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Papers by Patricia Watson

This handbook is designed help create a safe caring and enabling environment for learning and tea... more This handbook is designed help create a safe caring and enabling environment for learning and teaching in public schools in South Africa. The handbook equips learners with knowledge and understanding of sexual harassment and sexual violence its implications ways to protect themselves from perpetrators and where to report incidences of sexual violence or harassment.

Poetics Today, 2001

This article examines the ways comics contribute to nonformal education in contemporary South Afr... more This article examines the ways comics contribute to nonformal education in contemporary South Africa, especially the Heart to Heart project,produced by the Storyteller Group, and Body and Soul, by the Soul City project. While Soul City follows the urban bias of many educational programs in its focus on urban stories and contexts, Heart to Heartis the result of a collaboration in which rural secondary school students produced and revised a graphic story using workshop performances to reenact and revise a story about lives similar to their own. The article shows how the comics critically engage with participants' desires for the modernity and success associated with urban lifestyles as well as life skills. It also highlights Heart to Heart's differences from many other rural culture-for-development projects elsewhere in southern Africa, including theater for development and literacy programs. It differs in its acknowledgment of the local impact of transnational cultural forms ...

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 2007

This paper reports on the processes that a parent followed to have his child's language in ed... more This paper reports on the processes that a parent followed to have his child's language in education rights acknowledged and implemented within the state schooling system in South Africa between April 2004 and June 2005. The case of Mr. Parent X1, representing his son at Gauteng Primary School (a former Model C School in Johannesburg) would like access to Sesotho as a first additional language-as-subject. This case highlights the routes for linguistic advocacy that are provided for in the Language in Education Policy of 1997, from the principal, to the School Governing Body (SGB), the provincial Department of Education and finally the institutions for language rights promotion and protection provided for in and by the new Constitution. Mr Parent X's navigation through the unchartered waters of language-as-subject rights recognition is both admirable and disconcerting, especially since it highlights the limitations of a language policy that is so inclusive that it risks not adequately creating real space for the historically marginalised endoglossic languages in education. The case also alerts us to many emergent ironies related to language rights in this democratic context which would seem to have become a 'breeding ground' for linguistic genocide.

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Sudies , 25(4).‘575-588, 2007

This paper reports on the process that a parent followed to have his child's language in educatio... more This paper reports on the process that a parent followed to have his child's language in education rights acknowledged and implemented within the state schooling system in South Africa between April 2004 and June 2005. The case of Mr. Parent X‘, representing his son at Gauteng Primary School (a former Model C School in Johannesburg) would like access to Sesotho as a first additional language-as-subject.This case highlights the routes for linguistic advocacy that are provided for in the Language in Education Policy of 1997, from the principal, to the School Governing Body (SGB), the provincial Department of Education and finally the institutions for language rights promotion and protection provided for in and by -the new Constitution. Mr Parent X's navigation through the uncharted waters of language-as-subject rights recognition is both admirable and disconcerting. especially since it highlights the limitations of a language policy that is so inclusive that it risks not adequately creating real space for the historically marginalised endoglossic languages in education. The case also alerts us to many emergent ironies related to language rights in this democratic context which would seem to have become a ‘breeding ground’ for linguistic genocide.

P(ICT)URES of ENGLISH Teachers, learners and technology Edited by Cal Durrant and Catherine Beavis, Wakefield Press, 2001

This chapter provides a reflective account of a three-year virtual classroom exchange between uni... more This chapter provides a reflective account of a three-year virtual classroom exchange between university students in Johannesburg, South Africa and Melbourne, Australia;‘
Cross continental email exchanges between writing partners were integrated into part of the course work for both groups of students who were exploring the implications of new information technologies for literacies in education. In particular, the chapter elaborates on the merger of the personal with the autobiographical mode through the students’ exchange of their literacy histories for the purposes of comparison and detailed analysis based on Barton's (1994) framework for a social view of literacy.

International Journal of Comic Art, Fall 2001, 2001

This article has been about redesigning stories of romance. it has also been about how pedagogy c... more This article has been about redesigning stories of romance. it has also been about how pedagogy can create alternative possibilities for students. Finally, it has been about the relationship between theory and practice: the use of theory for critical reflection and the use of practice for testing theory. However,no analysis can substitute for the pleasure of reading the stories themselves. The full-color comic drawings evoke the nuances of life in rural Gazankulu and the dialogue, taken from the transcripts of the drama in education workshops, captures the wit and insights of the students, as well as, the contradictions they have to negotiate as they live their every day lives. It is in the detail of the diverse positions and in the dialogue of the competing voices that the comic is finally able to resolve the opposing demands of popular and educational imperatives.

A comic on teenage pregnancy set in rural South Africa. It also deals with issues of gender based... more A comic on teenage pregnancy set in rural South Africa. It also deals with issues of gender based violence and sexual orientation. The comic was developed using Augusto Boal's forum theatre technique as a way of negotiating rehearsals for change and transformation of sexual and gender identities with teenagers.

South Africa in the Global Imaginary Edited by Leon de Kock, Louise Bethkehem & Sonja Laden, University of South Africa Press, 2004

The Heart to Heart project is exemplary because its producers respect the specific concerns of ru... more The Heart to Heart project is exemplary because its producers respect the specific concerns of rural and urban communities while showing their necessary and productive interaction. Heart to Heart’: significance for culture and development lies in the
way the graphic story and the different accounts of its creation make visible the tension between manipulation and communication, critical intervention and outside imposition. This tension troubles and animates not only this particular project but the staging of conscientisation more generally,which, as Mda’s (1993: 186) dissection of theatre for development reminds us, is not an automatic product of certain forms or practices. VVhat it can do is provide a stage for enacting the dialectic between fiction and daily practice or, in Raymond Williams’ words, between ‘subjunctive’ and ‘indicative’ action. The project highlights the process of conscientisation through performance and the contribution of performance in general and structured role-playing in particular to the work of literacy, gender, and ethnic— such as xiTsonga-— identification, socialisation, and self—representation.This stage occupies a small space in an education system that still relies heavily on rote learning and corporal punishment to discipline overflowing classes of unevenly prepared students. It nonetheless offers room for alternative scenarios, whose constituent elements are local but whose resonance, as in the cases of Heart to Heart and the Soul City Life-Skills Packet, are national and international in scope. Heart to Heart has been translated into French for African countries and into isiZulu and Sesotho for the local market, while the Soul City Life—.Skilla Packs were distributed in southern Africa in English and Portuguese (in Mozambique). ‘The production and distribution of these texts/goods helps as much as their consumption to redirect the flow of cultural capital in ways that challenge the binary opposition between centre and periphery to produce a more differentiated understanding of modernity.

A collection of personal stories of queer people from Malawi

The booklet assists schools to understand sexual orientation and gender rights in education in So... more The booklet assists schools to understand sexual orientation and gender rights in education in South Africa.

Speak Out! assists youth to handle sexual abuse that they encounter in their school environments ... more Speak Out! assists youth to handle sexual abuse that they encounter in their school environments in South Africa.

All you need to know about South African cultural symbols and heritage.

During 1995, we participated in the production of 18 English Readers for Speakers of Other Langua... more During 1995, we participated in the production of 18 English Readers for Speakers of Other Languages. The English Readers were developed for a nongovernmental organization working in the broad area of adult basic education in SouthAfrica. The project emerged out of a specificset of political, historical, and institutional circumstances that shaped and constrained the production ofthe Readers. It was implicated in a complexset of interconnected struggles among actors differentlypositionedinvarious social practices and institutional sites. Therefore, we locate the project withinthe context of the new SouthAfrica. ' In thelast5 years, thenew SouthAfrica has sustained the optimismassociated withthe honeymoon period of liberation, fueling the process of dismantling apartheid. This political process is marked by the unbanning of theAfrican National' Congress in 1990, as well as otherliberation movements, and multipartynegotiationsthat culminated in thefirst democratic election and the inaugurationor Nelson Mandela as the president of the Governmentof National Unity in 1994. These historic politicalevents were rvu