Exploring the practical adequacy of the normative framework guiding South Africa’s National Curriculum Statement

Abstract

This article examines the practical adequacy of the recent defining of a normative framework for the South African National Curriculum Statement that focuses on the relationship between human rights, social justice and a healthy environment. This politically framed and socially critical normative framework has developed in response to socio‐political and socio‐ecological histories in post‐apartheid curriculum transformation processes. The article critically considers the process of working with a normative framework in the defining of environmental education teaching and learning interactions, and seeks not only to explore the policy discourse critically, but also to explore what it is about the world that makes it work in different ways. Drawing on Sayer’s perspectives on the possibilities of enabling ‘situated universalism’ as a form of normative theory, and case‐based data from a teacher professional development programme in the Makana District (where the authors live and work), the article probes the relationship between the establishment of a ‘universalising’ normative framework to guide national curriculum, and situated engagements with this framework in/as democratic process. In this process it questions whether educators should adopt the ‘norms’ as presented by society and simply universalize and implement them as prescribed by curriculum statements, or whether educators should adopt the strategies of postmodernists and reduce normative frameworks to relations of power situated in particular contexts.

Acknowledgements

This article forms part of a set of synthesis papers within a Rhodes University/National Research Foundation (NRF) research programme entitled ‘Environmental Learning and Curriculum’. Researchers contributing to this programme are acknowledged. In particular, we would like to acknowledge the teachers who have participated in this study with us.

Notes

1. The article will not be able to do full justice to this objective, and thus merely attempts to ‘open the space’ for this kind of examination.

2. This dialectic is often the basis for discussions on values and ethics in education, as evident in the deliberations on the Earth Charter as a normative framework for education in southern Africa (see Corcoran, 2003, and a response to this paper by Van Harmelen, 2003).

3. Melucci (1996) argues that reflexivity is culturally situated, allows for social action and change, and is a cornerstone of enabling a deepening of democracy in society.

4. Because we wanted to retain a close connection to the actual data and experiences of the teachers, we chose to only represent six cases in this article, although we have analysed up to 40 such cases, and our initial findings (the main trends) are not dissimilar from those presented in the analysis of the six cases. We felt that using more cases would detract from the specific detail contained in each case. Each new case has specific insights that provide depth and nuance to the main trends as reflected in the analysis of the six cases below, and 40 cases would have simply been too much.

5. The Norms and Standards for Educators (DoE, 2000) explains that applied competence involves a combination of practical, foundational and reflexive competence.

6. These are separate areas created for black people to live in near towns and cities. They were not adequately planned or serviced, and thus lack infrastructure.

7. In this system, the municipality collects sewerage ‘buckets’ from households, as water‐borne sewerage systems are not yet available in densely populated informal settlement areas, due to skewed apartheid planning. This collection is unhygienic, and is not done regularly. There is large‐scale dissatisfaction with this system.