Refusing Systemic Inequality: Curriculum as Disruptive-Productive Device for Equity Aspirations

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session’s aim is to theorise systemic inequality in education in South Africa alongside the disruptive-productive potential of the curriculum as device for equity aspirations. As curriculum scholar activists we perpend a theorisation of the ‘disruptive-productive’ as operational heuristic as we meditate and cogitate on curriculum’s potentiality as liberating and emancipatory crack from which to provoke a theory-practice curriculum dialectic in lieu of a movement towards educational equity. Our objective in this session is to consider ways in which curriculum could be harnessed to seek out, look through and prise open cracks that might lead to education equity. This session have implications for the development of new theoretical and practical insights that move beyond the reactive towards profound agentic responses.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 6: De/Colonization and Transformative Curriculum Studies

Chair

• Suriamurthee Moonsamy Maistry, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Papers

• Toward an Equitable and Sustainable Model of Education Reform in South Africa - Sylvan Everton Blignaut, Nelson Mandela University

• Exploiting Opportune Spaces to Disrupt Dominant Discourses - Prevanand Labby Ramrathan, University of KwaZulu-Natal; Chris Paul Reddy

• 21st Century Skills and the Curriculum: Doomed Pedagogical Fad or Key to a More Equal Future? - Petro Du Preez, North-West University

• Curriculum as a Contentious Space to Disturb Inequalities: Academics and Decolonizing the Curriculum - Shan R. Simmonds, North-West University

Discussant

• Lesley Lionel Leonard Le Grange, Stellenbosch University