Unsettling paradigms; the quest for inclusive and democratised knowledge
From a scholarly project commenced in 2017, four academics had come together to share insights emerging from on-going research projects investigating what to change, how to change it, why, for whom and to what outcomes. The scholarly enquiries are a deliberate project underway at eight research-intensive universities, driven by Universities South Africa's Teaching and Learning Strategy Group (TLSG) and co-ordinated from the University of Pretoria's Faculty of Humanities.
Named Unsettling Paradigms: The Decolonial Turn in the Humanities Curriculum at Universities in South Africa, the five-year project, sponsored by Andrew W Mellon Foundation, represents public universities' response to students' demands for a transformed curriculum.
On 7 September, the TSLG hosted a Colloquium providing a platform to share insights from some of the research either completed or still going on under the Unsettling Paradigms banner. The idea was to stimulate debates on these works that are meant to transform teaching and learning at South Africa's institutions, over time. As he welcomed the gathering comprising students, academics, senior leaders in the university sector and policymakers in higher education, Dr Sizwe Mabizela, Chair of the TLSG and Vice-Chancellor and Principal of Rhodes University, said the insights were also intended to equip academics in humanities and social sciences to engage with these dialogues. This, as the Unsettling Paradigms research project reaches mid-term.
Recovering Subterranean Archives – Stellenbosch University
Dr Uhuru Phalafala, a Lecturer in the English Department at Stellenbosch University, was one of the four scholars presenting at the Colloquium. She said her study, titled Recovering Subterranean Archives, was inspired by curiosity when she discovered, in her readings, that South Africa's literature had labelled the 1960s as a period of literary "silence".
Suspecting that the apartheid dispensation had silenced, censored or banned African voices of this period, Dr Phalafala cast her enquiry wide and deep in search for hidden data elsewhere in the world.
Dr Phalafala has titled this study a "recovery" to denote movement from fragmentation or illness to wholeness or wellness, and also as an act of repair from illness or injury. She also refers to subterranean, meaning below ground, hidden and not mainstream. She equates her research to excavating and exhuming what she sees as buried treasure. She also sees this project interviews as enabling a process of "healing or locating the lost parts of ourselves, naming them and seeing our incompleteness without them."
Her research field therefore became the places where political and cultural exiles had fled to, and dwelt in, abroad. The objectives of her study are to:
- Recover South African cultural text in exile
- Reassess theory regarding South African cultural production
- Reposition South African culture within a robust and generative world-making network and to
- Insert the recovered cultural text in curricula.
Proponents of the project have dug far and wide into the works of the likes of Miriam Makeba and Keorapetse Kgositsile in the United States, Ernest Mancoba in Paris; Lefifi Tladi and Ernest Cole in Sweden, Noni Jabavu in London, and the ANC at the historical Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC).
By the end of Year One of this project, Phalafala's study had republished Malibongwe, an anthology of poetry by ANC women in exile. This is a book first published in 1981, re-published and translated throughout Europe but banned in South Africa by the apartheid regime.
In her view, the republication of this book re-establishes the place of women artists in the history of South Africa's liberation. It also makes the material available for use in future curriculum.
Unsettling Paradigms; the broad project purpose
Professor Vasu Reddy, Dean in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria, and co-ordinator of the collaborative endeavour taking place at eight research-intensive universities, said the project was exploring how knowledge was being transformed into the curriculum. He said the primary purpose of this project is curriculum reform. The participating scholars are exploring untested curriculum assumptions and drawing attention to existing gaps. They are prioritising research into local challenges to accumulate Global South insights, thereby stimulating and strengthening fresh insights in Humanities disciplines while also fuelling inter-epistemic dialogues and comparative analyses. Within the context of Reform, Professor Reddy said Unsettling Paradigms is looking to diversify knowledge and, ultimately, to achieve curricula driven by inclusive and democratised knowledge.
Professor Reddy summarised the project conceptual framework into three Rs: Recovery, Reassessment and Reposition. In the Recovery leg, the project is looking to dismantle apartheid's distorted perceptions of local scholars and local knowledge; to support scholars in the university system in recovering previously silenced voices of blacks, female and dissident writers, philosophers, artists and thinkers; to recognise new role models and to restore the dignity of 'othered'" lives, in pursuit of a multi-voiced understanding of curricula and standards.
The second R, to Reassess, refers to interrogating the current syllabi to determine what it is that ancient scholars are teaching our students and to identify and interpret deeply entrenched attitudes.
The central tenet of the third R, Reposition, is to mainstream previously marginalised voices across disciplines in Humanities and to define their relationships with education and the economy; the supremacy of European genres; international trade agreements and the mechanics of social and political power.
Ultimately, curriculum change will come about when the ongoing enquiries yield theses and dissertations, books and scholarly articles as well as creative outputs such as music, drama productions, film and art.
Echoing Professor Reddy's sentiment, USAf's Chief Executive Officer, Professor Ahmed Bawa, said South Africa's Knowledge Project was about "how our universities enter the global knowledge system on our own Global South terms."
Background
Unsettling Paradigms: The Decolonial Turn in the Humanities Curriculum at Universities in South Africa is an inter-institutional collaborative project that brings together eight research-intensive universities: University of Pretoria, University of the Witwatersrand, University of the Free State, Rhodes University, University of the Western Cape, University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University and the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Although the push to decolonise university curricula dates back to the 1980s in South Africa (Chapman, 2020) it spiked during the Fallist movement of 2015/16, when students protested that contemporary curricula and teaching approaches in higher education are devoid of social, contextual and political relevance. This transformational project was made possible by a USD 1, 933, 700 grant, an equivalent of R27, 588, 821 in 2017 from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation. Dr Mabizela said USAf is deeply indebted to the leadership of Prof Saleem Badat, former Vice-Chancellor of Rhodes University and former Programme Director: International Higher Education & Strategic Projects at the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, for supporting this project. The project is running until 2022.
According to Professor Vasu Reddy, this project ultimately concerns itself with who teaches, what is taught, how teaching and learning happen, and, equally importantly, who makes decisions. He said as the Unsettling Paradigms project enters its mid-term, it is increasingly interrogating knowledge, a deeply contested term and how it influences decisions on educational goals. "What counts as valid knowledge was at the core of the students' movement in 2015," Professor Reddy said.
This article is the third in a series developed from the 7 September Colloquium of the TLSG.
'Mateboho Green, the Writer, is the Manager: Corporate Communication at Universities South Africa
