Moving from discourse to Praxis: Situating academics at the centre of decolonisation struggle

Abstract

As part of contributing to the decolonisation debate to reclaim and re-purpose the universities as public good institutions, drawing from Freire's notion of praxis we argue that there is a need to move from theorisation of concepts or what we refer to as discourses to praxis, and academics must drive the decolonisation project. Unlike students, academics have immense power to influence choices of pedagogical approaches, processes of curriculum design, and knowledge production. Academics enjoy academic freedom. This implies that they have the freedom to teach and conduct research without external control in their area of expertise, which gives them special protection within the classroom and the parameters of their field of expert knowledge. Thus, we argue that the freedom that academics enjoy puts them in a good position to be drivers of the project of decolonising higher education. As key role players on processes of teaching and learning as well as knowledge production in higher education, they have some degree of power that they are better positioned to drive the decolonial project. They can use their roles as teachers and researchers to advance the decolonisation agenda.

Boundary knowledge in conversation: Imagining higher education through transdisciplinarity and decoloniality

“…28 While decolonisation aims to deconstruct the edifices of colonisation or colonialism from the human experience, decoloniality seeks to interrogate the three forms of coloniality from the human experience. Elsewhere, we have defined coloniality as a tendency of a previously colonised people and the systems, which govern their lives to return to the colonial condition 29 and decoloniality as attempts to unravel or undo these tendencies. Therefore, the decolonial turn questions and seeks to subvert the epistemological, ontological, axiological and methodological assumptions of the Western canon.…”

“…They expanded access to broader cross-sections of students in line with the democratic principles upon which the new nations were founded. Over the past years, there has been a significant surge in research focusing on decolonisation 29,30 and the Africanisation of various fields. 30,31 Despite these changes, three processes conspired to maintain and reproduce the colonial character of post-colonial universities.…”

“…The resilience theory aims to enhance the adaptive, predictive, and transformative abilities of both institutions and individuals, ultimately creating value. 28,29 Towards a framework for reimagining the future of higher education in Africa…”