How a western bias in educational research in Africa contributes to marginalization of African experiences

• In Event: Educational Power and Empowerment in Africa

Proposal

There is an inequality within educational research in the fact that most theories also students from developing countries are encouraged to use are theories developed in the west and north based on experiences in these countries. Through the so-called “sandwich” programs e.g. African students come to Europe, the US or Canada and learn theories developed in these countries. They then go back to their own countries for field-work and collect raw data, return to the western countries and put their data into western theories to satisfy their supervisors. When they themselves get jobs at African universities they continue teaching western theories. Examples will be given in the paper of an autoethnographic approach to research carried out in Africa which takes African experiences as the starting point for shifting paradigms and creating new theories. For instance when it comes to the language issue in Africa and also in Asia there is a clear need for a paradigm shift since concepts developed in the west like bilingual education, late exit, early exit, immersion and submersion do not describe the African situation. Forcing research into such categories makes for inequality among researchers and prevents a better understanding of the multilingual situation of African countries. There is a growing trend among African educational researchers, maybe especially in South Africa, of trying to build theories based on African experiences and also coining new concepts like ubuntu translanguaging.

Author

• Birgit Brock-Utne, Department of Education, University of Oslo