Reframing the curriculum: a transformative approach

ABSTRACT

While acknowledging higher education’s complicity in inequality, the premise of this paper is that curriculum transformation can be one means of challenging and dismantling structural injustices towards the goal of equity of access and outcomes. Fraser’s multi-dimensional framework for social justice is drawn upon to explore what this transformation requires. The framework is used to critique a particular case of curriculum intervention, Education Development in South Africa. In Fraser’s terms, the interventions have been largely affirmative, not transformative. In addition, they have focused on only the first dimension of justice, redistribution, and have generally failed to attend to misrecognition and representation. Overall, we argue that the responses of higher education institutions in South Africa to the challenges of a globalised, pluralist world have been affirmative, not transformative. A transformative approach demands a ‘reframing’ of the curriculum. This involves adjusting the scale of the problem, interrogating assumptions informing the norms of the curriculum, questioning current boundaries between ‘mainstream’ and ‘other’ students and reviewing the fitness of the curriculum for a pluralist society. The paper concludes with recommendations for what such a reframing of the curriculum might entail.

KEYWORDS:

• Curriculum transformation
• education development
• inequality
• South African higher education

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to Prof. Sue Clegg and Prof. Pam Christie for comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We believe that Fraser’s approach to justice is applicable to the South African case because it holds together the two dominant intellectual strands of anti-colonial movements in South Africa, namely the South African Communist Party’s neo-Marxist critique of the political-economy and the Pan-Africanist/ Black Consciousness African cultural assertion and the call for a positive black identity.

2. Our structural location as white places a limit on both our insights into the lived experiences of those subjected to institutionalised racism and on our right to suggest how transformation might take place.

3. Following Cooper (2015), we use the category ‘black’ to refer to historically oppressed groups that were classified African, coloured and Indian under apartheid. Given the continued overlap between race and class in South Africa, Cooper argues that post-2000 social inequality is still based on students’ ‘race-class’ position (2015:239).

4. NSFAS, the state’s financial aid system in South Africa is a loan-based scheme linked to students’ pass rates.

5. Over the last decade, state subsidy has decreased from 49% to 40% and fees have increased from 24% to 31% of total university income (Cloete, 2016, p. 7). Total state funding allocated to HE is currently (2014) 0.75% of GDP and 2.49% of the state budget, which is very low by international comparison (CHE Advice to government on university fee increases 12 August 2016).

6. We are not able to take into account here the geographic (rural/urban) and linguistic (English-/Afrikaans-medium differences within the historically white universities category. Cooper (2015) suggests that the most useful way of differentiating South African HEIs system currently is on the basis of degrees of research capacity – where there is least pressure for transformation in those HEIs with the greatest research capacity.

7. Chatterjee (2011) shows how western ‘standards’ were set up as norms from which colonized populations were shown to deviate empirically, leading to colonial policies in which they were treated as the exception to the norm.

8. Mills, C. (2007) defines ‘whiteness’ as a political construct that describes the psychic and moral dysfunctions required to identify with the myths of Eurocenticism and claims to universality.

9. Although the black middle class has grown and has greater access to economic goods, especially via access to state power, this has hardly shifted the racialised social hierarchy in South African society.

10. We think it is tragic that a generation after political transition in South Africa and two and almost three generations after Biko and Fanon were writing their anti-colonial works, these are the ideas that still most resonate with black politicised youth in South Africa.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation under [CPRR 13091339042 No: 91543].

Notes on contributors

Kathy Luckett

Kathy Luckett is Director of the Humanities Education Development Unit, University of Cape Town.

Suellen Shay

Suellen Shay is Dean of the Centre for Education Development, University of Cape Town.