Learning about African politics can be an alienating experience for Canadian undergraduates. Most students have little personal connection to or experience with African realities, and the established academic literature on Africa tends to be broadly-cast – its leading themes derivative of wider debates on globalization, restructuring and democratization. As a result, the richness of contemporary African politics, especially those involving the emergence of “new social movements” across the continent, is often inadequately profiled in the classroom.
At the same time, many African civil society organizations, which are increasingly realizing opportunities for engaging their States on issues of social policy development and implementation, suffer from skills and other resource shortages that undermine their capacity to participate in decision-making processes. Political access to public policy has been augmented, but the capacity of organizations to manage research strategies in support of strategic contributions is often weak. There is a critical, widely-recognized need in southern African civil society to strengthen capacities for active research from below, in order to strengthen the overall capacities of communities and organizations to lobby governments and participate effectively in decision-making processes.
In 2006, York moved in cooperation with African partners to address both challenges by launching a pilot Internet-based course focused on, and involving participants from, southern African civil society. Civil Society and the State in Africa, now in its second year, links senior York undergraduates with civil society practitioners and university students in Zimbabwe and South Africa. The course seeks to blend York’s recognized strengths in development research with the rich experience and skills resources of the project partners and African civil society participants. The result is a “virtual classroom” in which Canadian and African students meet to debate lectures and readings, raise new questions around the core theme of social and economic rights, and research strategies that might be developed by African civil society to strengthen them.
Active Learning by Doing
The concept of “active learning” is a key underlying element of the course design: students learn most effectively when they can take ownership of, and participate directly in, the learning process. In Civil Society and the State in Africa, the intention is not to lecture students what to think, but rather to expose them to issues and materials that raise questions about how to think and plan strategies for engaging in new critical research. The course’s starting point is to recognize that Canadian and African participants each have unique resources, insights and experiences to bring to bear.
The potential of this approach was reflected in the richly diverse backgrounds of the first course participants. The first sixteen students included eight York undergraduates from four different disciplines, four Zimbabwean civil society activists and four civil society organizers and researchers from the South African province of Kwazulu-Natal. Southern African participants included resident association representatives, labour movement officers, HIV/AIDS education workers, gender activists and human rights defenders.
Diversity of skills and experience also posed a significant obstacle in course design – not to mention the technical issues of varying reliability, frequency and affordability of Internet access. Identifying and developing pedagogical instruments that could accommodate the diversity of needs and skills of participants was a two-year process that involved extensive consultation, revision and testing by York and its two African partners, the Training and Research Support Centre of Harare, Zimbabwe, and the Centre for Civil Society at the University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa.
The idea of an Internet-based course that could facilitate a high degree of student-to-student contact and enable the inclusion of a diversity of Africa-based research resources emerged largely out of recognition of York’s established strengths in technology-enhanced learning (TEL). The technology-related costs related to mounting the course – including website design and management, software costs, library research resources and continuing technical support – were borne by York University.
The result is a course that contains key elements of “traditional” African undergraduate instruction while also featuring innovative learning materials and processes. The standard academic literature is used to help frame the analytical context of the discussion, and is delivered via weekly on-line lecture texts, reading lists (hyperlinked to downloadable electronic versions of readings) and discussion questions. This literature is then located within the wider context of African debates and practices by means of several innovations.
Innovations
One innovation involves the learning materials: about half of the foundational lectures in the first year were delivered by leading southern African civil society practitioners and scholars. A substantial part of the course readings come from the work of African researchers and civic activists – so-called “grey literature." While this kind of research and publishing is at the cutting edge of contemporary research and debate in Africa, it is rarely encountered in Canadian undergraduate classrooms.
Another innovation relates to course research work. In the major research project, students identify a real-life civil society policy challenge and develop a preliminary strategic plan for meeting research and knowledge needs by the organizations concerned. The research groups must include members from both York and southern Africa, and draw heavily on input from the African course participants and African-generated research. The assignment demands that such inputs be interrogated using critical concepts emerging from the course’s theoretical material. This approach to collective research facilitated a dynamic, highly challenging, unusually interactive learning experience.
A third innovation centred on student interaction and discussion, enabled primarily by a student discussion forum on the website. Here students respond to lectures and readings, converse, share resources and websites, and raise their own questions for debate and work in restricted-access smaller discussion groups. Part way through the first running of the course an additional discussion tool was introduced: with the course instructor having relocated to South Africa to complete the term on-site in the region, weekly 3-hour tele-conference seminars were initiated using Skype, a no-cost Internet-based communications facility. This was highly successful, and in the second year of the course Skype seminars have been integrated as a regular course component.
High Intensity Input and Output
It is commonly accepted that mounting a web course is more time-consuming and energy intensive than administering a traditional classroom equivalent; and running a course across two continents, three countries, six times zones and several institutions much more so. Civil Society and the State in Africa continues to require exceptional commitment of resources – financial, technical and intellectual – from both York University and from course participants. Without such commitment, student interaction at the heart of the course’s pedagogical design is fundamentally threatened. In the course’s first year, students from all three participating sites identified the unusual level of work intensity as the course’s strongest challenge – and most rewarding benefit.
The benefits were clearly evident in the work produced: the quality of student participation and research assignments surpassed expectations. Moreover, student evaluations highlighted the development of new strengths in both scholarly understanding and especially practical research skills at the level of African research. York student feedback made frequent references to the discovery of “new places to find quality information," new “criteria by which to judge ‘quality’ information," and new questions for reflection from “real practitioners."
Several students specifically noted that their thinking about African politics had changed in unexpected ways. Some attributed these shifts to the literature used in the course; others highlighted the impact of their unique engagements with African civil society practitioners. Wrote one York student, “I found that the ‘grey literature’ was something that no other course really engaged with, and it was hard to grapple with at first. But it was really challenging and interesting to see the diversity of resources out there that I had never been able to tap into for academic courses before." Another observed, “…we not only engaged with peers, but with actual activists and NGO workers in the field, providing us with real innovative primary knowledge not usually attainable with other courses… [this was] the most beneficial course I have ever taken… and it has inspired me to go to southern Africa in the near future."
Freshness
A number of African participants identified the important benefits of being exposed to fresh intellectual materials and critical questions that reached beyond the realm of the familiar. Most practitioners had not been exposed to the academic literature on wider civil society issues, and were fascinated by it – several reported they were astonished and energized by the fact that their own community or organization was the legitimate subject of academic research.
“I thought it was only my comrades in the community association and the local newspaper who were interested in our hardship and our struggle," reported a South African participant. “I really could not believe my eyes when I saw that chapter in the book and the library article about my community! And the questions and ideas they raised were really important and useful – I have since raised these with my comrades in my community. We are all thinking on this.”
A gender activist from Zimbabwe noted, “Some of my expectations met include exposure to new ideas about the reality of the relations between civic society and the state... I have been able to link with other people with the same interests as mine in (Zimbabwe), South Africa and Canada, and in future we can continue as a group to help each with information on women’s issues and other topical issues or any other related information sharing exchange programmes.”
A participant from a student organization reflected on the dynamic of working with new colleagues on familiar problems. “With the kind of work that we are doing it has been quite helpful to work in our group research with students from Canada. I learnt how to accommodate other people’s views and critically think before making any contributions. The outcome is also wonderful since it shall do a lot for my organization. I strongly feel that my actual research skills have been developed by this work with students from outside of my organization.”
Continuing Challenges
If students were univocal in citing the benefits of intense engagement across borders and expertise, they were also unanimous in noting the continuing challenges to sustaining such interaction. Technical concerns – a point of worry at the outset in the course design – in practice only figured importantly in Zimbabwe, where the worsening economic crisis saw rapidly deteriorating levels of Internet connectivity and reliability. These have only worsened in 2007, and they now pose a real obstacle to regular student engagement in the discussion fora and online real-time seminars (course lectures and reading materials are less vulnerable, as they can be easily distributed by means of CD-ROMs, for example).
A more widespread, and less easily resolved, challenge noted by students has been the workload expectations of the course. Among African participants in particular – most of whom maintained full-time regular jobs and followed the course in their personal time – the time demands of the course were impossibly high. As a result, in 2007 an important and unanimous recommendation from the students' evaluations is being implemented: the half-year course will now be run over a full academic term of two terms. This will enable significantly more time for all participants, and particularly Africans, to retrieve, read, digest and engage with course materials.
The question of resource allocations remains. Civil Society and the State in Africa has represented a considerable financial commitment for York, which paid the bulk of the course’s development costs, including subsidizing the materials and Internet access of Zimbabwean participants in 2006. And in 2007 York’s Faculty of Arts is once again generously supporting the course by agreeing to limited enrolment levels, and waiving the course fees for African participants. But the sustainability of this and other such resource-dependent courses rests on the commitment of dedicated resources by university administrations and their supporting development partners – and this, in turn, demands clear, strategic and imaginative commitments to new forms of internationalization.
Author's Information
Richard Saunders, an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, came to York University in 2002 after 17 years working as a journalist and researcher in southern Africa. His research focuses on civil society engagement in political and economic reform processes in Africa. He is currently researching the re-emergence of South African capital as a dominant regional player, and the implications for national stability and regional integration. His new book, Mediating Zimbabwe: The Press, Politics and Power, will be published in 2008 by Merlin Press.
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