Combatting the Imperativeness of Modernity in Students' Unrest: The Need to Decolonise the Minds through Ubuntu

Abstract

<jats:p>The trajectory of students' unrest in Nigeria universities has been linked to the underside of modernity. By responding to this, the study explores conditions necessary to decolonise the mindset of university authorities and students, against modernity as an offshoot of students' unrest. Ubuntu philosophy rationalised the study while Transformative Paradigm lensed the process with the use of Participatory Action Research design. The study involved ten co-researchers, three university management staff, three students' leaders, two security personnel and two university lecturers were selected using Convenient Sampling Technique. Focus Group Discussion was employed to generate data, and the data were subjected to Conversational Analysis to make sense of the data. Students' involvement in decision-making, democratic and facilitative leadership style, were found as tools to decolonise the space of students' unrest as an underside of modernity. The reconstruction of the university system against social unrest emanating from modernity becomes expedient through Ubuntu cum decoloniality.</jats:p>

Deconstructing Social Unrest as a Response to Redefine Strained Relationships between Students and University Authorities

“…Socio-thematic analysis, according to Omodan (2019), is a simultaneous implementation of Braun and Clarke's six steps of thematic analysis, which borders on breaking down of the transcribed data into themes, and conversational analyses which borders on how the sociality among the participants could be tested to understand how they live or do things together (Braun and Clarke, 2006;Nordquist, 2019). This method of data analysis was adopted because it enables the researcher to categorise the data into themes according to the objectives of the study and subject the data into sociality test to fulfil the conversationality involved (Omodan, 2020). This method helped the researcher to socially interpret and understand the social dependencies and/or independence and the social interactions coming from the social differences of the participants.…”

Conceptualisation of Ubuntugogy as a Decolonial Pedagogy in Africa

“…Ubuntugogy has been justified in that it adopts democratic principles and offers an alternative to conventional educational practices, which tend to promote student's tolerance towards understanding different experiences and backgrounds (Omodan & Ige, 2021b). It also promotes a democratic classroom environment where teachers are facilitators who support students in developing skills necessary for participative decision-making processes (Omodan & Tsotetsi, 2019;Sambala et al, 2020;Omodan, 2020). This may not be unconnected with the fact that it focuses on more than one way of learning; therefore, it does not marginalise those who are slow learners or have some disability, for example, deafness.…”

Assessment of Group Tasks as a Decolonial Pedagogy in University Classrooms

“…The choice of this paradigm also lies in its ontological and epistemic stance rooted in the social nature of classroom reality (Chilisa, 2011). Transformative paradigm is not only suitable for this study because of its quest for academic freedom (Scott & Usher, 2011) but it is a paradigm that preaches emancipation by challenging social phenomenon (Omodan, 2020b). In order to complement this, Participatory Action Research (PAR) was adopted as a research design for the study.…”

“…This method, according to him, combined the principles of Braun & Clarke's (2006) six steps of doing thematic analysis and the use of conversational analysis described by Nordquist (2019 p. 2) "as doing things with words to perform social actions such as describing, agreeing, questioning, and talking." This is an instrument that is best to interpret the sociality involved in data that has been broken down into themes (Omodan, 2020b). This was implemented to respond to the objectives of the study, which were already in two different themes.…”