Bridging between orthodox western higher educational practices and an African sociocultural context

Abstract

The cultural validity of a psychological or educational theory is a function of its sensitizing and heuristic power for a given task addressed by a given community. African universities have inherited from the West a number of institutionalized arrangements for learning that tend to decontextualize the learning process by extracting learners from everyday life. The challenge of adapting university education to the needs and aspirations of an African, postcolonial state is approached in this paper from a theoretical perspective on situated learning and participatory appropriation. A pedagogical rationale is advanced for student project‐based learning, as affording students unique opportunities to test formal theories against reality; preparing them for practical challenges in the world of work; and inviting them to confront indigenous interpretations of experience. In addition, some projects incorporate a dimension of community service that facilitates public appraisal of universities as engaged and valuable resources for the wider society.

Notes

1. As Bruner (1986, p. 48) has observed, although the role of metaphors is often acknowledged as a part of theoretical model‐making, there is a tendency to treat them as ‘crutches to get us up the abstract mountain’, to be later discarded ‘in favour of a formal, consistent theory’, and ‘made not part of science but part of the history of science’. Yet, in many ways we ‘live by’ the metaphors that inform our conception of the world (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Moreover, the semantic device of metaphor is essential to any kind of innovative communication (Barfield, 1947).

2. The concept of restricted literacy has been debated (Goody, 1977; Street, 1984). My use of the expression in this context refers, not to different levels of intellectual sophistication, but rather to different levels of complexity of the repertoire of activities across which literacy is applied as a tool of thought. In many Zambian families, literacy is used almost exclusively for religious and commercial purposes (cf. Wells, 1990, on different modes of engagement with texts).

3. Luangala (2004) takes this argument a step further, arguing that Zambian society lacks ‘a reading culture’, and that the promotion of such a culture is an appropriate part of the national agenda of acquiring new modes of thinking as an adaptive response to the evolving global culture. I find his interpretation of various contemporary cultural phenomena in our society insightful about the prevailing character of adult literacy. But I do not agree with him that the restricted uses of literacy that prevail in contemporary Zambian society show that the culture of Zambian society is under‐developed with respect to self‐regulation, nor that Zambians are a ‘primitive’ species of humans. I have argued elsewhere, in response to Scribner’s (1985) analysis of Vygotsky’s ‘uses of history’, that it is inappropriate to portray the processes of change over time in biological evolution as homologous with those involved in social history (Serpell, 1995).

4. I am grateful to the following colleagues for their contributions to this survey: Mr Chitundu Kasase, Acting Head, Department of Food Science and Technology, School of Agricultural Sciences; Dr C. K .Wamukwamba, Dean, School of Engineering; Dr Musonda Lemba, Senior Lecturer, Department of Social Development Studies, School of Humanities and Social Sciences; Dr G. Silwamba, Department of Community Medicine, School of Medicine; Dr S. Kambani, Dean, School of Mines; Dr Mulenga, Head of Department of Geography, School of Natural Sciences.

5. Giddens (1999) argues that in the contemporary era of globalization, multiple forces ‘are creating something that has never existed before, a global cosmopolitan society. We are the first generation to live in this society, whose contours we can as yet only dimly see. It is shaking up our existing ways of life, no matter where we happen to be. This is not—at least at the moment—a global order driven by collective human will. Instead, it is emerging in an anarchic, haphazard, fashion, carried along by a mixture of economic, technological and cultural imperatives. It is not settled or secure, but fraught with anxieties, as well as scarred by deep divisions. Many of us feel in the grip of forces over which we have no control. Can we re‐impose our will upon them? I believe we can. The powerlessness we experience is not a sign of personal failings, but reflects the incapacities of our institutions. We need to reconstruct those we have, or create new ones, in ways appropriate to the global age’. The university is clearly one candidate institution for such adaptive reconstruction. Giddens (1999) also cites the insightful observation of the American sociologist Daniel Bell that, in this era of globalization, the nation state becomes too small to solve the big problems, but also too large to solve the small ones.

6. See, for instance, the work of the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa, located at the Programme of African Studies, Northwestern University, inaugurated in January 2001 (http://www.isita.org).

7. This account of the origins of contemporary university education draws on my address to the 34th Graduation Ceremony of the University of Zambia in June 2004.

8. Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland, USA, largely self‐educated under adverse conditions, an ardent believer in the enlightening power of literacy, and a leading figure in the Abolitionist movement, eventually rising to be appointed the first person of African descent to serve as US Ambassador, and in old age an activist on behalf of women’s emancipation. Anderson was born into the family of a professional Englishman, and inspired by her father’s work to enter the medical profession. With the (initially reluctant) support of her father, she worked her way around the barriers against women erected by the medical guild in Britain to win eventual accreditation as a medical practitioner, and went on to become a pioneer of women’s admission to the medical profession. Gandhi was born into a high caste family in India and sent to Britain to receive training as a barrister in the London Inns of Law. Graduating with distinction, he went to South Africa where he encountered crass racial discrimination, and launched some early protests against institutionalized racism. Moving back to his home country in his thirties, he embarked on a forty‐year campaign against British imperialism that eventuated in the collapse of the Raj in 1948. The expulsion of the British from India inspired the struggle for decolonization in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s.

9. This checklist was presented and somewhat elaborated in my address to the 36th Graduation Ceremony of the University of Zambia in June 2006 (Serpell, 2006).

10. SAUVCA was renamed HESA (the Higher Education Association of South Africa) in 2005.

11. I have discussed elsewhere several different ways in which the cultural‐political agenda of affirmative Afrocentrism can be applied in the field of developmental psychology (Serpell, 1992).

12. The tension between academic rigour and local relevance is sometimes expressed in the form of advocacy by academic staff for greater formalization. But in my view this is a hazardous direction in which to move the curriculum. In the Extension Services courses offered at UNZA’s provincial centres I have observed a related danger of lecturers bowing to pressure from their student clientele to introduce a greater element of professionalism into the courses they offer. This pressure is driven by credentialism rather than by the deeper agenda of extension education.

A similar debate is ongoing in Zambia about how the Clinical Officer training relates to career progression in the health services and to the accessibility of quality health care to the widely dispersed rural population. Recently, the UNZA School of Medicine has endorsed the launching of a Licentiate degree at the Health Sciences College, which stands as an intermediary qualification between that of the Clinical Officer Diploma and the full medical degree, MB ChB, offered by the University.

Prof. Dickson Mwansa has problematized the same issue in the context of adult literacy and Adult Education programmes in Zambia. The original rationale for such programmes was to broaden access to education beyond the narrowing staircase model of provision within the mainstream of the public school system (Serpell, 1993a), and beyond the first two decades of the lifespan, and to empower adults who missed out on that provision in their earlier years by offering them opportunities to achieve functional literacy and access to those aspects of humanity’s cultural heritage that are stored in written texts. By offering such courses to older students without formal educational credentials, such programmes have the potential to counteract the socially extractive tendencies of the elitist narrowing staircase model. But if excessive emphasis is placed on formal certification, the courses are liable to be co‐opted as back‐door entry routes to the extractive and elitist model they were designed to counteract.

13. Fincher (2002) describes as follows an ingenious management tool for students on a cooperative project assignment to share responsibility for early detection of freeloading and formative guidance to bring deviants back into fuller participation:

 ‘Red Card/Yellow Card (aka ‘La Coupe du Monde 1998’)

 Bundle body

• This bundle gives students some control over the behaviour of members of their project group and allows their non‐performance to be factored into assessment.

• The way it works is that students are allowed to issue others in their project group with yellow, and in extremis, red cards. A yellow card is “shown” to a student who is deficient in effort or attitude or in other ways not making a full contribution to the group and is then lodged with the project supervisor. Being “shown a yellow card” results in a known penalty being applied to the student (for example, a fixed number of marks lost), though a yellow card may be cancelled by increased effort, or at a boundary between phases of the project, or after a set time. A student who attracts the maximum number of yellow cards can be “shown a red card”, which excludes the student from the rest of the project and sets the mark awarded to zero. There is no recovery from a red card.

 Bundle conditionals

• It works better if staff set the parameters of control (the penalty, the number of yellow cards that can be carried)

• It doesn’t work if the system leads to the frivolous use of penalties. It doesn’t work unless day‐to‐day management of the resource/role allocation is in the hands of the group themselves’. (pp. 30–31)