Pedagogical Model for Decolonising, Indigenising and Transforming Science Education Curricula: A Case of South Africa

Abstract

In Africa, Science education curricula have been instrumental in promoting Western worldviews as being universal. An educational transformation and decolonisation of the school curriculum is required. A focus on an African worldview and an integration of the local context and community-based information is necessary for survival, i.e., Indigenous Knowledge System (IKS). While IKS is enshrined in the schooling curriculum, Educators experience challenges with implementing it, because the pedagogical strategies have not been clearly described. An in-depth qualitative study was conducted with the Indigenous Knowledge (IK) holders of the Zulu cultural group and Senior High School (SHS) Science teachers to explore how IK on environmental sustainability could be taught in South African science classrooms. The research employed an interpretivist, multi-site ethnographic, qualitative approach, and naturalistic research style. In-depth interviews were used to generate data from the purposively selected community persons. The thematically analysed findings were used to develop a culturally specific pedagogical model on how to teach IK in science classrooms: touring cultural places; demystifying indigenous practices and perception; utilizing indigenous pedagogies; teaching wisdom behind indigenous practices etc. The research recommends that future studies be conducted on applying the model in different geographical and cultural schooling contexts. Keywords: context sensitive curricula, pedagogical strategies, South African curriculum, Western worldview

Science teaching in BRICS: A systematic review of pedagogical approaches and challenges

“…An intriguing aspect revealed in the analysis is the inclusion of indigenous knowledge, as exemplified by articles such as Opoku and James (2021). However, this topic is not consistently observed in all studies, suggesting it may be more relevant in countries with a substantial indigenous heritage and cultural background.…”

Rise of Wisdom Pedagogy Research in Higher Education (1980–2022): A Systematic Literature Review

“…2024, 3, FOR PEER REVIEW 12 Figure 9 shows the links between two types of nods i.e., authors and keywords. The interesting finding is that in the network there were seven articles [46,52,[56][57][58]60,61] which were not directly connected to others with any of their keywords. However, 17 articles [2,14,[42][43][44][45][47][48][49][50][51][53][54][55]59,62,63] were directly connected with keywords such as character education, practical wisdom, self-awareness, well-being, sustainability, higher education, pedagogy, wisdom pedagogy, immigrant, spirituality, and university.…”

The Decolonisation of Climate Change and Environmental Education in Africa

“…While it is not clear why the South African literature dominated the review, the country's apartheid history and attendant government's interest in the field may have possibly played a role. Opoku and James [99] observe that in October 2015, the Minister of Higher Education and Training (HET) of South Africa requested an African-focused higher education system to help address the country's historical challenges and decolonise the education curriculum.…”

“…In Tanzania, Scholz et al [127] (p. 4) note what they referred to as "a 'copy-and-paste' design of the planning legislation and the planning education" that is similar to what was found in 1940s England and constitutes an obstacle to the introduction of new approaches and subjects, such as decolonised climate change education. In this context, the integration of ILK is inhibited by the lack of recognition and apparent alienation in national and sub-national education policies [99,111]. It can be argued that African policymakers and education managers contribute to epistemic injustice by attributing epistemic attention deficit to ILK [128].…”