Using South African Short Stories to Create Understanding and Appreciation of Diversity

Collaborating, understanding and appreciating people from diverse backgrounds is extremely important in South Africa. One of the cornerstones of apartheid ideology was to keep people of different races separate. The overarching aim was to foster distrust and hate amongst the separate racial categories. It is now more than two decades into democracy and lack of knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the other is still pervasive. South Africa is plagued by many woes: economic, social and political. The time is ripe for people from different backgrounds, ideologies, cultures and races to work together to find solutions to problems that plague the country. However, this is a mission impossible if distrust amongst the country's people continues to thrive. This study was borne out of the need to find ways to build understanding and appreciation of diversity. This paper aims to demonstrate that the English language classroom can be a fertile space to create collaboration, understanding and appreciation of diversity. South African short stories have been selected as the conduit to facilitate the aforementioned. This study used the qualitative method of enquiry and is located within the interpretative design. The research design employed was the narrative enquiry. Data were generated through semi-structured individual interviews. The population comprised a level 2 English class of Bachelor of Education students at a South African rural based comprehensive university. The main finding of the study was that students had a poor understanding and a lack of appreciation of other cultures and races, predominately based on assumptions and stereotypes. The study recommends that South African short stories be used by English language facilitators to create understanding and appreciation of diversity in the South African context.