Rupturing African Philosophy on Teaching and Learning

225 Pages·2018·1.78 MB·English

by  Yusef Waghid

YUSEF WAGHID,
FAIQ WAGHID
& ZAYD WAGHID
R U P T U R I N G
A F R I C A N
P H I L O S O P H Y
O N
T E A C H I N G
A N D
L E A R N I N G
Ubuntu Justice
and Education
Rupturing African Philosophy on Teaching and
Learning
“Against a global and South African background of increasing calls for the decol-
onisation of knowledge, this book provides a refreshing account of a pedagogic
rupturing as a decolonising exertion. Instead of ridding itself of all that might be
‘colonialist’, this book – through adopting an African philosophical lens – argues
for deliberative inquiry and reflexive openness, not only in relation to pedagogi-
cal encounters, but as enactments of just humaneness.”
—Nuraan Davids, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Education,
Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Yusef Waghid • Faiq Waghid
Zayd Waghid
Rupturing African
Philosophy on
Teaching and
Learning
Ubuntu Justice and Education
Yusef Waghid Faiq Waghid
Education Policy Studies Centre for Innovative Learning Technology
Stellenbosch University Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Stellenbosch, South Africa Cape Town, South Africa
Zayd Waghid
Faculty of Education
Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Cape Town, South Africa
ISBN 978-3-319-77949-2 ISBN 978-3-319-77950-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77950-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018937234
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Foreword A
In California, Stanford University’s recent “MacArthur genius” invents a
powerful MOOC (massive open online course) that teaches introductory
economics with the course title “Using big data to solve economic and
social problems”.1 Students learn about inequality and the course invites
them to design practical solutions to real problems facing the poor such
as health care, education and migration. This inventive technology at one
of the world’s leading universities allows for open access to advanced
learning about inequality, is offered without cost, and therefore presents
students with quality, affordable education. Professor Raj Chetty is an
expert on “Big Data” and so students also gain knowledge of cutting-edge
methods of data analysis to make sense of complex social problems and
to act on them as activists backed up with real-time evidence of problems
and concrete skills for how to tackle those problems.
In South Africa, Cape Town university professors in collaboration with
an international partner have also designed an impressive MOOC that
introduces students to African Philosophy of Education, in which they
are equipped with powerful concepts from within their own environment
to understand and act on the world around them. Their problem sets
concern subjects such as student protests, military rule in Africa, geno-
1 https://qz.com/1103806/a-pioneering-economics-class-is-tackling-social-justice-issues-with-
big-data-and-women-and-minorities-are-enrolling-in-droves/.
v
vi Foreword A
cide, terrorism and the education implications of such phenomena on
the content. The content for such engagement is various strands within
African philosophies generally and philosophies of education, in particu-
lar. Through engagement with this rich conceptual language drawn from
various African leaders—such as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu—
and African philosophy—such as ubuntu—students are equipped to
make sense of these social dilemmas familiar to the continent. The
MOOC is the subject of this fascinating new book titled Rupturing
African Philosophy on Teaching and Learning: Ubuntu Justice and Education
(Rupturing, in this review, for short).
What is the difference between these ‘massive online courses’ offered
from Palo Alto and Cape Town? At first glance, both MOOCs tackle
problems of injustice in their respective societies—from housing inequal-
ity in the USA to the unaffordability of tuition fees for poor students in
South Africa. Both provide free access to online education and specific
competencies for analysing and changing familiar social problems. Both
make some very bold claims, though somewhat more modestly in the
California case, about the impacts of these technological innovations on
students and their learning. And yet these two creative platforms for
teaching university students are fundamentally different in how they
present their political claims for the change they seek.
The Stanford MOOC works in the best tradition of what Americans
call a liberal arts education. It offers broad access to the best ideas avail-
able in the stock of human knowledge and engages students practically in
conception and action on those ideas. The problems are social and their
resolutions are technological. The language deployed is simple and acces-
sible and the tools for engagement drawn from evidence that informs
rational action.
The Cape Town MOOC is explicitly political in its orientation and
links some of its case work and language to South Africa’s student protest
movement of 2015–16 through references to decolonisation and colonial-
ity. Its work is an attempt to give prominence in university curricula,
which is still largely based on European intellectuals, their concepts and
methods, to African scholars and their thoughts as these relate to social
problems on this continent. The language is conceptually dense with
familiar and fresh concepts concerning the human condition. Students
Foreword A vii
are invited not only to engage with these concepts but teachers are
expected to engage this “disruptive pedagogy” to change their minds as
individuals and their social conditions as activists.
This book does well to deal with three common criticisms of the quest
to seek knowledge within the “ethno-narratival” archives of African reser-
voirs of knowledge. First, it does not fall into the trap of ethnic chauvin-
ism, the position that there is something uniquely or essentially African
that merits an engagement with philosophy in isolation of international
streams of thought in this field. This is important in the strident atmo-
sphere of South African student politics in which Africanisation is some-
times posed in rigid contradistinction to the Europeanisation of the
curriculum; the global development of knowledge production has long
become much more complex and cosmopolitan than these old polarities
still insist on. In this respect, the book takes forward the enduring debate
on knowledge, power and identity in the wake of cataclysms such as colo-
nialism and apartheid.
Second, the book avoids not only the pitfalls of African chauvinism
but the common retreat into an African romanticism about the present
past. Difficult subjects are taken on such as military rule and genocide as
subjects for philosophical inquiry. The narrative of the evil West posited
against the good African finds no refuge in a scholarship that insists on
truth as its standard of pedagogical engagement. How does philosophy in
and from Africa speak to problems of its own making? To simply dismiss
these continental problems as a reflexive consequence of Western imperi-
alism is to both dull the intellectual senses and disable a necessary activ-
ism that should flow from a critical philosophy in Africa.
And thirdly, the book places social problems within the context of
ideology and power. This opens up difficult questions that the liberal arts
orientation of the curriculum in capitalist America would rather avoid—
namely, that problems of inequality are not simply an unfortunate aber-
ration inside a political economy that distributes access and opportunity
fairly across the populace. If only the individual worked hard enough or
pulled themselves up by their bootstraps or simply showed up—anything
is possible; even that founding myth of American society has recently
floundered on the hard realities of a globalising economy.
viii Foreword A
The book draws attention, rather, to the social and material conditions
that create and sustain inequality. By implication, the solutions to these
dilemmas are not simply technical but social; not merely instrumental
but political; not individual but communitarian. This book offers trans-
formation with a soul so that what results is not simply a “big data” solu-
tion to intractable problems but a large-hearted response to these
problems through perhaps the most recognisable precept if not practice
of philosophy in South Africa, ubuntu. For here, the solution to inequal-
ity is not merely to rectify but to restore through an approach that is
moral, compassionate, inclusive, humane and interdependent.
In these and other respects, Rupturing breaks new ground as the first
online course on African philosophy of education to emerge from this
continent.
Education Policy Studies Jonathan D. Jansen
Distinguished Professor
Stellenbosch University
Foreword B
One significant societal sphere of the application of the worldwide
increasing importance of Information and Communication Technologies
(ICT) is the domain of education, with various dimensions, implications
and possibilities for the different levels and types. There are considerable
cross-national variations of the application depending on the levels of
broader technological capacities and the nature of the demand for educa-
tion. As African countries in general have more prevailing limitations in
educational supply, from the basic issues of inadequate facilities to accom-
modate simple access for all to tackling effectively the issues of severe
attrition to the low percentage of access to higher education. In search of
cost-effective methods and tools to respond to high demand, help equal-
ise educational opportunity at all levels of the systems including tertiary,
African countries have been increasingly exploring and adopting distance
learning using ICT. While in this context the advantages tend to be high-
lighted, there has been a debate about concerns for the various usages of
the technology for teaching. Among such issues has been the actual or
potential impact on the sustainability and integrity of the teaching pro-
fession. While various dimensions and nuances have been articulated, it
is fair to argue that the discourse has been structured in the polar and
nearly mutually exclusive framework of capital-intensive versus labor-
intensive policies and practices in the present and future of education
amid the fast-paced technological possibilities for delivery of education.
ix
x Foreword B
In this very groundbreaking, daring, insightful and provocative manu-
script, Rupturing African Philosophy on Teaching and Learning: Ubuntu
Justice and Education, Yusef Waghid, Faiq Waghid and Zayd Waghid
unequivocally situate their project outside this focus of the debate. They
situate their theoretical and conceptual parameters from the onset, argu-
ing that their goal is not to take a position on the discourse regarding, in
this case, the use of massive open online courses (MOOCs). They clarify
that, instead, their aim is to make a case for “an African philosophy of
education which has been espoused through a Massive Open Online
Course (MOOC)”. In an article entitled “Implementing the Online
Learning Community in Africa: A Unisa Case Study” J. F. Heydenrych,
P. Higgs, and L. J. Van Niekerk (2003) articulated in a concise way the
question of the desirability and even the necessity and possibility for
utilising an African collective learning mode to the application of tech-
nology. In a similar spirit is the recognition that MOOCs have been
irreversibly introduced in the education landscape and delivery in Africa.
In this proposed book the authors argue that a deliberate approach
informed by “African philosophy of education” ought to be part of the
education delivery of education via MOOCs in Africa.
With a compelling and authoritative introduction of the subject mat-
ter and goal, the authors present nine well-structured and enthralling
chapters. Chapter 1 has a didactic feature aiming to articulate a “plausi-
ble” understanding of African philosophy of education whose strands
vary from what they refer to as “ethno-philosophy” to “ a communitar-
ian” philosophy of education, which must be, in its totality, taken into
consideration in offering the framework for relevant understanding and
reconceptualisation, thus departing from the hitherto misunderstanding
and mischaracterisation of the assumed “ethno-centrism” and “commu-
nitarian practices”. Instead of boxing African philosophy of education in
its assumed shortcomings, the authors endeavour to articulate its values
for “pedagogic justice” defined by its intrinsic capacity “deliberative
engagement, responsibility towards one another, and the cultivation of
humanity”. In other words, the authors contend that African philosophy
of education is far from being randomly set and applied. Rather, it is
firmly and consistently framed by the tenet of ubuntu.