3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/45
Browse
3 results
Search Results
Item Student voices on decolonising the curriculum: a study of two department at the University of the Witwatersrand(2019) Mashibini, SelloThis thesis uses three approaches to the curriculum - Afrocentrism, Pan-Africanism and Pluriversity/Moving the Centre - to explore students’ understandings of decolonising the curriculum. I examine the meanings they attach to this project as revealed in semi-structureddepth-interviews that I conducted from September to December 2016. The study focuses on voices of postgraduate students in the departments of Sociology and Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. I discuss the implications of the culture of this university for Black students in light of its roots in the European Enlightenment project for which Black people are not human-beings. My main findings are first, that students experience this culture as alienating and violent, and that it treats Black students as disabled bodies and constructs them as deficient. Second, scholarship premised on Black thought is not part of the university’s culture even though some of this scholarship is housed in formal structures of the university such as William Cullen Library. Third, intricately related to the content of the curriculum, pedagogical practices and questions of epistemology are deeply shaped by the culture of this university. I conclude that even when African scholarship and Black thought are introduced into the university, the likelihood of its impact would be small unless the culture of the university changes. Furthermore, while students’ understandings of what decolonising the curriculum means are not homogeneous, the similarities in these understandings stem from common experiences of oppression. Finally, I conclude that at the heart of decolonisation and decolonising the curriculum is a quest for humanity and mental liberation.Item Decolonising curriculum in an African University: the case study of development studies at the University of South Africa(2019) Ndlovu, MorganThis research project is an examination of the meanings of decolonising curricula within an African university using the case study of Development Studies curriculum at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Thus, I deployed the theory of Decoloniality to examine whether the meanings of decolonising curricula at UNISA’s Department of Development Studies transcend or reproduce coloniality— a power structure with multiple forms of colonialism that affect the meaning of development within the Development Studies curriculum. Through empirical study, I established that there is no singular and homogenous meaning of decolonising the Development Studies curriculum within the Department of Development Studies of UNISA due to differences in the social and epistemic backgrounds of the department’s academic staff and student body. Thus, for instance, there were academic members of staff and students who viewed the current Development Studies curriculum as colonial and not serving the development aspirations, interests and agendas of the marginalised members of the society and those who viewed it as just and uncontaminated by coloniality. In this way, this research project concluded that the meanings of decolonising curriculum at UNISA’s Department of Development Studies are bifurcated between those that synchronically reproduce coloniality in the curriculum thereby enabling continuity instead of change and those that have a potential to cause a diachronic effect to the existing status quo. This creates a stasis in the search for a decolonised Development Studies hence this research project recommends a more radical approach to resolving the question of curriculum decolonization at UNISA in particular and the modern university institution in general. This radical approach entails a ‘reptilian’ epistemic violence against the forces of coloniality—a Fanonian form of temporary violence solely aimed at tilting the status quo of coloniality as opposed to a permanent form of epistemic violence that reproduces the same power structure of coloniality.Item Decolonising the South African art curriculum(2018) Smith, Candice JaneThis study is a broad inquiry into art education and curriculum. This research focuses on determining the modernist ideologies that underpin the Visual art curriculum and assessment policy (CAPS) document for grades 10 to 12 and considers the impact of modernist ideologies on decolonising art curriculum. A content analysis has been used in relation to the available literature, various iterations of the art curriculum and the prescribed CAPS textbooks for Visual art. My argument is that the curriculum does contain modernist underpinnings that hinder the decolonial potential of the CAPS curriculum and will reproduce the underlying modern system. There has been a call for decolonised curriculum across educational institutes and for education that is relevant to the learner's world.