Race, Diversity Pedagogy: Mediated Learning Experience for Transforming Racist Habitus and Predispositions

This article foregrounds the salience of "lived experience" in the mediation of unlearning racialized habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), and in learning and relearning the "truth about reality," or the truth about others. This article emphasizes the value of positive "lived experience" for anti-racist and reconciliation pedagogies, in addition to text-based experiences that facilitate the cognitive dimensions of learning (formal knowledge). Planning and providing positive lived experience and enabling systematic reflection and symbolic representation of informal experiences are essential for triggering the necessary disequilibrium for reviewing habitus, formed by apartheid structured realities, and for creating the conditions for the metanoia--"a mental revolution, a transformation of one's whole vision of the social world". In this regard, this article represents an attempt to integrate this pedagogical dimension to current race- and diversity-related pedagogical discourses, which tend to overemphasize text-based experiences in isolation from lived experience.