ABSTRACT
In this chapter I ask the question, Who or what is the subject of teaching in the Global South? I pose this question facing a mural-cum-blackboard on a street corner in central Johannesburg, South Africa. The mural is a wall painted in black with four parallel slogans English, Zulu, Afrikaans and Textese: ‘Before I die’; ‘Phambi kokuthingife’; ‘Voor ek sterf’ and ‘B4 I Di☺.’ In this chapter I undertake an extended meditation on this street art to answer the question above by exploiting the ambiguity of the term ‘subject’ in the context of teaching. I suggest that the subject of teaching/learning in the Global South is both a scholastic or scholarly ‘discipline’ that is imposed partly within, according to the scholarly traditions of the subject-area (the ‘discipline’) itself, but also from outside by the imperatives of the current time of global crises; phenomena such as climate change are increasingly ‘disciplining’ the excesses of human action since the seventeenth century also wield stringent ‘disciplinary’ constraints upon human action. These urgent imperatives for thought and action constitute a novel pedagogical ‘disciplinarity’.
