De-colonising international collaboration: The University of KwaZulu-Natal-Mauritius Institute of Education Cohort PhD programme

Abstract

This paper explores the setting up of the partnership across the Mauritian and South African higher education contexts with respect to the development of a postgraduate PhD doctoral studies programme. The Mauritian Institute of Education (MIE) aims to develop staffing capacities through engagement with doctoral studies, especially in the context of limited experience in doctoral supervision. The South African model of doctoral cohort supervision at The University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) School of Education is a recent alternative model of delivery in the building of these student and staff capacities through shared ownership of the process and products of doctoral education and development. This paper highlights the expectations, constraints and enabling features of the setting up of the UKZN-MIE PhD programme across international boundaries, driven by mutual reciprocity through valuing of indigenous local knowledges, a non-colonising engagement and innovative methodologies for postgraduate education. Adapting the UKZN cohort model for the international context is the subject of this paper. The paper draws on the experiences of the designers and deliverers as well as users of this programme. The paper explores what drives this form of international collaboration for both contracting partners in the context of shifting conceptions of a teacher education institution.

Keywords:

• international collaboration studies
• decolonisation
• migration
• doctoral education

Notes

1. The engagement with the island by Arab traders, French and Portuguese colonial authorities pre-dates this steadier pattern of Indian and Chinese migration. The French East India Company maintained a territorial strategic oversight of the trade route between the East and the West, using the slave trade and settlement of retired European masters to entrench their identity on the island. Their links with the Portuguese in Mozambique are noted as means to establish a labour supply, and their conflicts with the Dutch East India Company based at the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa) and, later, the British, were always volatile (Asgarally 2008).

2. Liberalisation, in the Mauritian context, is taken to mean the process of opening up tertiary education to private providers, both local and foreign.

3. This term refers to person other than that of White origin in European contexts. It includes the apartheid categories of so-called Indian, Coloured and African persons.

4. Mauritius is regarded as a SADC country. Recognition of equivalence of qualifications obtained is still required through the South African Qualification Authority for entry in South African institutions. As the numbers of SADC students swell beyond the targeted 5%, the Ministry of Higher Education is deliberating the possible capping of numbers (still under review) (Macupe 2012).

5. After a five-year review in 2011, the Faculty of Education has been reconfigured as School of Education.