that intellectuals need to address:
first, cultural studies constitute one and new ways of study, testing the lines between intellectual rigour and social relevance... But, secondly, ...cultural studies insist on what I want to call the vocation of the intellectual life. That is to say, cultural studies insist on the necessity to address the central, urgent and disturbing questions of a society and a culture in the most rigorous intellectual way we have available.
In this view intellectuals must be accountable in their teaching for the ways in which they address and respond to the problems of history, human agency, and the renewal of democratic civil life.
2.5.1 Universities as critical centres for social transformation
Also critical for this study is how to democratise the universities so as to enable those groups who, in large measure, are divorced from or simply not represented in the curriculum to be able to produce their own representations, narrate their own stories and engage in respectful dialogue with others. In this instance, the study must address how dialogues are constructed in the lecture halls about cultures (African) and voices by critically addressing both the position of the theorist and the insights in which dialogue are produced. Hitchcook (1986) argues that the governing principles of any such dialogue exchange should include some of the following elements:
(i) attention to the specific institutional setting in which this activity
takes place.
(ii) self-reflexivity of the particular identities of the teacher and
students who labour collectively under this activity.
Comment [Hester23]: Spellin g? Hitchcock? References?
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(iii) an awareness that the cultural identities at stake in 'other'
cultures are in the process of becoming in dialogic interaction and are not static as subjects.
(iv) knowledge produced through this activity is always already
contestable and by definition is not knowledge of the other as the other would know him/herself.
It is worth repeating that contemporary students in the transformed higher education system in the Free State rely more on the technology and culture of learning guides to construct and affirm their identities. Moreover, they are faced with the task of finding their way through the closed narrative structures of learning guides. This study, if profoundly committed in focusing on learning guides, is not merely in terms of how they distort and misrepresent reality, but also on how learning guides play a part in the formation, in the constitution of the things they reflect. It is not that there is a world “out there” which exists free of the discourse of representation. What is "out there" is, in part, constituted by how it is represented (McLaren, 1989).
2.5.2 Critical pedagogy
This study believes that critical pedagogy should be established as one of the defining principles of transformation of higher education in South Africa. It is possible to generate a new discourse for moving beyond a united emphasis on the mastery of techniques and methodologies. Critical pedagogy represents a form of cultural production implicated in and critically attentive to how power and meaning are employed in the construction and organisation of knowledge, desires, values and identities. Critical pedagogy in this case is not reduced to the mastering of skills or techniques, but is defined as a cultural practice that must be
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accountable ethically and politically for the stories it produces, the claims it makes on social memories, and the images of the future it deems legitimate. As both a method of critique and a method of cultural production, it refuses to hide behind claims of objectivity, and works both as a method of critique and a method of cultural production. It refuses to hide behind claims of objectivity, and writes effortlessly to link theory and practice to enable the possibilities for human agency in a world of diminishing returns (Roberts, 2004).
2.5.3 Political education against politicising education
According to Eubank (2001), political education, which is central to critical pedagogy, refers to teaching students how to think in ways that cultivate the capacity for judgment essential for the exercising of power and responsibility by a democratic citizenry. Political education, as distinct from politicising education, would encourage students to become better citizens to challenge those with political and cultural power as well as to honour the critical traditions within the dominant culture that make such a critique possible and intelligible. A political education means decentring power in the classroom and other pedagogy sites in order for the dynamics of those institutional and cultural inequalities that marginalise some groups, repress particular types of knowledge and suppress critical dialogue, can be addressed. On the other hand, politicising education is a form of pedagogical terrorism in which the issue of what is taught, by whom and under what conditions is determined by a doctrinal political agenda that refuses to examine its own values, beliefs and ideological construction, while refusing to recognise the social and historical character of its own claim to history, knowledge and values. A politicising education silences in the name of a specious universalism and denounces all transformative practices through an appeal to a timeless notion of truth and beauty. For those