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  • Essay / Applying the Pedagogy of Discomfort to Teaching

    During the discussion with my group, many emotions and thoughts ran through my head. Most of these feelings were negative feelings like anger, isolation, disgust, and the fact that what we saw during the movie blew me away because the things the students experienced were exactly the same as the ones I experienced, crumbling and dilapidated school grounds that became negative feelings. destroyed by community gangsters and unsanitary bathrooms allegedly broken doors, toilets, etc. The pedagogy that we used was very effective in bringing out these emotions that we have implanted in ourselves unconsciously through our daily habits and the hegemony in which we find ourselves. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Hegemony… “refers to the maintenance of domination not through the mere exercise of force, but primarily through social practices, social forms, and consensual social structures. in specific places such as the Church, the State, the school, the media, the political system and the family”. Because we began using the pedagogy of discomfort during this session, I understood why I felt the way I felt and how I should use these emotions to properly think about the problem in a more open way. The pedagogy of discomfort is a teaching method in which the student and the teacher need to be placed or taken out of their comfort zone. This was very interesting to know because I normally have difficulty talking to people about very sensitive topics like the one we had to discuss in the group. Luckily, the group I was in was a really good selection of people who all shared the same views, even though we came from different places and schools, which meant that everyone did. We all seemed to share the views we discussed, namely that there was not much transformation needed in such schools, and that transformation as such has not been effective since the end of apartheid. When I told them about my experiences, I felt very isolated because most of the group couldn't really speak from direct experience of this experience, and for me, I felt like I was alone and lost, as if I were truly forgotten as such. a person of color through the South African school system, because I was the only one who was afraid of having first-hand experience of what the students at the school were portraying in the film. The things I mentioned where I was quite privileged in the sense that I had the opportunity to study at one of the first Focus arts and culture schools in the Western Cape, but that didn't doesn't mean I haven't been privileged in other ways. In the area where the school is based, gangsterism, unemployment, teenage pregnancies, drug and alcohol abuse are rife at the school. The gang members even entered the school and injured the learners. It is in such a radical state that in the 6 years I have been at university, about 5 learners have been killed during class hours. Regarding the sanitation of the school, it is not tidy, especially the learner toilets. These bathrooms are dilapidated and disgustingly dirty to the point that students are getting sick, which in comparison to the teacher's bathrooms, which seem to be cleaned every day. These emotions and thoughts followed me to college where I was told I wasn't good enough, that it didn't matter what grades I had..