Disrupting metaphors of coloniality to mediate social inclusion in the global South

ABSTRACT

New voices emerging in the global South are contesting the academy’s elitist and exclusionary ethos by disrupting the normalcy of coloniality. Concerns raised by the student protests of 2015 and 2016 have challenged the higher education sector to rethink its traditional teaching, learning, and assessment practices in response to student calls for decolonised and transformative curricula. This paper explores the ‘voice’ of the marginalised, who dare to ‘speak’ in authentic and provocative ways to call the university to action. We pose the questions: are alternative voices enough to inspire institutional change if traditional hierarchies of power remain intact? What does this mean for the collective project of re-imagining a university that carries a promise of social inclusion and social justice? What are the implications for academic development (AD) work, which finds itself on the margins, in service of mainstream (and dominant) epistemic and pedagogic practices? Using reflective narratives, and drawing on decolonial scholarship, this study explores a group process involved in curriculum change work at a university in South Africa. It raises challenges for AD and its role in the current context of change.

KEYWORDS:

• Being
• disruption
• emerging voices
• knowledge
• power

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kasturi Behari-Leak

Kasturi Behari-Leak is a senior lecturer in the Centre for Higher Education Development at UCT. Her professional and academic staff development work focuses on exploring the interplay between structures (national, institutional, departmental and disciplinary) and culture and their influence on lecturers’ critical agency in a decolonial context. She is President of the Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa (HELTASA); council member of the International Consortium of Educational Development (ICED); and project leader of a national professional development collaborative project, NATHEP. She was co- chair of the Curriculum Change Working Group at UCT.

Goitsione Mokou

Goitsione Mokou is a co-founder of the Cape Town based education collective, People’s Education. A Masters Graduate at the UCT School of Education, her specialisation is in Curriculum Studies and Adult Education. In both her scholarship and practice, her interests are in decolonisation and curriculum and their inherent relationship to knowledge production and society, toward notions of ‘subject’ making. A former Junior Research Fellow at the UCT Faculty of Health Sciences’ Curriculum Change Working Group and a Research Assistant on the campus-wide Curriculum Change Working Group at UCT, she is currently working towards her PhD.