Jazz, education, and alternative culture in South Africa: Pedagogy and music in transgressive action
My research focuses on the intersection of jazz and alternative education as forms of resistance within the context of South African defiance. I situate this focus within antiapartheid resistance that took place in the late 1980s, this period was shaped by heightened apartheid violence and repression. I focus on the movements of People’s Education for People’s Power and jazz which aligned with People’s Power ideology, extending to People’s Culture. I show how people responded to this energy of repression through radical innovation and creativity in jazz and pedagogy. The notion of creativity I reflect on is situated in a context of sustained and revolutionary activism, where people utilised and developed all the tools at their disposal for liberation. In this thesis I explore the history of values of learning in South Africa, informed by the contexts of both oppressive educational regimes and student movements of resistance to investigate the visible links between jazz and pedagogy. To do so, I lean on and further develop the concepts of sovereignty, heterotopia, and non-linear convergences that demonstrate the ideological, material, and temporal links between jazz and pedagogy. Through engaging with archives of resistance, pedagogy, and sound, I identify a shared thisness in both jazz and People’s Education: thisness being a quality and density of a specificity, expressed in the form of a time, an object, a person, a song, a collective or historical moment. Through identifying the shared characteristics of pedagogy and jazz in a South African context, I develop a curriculum that leans on the curriculum style of People’s Education for People’s Power, an education movement with political roots countering inferior education for Black 1students, prioritising community engagement and creative methods of teaching. I identify a learning quality in jazz, especially when played within a political awareness, which aligns with popular education movements. The ability of jazz to construct a culture and create and support political spaces, I argue, is found in pedagogy. Through noting the pedagogical possibilities of jazz, grounded in a transgressive sense, I investigate how jazz facilitates learning moments.
Materiality, Jazz, Pedagogy, People’s Education, Curriculum
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