Paper short abstract:

I reflect on the problems of using post development as a tool to teach international students most from the global south. The paper sets out the difficulty of unsettling apparent truths of the development project in teaching processes.

Paper long abstract:

'one of the tricks that western modernity plays on intellectuals is to allow them to produce revolutionary ideas in reactionary institutions.'Boaventura De Sousa Santos (2014:3)

This quote from De Sousa Santos played a trick on me as I boldly attempted in 2015/6 to use post development as a tool to engage students in critical reflections on development. One of their assignments was to create an ISS Development Dictionary emulating the Sachs's collection. The results were mixed - wonderful digital collations of concepts, ideas, critiques, but as many said, they felt their world had been turned upside down. In my paper I reflect on the problems of using post development as a tool to teach international students most from the global south. My experiment in asking students to engage in their own 'unmaking of development' recorded in their evaluations, a series of interviews, and my own and other colleagues reflections sets out the difficulty of unsettling apparent truths of the development project even in progressive institutes as the ISS which claims to be at the interface of activism and academe.