringing out these emotions which we implanted in us subconsciously though our everyday habits and the hegemony which we find ourselves in.

Hegemony…“refers to the maintaince of domination not by the sheer exercise of force but primarily though consensual social practices, social forms and social structures proceeded in specific site such as the church, the state, the school, the mass media, the political system, and the family”. Because we started using the pedagogy of discomfort during this session, I understood why I felt the way I did and how I had to use these emotions to correctly think about the problem in a more open-minded way. The pedagogy of discomfort is a pedagogical method in which the student and the teacher need to be placed or moved out of their comfort zones. This was very interesting to know because I normally find it very difficult to talk to people about very sensitive matters like the one which we had to in the group. Luckily the group I was in was really a good selection of people who all shared the same views even though we came from different places and schools which meant that we all had. We seemed to all share the views which we discussed which was that there was not a lot of transformation which was needed in such schools, and this transformation as such has not been effective since the end of Apartheid. When I spoke to them about my experiances I felt very isolated as most of the group could not really speak from first-hand experience about going though this, and to me it felt like I was alone and lost, like I was really forgotten about as a person of colour by the schooling system of South Africa, because I was the only one that spook about having a first-hand expericiance of what the students of the school depicted in the film.

The things that I brought up where how I was quite privileged in the sense that I had the opportunity to study at one of the first Focus schools for art and culture in the Western Cape, but this does not mean that I was not privileged in other ways. In the area which the school is based in, gangsterism, unemployment, teenage pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse plagues the school. The gang members would even come into the school and hurt the learners, It is in such a radical state in as for the past 6 years that I have been on university approximately 5 learners were killed during school hours. In relation to the sanitation of the school, it is not tidy especially the learner bathrooms. These bathrooms are dilapidated and disgustingly dirty to the point where students get sick, which in comparison to the teacher’s bathrooms which look like it gets cleaned every day. These emotions and thoughts followed me to university where I was told I was not good enough, that no matter what my practical marks were for my singing exam, I am from an underprivileged school, which means by default that I do not have a secure foundation needed to study for the degree I really wanted to and I had to settle with second best. These thoughts and emotions were something I decided to “put into a box and move on. This pedagogy brings out the emotional links which we have created about ourselves, things like I feel inadequate to teach learners at a prestigious school because of my own educational background, or that I will not be able to make it as a professional singer because of my class or race. This is something that really stuck with me and I wanted to talk to someone about it, which I did and I realised that even at home in the community I live I would get told things like you’ve got money cause you study at UCT, or that I should not act like I am from where I am from because of the way I speak, is not the norm like the rest of the people in the community.

“A pedagogy of discomfort recognizes and problematizes the deeply embedded emotional dimensions that frame and shape their daily habits, routines and unconscious complicity with hegemony”. I intend to use this method will not only allow myself to grow more as a teacher but it will also allow my learners to know that no matter what their discomforting emotion or thought they might have surrounding the topic, the classroom itself is a safe open space in which they can freely discuss things that they feel discomfortingly about, and make them think about their beliefs and their assumptions. “…a teaching practice that can encourage students to move outside of their “comfort zones’ and question their ‘cherished beliefs and assumptions’ ”. This approach is grounded in the assumption that discomforting feelings are important in challenging dominant beliefs, social habits and normative practices that sustain social inequities and they create openings for individual and social transformation.