Work

Invisible landscapes: students’ constructions of the social and the natural in an engineering course in South Africa

Year: 2009

Type: article

Abstract: This paper examines the discourses that students draw on and propagate in a course on rural development in a first‐year engineering foundation programme. It looks at the way ‘rural’ is often constructed as ‘lack’ and therefore ‘other’, the dangers of constructing development as linear, the ways nostalgia and utopianism feed into discourses of development and how ‘propriety’ serves to maintain boundaries between nature and people, society and individuals. Different modes and media, coupled with the degree of regulation in the classroom, may enable alternate discourses to emerge or to be suppressed. This paper argues that the curriculum needs to engage with students’ views in order to understand, interrogate and critique the kinds of realities they feed into.

Source: Social Dynamics

DOI: 10.1080/02533950903076220

Author: Arlene Archer

Institution: University of Cape Town

Language: English

Topic: Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies

Subfield: Sociology and Political Science

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Research Foundation, Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior, University of Cape Town, African Institute for Mathematical Sciences