I teach English as a Second Language (ESL) at the post-secondary level. All of my students are immigrants and a fair number of them are refugees. I am faced with the challenges of a socioeconomically, culturally, and linguistically diverse classroom every day; I suspect that these challenges are inherent to the South African educational system as well. I believe that I have a responsibility to seek out experiences that will help me better manage a diverse classroom and the conflict that occasionally arises within it. I hope this course will help me hone the skills necessary to continue my work with a diverse body of students while simultaneously helping me broaden my knowledge of the international contexts in which my students have lived and learned.
As my first assignment in this course, I read the novel Cry, the Beloved Country. It was, in retrospect, a good first choice for this course. Having read Mandela’s autobiography a number of years ago, Cry, the Beloved Country helped put some of South Africa’s history into perspective. But more than that, I found the novel superb in its humanizing quality, in the manner in which it highlighted the dignity that all humans seek and that all human beings have the opportunity to grant one another. In fact, I would go so far as to say this was my major takeaway from the novel—that the things that connect the South African experience to the American experience rest in the ways we seek and either are or are not offered dignity in return. After completing Cry, the Beloved Country, I watched the film In My Country. The film centered on the experiences of a white South African journalist and an African American journalist reporting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of the mid-1990s. I learned a tremendous amount about South Africa in this process, both as a result of the film itself and as a result of extracurricular reading that I completed on the TRC after watching the film, but what really sticks out for me is the African concept of ubuntu and how it both governed and nourished the TRC. While perhaps flawed, my reading suggests to me that the TRC was largely viewed a success. I’m left wondering how American society might be different today had we enacted restorative justice of this type at any number of points in our history.
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AuthorI'm Kelly. I teach English as a Second Language, business English, and writing. I eat poems for dinner. Archives
January 2019
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