Decolonising Knowledge and Knowers

Struggles for University Transformation in South Africa

Mlamuli Nkosingphile Hlatshwayo, Hanelie Adendorff, Margaret A.L. Blackie, Aslam Fataar, Paul Maluleka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367618841
• eBook ISBN: 9781000597783
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Decolonising Knowledge and Knowers contributes to the current struggles for decolonising education in the global South, focusing on the highly illuminating case of South African higher education. Galvanised by #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall student protests, South Africa has seen particularly intense and broad social engagement with debates over decolonising universities. However, much of this debate has been consumed with definitions and meanings. In contrast, Decolonising Knowledge and Knowers shows how conceptual tools, specifically from Legitimation Code Theory, can be enacted in research and teaching to meaningfully work towards productive decolonisation. Each chapter addresses a key issue in contemporary debates in South African higher education and show how practices concerning knowledge and knowers are playing a role, drawing on quantitative and qualitative research, praxis, and interdisciplinary research.

1 Introducing ‘decolonising knowledge and knowers’

Mlamuli Nkosingphile Hlatshwayo, Hanelie Adendorff, Margaret A.L. Blackie, Aslam Fataar, and Paul Maluleka

DOI: 10.4324/9781003106968-1

Universities in the global South and beyond are engaged in protracted struggles for higher education transformation and decolonisation (Mbembe, 2016; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). The purpose of the university, its epistemic foundations, curricula, and assessment practices have been at the receiving end of decolonial critique. These debates have been taking place in South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Turkey, India, Latin America, and Caribbean countries. At the heart of all these struggles is the challenge of how to decolonise higher education beyond the emotive and simplistic binary discourses that have hitherto characterised such critical conversations. With its history of settler colonialism and apartheid, South Africa offers a deeply insightful case study for exploring these debates more closely. This book focuses on the decolonisation of education in South Africa, with a specific emphasis on curriculum knowledge.

The 2015–2016 student movements sparked the call for decolonisation in South African higher education. This call included decentring Western epistemologies in higher education curriculum, troubling the alienating nature of university curricula, and the need to transform teaching and learning practices. The imperative to decolonise education has become a constitutive feature of the politics of knowledge at universities.

This book addresses two concerns that persist in current decolonisation debates. The first is a concern about the fractious and emotive tone that recontextualisation decolonisation debates. Some students and scholars have posited these debates as an either/or dichotomy, calling us to think beyond the discourses of ‘dead white men’ in our educational practices. The second concern is the need to foreground how decolonial debates tend to collapse ontological and epistemological considerations when proposing various ways of achieving decolonial aims. We believe that focusing on these two aims will allow for a more rigorous engagement to integrate decolonisation into education and curriculum policy and practice. The South African context provides a particular perspective because the debates and protests in this country have pushed decolonisation onto the national agenda. We argue that what is required is an approach that can advance the decolonial debate and propose some necessary curriculum, teaching, and learning interventions.

This book brings together a multidisciplinary group of South African scholars who present a decolonising education approach that places knowledge-building at the heart of the sociology of education. This book contributes to calls for recentring Africa-centred knowledge forms in curriculum knowledge-building. We support the view that despite ‘the normativising effect of colonialism on marginalising African knowledge, [such knowledge forms] remain alive on the continent and [are] currently reproduced in various forms’ (Fataar and Subreenduth, 2015, p. 107). The book addresses the marginalisation of African knowledge in formalised settings such as the university and its curriculum. We critique the workings of epistemicide that have discursively constructed the colonised as the inferior ‘Other’ of the superior European ‘Self’ (Lushaba and Lategan, 2019). Our decolonial approach proposes a formalised curriculum knowledge orientation that is decolonial and inclusive (Fanon, 1961). Following Fanon (1961, p. 45), we envisage a ‘fully conscious human being free from coloniality and all its weakening effects’. As for the coloniser, we envisage a human being stripped from all biases and the weakening effects of the abyssal imperial attitudes (Madlingozi, 2018).

This book is founded on a bold proposition: to provide conceptual tools to inform the take-up of the decoloniality imperative within the curriculum. This task is based on what we have observed as a lacuna in the recent writings on decolonising education. Writing on decolonising education in South Africa since 2015 has focused almost exclusively on definitions and meanings. These writings turn on whether universities should favour a delinking type of argument that emphasises Africa-centred discourses and epistemologies. Debates also focus on whether decoloniality should be framed as part of broader inclusive ecologies of knowledge approach (de Sousa Santos, 2014). Writings on decoloniality centre a commitment to deep African pre-colonial history, the need to historicise African epistemic traditions, and specific articulations of the relationship between decolonial knowledge traditions and Africa-centredness.

Based on this quest for epistemological centring, we attempt to move the decolonial quest into the curriculum knowledge domain. We believe that such an emphasis is a requirement for concretely advancing the decolonisation of education. Without addressing the curriculum question, decolonisation will remain located at the symbolic level. In this case, it will struggle to impact the institutional curriculum of universities. Garuba (2015) called for such a development when he suggests that the decolonisation content to be studied must proceed based on critical modifications of the curriculum. In this light, Hapazari and Mkhize (2021, p. 109) argue persuasively that:

Most African universities have not substantially transformed; hence, they continue to be grounded in colonial and Western epistemological traditions. By so doing, the colonialists have effectively instilled an inferiority complex in the Africans, and this complex is currently ingrained in their minds.

This book takes up the challenge of developing a theoretical approach to centring decoloniality into the university curriculum. We present what we call a knowledge-building approach to disciplines across the university’s curriculum offerings, including the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and applied sciences. A knowledge-building approach is crucial for responding to the call to decolonise education. The book emphasises the importance of developing knowledge frames and approaches that can inform curriculum knowledge selection in cumulative and principled ways. In light of this, the chapters focus on developing an approach for inserting decolonial curriculum knowledge into knowledge-building processes in university curricula. The first three chapters offer perspectives on how decolonial curriculum knowledge could be contextualised and centred in university curricula. The final three chapters focus on knowledge-building approaches in specific disciplines. The book’s commitment to curriculum knowledge across the curriculum is founded on the need to make careful distinctions about the precise nature of disciplinary knowledge in question in a specific curriculum knowledge field. The book provides an account of the conceptual basis on which these distinctions are made to guide decolonising the curriculum in specific disciplinary areas.

A realist approach

In this book, we are taking a realist approach. Knowledge is not simply socially constructed. Knowledge is a social attempt to describe a real mechanism operating in the world. Social sciences attempt to describe social mechanisms; natural sciences attempt to describe physical mechanisms (Price, 2019).

The first four chapters in this book, which are more focused on the social sciences and humanities, show in different ways how decoloniality involves both the critique of Eurocentric social concepts and an invitation to introduce concepts from the global South. This is important because the concepts point to real social mechanisms in the sense that they evidence more profound ways of thinking, valuing, and being. To reject a concept simply because of its source – for example, to throw out works by ‘dead white men’ or scholars from the global North – is to lose some insight into those mechanisms, such as where and how their knowledge was created and for what purposes (Fataar and Subreenduth, 2015). Although Eurocentric concepts have been forged in and through a Eurocentric worldview and may be unable to fully recognise and represent the epistemologies and ways of being of peoples with alternate worldviews, we can mount much more robust critiques if we engage in a realist manner with this knowledge. The chapter on the teaching of History (Chapter 5) illustrates the distortion of the colonial lens and the need to work away from this towards a more inclusive decolonial lens.

It is perhaps more difficult for those in the natural sciences to recognise the need for decolonisation. Whilst the concepts being taught describe a mechanism that exists independently of humanity and structure of human society (Price, 2019), natural science itself is a human activity. It is thus subject to power dynamics that exist in human societies. For example, the ‘rational’ and ‘objective’ so valued in natural science can easily unconsciously equate to an embodiment in a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered male. Thus, anyone who appears different must first prove themselves sufficiently ‘rational’ and ‘objective’ before their work is valorised.

If natural science is not Contextualised as a social activity, it cannot be recognised as having colonial or decolonial tendencies (Adendorff and Blackie, 2020). In the last two chapters of the book, we explore the nature of decoloniality in the natural sciences. A starting point for decolonising science is to recognise that particular human experiences shape thinking, and therefore a diversity of human experiences will benefit scientific progress.

One aspect of the unique contribution of this book that we have been able to illustrate is that the process of decolonisation will always be context dependent. Furthermore, part of the challenge is bridging the gap between the centring in the university’s episteme on the one hand and developing curriculum and pedagogical tools for its context-sensitive incorporation into teaching and learning on the other. The use of established frameworks can facilitate this application within a particular university context. Whilst authors of the chapters in this book have drawn on multiple frameworks, most have drawn on Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2014, 2016, 2020) to varying extents.

Introducing Legitimation Code Theory (LCT)

Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) is described as a ‘sociological framework motivated by social justice and knowledge-building issues’ (Winberg et al., 2020, p. 2). LCT is a framework comprising four sets of concepts or ‘dimensions’, of which Specialisation, Semantics, and Autonomy are enacted in this book. Each dimension comprises conceptual and analytical tools that enable analyses of different aspects of knowledge practices (Maton, 2016). In addition to analysing knowledge practices in curriculum, the use of these dimensions and their conceptual tools also affords us a means of achieving the kind of self-reflexivity that de Sousa Santos et al. (2007, p. xxi) hold as ‘the first step towards the recognition of the epistemological diversity of the world’. For instance, in Chapter 5, the LCT dimension of Autonomy is used to show the imbalanced power relations that exist in the South African school history curriculum. These imbalanced power relations were traced from colonial-apartheid curricula to the post-colonial-apartheid curricula and have continued to produce a school history curriculum that is not epistemologically diverse. However, beyond this, LCT along with decolonial theory was used in this chapter to show how we can work towards transcending these imbalances towards a school history curriculum that is more epistemologically diverse.

Moreover, in Chapter 4, Hlatshwayo relies on the LCT concept of the ‘epistemic – pedagogic device’ (Maton, 2014) explore the different struggles that are happening in the calls for transformation and recontextualising,, he proposes that curriculum design and teaching and learning is not an innocent, neutral, and apolitical process. Rather, it is an important site that needs further exploring, critiquing, and challenging if we are to lodge a serious commitment to the transformation and recontextualisation of higher education.

Thus, although Western in genealogy, LCT offers a means of exploring, critiquing, and possibly addressing the power relations inherent in various meaning-making practices.

Authors in this volume employed various LCT tools, drawn from the dimensions of Autonomy (Chapter 4 and 6), Specialization (Chapters 3, 6, and 7) – including the ‘epistemic plane’ (Chapter 7), ‘gazes’ (Chapters 3 and 6), and the ‘epistemic–pedagogic device’ (Chapter 4) – and Semantics (Chapter 2). The epistemic–pedagogic device or ‘EPD’ theorises that different underpinning logics drive knowledge practices econtex through interconnected yet analytically distinct fields of production, recontextualisation, and reproduction. Acknowledging and working with such differences enabled authors using this conceptual tool to analytically separate and explore knowledge-building in the areas of research, curriculum design, and pedagogy (see Chapters 3 and 4).

The dimension of Autonomy focuses explicitly on power relations in different knowledge practices (Maton and Howard, 2018, 2021). Tools in this dimension conceptualise who the knowledge belongs to and to what end it is being used; it thus offers a way of exploring why some decolonisation attempts might fail, i.e., some of the curriculum renewal attempts discussed by Paul Maluleka and Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi in Chapter 5.

The dimension of Specialisation focuses on the relationship between knowledge and knowers in knowledge practices and differentiates fields based on whether and to what extent it is knowledge or knowers that is econtextu, neither or both equally. In this volume, the epistemic plane was used to highlight knower-blindness as a weak spot in natural science curricula (see Chapter 7). The social plane and the notion of developing a ‘gaze’ was used to look at the knower develo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Introducing ‘decolonising knowledge and knowers’
• 2 Pursuing decolonial knowledge-building in South African higher education
• 3 Building a ‘decolonial knower’: Contestations in the humanities
• 4 Decolonising the university: Some thoughts on recontextualising knowledge
• 5 Towards a decolonized school history curriculum in post-apartheid South Africa through enacting Legitimation Code Theory
• 6 Decolonization and science education: What is at stake?
• 7 A decolonial science education: How do we move forward?
• Name index
• Subject index