Educational Studies

A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association

ISSN: 0013-1946 (Print) 1532-6993 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/heds20

Engaging Schooling Subjectivities Across Post-

Apartheid Urban Spaces. Fataar, A. Cape Town,
South Africa: Stellenbosch University Press, 2015.
(paperback).

Yunus Omar

To cite this article: Yunus Omar (2016) Engaging Schooling Subjectivities Across Post-Apartheid
Urban Spaces. Fataar, A. Cape Town, South Africa: Stellenbosch University Press, 2015.
(paperback)., Educational Studies, 52:1, 78-82, DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2015.1120210

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2015.1120210

Published online: 03 Feb 2016.

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 EDUCATIONAL STUDIES, 52(1), 78–82, 2016
Copyright 
C American Educational Studies Association
ISSN: 0013-1946 print / 1532-6993 online
DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2015.1120210

BOOK REVIEWS

Engaging Schooling Subjectivities Across Post-Apartheid

Urban Spaces. Fataar, A. Cape Town, South Africa:
Stellenbosch University Press, 2015. (paperback).
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Yunus Omar
University of Cape Town

Aslam Fataar, Professor and Vice Dean of Research, in the Faculty of Education at the University
of Stellenbosch, Cape Town, inserts his new book, Engaging Schooling Subjectivities Across
Post-Apartheid Spaces, into a South African educational arena marked by unprecedented scenes
of university students moving into the parliamentary precincts in Cape Town at the end of
October 2015 to press home their demands for free higher education. Higher education institutions
across the country shut down, or were forced to shut down, all campus activities on the eve of
year-end examinations. At the completion of this review, at least one institution won a historic
student–worker alliance for insourcing all privatized services, including security and transport
services. Other institutions are at various stages of acceding to, or actively engaging with, this
class-eroding demand. One of the most incisive displays of solidarity between students and
outsourced university workers has centered around the reality that outsourced university workers
are not able to afford higher education for their children at the very institutions at which their
parents/caregivers toil.
Engaging Schooling Subjectivities creates an engagement with, and speaks alongside the
postschool (university) subjects who have made a decisive break with the South African neo-
liberal project, as they articulate a vision of a postapartheid South Africa in which nothing less
than a reimagining of society is at the front of the national debate. Fataar’s book is addressed
to audiences including sociologists of education, teachers, education policy-makers, and indeed
all actors who are serious about understanding the emerging identities and subjectivities of their
youngest citizens.
Keeping in mind the current #FeesMustFall campaign, how, we ask, did students, born after the
formal end of apartheid, come to this moment of consciousness and action? Engaging Schooling
Subjectivities encourages us to pause at this question and ask ourselves what we really know about
the students at the picket-lines on the streets, and in the debating halls. How do they become
what they are? How does a state, which co-opts these students as their own, understand what
 BOOK REVIEWS 79

these citizens bring to the streets? Finally, how do the institutions at which these students receive
their higher education understand who it is being taught and debated with? The students who
are at the heart of Fataar’s new work find themselves one tier below the higher education arena,
namely the public schools. These are dominated by schools in the sprawling, apartheid-created
urban townships, incorporating still-growing ‘informal’ settlements two decades after the ruling
party’s 1994 election promise of houses for all. The same questions posed earlier can be directed
to the units of analysis of Fataar’s book: the post-apartheid township student, navigating primary
and secondary schools in spaces marked by apartheid’s enduring geography of deprivation in
Cape Town. Soudien (2006) states that, in the racialized dispersal of people of colour during
apartheid, “New but inferior civic institutions came into being: hospitals, schools, libraries and
other amenities which reminded them, every day of their lives, that they were second-class citizens
in the city of Cape Town” (pp. 109-110).
Engaging School Subjectivities is a dense work, drawing on a decade of situated research
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with students, teachers, school principals, school governance structures, parents, and broader
community actors such as ward councillors, police officials, and social workers in these spaces
of second-class citizenship. Fataar comes to this work in his primary guise as a sociologist
of education, with an overarching research focus on education policy. Within this context, his
important work positions itself within an underrepresented and undertheorized arena of student-
centered agency, even as these students engage in crippling, vastly underresourced living, learning
and leisure spaces in the urban townships of post-apartheid Cape Town.
Fataar is aware of, and makes explicit reference throughout the nine chapters of the book to
the crushing, deprived dreariness of young lives in the townships and their broadly dysfunctional
schools. These conditions have been metaphorically delineated in Engaging Schooling Subjec-
tivities as “deadness,” a position proffered by Nuttall (2009, p. 151), and engaged with by Fataar
in imaginative new ways. He is interested in teasing out new interpretations of agency, perhaps
even new iterations of a coming to citizenship by young people too often lumped under discursive
rubrics of “deprived” and “condemned by their circumstances” (Fataar, 2015, pp. 13-14).
Central to Fataar’s work is the notion that finding out who the sociological subject is, i.e., the
young students, necessitates a theoretical re-orientation. The first five chapters of the book, which
are introduced by Fataar’s invoking of late Stellenbosch University’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor
Russel Botman’s “pedagogy of hope” as the “inspiration” (p. 1) behind its writing, immerses its
readers in a theoretical landscape in which young students are framed in their educational lives
as “on the move” (p. 15).
As a sociologist of education, Fataar is drawn to social interfaces and relationships between
these. The students who are framed in these first five chapters exude the Bhabha-ian notion
of hybridity (Bhabha, 2004), acting in spaces that are fluid and marked by identities that are
constantly in flux. This dynamism, enacted in the between spaces of the known, is filled with
the potential for the new. This is what Fataar seeks to find, and his project is grounded in, as
any good educational sociological text should be, the tangible world of learning and teaching,
here specifically the urban township schools of Cape Town. He is intent on moving toward
“pedagogical justice” (p. 158) within these schooling arenas, but he comes at it in a unique way.
The important conceptual move made in this regard is to dislocate the “school” from its
bounded physical environs. For Fataar, “Schools are not simply settings with clear boundaries
and easily definable practices and intellectual content” (p. 11). Instead, a far more dynamic
conceptualization of the school emerges in his account. As he states,
 80 BOOK REVIEWS

The book’s emphasis is on the spatial locations and conceptual entailments involved in viewing
schooling as “extensive in space and time, fluid in form and content; as intersections of multi-
ple networks shaping cities, communities, schools, pedagogies, and teacher and student practices.”
(p. 11)

In this more extensive conceptual frame, Fataar defines schooling subjectivities as “what
citizens and institutions become out of their interaction and engagement with the city’s schooling
landscape” (p. 10).
It is important here to state the reflexive account that emerges from the text in significant ways.
“I was forced very early on during my qualitative work to shift my initial conceptual approaches”
(p. 6), writes Fataar. He reveals this as part of his own awakening as a researcher “looking to
understand how national educational reform plays out at the local level of a township in Cape
Town” (p. 6). Engaging Schooling Subjectivities allows its readers a refreshing encounter with a
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research orientation that speaks to its ability to identify the moment at which existing theory is
found to be lacking. It is at this point that Fataar’s work stretches out its arms, as it were, to embrace
the uncharted. It is not accidental that I utilize a geographic metaphor here. Fataar indicates that
he “had to be in a position to capture the interactions between geography, lived spatiality, flux
and mobility” (p. 6). He invokes Urry’s (2000a, 2000b) work on “mobile sociologies” as the
“epistemological basis to capture the education subject as mobile, relational and dynamic” (p. 6).
Chapters one through five are a detailed elucidation of the spatiality of his theoretical lens
throughout the book. It is in the post-apartheid movement to schools across the city, but also
intra-township, that Fataar seeks to find the routes to the “high aspirations” (p. 73) which he
finds in what is routinely characterized as dysfunctional schooling sites. Chapter three, “Muslim
community schooling in the city,” provides a nuanced reading of otherwise opaque Muslim
educational institutions, but I held uneasily to this chapter as I delved further.
The ethnographic layering that Fataar brings to his work is encountered by the reader as she
moves on to chapters six and seven. The student at the center of chapter six, whose mother marries
a Muslim man, and whose religious identity she nominally adopts, proclaims in light of her en-
counter with the Muslim primary school to which she travels each day: “I felt my difference on my
skin” (p. 108). Chapters six and seven mirror this visceral difference as the text moves ever-deeper
into the on-the-move worlds of the students. Fataar makes clear that he does not engage in binary
distinctions along the quantitative–qualitative research continuum. Both are useful and necessary.
Yet, the grist of the text is firmly held in these two overtly qualitatively-oriented chapters.
The earlier conundrum involving chapter three (“Muslim community schooling in the city”)
is solved by an intertextual reading of chapters three, six and seven. Chapter three is vital for
a positioned reading of the life-worlds of Layla (pseudonym) and Fuzile Ali, the protagonists
of chapters six and seven, respectively. Layla, quietly but determinedly aided by her mother,
maintains a focused desire in the sphere of schooling, to be more than what her surroundings
may enable. Her physical journey to school each day could easily be read as the travelling text of
a migrant labourer in a race-reserved employment dynamic that constituted the de facto colored
labor-preference policies of the apartheid regime in the Cape. She travels 45 km to school, and
her interviews with Fataar reveal a soaking in of the passing landscapes. She moves further away
from her woes with each passing kilometer to a space in the inner city that promises to fulfil her
educational aspirations. At the heart of this movement away from her home is what Fataar labels
the “thin connectedness” (p. 15) displayed by these youth to their places of residence. Instead,
they make deeper connections at these schooling sites, albeit under conditions of stress due to the
 BOOK REVIEWS 81

assimilationist approaches of the previous White schools, and through sophisticated readings of,
and bodily adaptation based on their “otherness”.
What emerges from Layla’s story, says Fataar, is that we need to know that Layla is unique,
but not so. She is typical of the student demographic of the urban township; she is typical of
a child from an abusive home, abuse endured at the hands of a step-father; she is prone to the
same withdrawals and antisocial behaviors that would have her labelled as troublesome. She does
not exhibit such behavior, though, even as she endures the dislocatedness of the Muslimness she
must navigate at her new primary school far away from her home. The textures of prejudice, of
raw discrimination, and the resultant deviant-behavior tropes do not emerge. Nor does it manifest
in Fuzile Ali. His story is the stuff of fiction. As teachers, were we to be asked to guess at the
life-stories of the students who co-occupy our classrooms, Fuzile Ali’s story would arguably
not be accurately guessed at. As former University of Cape Town Deputy Vice-Chancellor and
professor of education, Crain Soudien, states in his Foreword to the book: “(Fataar), in his account
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of Fuzile Ali, (is) intuiting that there are things that can come from a kind of ‘nowhere’ in a young
person’s life. In this young person’s life and in the decisions that he makes one sees him plucking
from almost nowhere the material from which he assembles his life” (p. xii, original emphasis).
Chapters six and seven are quite extraordinary, and warrant, perhaps, their own books. Based
on the continually surprising insights that emerge with each passing page, it is seductive to lose
sight of the fact that these students’ narratives derive from a research project that was initially
premised on examining national policy instantiations as played out in township school sites.
These stories of academic desire, of daring to dream and daring to navigate spatial arenas of
learning that are, at times, terrifying, do much to unsettle a reading of these urban townships as
bereft of hope. Here, Fataar’s work makes a decisive rupture in a hitherto largely settled discourse
that marginalises the overwhelming majority of South African schoolgoers, located as they are
within these urban townships.
It is a mark of good writing when a reader is disappointed at story’s end. It is the case with both
chapters six and seven. Fuzile Ali’s story, I think, is bursting with even more insights. I missed
a sense of Fuzile’s own deep account of why he was able to act so incisively in the face of what
are clearly formidable obstacles. Why does he choose to endure such enormous pressures at such
a young age? How does he come to garner the intellectual and emotional stamina to embark on
such a path, a path to a schooled body, when he could easily have his body inscribed exclusively
with the markers of his initial rural upbringing in the home of his grandfather? Why, in chapter
six, does Layla make the decision to, quite remarkably, phone the principals of the five city high
schools who accept her application? How does she come to the idea of “in effect interviewing
them to establish how each school could facilitate her aspiration and ambitions” (p. 109)?
As powerful as these two chapters are, Fataar moves on to conclude the book with a chapter
that challenges a dominant pedagogical orientation in South African teacher education and school
curriculum orientation.
Chapter nine takes as its point of departure the notion that South African schools, unable as
they are to “meaningfully recognise the school going subjects in their midst” also fail to “provide
compelling curricular and pedagogical registers to better connect with these students’ complex
and fecund identifications, social circumstances, literacies and knowledges” (p. 153). Fataar is
concerned here with the key idea that a progressive sociology of education must concern itself with
conceptualizing “pedagogical justice for disadvantaged students in South African schools” (p.
153). Fataar begins what may turn out to be a sustained encounter with “those who favour a strict
separation between horizontal and vertical knowledge discourses” (p. 155). As Maton (2004)
 82 BOOK REVIEWS

notes, “Bernstein’s approach has been the basis for extensive and sustained empirical research
into education for several decades” (p. 32). Unlike earlier reproduction theorists like Althusser,
Bernstein foregrounds “the relative autonomy of educational fields from external influences”
(Maton, 2004, p. 46). Bernstein (1975), a sociologist who came to influence education deeply
since his early work in linguistics and social power, asserts that three systems of knowledge are
key to the concept “educational knowledge” (p. 85), namely curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation.
In the South African context in which Fataar situates his book, proponents of Basil Bernstein, like
Moore and Muller (1999), have been influential in positioning what could be called a “Bernsteinian
lens” on matters of curriculum theory and classroom pedagogical practice. In this configuration,
says Fataar, Moore and Muller (1999) “favour a strict separation between horizontal and vertical
knowledges” (p. 155), or, in another set of concepts more accessible in a discussion of urban
schools in impoverished areas and a minority of schools in affluent areas, between “everyday” and
“esoteric” (pp. 155–168) knowledge. In essence, argues Fataar, advocates of Bernstein hold to an
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impermeable separation of knowledge (the everyday vs. the esoteric), privileging the knowledges
most desired by schools. This desired school knowledge, asserts Fataar, must be accessible to
those disadvantaged by institutions such as the less-than-functional-schools in which the majority
of South Africa’s youth are schooled. If pedagogical justice is to be effected for the students in
the urban townships, and all disadvantaged students in the country, Fataar indicates that the
“deep scepticism about mixing the two forms (of knowledge)” (p. 155) must be worked with
imaginatively, unapologetically, and in the interests of the marginalised.
At the heart of this endeavor are twin strands of intervention. First, it must be recognized that
“teacher pedagogies are the key to leveraging a social justice orientation in schools” (p. 168).
Second, Fataar indicates that “valorising the life contexts and knowledges of students is meant
to secure the disadvantaged students’ engagement with their schooling and the acquisition of the
school knowledge necessary for exercising their future educational aspirations” (p. 168). This
final chapter of the book positions Fataar as a theorist willing to engage with concepts that are
deeply ingrained in the postapartheid versions of curriculum planning and writing. It will be
interesting to plot the trajectory of Fataar’s engagement in this regard, and I suspect that it will be
a short period between the publication of this important contribution to South African education,
Engaging Schooling Subjectivities, and Fataar’s next book.

REFERENCES

Bernstein, B. (1975). Class, codes and control: Towards a theory of educational transmission (Vol. 3). London, UK:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bhabha, H. (2004). The location of culture (2nd ed.). London, England: Routledge.
Maton, K. (2004). The field of higher education: A sociology of reproduction, transformation, change and the conditions
of emergence for cultural studies (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England.
Moore, R., & Muller, J. (1999). The discourse of “voice” and the problem of knowledge and identity in the sociology of
education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 20(2), 189–206.
Nuttall, S. (2009). Entanglement: Literary and cultural reflections on post-apartheid South Africa. Johannesburg, South
Africa: Wits University Press.
Soudien, C. (2006). The city, citizenship and education. Journal of Education, 40, 103–118.
Urry, J. (2000a). Mobile sociology. British Journal of Sociology, 51(1), 185–203.
Urry, J. (2000b). Sociology beyond societies: Mobilities for the twenty-first century. London, UK: Routledge.