Africanisation of the South African archival curriculum: A preliminary study of undergraduate courses in an open distance e-learning environment

Abstract

Educators and archivists in Africa have repeatedly raised the need for redeveloping university curricula to reflect local and global best practice. An African education curriculum case study by the InterPARES project (2013–2018) that covered 38 countries out of 54 revealed the existence of few available archival training programmes in the continent. Literature further reveals that where educational programmes are available, the curriculum is mostly Eurocentric and thereby addresses archival issues from a Western perspective. As a result, the infinite problems facing archivists on the continent such as resources, skills, technology, infrastructure, advocacy, holdings, collaboration, displaced archives and many more (the list is endless) are not fully engaged. The archival programmes at the institution of higher learning appear not to address grand societal challenges such as unaccountability, poor governance, service delivery, as well as the low usage of archives repositories in the continent. In South Africa, there has been a call to use African epistemologies such as Ubuntu, a philosophy that provides an African overview of societal relations or the Batho Pele, principles adopted by the post-apartheid South African government to guide and direct its public service and address imbalances of the apartheid regime. This study utilised the Africanisation pillar of Sibanda (2016)’s model to analyse the infusion of curriculum transformation into the ten modules for archives and records management in an open distance e-learning (ODeL) environment. In this regard, the content of ten archives and records management modules for a bachelor’s degree in an ODeL environment is analysed to explore the transformation of archival curriculum. Only one university in South Africa offers a fully-fledged bachelor’s degree with a major in archives and records management. The study established that an attempt was made to transform the archival curriculum at study material development and module delivery level. This resulted in a missed opportunity to transform archival curriculum in the development of the new bachelor’s degree being implemented in 2017. The study concludes by arguing that failure to decolonise the archival curriculum will result in archivists being highly unlikely to contribute to solutions to societal problems that are difficult to solve confronting South Africa using local solutions. It is recommended that transformation of the curriculum should start at a programme level rather than module level.

Advancing archives and records management professionals in Africa

“…The larger study was known as the education case study (AF01) whose objective was identifying gaps in ARM education and training programmes in Africa. There are several publications on the history and research process of the overall study (Katuu, 2015(Katuu, , 2020(Katuu, , 2022aKatuu and Ngoepe, 2014;Katuu and Ngoepe, 2017) as well as the outcomes and impact of the study (Katuu, 2022a;Ngoepe et al, 2022a;Ngoepe et al, 2022b;Ngoepe and Saurombe, 2021) However, those publications as well as the research team reports only provided a synopsis of the survey activities that contributed to the research (Katuu et al, 2018a(Katuu et al, ,2018b(Katuu et al, , 2018c. The objective of this article is to outline the methodology, findings and discussion of results from the two surveys conducted during the course of the IP Trust case study.…”

Inclusion of digital records in the archives and records management curricula in a comprehensive open distance e-learning environment

“…This necessitated the need to revise archives and records management qualification curricula to reflect international good practice as it aligns to an African context (Horsthemke, 2008). Such a revised curriculum should be one of the major constructs in ensuring that higher education institutions in Africa offer knowledge, understanding, application and principles towards building professional competencies (Barnett and Coate, 2005), with specific reference to digital records management (Ngoepe and Saurombe, 2021).…”

“…In addressing the gap in enhanced skills and knowledge development related to digital records management, the ICA developed a strategy for Africa in 2015 which included elements of curriculum transformation and advocacy (Ngoepe and Saurombe, 2021). The implementation of the educational leg of the proposed strategy by the ICA relied on the findings of the InterPARES project and resulted in the development of a digital curatorship module in the form of a workshop offered to archives and records management practitioners and academics in Africa.…”