(De)coloniality and South African academe

ABSTRACT

The colonial nature of South African universities remains a source of debate among students and academics. Decolonization as rethinking academic institutional practices seems less controversial; the specificity of how to decolonize the academia is the core of divergent arguments and contesting ideologies. Consequently, many suggestions and methods for the decolonization of South African universities have been proffered. Although some of these suggestions are pertinent, a critical question about what should South African academe decolonize from needs to be engaged. This requires a critical, theoretical and intellectual discourse of coloniality in order to rethink the academia in South Africa. Drawing from Anibal Quijano’s critical discourse of coloniality of power, this paper (re)visits the nature of coloniality, explores approaches to decolonization and situates these understandings to the academia in postcolonial South Africa. A polycentric approach to decolonization is supported with a goal of decolonization as innovations.     

Cultivating the next generation of academics in South Africa

Abstract

The academic workplace is experiencing numerous changes in South Africa and around the world, including increasing managerialism, declining governmental funding and massification of university systems. Global trends have impacted South Africa, and additional local contextual factors combine to create a situation in which the pool of prospective academics is limited, particularly with regard to individuals from diverse backgrounds, at the same time as vacancies for academic staff are expected to increase. In order to address the question of who will become the next generation of academics in South Africa, the author investigates potential barriers to developing academics through qualitative research conducted with postgraduate students, academic staff and administrators at two higher education institutions. Two central thematic categories are explored—induction into postgraduate studies and induction into the academic profession. The author posits that systematic socialization, both into postgraduate studies and into the academic profession, is a vital link toward cultivating emerging academics to fill academic positions for an equitable workplace in South African higher education institutions.     

Old Symbols for New Journeys: Re-Imagining Transdisciplinary Collaboration for Learning and Transformative Practice in Education

Abstract

The community engagement project described in this article took the form of the re-invention and re-interpretation of a historic symbol (Diana the elephant) on the Potchefstroom Campus of North-West University (NWU), South Africa. In 2015, the Faculty of Education Sciences invited staff and students to reinterpret the elephant (a symbol of education, longevity, wisdom, care, stamina, memory) in a new and more multicultural, multilingual, inclusive and environmentally conscious South Africa. The participatory process described, and the related outcomes, involved learning by students and academics across disciplines (the conceptualisation, design, engineering and creation of the structure) and collaboration between academics, children and adults from the community, all with a strong servicelearning dimension in relation to teacher education.     

The changing demography of academic staff at higher education institutions (HEIs) in South Africa

In this work, we contribute to the debate on the transformation of higher education institutions (HEIs) in post-apartheid South Africa by examining the changing demography of academic staff bodies at 25 South African HEIs from 2005 to 2015. We use empirical data to provide initial insights into the changing racial profiles of academic staff bodies across age, gender and rank and then summarise our findings into a transformation ‘scorecard’ which provides an indication of how all racial groups in the country are performing in terms of their representation in higher education. Initial results indicate that most academics in South Africa are middle-aged (between 35 and 54) but an ageing trend is evident, particularly among white academics. In terms of gender, males marginally outnumber females, although we estimate an equitable distribution to be attained within the next 5 years. Significantly, the data indicate that there is an upwards trajectory of black African academics across all rankings from 2005 to 2015 and a concomitant downward trajectory of white academics across all rankings. Both Indian and coloured academics most closely represent their national population representation. Our transformation ‘scorecard’ indicates that the demography of academic staff at higher education institutions in South Africa is changing and will continue to change in the future, particularly within the next 20 years if current trends continue.     

A site of struggle: Black academics at historically white universities in South Africa

Abstract

This article examines the identities of three black academics at historically white universities in South Africa. Three portraits that highlight politics within the professoriate as constituting a site for struggle are crafted. The wish is to shift the present focus in the South African literature by addressing the variety and complexity of black academics' everyday involvement in their oppression, demonstrating how that works. The analyses are set against the background of globalisation and the transformation of higher education worldwide. It is argued that the future of tertiary education in South Africa and elsewhere is likely to be influenced by battles within the academy about issues of diversity in regard to race, class and gender. Its outcomes are far from predictable.     

African(a) philosophy of education and deliberative university teaching

Abstract

This article explores the notion of an African(a) philosophy of education and its implications for university teaching in South Africa. African(a) philosophy of education brings into sharper focus the need to reconceptualise university teaching in South Africa, particularly along the lines of deliberative inquiry. This article examines constitutive meanings of African(a) philosophy of education and what it means for teachers both to be deliberative and to cultivate deliberation.     

The didactics tradition in South Africa: a reply to Richard Krüger

There has been a growing interest in the European Didaktik tradition as part of a process of ‘internationalizing’ curriculum studies. Krüger provides useful insights into some aspects of Didaktiek in South Africa. However, the essay does not contextualize this tradition within the broader history of South African education. This reply contends that Didaktiek was interwoven with ‘fundamental pedagogics’ and as a consequence played a role in reproducing apartheid ideology—it did not provide a language of critique or possibility. This is one reason why the tradition has seen its demise in post‐apartheid South Africa. I argue that curriculum theory, which crucially deals with the relationship between schooling and society and highlights the socially constructed nature of schooling, offers a more useful alternative for critiquing apartheid education policy and for charting a process of transformation of education in South Africa.     

Globalization and higher education restructuring in South Africa: is democracy under threat?

My intention is to explore the link between globalization and higher education restructuring in South Africa and whether it looms as a threat to democracy. I contend that an argument can be made that the ascendancy of market-driven concerns in defining the restructuring of higher education in South Africa may have the effect whereby higher education institutions (universities and technikons) become subordinated to the demands of the market place, which situation in turn, can be detrimental to the consolidation of South Africa's newly found democracy. First, I argue that the restructuring of higher education according to the ‘logic of globalization’ would not necessarily minimize socio-economic inequality, thus providing a major barrier to the move towards deepening democracy. However, the economic, political and cultural effects of globalization as determinants of higher education restructuring in South Africa are not going to disappear, at least not for the immediate future. Already the South African government considers as a central feature of its economic policy the meeting of the ‘challenge of international competitiveness … (and) an inability to compete will increasingly marginalise the South African economy (and), have profound effects on its rate of growth and consequences for the social well-being and stability of South African society’ (CHE 2000a: 20)

Second therefore, in order to safeguard and promote democracy, in spite of the market-bound trend, I assess some democratic prospects of a globalizing world in the restructuring of higher education. Like Jones (1998: 153), I contend that an argument can be made for achieving democracy in a sphere of corporate dominance if higher education is considered as a public good that allows space for the development of relations of trust, individual autonomy and democratic dialogue.     

Transforming teaching challenges into learning opportunities: interdisciplinary reflective collaboration

ABSTRACT

Teaching in higher education poses unique sets of challenges, especially for academics in the engineering, built sciences and information science education disciplines. This article focuses on how reflective collaboration can support academics in their quest to find unique solutions to challenges in different academic contexts. A reflective collaboration framework was applied during a three-year interpretive research process at an Engineering, Information Technology and Built Environment Faculty in a residential research intensive university in South Africa. Interdisciplinary reflective collaboration was found to bring richness and depth into investigations of complex teaching challenges. This framework provides a structure to support the transformation of teaching challenges into learning opportunities through the promotion of dialogue, critique and reflection between engineering and education academics.     

Argumentative and trustworthy scholars: the construction of academic staff at research-intensive universities

Research-intensive universities, such as the Russell Group in the UK, the Ivy League Colleges in the USA and the Sandstone Universities in Australia, enjoy particular status in the higher education landscape. They are, however, also often associated with social elitism and selectivity, and this has led to critique as higher education systems seek to widen access. This article looks at how academic staff are discursively constructed in five such institutions in South Africa through an analysis of documentation submitted as part of a national review. Three interrelated discourses are identified: a discourse of ‘staff as scholars’ whereby research is privileged over teaching, a discourse of ‘academic argumentation’ whereby a critical disposition is valued and is called upon by academics to resist development initiatives and a discourse of ‘trust’ whereby it is assumed that academics share a value system and should thus be trusted to undertake quality teaching without interference.     

Pedagogy of Learning and Teaching: A Phenomenographic Perspective from Selected Classrooms in Rural South Africa

Abstract

Classroom practitioners are expected to facilitate effective learning under the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) in South Africa. During this facilitation process, educators are required to become more resourceful in terms of their learning and teaching strategies. This article is based on a case study – within the phenomenographic paradigm – of Grade 9 educators and learners in four rural schools in North West, South Africa. The study focussed on a specific economics and management sciences (EMS) topic relating to the understanding of the value or price determination of the South Africa rand on the foreign exchange market. The article is divided into three parts: firstly, the concepts of phenomenography and the variation theory of learning are explored and constituted as the conceptual framework; secondly, educators’ experiences with the variation theory as a classroom resource for learning; and thirdly, the impact of educators’ classroom experiences with the variation theory on learners’ quantitative and qualitative learning outcomes. The results showed an improvement in the learners’ understanding of the EMS topic studied.     

Gender & Education Association: a case study in feminist education?

This article focuses on feminist activist academics who were instrumental in creating the UK Gender & Education Association at the turn of the twenty-first century. Drawing on my own intellectual biography (David, M. E. 2003. Personal and Political: Feminisms, Sociology and Family Lives Stoke-on-Trent. Trentham Books.) linked to the collective biography and life history of feminism in academia over the last 50 years, Feminism, Gender & Universities: Politics, Passion and Pedagogies (David, M. E. 2014. Feminism, Gender & Universities: Politics, Passion & Pedagogies. Farnham: Wheatsheaf.), I consider how we, as feminist educators, developed our pedagogies and professional approaches to gender and education. In so doing, I also look at three cohorts or generations of feminist academics, from the university pioneers of second-wave feminists like myself, through to those who might be considered third wave feminists. In this it is clear that whilst feminist values of women's liberation and/or gender equality shine through, there are clear differences of emphasis. This is in relation to personal, political and professional values, and approaches to education through teaching or the social sciences. Indeed, neither feminism nor gender was in the lexicon of higher education or public policy when we were starting out, and by the third cohort gender equality had become incorporated into forms of neo-liberalism. In reviewing the developments of feminisms in higher education, I also look towards what might be considered a feminist future in global higher education, given learning from previous waves to new waves of feminists such as fourth wave and beyond. Here I briefly consider the work of our EU Daphne funded research project (2013–2015) into challenging gender-related violence (GRV) through education and training for professionals working with children and young people.     

In my life: youth stories and poems on HIV/AIDS: towards a new literacy in the age of AIDS

This article comes out of an HIV and AIDS prevention and education project with young people in two townships in the Western Cape of South Africa. As part of that project, a small anthology—In my life: youth stories and poems on HIV/AIDS—was produced and distributed locally as well as in several districts in other provinces. The avid consumption of In my life by local youth in Khayelitsha and Atlantis but also as far away as Durban in KwaZulu‐Natal speaks to the power of a youth‐to‐youth connection. In the article I examine some of the ways in which literacy is changing in the age of AIDS in an area of the world which has been ravaged by the AIDS pandemic.     

Reading posthumanism and decolonisation diffractively towards (re)configuring an ontoepistemic approach to religion education

ABSTRACT

Student-teachers are exposed to different approaches to teaching Religion Education in South Africa. Amongst these have been the phenomenological-reflective-dialogical approach of Cornelia Roux and the empathetic-reflective-dialogical approach of Janet Jarvis. These different approaches made immeasurable contributions as they started to shift how Religion Education has been taught. The approaches are both informed by a social constructivist methodology, which riposte previous traditionalist approaches. This article questions whether these approaches, amidst the decolonial turn and the posthuman predicament, are still germane as they tend to separate ontology from epistemology. A diffractive reading of posthumanist theory and decolonial literature enabled us to bring texts in intra-action so as to problematise the colonial, capitalist and patriarchal character of existing approaches to Religion Education, both ontologically and epistemologically. This remains pivotal for a country like South Africa where colonial epistemicide prevails despite it being vehemently challenged. Our aim is to weave a text(ile), an ontoepstemic approach, to (re)configure Religion Education in support of the transformative potential of the decolonial project in South Africa. In our pursuit of ontoepistemic justice, we advocate for decolonising the Religion Education curriculum, understood as a verb, as (1) a means to critical empowerment and as (2) a complex encounter with entangled, embedded knowledges.     

Specific remedy for specific problem: measuring service quality in South African higher education

This study commences a process of developing a scale for the measurement of service quality in higher education in South Africa and also examines the relationship between the measures of service quality on the one hand and some other related variables such as intention to leave the university, trust in management of the university and the overall satisfaction with the university. Using structured questionnaires, survey data was collected from students (n = 391) in two South African universities. Findings indicate that the 52-item measure of service quality in higher education is a multidimensional construct loading on 13 factors with a high reliability coefficient (0.93) and some construct validity. Significant relationships were also found between service quality in HE and other study variables—intention to leave university, trust in management of the university and overall satisfaction with the university. Some further research directions were suggested and policy implications of findings discussed.     

Research capacity and dissemination among academics in Tanzania: examining knowledge production and the perceived binary of ‘local’ and ‘international’ journals

This article explores two distinct strategies suggested by academics in Tanzania for publishing and disseminating their research amidst immense higher education expansion. It draws on Arjun Appadurai’s notions of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ internationalisation to analyse the perceived binary between ‘international’ and ‘local’ academic journals and their concomitant differences in status. In an attempt to examine critically how the status quo regarding knowledge production in higher education is maintained and reproduced, the article explores interactions between a Tanzanian academic and an educational researcher from the global North, including the ways in which research collaborations between academics from different contexts and material conditions in their institutions may both advance and inhibit professional development of academics and comparative education research, writ large. The article concludes with a call for comparative education researchers to carefully consider the future of educational research in sub-Saharan Africa and the complexities of continued involvement in knowledge production processes.     

Memory and critical education: Approaches in the District Six Museum

Abstract

This article begins with the argument that education has become an important site of activity in museums around the world. This development has been of crucial significance for South Africa where many new museums have come into being and where old museums are now taking new courses. The challenge that these museums are having to confront is how to deal with the question of their public education responsibilities with respect to issues such as race, identity, nation and nation-building. How does the museum tell its story in ways that are inclusive and at the same time critical? How these challenges play themselves out in a museum such as the District Six Museum is important to talk about. What this discussion about the District Six Museum reveals is how little attention is paid to forms of public education in institutions outside of the school in South Africa. It is significant that the museum, which has come to play such a significant role in the reimagination of South Africa and is assuming in the intentions of the new government such a pivotal role in teaching South Africans about their pasts, is understood so poorly. The article uses the District Six Museum example to look critically at what a new museum educational practice might consist of.     

Beautiful minds and unruly bodies: embodiment and academic identity in Still Alice and The Theory of Everything

ABSTRACT

This article explores the representation of disability and academic identity in two award-winning films: Still Alice and The Theory of Everything. Drawing on scholarship about embodiment and the ‘normal professor body’, I demonstrate how the complex images of disabled academics in these films take up and replicate (to differing extents) dominant discourses of disembodied intellectualism that shape conceptions of the professoriate. As examples of public pedagogy, these representations have significant ramifications for popular understandings of disability and higher education.     

In pursuit of African scholarship: unpacking engagement

Engagement between higher education and other societal sectors is a key theme in higher education discourse in South Africa, as it is in other countries. In South Africa, however, engagement has gained additional status as an appropriate strategy for pursuing African Scholarship. On the ground, however, inequitable power relationships and erratic participation have posed serious challenges to the effectiveness and sustainability of engagement initiatives. From the experiences of seven South African academics and the local community members and service-providers with whom they engaged in service-learning, three factors emerged as mediating the power/participation dynamic of their engagement. The impact of these factors, namely, structure, meaning, and place and time, are discussed, leading to the conclusions that scholarly engagement requires ideological and practical support from higher education institutions and further study in South African contexts.