Epistemic Journeying across Abyssal Lines of Thinking: Towards Reclaiming Southern Voices (original) (raw)
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Journal of Education
Post-apartheid South Africa has witnessed many changes in its quest for social justice. However, these changes have not affected South African higher education institutions (HEIs) that continue to privilege epistemic traditions that are embedded in Western frameworks. The science curriculum has been instrumental in promoting Western worldviews as being universal. This has resulted in normalising the subordination of non-Western people and their knowledge systems. In seeking a change in the tenor of science education, I report on a qualitative study that explored the intersecting influence of the pre-service science teacher curriculum and indigenous knowledge systems (IKS). In my reconceptualising of a part of one science module, a departure from the revised curriculum and from the Western epistemic canon was effected by reframing who teaches, what is taught and how it is taught. A purposively selected sample of 224 pre-service teachers engaged in a field trip and a gardening project that was facilitated, in part, by an indigenous knowledge expert. Pre-service teachers planted a vegetable garden using indigenous methods and cultivated indigenous and non-indigenous plants. They captured the processes of planting and growing the plants in their portfolios and reflected on their learning by responding to questionnaires. I analysed the data drawn from the portfolios and replies to the questionnaires thematically. My findings revealed that consciousness-raising had occurred in these pre-service teachers about the value of indigenous knowledge (IK) and they endorsed the IK expert as a legitimate teacher in higher education. Insights into using IKS to transform and decolonise the curriculum by engaging an IK expert to teach brought previously marginalised IK to the centre. Teaching and learning in this context maximised interaction between the pre-service teachers and the materials being studied in their natural setting.
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2014
This article is an exploration of the dynamics of contemporary colonialism in the Canadian settler nation-state in the context of programs of teacher education. From my perspective as a settler-scholar-teacher working in teacher education, I explore the imposition of Western forms of knowledge production in higher education in settler dominated academic spaces. Through a coloniality lens, I consider the ways that educational spaces in higher education continue to support and perpetuate structures of colonialism through an epistemic monoculture based in Western scientific materialism. I particularly explore the ways the imposition of a Western secular cosmology silences and resists Indigenous knowledges, pedagogies and perspectives in institutional spaces. Through story and scholarship, I draw out the complexity of epistemic dominance and problematic discourses that manifest in pedagogical encounters in programs of teacher education. Reflecting on the epistemic collisions that emerge in these encounters, I consider decolonial pedagogical practices with adult students that trouble problematic narratives and discourses that are pervasively shared in Canadian society, and engage expectantly, meaningfully and generatively with forms of resistance that arise in this complex context.
Whose knowledge?: Science education, Indigenous knowledges and teacher praxis
2016
This study investigated how a group of secondary school science teachers considered the implementation of a Cross-Curriculum Priority that mandated the inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures in all learning areas. The inclusion of Indigenous content and perspectives, as a way of promoting intercultural understanding, has been advocated in the Australian context for some time. However, classroom implementation has been lacking with teachers feeling unsure about how to satisfy these curriculum initiatives. With the introduction of the new (national) Australian Curriculum such content and perspectives were mandated. This context enabled an exploration of science teachers’ responses to the Cross-Curriculum Priority as they attempted to translate the intent of the curriculum into classroom practice. The investigation took place through a collaborative and collegial approach using Participatory Action Research. A group of five teachers from different sch...
Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into the Curriculum: Responses of Science Teacher Educators
The International Journal of Science in Society
In many parts of the world, concerns to enact a practical reconciliation between indigenous and coloniser populations are finding their expression through various action plans and formal social initiatives. At base, such initiatives require the acknowledgement of both colonial injustices and the awareness of and respect for the strength, wisdom and holistic integrity of displaced/colonised knowledge systems. In the Australian context, draft national curricula in five areas-English, Maths, Science, History and Art-all reflect a concern to incorporate local indigenous knowledge and perspectives into each respective syllabus. While there have been attempts to attach aspects of indigenous knowledge to various strands of individual State curricula in the past, the present national concern would require something of a reconceptualisation of what constitutes, for example, Science as currently taught in schools. This paper presents initial findings from a larger research project that aims to identify the concerns and opportunities presented by a rethinking of the nature of Science as a result of the national curriculum process. Here, the reactions to and ideas of arguably central figures in any successful reorientation of "official knowledge" in school-based teaching-teacher educators-are presented by way of suggesting challenges, possibilities and imperatives for the genuine incorporation of local indigenous knowledge into the formal school Science curriculum.
Against coloniality: Toward an epistemically insurgent curriculum
This study interrogates the colonial and Western epistemology underlying mainstream curricula and proposes a decolonial approach that can build an epistemically insurgent curriculum that takes into account non-Western epistemologies. We begin with an analysis of coloniality in Western culture and knowledge systems, including in education. Then, building on the epistemological challenge proposed within decolonial literary works by Pablo Neruda, Eduardo Galeano, and Jos ıas L opez G omez, we describe how history and literature curricula can foreground nondominant saberes (ways of knowing) that call into question the monopoly on understanding claimed by Western modes of reason, and how they can participate in the ethical and analectical project of attending to the being and agency of those who have been marginalized. This approach can help teachers and students to participate in building a sophisticated global border thinking and can provide them with new conceptual tools to make sense of their own realities.
Indigenous and Afro Knowledge in Science Education: Dialogues and Conflicts
Upgrading Physics Education to Meet the Needs of Society, 2019
This chapter provides ethnographic descriptions and analyses of interviews with indigenous and Afro-Colombian (The term refers to the descendants of Africans who survived the slave trade and to their dual affiliation: to both their black African roots and the Colombian nation. In some articles, especially those from Africa, the original African cultures are called “indigenous” (Semali and Kincheloe (Eds),What is indigenous knowledge? Voices from the academy. New York and London: Falmer Press, 1999). However, in America they are called “Afro” in order to distinguish them from the original American cultures.) teachers and of some discursive interactions with their students in primary school classrooms in underserved communities. In those contexts they mobilize their local community knowledge for science lessons. We analyzed the teachers’ purpose in incorporating indigenous and Afro knowledge in teaching science and how these different knowledge systems work in the interaction. These teachers’ and students’ co-constructions modify and enhance the official science curriculum with forms of resistance to the scientific myth of only one universal truth about physical phenomena. This resistance is based on the strength of their collective identity constructs as well as their connection with and respect toward nature. These kinds of studies are relevant references for a culturally sensitive science curriculum development.
A cogenerative inquiry using postcolonial theory to envisage culturally inclusive science education
Cultural Studies of Science Education, 2008
This forum constitutes a cogenerative inquiry using postcolonial theory drawn from the review paper by Zembylas and Avraamidou. Three teacher educators from African, Asian and Caribbean countries reflect on problems confronting their professional practices and consider the prospects of creating culturally inclusive science education. We learn that in Mozambique, Nepal and the Caribbean scientism patrols the borders of science education serving to exclude local epistemological beliefs and discourses and negating culturally contextualized teaching and learning. Despite the diverse cultural hybridities of these countries, science education is disconnected from the daily lives of the majority of their populations, serving inequitably the academic Western-oriented aspirations of an elite group who are "living hybridity but talking scientism." The discussants explore their autobiographies to reveal core cultural values and beliefs grounded in their non-Western traditions and worldviews but which are in conflict with the Western Modern Worldview (WMW) and thus have no legitimate role in the standard school/college science classroom. They reflect on their hybrid cultural identities and reveal the interplay of multiple selves grounded in both the WMW and non-WMWs and existing in a dialectical tension of managed contradiction in a Third Space. They argue for dialectical logic to illuminate a Third Space wherein students of science education may be empowered to challenge hegemonies of cultural reproduction and examine reflexively their own identities, coming to recognize and reconcile their core cultural beliefs with those of Western modern science, thereby dissipating otherwise strongly delineated cultural borders.
Decolonisation of the Science Curriculum: A Different Perspective (#Cookbook-Labs-Must-Fall)
2016
Issues about transformation in education is exponentially receiving more focus (just consider the #RhodesMustFall campaign). In this paper we argue for more Afrocentric approaches to curriculum development in science education from a learning psychology perspective [embodied, situated and distributed cognition], rather than from the predominant political perspective that characterizes such discourse. In the paper we share mixed-method research (with emphasis on the qualitative component) on how Gibbon’s concept of Mode 2 knowledge production, and contextsensitive science, could be the answer to a more Afrocentric science curriculum. We show how indigenous knowledge could provide an authentic context to many science inquiries currently included in the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement. Through this epistemological border-crossing between the (western) constructs in the science curriculum, and indigenous knowledge, we could create authentic learning opportunities that center-...