‘The village of my childhood’: nostalgia, narrative and landscape in an engineering course in South Africa
Journal Article
2008
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International Journal of Learning
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Common Ground Publishing
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University of Cape Town
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Abstract
Different views of society, nature and technology inform engineering activity and proposed developmental interventions. This paper examines the discourses that students both draw on and propagate in a course on rural development in a first year engineering foundation programme. Students’ texts reflect and recycle different discourses, some of which may complement each other, and others may compete or represent conflicting interests. A range of modes and media, coupled with the degree of regulation in the classroom space, may enable different discourses to emerge or to be further suppressed. This paper looks at the way rural is often constructed as ‘lack’ and therefore ‘other’, as well as discourses of nostalgia and utopianism and how these feed into notions of development. The agenda underlying this investigation is about facilitating student access to the engineering curriculum and contributing to the theorizing of a pedagogy of diversity that utilizes rather than ignores or devalues diverse subjectivities.
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Reference:
Archer, A. 2008. ‘The village of my childhood’: nostalgia, narrative and landscape in an engineering course in South Africa. International Journal of Learning.