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“The Out of Sight Classroom” - Teaching and Learning Sociology through Field Trips
Sultan Khan
School of Social Sciences
University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Abstract
There is wide agreement that field trips offer students benefits to learn in an informal environment as they help them to visualize concepts introduced in class laying the foundation for a deeper understanding of the discipline. In the merged university of KwaZulu-Natal, after a long absence of teaching sociology through field trips due to serious political violence raising safety and security concerns, this approach to learning was re-introduced in 2007. This presentation takes the form of visual representation of level three sociology students from diverse racial and socio-economic backgrounds on their experiences in high risk research localities which are often avoided by many field researchers. The visual presentation captures the sociological experiences of students who under normal circumstances would not have visited such localities anywhere in South Africa due to the social construction of such spaces as a haven for a myriad number of problems making it out of bounds for locals. Given the racial inequalities in South Africa, such localities are often labeled dangerous spaces for ordinary citizens. Students’ experiences after their field trip attest to how their understanding of such spaces was reshaped from it being portrayed as zones of human misery to the prospect of researching and studying a large section of the South African populace who are structural victims of poverty and inequality. The visual presentation illustrates how the sociological imagination of undergraduate students are captured through field trip training and can serve as a hallmark to renew and sustain the training of future sociologists in a rapidly transforming and challenging post apartheid context..
NB: This presentation will be undertaken by visual screening of a DVD.