Letting the Light In: A Self-Reflexive Account of Teaching Life Skills

 

Title: Letting the Light In: A Self-Reflexive Account of Teaching Life Skills

THEME 6: Methodological Innovations in Educational Research

Dr Veronica Msutwana

The work described in this paper emerged from my own teaching of Life Skills (LS) to first- and second-year students in 2025. Against a backdrop of marginalisation for the subject – fewer periods, fewer qualified teachers, fewer notional hours in schools – I came to internalise Life Orientation’s (LO) peripheral position. I began the module with a sense of uncertainty about whether students would meaningfully absorb what was taught or only pretend to cooperate. What methods might allow researcher positionality to emerge when working in marginalised knowledge areas like LS/LO? What happens when self-reflexivity becomes method? I drew from self-reflexive methods and arts-based methodologies to craft an activity in which students would have to literally embody an argument for LO/LS’s place in the curriculum by picking an animal to “defend” the subject, allowing them to use metaphor and creative exploration in place of the standard argumentative essay. Students taught me exactly where my thinking was flawed: they lived their answers rather than just writing them, calling upon both conviction and curricula without being tensive. Instead of declaring “sterling” results and departing, I lean into my own astonishment: what beliefs did I harbour that caused me to expect less from students? To view wonder itself as data is to begin to see self-reflexivity as a generative research method, one which puts my positionality and previously unexamined assumptions on trial, rather than regards it as a threat to “valid” data. This paper speaks to conversations about methodological innovation in educational research broadly, and efforts to re-centre Life Orientation/Life Skills in socially just, contextually informed pedagogy more specifically.

Keywords: self-reflexivity; self-reflexive methodology; Life Skills; researcher positionality; embodied learning; epistemic justice

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