Abstract
Teachers from various countries on the African continent are being employed in the South African
education system. The bio-geographical identities, ideologies and pedagogies that this diverse teacher
cohort brings to the educational landscape warrants exploration into the varying experiences,
interpretations and enactments of social justice that they experience within the South African context.
This paper draws on the personal and professional experiences of teachers from South Africa, India,
the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe and Cameroon, to denaturalize the unproblematic way
in which teachers are linked to school contexts. It draws on Buell’s (in Raill) [1] contention that place
gestures in three directions, namely: (i) towards environmental materiality; (ii) towards social
perceptions or constructions of identity; and (iii) towards affect or bond. It explores teachers’ personal
and professional experiences in relation to Fraser’s [2] conceptions of social justice. This qualitative
study contributes to research on critical pedagogies of place, which view education as a
contextualized social process that shape teachers’ identities, and behaviors. This paper aims to:
(i) sketch the biographical-geographical, and socio-cultural impulses that frame the participants’
personal and professional identities; and
(ii) examine the techniques that these teachers employ in order to navigate their current
situatedness presents them.