FVPA, Stuart Hall and the Labour of Transformation

Abstract

The restructuring of this core Wits School of Arts first-year course entitled FVPA (Film Visual and Performing Arts), took shape through a series of conversations across disciplines in which teaching staff thought about some of the contemporary social issues that students confront in their experiences at Wits, and more broadly in South Africa.

The course is divided into two semesters. The first, titled Representation, Contexts and Conventions, is taught primarily through Stuart Hall’s chapter, The Work of Representation, and provides a foundational language for the work of the second semester. Titled Sex, Race and the Body, this second semester happens also to be taught primarily through Stuart Hall, particularly his chapter The Spectacle of the Other.

This course recognises and is used as a key first-year moment in which complex “hot” content is politicised, and the politics made transparent to students.

This paper argues that implementing such a course requires tight management and outlines a range of pedagogical strategies without which the content is at risk of being flattened and reduced to bland superficialities capable only of giving the appearance of a transformed curriculum.

Some key strategies which are reviewed in the paper include ensuring that senior and experienced staff leads the bulk of teaching at this critical moment; the material is scaffolded across the two semesters; the large group lecture-based experience is countered by weekly small group tutorials; assignments are aimed at helping students navigate complex readings in order to be able to use the central theoretical ideas in their analysis of a range of different texts.

The school level “buy-in” to the significant role of this course in preparing students to engage critically with their work, and with the social environments within which they work, is crucial to guiding students towards using the critical knowledge they acquire in FVPA to question convention, to understand the politics of representation and to challenge the ways in which images and texts, language and actions, create situations of inclusion and exclusion and can impact on experience—their experience—in powerful ways. In other words, this course, in its current conceptualisation, is connected to the development of student voice as a central aspect of the transformation of higher education, and this paper explores how this works.