Abstract:
This article presents the reflections of a research team from the ZAPP-IKS
project. ZAPP (the South African Poetry Project) undertook a three-year NRFfunded research project titled “Reconceptualising Poetry Education for South
African Classrooms through Infusing Indigenous Poetry Texts and Practices”.
The research on which we report here was undertaken as part of that project.
The team consists of an English teacher, a poet and an academic. Together, they
attempted a research intervention at a Johannesburg secondary school. The
article presents their reflections on the challenges, successes and potentials of
the attempted research intervention, which was intended to energise and inspire
the teaching of English poetry by drawing from and developing indigenous
knowledges and principles. Presented as a play, a praise poem and a
conventional academic analysis by the school-based teacher, the universitybased poet, and the university-based academic, respectively, the article offers
diverse analyses as an illustration of how research relationships may be
understood, experienced and represented in various ways. These analyses draw
implicitly and explicitly on conceptualisations of indigeneity and indigenous
knowledges, as well as decoloniality, with the conventional academic analysis
making use of Erik Olin Wright’s concept of real utopias to frame its understanding of the project and the other two perspectives on it. Together they
invite readers to challenge and transform the conventions that govern
educational practices, research and representation, but caution against naïve
idealism when doing so.
