Restorying for transdisciplinarity: A proposed teaching-learning strategy in a context of Human Rights Education

Abstract

Human Rights Education can provide a context for transdisciplinary boundary talk as a possible way to create cohesion among the multiple disciplines embedded within the Social Sciences. This article presents a teaching-learning strategy, Empathetic-Reflective-Dialogical Restorying, which can be employed to facilitate such boundary talk. Both self-dialogue and self-narrative are used to create open space stories. This provides a platform for restorying as Social Science postgraduate students at a South African higher education institution engage in the space between, across and beyond academic disciplines. Conversation centres on the human right to gender equality as informed by the individual’s substantial and situational identities. The teaching-learning strategy introducing as it does, communities in conversation, communities in dialogue and communities for transformation, can be used to create possible cohesion among both academics and students in the Social Sciences. It also has the potential to be transformative beyond the Social Sciences and indeed, society at large.

Keywords

• empathetic-reflective-dialogical restorying
• communities in conversation
• communities in dialogue
• communities for transformation
• human rights education
• transdisciplinary boundary talk