De-colonising curricula in South African higher education

• In Event: Epistemic disruptions, equity and social justice in higher education: Reimagining teaching and learning beyond the COVID-19 challenges in South Africa

Proposal

In 2015-16 university students throughout South Africa participated in mass protests against the fees they were paying and governance in higher education. In addition, they focused on criticisms of curricula and demanded that these be decolonized. These social struggles are currently on-going within many universities. Presently we know little about what informs lecturers’ teaching, the content of their teaching, how subject matter is taught, and how students are assessed. We furthermore know little about how, if at all, they are changing. Against this background, our research consists of analysing semi-structured interviews with lecturers in South Africa about their work and examining their course materials and methods of assessment.

This paper will provide an overview of the student protests and their demands. We shall then present preliminary analyses of interviews with academics we are in the process of conducting. These analyses are informed by postcolonial writing because decolonization is a crucial demand of the student movement, and because it is a key concept in postcolonial scholarship. Finally, we reflect on the wider significance of our analyses for the development of postcolonialism and Comparative and International Education.

We wish to present in the form of cursory notes an example of analysis of a single interview. The lecturer stated that she taught a course designed by a colleague in the Sociology of Education to first year students. The course drew on the work of the British scholar, Basil Bernstein. Bernstein is known for his contribution to communication and sociolinguistics. He has examined how language codes relate to the reproduction of inequality based on socio-economic class. On the face of it this might be seen as relevant to debates about class inequality in South Africa. However, the lecturer related she encountered difficulties in teaching this course. Among these was the fact that it was being taught to first year students including a growing cohort of black students, often the first in their families to attend university. They had recently graduated from working class township and rural schools that are poorly resourced, with overcrowded classes, and which had ill-prepared them academically for study at university. Their confusion at what the university was all about, the timetables and how the institution functioned contributed to an alienating experience. The modern architecture of the buildings with its high-tech lecture halls and blended teaching and learning pedagogies, compounded the confusion. And now they also had to deal with difficult academic readings in English (probably the second language). A place for white people and not the likes of us. Of the blacks allowed in, many were soon forced out. In this case there is a contradiction between the life and scholastic experience of black students and the sophisticated academic discourse they were expected to master. It did not matter much that the subject matter might be socially relevant. It reproduced at university the social class and racial differences within South African society. Ironically Bernstein wished to understand and critique class inequality. While the subject content’s relevance to Britain might be self-evident, translating this Northern writing written for and about the North, to South Africa is another matter. The lecturer who had designed the course may have had the best politically motivated intentions, but in effect had outcomes among students she might not have intended. It implied that she had to critically reflect on her work, and she may find great difficulty in doing so. It meant examining current identity, likely to have evolved over several years, critically and being willing to re-define it. If the identity of the lecturer is problematic, then so too are the identities of the students she taught. The students wished to join perhaps not the white world in which they now found themselves, but the middle class one to which they and their families had been denied access. The cultural and material trappings of the neoliberal world were the subject of dreams and desires. Their denial provided the tinder for revolt. The oppressed are often embroiled and complicit in their own oppression as they fight for a better world. Such perspectives are too often absent in the relevant literature.

This example provides a sense of what we expect to be a range of diverse material. The case we discussed highlights a problem found in the writing on postcolonialism. These texts cover a variety of very different societies such as for example, Jamaica, Kenya, and Canada, across different historical periods. Africa, despite the myths, is not a single place. Almost all the more than 50 countries on the continent have had a common experience of colonialism and neocolonialism. It is this common experience that underpins the idea of Pan-Africanism. The challenge for concept-building within postcolonialism scholarship is to capture and explore the dialectic of commonality and difference. We wish to advocate that such work be rooted in empirical research on the ground. This means going beyond simplistic, binary generalisations of North and South. It means portraying and understanding complexity, diversity and the specificities of time and place within the context of international dialogues.

South Africa has been categorized as the world’s most unequal society. The society is grappling with the legacies of apartheid and with the implementation of government policies that in important ways have failed to produce greater equity. Student protests at university highlight the role of inherited colonial curricula in the quest for social justice and democracy in education. Lecturers’ curricula and pedagogy are fundamental in this regard. The South African case highlights the broader problem of providing access to higher education to Others and, once in, pushing them out through curricula and pedagogy. Curriculum transformation is not a purely academic exercise but is closely related to social change. Through our research in South Africa, we hope to speak to similar developments worldwide. We wish to build better postcolonial scholarship and practices that will contribute to breaking down inequality and inequity.

Author

• Venise Joubert, University of Johannesburg