ABSTRACT
In response to the coda on remote teaching, it is argued that teaching-learning constituted by ubuntu is transformative in the sense that it remains open to new becomings. What unfolds are not final and actualised because acting with wandering as ubuntu intimates is a matter of making the familiar strange and, in turn, the strange, familiar. Likewise, the ethical dimension of ubuntu gives teaching-learning its just impetus so that whatever teachers and students pursue invariably involve a quest for justice that remains in potentiality. These acts of humanity make remote teaching a task without the possibility for new re-beginnings on the ground that what is new is intertwined with acting relationally with others. More poignantly, teaching-learning in a spirit of ubuntu for once opens up the possibility that things could be perceived differently as humans endeavour to make justice count. What remote teaching does not do, is to create opportunities for wandering as such a form of teaching is not just disconnected from learning but seemingly ignores the presence of students. Hence, remote teaching seems rather unidirectional and instrumental on the basis that, first, teaching is done for students as if they are not co-teachers in pedagogical encounters themselves; and second, teaching is concerned with remedying a perceived wrong as if human resolutions are not challenging actions that require far more than instrumental actions. What the act of rethinking ubuntu does is to make teachers and students think differently about their pedagogical relations – that is, towards an understanding of relations that are inextricably bound to acts of unfamiliarity, strangeness and new becomings.
