Ubuntu Sustainable Learning Ecosystem: A Zambian Prototype

• In Event: Harmonizing Aid to Improve Literacy Outcomes: Making an impact in Zambian schools

Abstract

In an era of continuously advancing ubiquitous technologies and deep global linkages, we need to conceptualize a transformation of education in terms of a sustainable learning ecosystem. This is an innovative moral embodiment of networks that inspire and harness a wide range of ecological settings, worldviews, indigenous epistemologies and ideological schools of thought. They exist in an interconnected and interdependent world and they enhance autonomy, humanity and nature as well as the intersecting of dynamic transdisciplinary curricula and transformative communities. This paper shows that the parameters of learning are rapidly changing and describes a learning ecosystem which is being prototyped in Africa - Zambia in particular. It is critically reasoned through the lens of knowledge economics from the perspective of the African value system of Ubuntu. The learning ecosystem is designed around these new parameters and usurps many of old frameworks for a sustainable, locally relevant, world-class research and learning environment built around a local, national and international network. The new learning ecosystem contrast with the traditional educational systems. Worldover, countries continue to compare and contrast their education systems in a bid for quality assurance, efficiency and effectiveness. For decades, the call has been that public school systems need to be reformed in order to meet demands of the digital age. The ecosystem now under development in Zambia is built from the premise that this historical effort at educational reformation has simply served to underwrite the replication of past and present systems of socio-economic and political inequalities with respect to diverse dimensions of social differentiation.

Author

• Samson M'zizi Kantini, Seoul National University