Space, Place and Inclusive Learning

Judy Hemingway, Felicity Armstrong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415719926
• eBook ISBN: 9781134915484
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This collection explores ways in which theories of space and place can be used in understanding processes of exclusion and inclusion in education. The contributions foreground how the 'spatial turn' and geographical knowledges can inform:

• debates on the relationships between learning, space and place
• understandings of the ways in which space and place affect education and learning
• 'familiar' research agendas through the application of conceptual perspectives from different disciplines

The ten chapters which make up this book are by contributors from Australia, Italy and the United Kingdom who draw, in very different ways, on spatial theory as a means of exploring processes of inclusion and exclusion in education. Each one of the authors not only seeks to challenge growing orthodoxies in their respective field but is interested in cross-disciplinarity and spatial theory in education.

This book provides key readings for experienced and beginning teachers studying for bachelors, masters and research degrees or professional qualifications. It will be particularly useful to equality and diversity post-holders, lecturers, researchers and policy makers working in all education establishments which take issues of inclusion seriously. The international content of the diverse papers in Space, Place and Inclusive Learning will be of interest not only to those practising in the United Kingdom but to educationists working in other countries who seek to understand how space and place modulate opportunities for inclusion.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Inclusive Education.

Place, race and exclusion: university student voices in post-apartheid South Africa

Rob Higham

London Centre for Leadership in Learning, Faculty of Policy and Society, Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H OAL, UK

The slogan ‘no education without representation’ symbolised a belief in the anti-apartheid movement that without a democratic government, South Africa’s people could not receive an inclusive education. Since the end of official apartheid in 1994, the education system has faced new transformative aims focused on ending racial separation and inequality. This article seeks, in three main ways, to contribute to debates over the progress made. First, postapartheid policy is explored. Desegregation of schools and universities is seen as a key goal but is shown not to have led simplistically to inclusion. Second, three concepts of ‘place’ are considered as analytical tools in the study of inclusion. These are shown to hold different but relevant interpretations of how ‘place’ can influence processes of in- and exclusion. Third, the voices of students at the Universities of Cape Town and the Western Cape set out how students experience, negotiate and participate in campus in- and exclusion. Racial inequalities and divisions are seen to be reproduced as primary fault-lines of exclusion, but new class cleavages and recognition of other social differences are partly disrupting this traditional picture. The article considers the implications for both inclusive education in South Africa and wider geographical engagements.

The definition of an inclusive educational institution as one that sees multiple forms of social ‘differentness’ as an ordinary part of human experience, to be valued and organised for (Ballard 1995 quoted in Slee 2006), holds particular resonance in South Africa. The country’s experiment in social division and discrimination is infamous. Building on colonial inequalities, the apartheid state sought to engineer racial separation in nearly all aspects of life. The Separate Amenities Act of 1953 legislated for the separate and unequal provision of public services based on an official hierarchy of racially defined ‘population groups’ (White, Indian, Coloured and Bantu (black African)).¹ The Bantu Education Act of the same year formally decoupled black school education from white provision. The resulting four Departments of Education, one for each population group, contrived a range of racial inequalities from student–staff ratios to examination pass rates. Bantu Education remained critically under-resourced and devoid of mathematics and scientific subjects. The wider curriculum promoted the superiority of whiteness and the negativity of blackness (Dean 1983).

The role of geography was also central to the apartheid imagination. As Robinson (1998, 535) argues ‘the racial order was crucially mediated through the creation of space’. The Group Areas Act of 1950, for instance, planned for urban segregation and enforced removals from racially exclusive residential zones. The Pass Laws Act of 1952 required black South Africans to gain permission for their presence in white areas, which was usually granted only through employment by a white person. The creation of the Homelands, at the subsequent zenith of apartheid, sought to engineer self-governing ‘national’ territories for specific black African ethnic groups (Hill 1964). As these geographies of segregation became lived in and reproduced, through cultural myths about particular places, the apartheid state anticipated an acceptance of its ideology of racial difference and separation (Norval 1996).

The legacy of these socio-spatial divisions confronts any post-apartheid vision. At the dawn of a new South Africa in the mid-1990s, the daily experiences of most citizens remained rooted in the spatial separation of different racial groups who continued to predominately give birth, live, travel, work and socialise in different places. In this context, contemporary concerns for developing a single inclusive education system have important geographical dimensions. Early post-apartheid debates over improving the quality of schooling, for instance, included proposals not only to redistribute educational spending but to relocate teachers from white residential areas to township schools. Similarly, questions over the ‘size and shape’ of higher education have concerned not only issues of quality and cost, but also the implications of an apartheid geography for student access and the location and role of knowledge producers.

This article seeks to contribute to the analysis of these related issues of inclusion, education and space. Acknowledging the traditional focus on disability within inclusive education, this article draws on Booth and Ainscow’s (1998) broader notion that inclusion concerns both the removal of barriers to learning for all students and a critical understanding of the dominant processes of exclusion within society more generally (Slee 2000). In the South African context, while appreciating the significance of disability (van Rooyen, Le Grange, and Newmark 2002), this can lead, as it does in this article, to a primary (but non-essentialising) concern for racial, as well as socio-economic class and gender, exclusion and discrimination (Tihanyi 2007).

The article progresses in three main ways. First, the post-apartheid transformation of education is explored. Desegregation of schools and universities is seen to have become a key policy lever but is shown to have not led simplistically to local processes of inclusion. Second, three geographical concepts of place are explored as analytical tools. These are shown to hold different but relevant interpretations of how ‘place’ can influence processes of in- and exclusion. These include place being purposefully constructed by traditional communities as exclusionary, by the impact of traditional local norms and everyday practice and through place becoming the locus for a unique mixing of wider social processes. Third, the post-apartheid voices of students at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the University of the Western Cape (UWC) are introduced. We hear how students experience, negotiate and participate in campus processes of in- and exclusion. Their voices outline how racial inequalities and divisions are being reproduced as primary fault-lines of exclusion, but how new class cleavages and a clearer recognition of other social differences are partly disrupting this traditional picture. The article concludes by considering the implications for both inclusive education in South Africa and the potential for geographical engagements to contribute analytically to such works.

Desegregation

Following its election in 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) government tabled a range of policies aimed at tolerance and inclusion. The 1996 Constitution enshrined equal civil, social and economic rights for all while providing for affirmative action to redress the historical under-representation of in particular black people, women and/or people with disabilities. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission attempted to collectively overcome decades of political violence. The discourse of a ‘Rainbow Nation’ imagined a multicultural society freed from historical oppression based on race, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability and/or sexual orientation. Within education, improving the quality of provision, particularly in township and rural schools, and formulating new non-oppressive curricula, became clear priorities. Questions of desegregation also came to the fore (Valley 1999).

As a policy, desegregation placed the onus on school and university governors to pro-actively transform admission policies. No official admission quotas or targets were legislated for, but all institutions were expected to work towards a greater representation of their provincial population and South African society more generally. There was a range of resistance, but also progress. Lemon (2004, 2005), for instance, reports on research in two provinces (the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal) to show that considerable change in the racial composition of state schools has taken place since 1994. A key caveat is that this has only been in one direction, ‘up the racial hierarchy created by apartheid. African schools remain African, former Indian and Coloured schools admit Africans, former white schools admit all groups to the extent that whites have become a minority in some cases’ (2004, 92).

The increasing representation of black African, Coloured and Indian students has not unproblematically led to their full inclusion in institutional life. While overt racism has not commonly been observed in desegregating schools and tolerance has usually been espoused (Soudien and Sayed 2003), newcomers have generally been expected to adjust to an institution’s historical ethos (Adam and Moodley 1999). Desegregating schools have often not shown a desire to accommodate cultural difference (Valley 1999) and so the process of desegregation has become more one of assimilation rather than inclusion (Carrim 2003).

Similar trends have been identified within higher education. Following a period of student expansion in the late 1990s, particularly for black African students, the total number of enrolments plateaued (Cooper and Subotzky 2001). This has since revealed a pattern of movement away from Historically Black Universities² (HBUs) and towards both vocational Technikons and Historically White Universities (HWUs) (Jansen 2004). While the 2001 national reorganisation of higher education somewhat complicates the picture, having reduced through mergers the number of institutions from 36 to 21, many HWUs have substantially increased the diversity of their student bodies since 1994.

Having gained access to HWUs, a challenge confronting many new students appears to again lie in the processes of exclusion from within. New students have not often benefited from mainstream processes to advance their marginalised interests (Subotzky 2003). Even where diversity projects have gained some momentum, Cross (2004) argues that these have often remained fragmented, characterised by adding-on cultural content to otherwise unreconstructed courses or organising random programmes on diversity that do not disturb traditionally racialised and gendered institutional power relations (Chisholm and Napo 1999). Diversity processes have also been seen to perversely sustain historical division. As Walker (2005) demonstrates in the case of Northern University – an Historically White Afrikaans-medium University, which now has about a quarter black students – the introduction of English-medium classes alongside traditional medium courses has resulted in essentially two separate universities, dividing newer and traditional students on campus. With comparable experiences reported on other campuses, Jansen (2004, 311) concludes that while so much has changed within higher education, two things remain crucially the same: the dominance of white middle class males as academics; and the institutional cultures of universities that still ‘bear their birthmarks of dominant traditions, symbols and patterns of behaviour’.

Place, permanence and power

Through these examples, South African universities can be seen as places that, despite broader processes of change, inherently protect and preserve particular local histories and ‘way of doing things (Curry 1999). These ideas were central to the apartheid geographical imagination, which sought to construct places as inherently bounded and fixed. While not of course sharing these apartheid aims, the development of c1970s humanistic geographical theory was also concerned with how ‘place’ could offer sanctuary and rest from the openness and threat of ‘space’ (Tuan 1977). These interests in security and belonging remain within contemporary geographical inquiry, but the implicit humanistic notion that places are in some way protected from wider social processes has been substantially critiqued. Place is now more usually understood as being open and porous, resulting of course from those that come before us, but equally always still in the process of being remade (Hudson 2006). Yet if place is not to be thought of as fixed or bounded, what perspectives can geographical theory offer of South African universities as sites of in- and exclusion? My interpretation, informed by Cresswell (2004), is that there are (at least) three key concepts of place that provide us with different, if partly overlapping, analyses.

The first, associated most clearly with the work of Harvey (1996), emphasises the responses people in particular places make to the threat, uncertainty and increasing speed of external change. Traditional communities or organisations, Harvey argues, no longer able to rely on the certainty of a place, try to create ‘temporal permanences’ capable of (re)marking boundaries and (re)differentiating ‘their place from outside changes. As broader shifts occur, each (perishing) permanence needs to be redrawn in continuing acts of resistance. In some instances, this might be interpreted as the struggles of those with little social power trying to maintain a foothold. In others, it may more clearly be a reactionary project that casts such place-making as a purposefully exclusionary force. It is within this latter interpretation that we can probably best understand Welsh and Johnson’s (1998, 157) claim that in South Africa ‘certain [university] campuses are perceived by certain population groups as their cultural possessions.… Father and mother, son and daughter went there; these institutions are worth fighting for. And a fight it is’.

The second conception, expounded most clearly by Cresswell (1996), emphasises how places can become laden with particular meanings of what is considered appropriate, normal or just. Given that dominant local meanings are often created – consciously and unconsciously – by people with most power, places can be seen to become tools of conformity, dominance or exclusion (Curry 1999). While open to change, these dominant norms are reproduced in local social relations so that people who are deemed to c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Citation Information
• Introduction: Space, place and inclusive learning
• 1. Place, race and exclusion: university student voices in post-apartheid South Africa
• 2. Remote control: a spatial-history of correspondence schooling in New South Wales, Australia
• 3. Integrazione scolastica and the development of inclusion in Italy: does space matter?
• 4. ‘Fallen Angel’: making a space for queer identities in schools
• 5. Spaces and places for disrupting thinking about inclusive education in Hard Times
• 6. The production of urban educational space
• 7. Reconceptualising gardening to promote inclusive education for sustainable development
• 8. Borderline space for voice
• 9. Landscapes, spatial justice and learning communities
• 10. Inclusive place-based education for ‘Just Sustainability’
• Index