Decolonization of Universities & Staff Development

Overview

• The discussion covers the decolonization of universities and its effects on academic staff development.
• It addresses student protests, transformation discourses, and social realism in higher education in South Africa.

Transformation Discourse

• In South Africa, the transformation discourse in higher education has lost momentum after two decades.
• Students and academics call for decolonization of university structures and curricula after the 2015-2016 protests.

The "Decolonial Turn"

• The "decolonial turn" has varying meanings, it refers to decolonizing knowledge, power, and being in institutions like universities (Maldonado-Torres 2011).
• Academic staff developers need to rethink how they work with university teachers to decolonize institutional cultures.

Social Realism

• Margaret Archer's concepts of culture, structure, and agency are used to examine academic staff development.
• Social realism explains responses to changes in higher education by looking at personal and socio-cultural factors.

Theoretical Lenses and Limitations

• Theoretical lenses from the global North might be inadequate
• There's a need to develop theoretical and analytical lenses relevant to the global South.

Decolonization

• Decolonization can't be easily integrated into existing critical or justice frameworks (Tuck and Yang 2012, 3).
• Contributing to debates on institutional decolonization is important for academic developers.

Addressing Calls for Institutional Decolonisation

• Issues in the South African context resonate with academic developers in Africa, the developing world, and developed countries with diverse student populations.
• Identify causal mechanisms beyond empirical experiences and events.

Critical Realism

• Critical realism, by Roy Bhaskar, combines science and social science philosophy focusing on 'epistemology is distinct from ontology'.
• Research should aim to uncover deeper structures and mechanisms, not just experiences and events.

Bhaskar's Observation

• Possibilities for changes exist, but are partially realized due to contextual constraints
• Macro-level structural changes are needed for broader systemic transformation.

Archer's Concepts

• Society consists of "people" (agents) and "parts" (culture and structure).
• Analytical dualism is examining culture, structure, and agency separately to understand their interplay (Archer 1995, 15).

Culture and Discourses

• Culture consists of ideas, ideologies, theories, beliefs, and values.
• Discourses are real and can affect the world (Fairclough, Jessop, and Sayer 2002).

Relational Social Science and Contradictions

• Social science objects are relational, students and teachers are logically related.
• Logical relations can be consistent or inconsistent like quality assurance vs. academic freedom.
• Awareness of conflicting values and beliefs is increasing.
• Contradictions result in 'situational logics’ for actors to confront inconsistencies (Archer 1996, xxii).

Beliefs and Actions

• Criticizing a false belief challenges related actions, practices, and necessities(Bhaskar 1979, 80).
• Structure involves the distribution of material goods, roles, and demographic markers (Case 2013, 31).

Human Agency and Transformation

• People can critically reflect and redesign their social environment to become effective agents (Archer 2000, 308).
• Concerns turn into projects, leading to practices and reflexive deliberation.

Analysis of Higher Education

• Understand the structural, cultural, and agential mechanisms that influence academics' reluctance to change.
• "Context" is understood as the environment in which system features are reproduced or transformed (Archer 1995, 11).

Discourses in South African Higher Education

• Since 1994, transformation discourse focused on access for black students, staff demographics and the National Qualifications Framework (RSA 1997).
• Racial tensions in 2015 and 2016 led to awareness of contradictory values in higher education
• Limited progress in real transformation.

Structural Issues

• Lingering structural conditions inherited from colonial and apartheid eras is a tragedy in South Africa (Case 2015, 3).
• Higher education participation is at 19% of the 18-24 population.
• Black students account for only 16% of the 18-24 cohort.

Extended Degree Programs and Academic Staff

• Extended degree programs cater almost exclusively for black students, leading to a ghettoising effect.
• Academics, especially in historically white institutions, are predominantly white.
• A Western tradition still influences most academics and teaching.

Transformation and Change

• South African universities use a discourse of transformation without significant structural and cultural changes.
• Radical discourse of social and epistemic inclusion is sought.
• Contradictions in universities' structural and ideational contexts emerged during 2015 protests.

Discourses Related to Decolonial Turn

• Strong discourse calling for decolonization.
• Discourse of alienation.
• Discourse of epistemological access linked to ontological access.
• Discourse of powerful knowledge.

Decolonization and Exclusion

• There is need to replace transformation discourse with a decolonizing discourse for change
• Achievement of epistemological and ontological access remains a challenge due to the exclusion of black people from basic rights.
• Students expressed alienation from formerly white higher education institutions.

Traditional Values in Education

• University structures privilege colonial Western traditions (Lebakeng, Phalane, and Dalindjebo 2006, 70 ).
• Black students and staff feel invisible due to the lack of transformation (Mbembe 2015).
• Cultural and structural contradictions lead to “problem-ridden” situations.

Academic Challenges

• Academics are challenged to reconsider traditional disciplinary knowledge and pedagogic practices.
• Students' comprehension of specialized knowledge requires adaptation.
• University curricula are not neutral and are predominated by the global North due to agency in curriculum selection.
• The nearly universal adoption of the Western knowledge tradition creates a sense of hierarchy (Grosfoguel 2007, 214).

Epistemological Access

• Uncritical use of epistemological access for decades contributed to "epistemic othering" and "epistemic injustice" (Fricker 2007).

Rethinking the University

• Rethinking the purpose and values of the university for curriculum, teaching, and learning is important for decolonization.
• Addressing curriculum and pedagogic processes, and aligning them with the backgrounds of black students is required.. It can be achieved by realizing that the teaching is not just on the epistemological level, but is a part of the ontological level

Knowledge and curriculum

• The integration of knowing, acting, and being is required to achieve the ontological turn,
• Critically and explicitly understanding that that the discourse of epistemological access, is integrally linked to ontological access is required.

Social Justice in Education

• Access to powerful knowledge for all people is required.
• Broadening what is considered powerful knowledge is important for curricula.

Enabling Epistemological Access

• Attend to curriculum choices and pedagogic processes to increase knowledge access.
• Use distanciation through theory with constant movement and understanding to create appropriate application..
• There are dominant discourses inconsistent with earlier ones
• Academic staff developers must take the decolonisation, alienation, epistemology, ontology and powerful knowledge discourses into account

Academic Staff Development

• By taking a transformative approach (Land 2004), academic developers prepare academics for challenges (Clegg 2009, 54).
• Foregrounding both academic projects and students' needs leads to teaching and learning
• Teaching and learning practices are required, to ensure that majority of students have academic success in the achievement of social justice

Ensuring Student's Understanding

• By ensuring students understand disciplinary discourses and research methodologies, the role of them in their disciplines would be clear to academics
• Offer lecturers theoretical and practical tools that will enable them to support epistemological access (Morrow 1994).
• Respect academics’ disciplinary differences and identities.

Encouraging critical engagement

• Encourage critical engagement with the theory and practice of higher education.
• Wondering if ‘academic development can be remade in ways can pay attention to critical discourses

Questioning Epistemological Access

• Awareness of the concept's potential for conservative application, it asks access to what for whom and how (Mignolo 2009)?
• Critical questions about knowledge are required, for building democratic, just, and non-imperial societies (Mignolo 2009, 2).

Incorporating Transformation

• Transformation that incorporate pedagogy and decolonisation must be encouraged
• It is important to promote epistemic justice to tackle the disruption of the structure (Keet 2014, 23).

Understanding Decolonization

• There are varied, contested, and contradictory meanings and motives for championing decolonization
• In designing a decolonising discourse, lecturers will experience constraint as they are tied to the traditional canon and need a space to explore tensions and paradoxes
• In fact, an academic developers challenge is to work with academic to face the incommensurable contexts

Critically Analysing Knowledge and Ideologies

• Higher education is aimed towards epistemological access, however some experience difficult contradictions when challenged to consider which knowledge needs to be chosen.
• Calling to decolonize curricula might challenge beliefs and disciplinary identities of people coming from a background of conservatism (Henkel 2000).

Addressing the Turn

• By understanding the influence of ‘the turn’ (decolonisation, changing curriculum etc) on some academics, is required of academic developers and experts to knowledgably undertake courageous conversations and ask in-depth question on the epistemological access

Acknowledging perspectives

• Acknowledging that hegemonic traditions also actively repressed articulated thoughts and envisioning from outside in frameworks(Mbembe 2015, 10), the dilemma for academic developers, can therefore be solved by decolonising the knowledge with innovative practices and ethical justice • Why do you only draw knowledge from Europe, the USA, the Western world or the global North? • Can you use examples of how this knowledge is used in Africa/the global South? • How is this knowledge linked to the histories of different students in your class? • How does it validate their lives? • Have you critically examined your curricula, pedagogy and assessment methods for practices which some students may find alienating?

Conclusion

• By recognising people's reality of both the epistemology and ontology they learn, education would be designed, taught, assessed and structured with empathy
• Higher education must challenge academics to have a critical mind, be reflective, and question one's teaching style