Working toward a socially just curriculum in South Africa: A collaborative autobiographical narrative inquiry

Abstract

In this article, we foreground the lived experiences of a group of post-graduate education students at the University of the Free State who explored issues of social justice in the curriculum. Our contextual and local experiences are situated as part of a call for the decolonisation of the curriculum. In this context, we view 86 Journal of Education, No. 74, 2018 curriculum as an autobiographical, lived, and storied practice (Pinar, 2012). Through our creative collaborative narrative, we focus on teacher identity and experience since this has been shown to have a major impact on the curriculum (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Furthermore, we use Kumashiro's (2002) conceptualisation of antioppressive education to highlight the messiness and discomfort of our experiences as we relearn, unlearn, and trouble oppressive knowledge in order to imagine alternatives. We posit anti-oppressive education as part of the social justice project as a useful theoretical stance in thinking around the decolonisation of the curriculum. In this article, we use a critical qualitative inquiry (Denzin, 2017) to explore what a process of decolonisation might look like; we offer an entangled view of how a collaborative narrative research methodology, identity, experience, and theory form part of the process of working towards a socially just and decolonised curriculum. Our article contributes to an existing body of work that uses collaborative and narrative methods to research issues of social justice. However, since much of the international literature on social justice education and curriculum is written in contexts far removed from our everyday experiences, we wish to make a unique contribution that is rooted in our local context and that highlights the unique experiences of South African teachers in relation to issues of social justice and the decolonisation of the curriculum.

Opportunities for social justice in the curriculum and pedagogical practices in higher education institution spaces in South Africa

“…Such an assumption creates injustice in higher education spaces which can be eliminated by modifying pedagogical practices to include emotional consciousness and different experiences, and by expanding on individual differences and identities. This is in line with the submission by Müller et al (2018), who established that educators' emotions, experiences and identity are pedagogical praxes that promote social justice in higher education. Therefore, curriculum redesign that allows academics or university teachers to take personal initiative to teach and model students both within and outside the classroom by providing tutorials, and to have office consultations and community learning and group work is imperative (Pillay et al, 2018).…”

“…Common to the idea of social justice in literature is fairness, equity, accessibility, representation, human rights and equal distribution of privileges, benefits, knowledge and resources. Importantly, social justice is more of a vision or goal, driven mostly by educationalists with the main focus on full and equal participation of all groups in a society (Müller et al, 2018). This is why the achievement of social justice in the educational system relies mostly on the teachers' ability to embrace a comprehensive view of equity, opportunities and democratic issues, as well as their ability to envision a just society (Sampaio & Leite, 2018).…”

“…Brazilian educator Freire (2018), in Pedagogy of the oppressed and pedagogy of hope: reliving pedagogy of the oppressed, emphasises the role of university education in changing the world for the better by stimulating critical thinking and empowering people so that they may be free from oppression, poverty, injustice and the difficult task of living peacefully with their former oppressors after political liberation. In addition to this, Müller et al (2018) aver that pedagogical practice enables fair and equal implementation and delivery of a curriculum that does not discriminate against students' emotions, gender, race, colour, sexuality and socioeconomic class differences. Thus, university pedagogical approaches that target a socially just society should promote students' self-awareness, identity, adequate knowledge of worldviews or other people's diversity, and understanding of issues of socio-political multiplicity through higher education settings, where fairness, equity, empathy and democratic citizenship skills are cultivated (Ross, 2014).…”