English Teaching: Practice and Critique

Creating Hybrid Border Spaces in the classroom through video production

Volume 9 Number 1 May 2010

Franci Cronjé (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

This article explores emerging patterns of communication within a multicultural school environment. South Africa consists various and different identities all sharing overlapping living spaces. Diverse cultural identities exist in public spaces, and family units are in many cases so hybrid that very few adolescents can define themselves as originating from one single background. However, social memory within the home environment often dictates a stereotypical prejudice reflecting from the older generations down to their children. A research intervention with video production as the main focal activity is discussed, where learners were encouraged to cross identity borders and move into a Hybrid Border Space with the explicit objective of ensuring that all four participants negotiated out of the perspective of their own cultural identity and background. How each participant saw and experienced her identity, and to what extent such an individual expression formed in a group situation, shed some light on the dynamics of meaning-making in such a particular mix of respondents. Extrapolations from lessons learnt in this specific situation serve as beacons for similar initiatives in a variety of South African youth situations.

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