Dalene M Swanson

Ubuntu: An African contribution to (re)search for/with a 'humble togetherness'

This article is a discussion in two parts. The first part addresses the Southern African indigenous philosophy of Ubuntu, providing it with a working definition and situating it within African epistemology and the socio-political contexts of its invocation. It raises critical concerns about Ubuntu’s embrace in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its promulgation as an ideology within the nation-building project of post-apartheid South Africa. Such concerns are referenced with respect to Ubuntu’s formulation within the advocacies of cultural nationalism. Nevertheless, the discussion commits to perspectives of possibility towards disrupting neoliberalism and decolonizing hegemonic meanings, and advances a debate towards transformation and transcendence within a post-apartheid context. The second part follows on from the arguments in the first part, which set the stage for a narrative journeying of a more personal nature. It offers a reflexive account of how Ubuntu was used as a guiding principle for engagement in fieldwork and the structuring of a qualitative research methodology. The narrative tone is somewhat different to that of the first part, which offers critical perspectives within a broad socio-political discussion. The second part moves from a national level to a local level. It locates more personal interactions and a search for a ‘humble togetherness’ within the context of a township school in South Africa. The article closes with a somewhat cautionary note on how a philosophy such as Ubuntu might be taken up in a political institutional forum that has unwanted implications, but it also advocates for Ubuntu in providing legitimizing spaces for transcendence of injustice and a more democratic, egalitarian and ethical engagement of human beings in relationship with each other. In this sense, Ubuntu offers hope and possibility in its contribution to human rights.

Voices in the silence : narratives of disadvantage, social context and school mathematics in post-apartheid South Africa

Voices in the Silence is a critical exploration of the construction of disadvantage in school mathematics in social context. It provides a reflexive, narrative account of a pedagogic journey towards understanding the pedagogizing of difference in mathematics classrooms and its realizations as pedagogized disadvantage in and across diverse socio-political, economic, cultural, and pedagogic contexts.

Value in Shadows: A Critical Contribution to Values Education in Our Times

This chapter explores the values-laden nature of pedagogy and practice in educational systems in the international context. Recognition of such values are often denied in the process of objectification of knowledge, as is prevalent in the mathematical sciences (see Bishop, 2000, 2001; Bishop, Gunstone, Clarke, & Corrigan, 2006; Bishop, 2007, 2008), but also through the “New Knowledge Economy” supported by standards and evidence-based approaches to education that have become increasingly dominant on an international scale. Rather than denying the values-laden nature of contemporary education thereby creating unattended-to shadows and ghosts in the Demidean (1994) sense, acknowledgement and embrace is advocated. This enables a redirection of the purpose of educational practice towards democratic values that, with critical embrace, would better prepare youth for the glocal conditions they face in a globalized world that is increasingly under ecological, political and economic stress.

Ubuntu, Indigeneity, and an Ethic for Decolonizing Global Citizenship

Global citizenship and associated discourses on globalization often comport with a moral liberal response to new widespread place-based formations of race, class, gender, migratory and ethnic inequality. This often-imported liberalism resides uncomfortably and selectively alongside increasing politically and ideologically invested cultural and religious polarizations (exemplified in the rise of ISIS in the Middle East pitted against Westernism); persistent and pernicious levels of poverty, global violence and states of war (as in regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Myanmar, and the Ukraine); widespread conflict-induced population displacement and mass migration (mainly South to North); and human and ecological degradation (as a feature of resource exploitation within capitalist relations of production worldwide); and the rise of new forms of extremist ethnic nationalism (Sunni versus Shia conflict, Sharia caliphates in Syria and Iraq, and countries such as Brunei) and differentiated capitalist formations geopolitically (as in the economic rise, albeit uneven, of China and India).

THE OWL SPREADS ITS WINGS: Global and International Education within the Local from Critical Perspectives

Within an era of a New Knowledge Society, assumptions abound regarding the ‘goodness’ and justice of global interconnections and distributions of knowledge through international educational organizations and structures worldwide. Just as George Bush Jr. in attempting to justify the invasion of Iraq made claim to the democratic goodness of the US ‘spreading their freedoms’ in the interests of an all-encompassing democratization of the world, so the assumption that sharing educational knowledge, especially an ‘all-knowing North’ with a ‘helpless South’ is without question for the greater good of all humanity.

Ethics, Power, Internationalisation and the Postcolonial: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Policy Documents in Two Scottish Universities.

ABSTRACT This paper provides a critical discussion of internationalisation in Higher Education (HE), and exemplifies a process of uncovering the investments in power and ideology through the partial analysis of four strategic internationalisation documents at two Scottish Higher Education institutions, as part of an ongoing international study into the ethics of internationalisation (EIHE).1 A Foucauldian discursive analytical approach is employed in analysing the policy documents. It reveals the relationships between power and knowledge in the constitution of regimes of truth within internationalisation, while serving to interrogate the dynamics of the affective and ethical in the comprising of such relationships and imaginaries. A critical postcolonial theorisation works in tandem with a Foucauldian approach in uncovering the relations of power discursively at work and the discursive effects of power in institutional terms. Four key themes are identified within the documents and critically discussed. The discussions serve to demonstrate that a lack of critical engagement with internationalisation discourses in Higher Education has the effect of reifying a dominant view and suppressing the emergence of alternative discourses. A critical postcolonial lens facilitates interpretability of power dynamics through and beyond internationalisation in Higher Education to consider the ethical effects of such power in its investments in global inequality, injustice and oppression within the global modernist imaginary.

Roots/Routes Part II

This narrative acts as an articulation of a journey of many routes. Following Part I of the same research journey of rootedness/routedness, it debates the nature of transformation and transcendence beyond personal and political paradoxes informed by neoliberalism and related repressive globalizing discourses. Through a more personal, descriptive, and philosophical approach, the author seeks to move, in a reflexive manner, beyond the delimiting roots of deficit discourse and its unrootedness with the daily, local, and lived. Through the use of a nontraditional writing—research approach, the author explores other, less objectifying, ways of being in research and attempts to provide alternative pedagogies of possibility away from dichotomous and positivist research engagement. By confronting socially constructed knowledges and identities, and “(re)sourcing” these through “humble togetherness” (Ubuntu), the storying seeks to find a transcendent spirituality through the routes/roots of research and achieve the emergence of transformative possibilities through pedagogies of hope!

Teaching towards social and ecological justice online: Introduction to Global Citizenship at UBC

max 250 words) How can we help university students make connections between ‘academic knowledge’, and their roles as members of local and global communities? How do we create a forum for students to engage in issues of social and ecological justice through critical thought, moral commitment and meaningful engagement in their learning and coming to know as global citizens? We are an interdisciplinary group of researchers and instructors who have collaboratively developed, and are now co-teaching an international, interactive, fully online university course: Introduction to Global Citizenship, available to students at five universities around the world. Our course combines academic rigour with personal reflection and group discussion. It provides students with a broad understanding of barriers and bridges to global citizenship, brings greater awareness of key global issues, and encourages individual and collective action and accountability on issues of sustainability and social justice. Pilot delivery of our course in 20052006 suggests that it offers students an extremely challenging, thought-provoking, international educational experience, as we learn about and discuss global issues together. In this working session, we hope describe our experiences with this course project, and to facilitate a productive dialogue with colleagues around teaching strategies for transformative learning in higher education. What ‘kinds’ of transformative learning are we seeking and how can we recognize it? Which instructional strategies facilitate deeper critical analysis and personal reflection? What roles might technology and interdisciplinarity play in this undertaking? Which investigative approaches might help us move our institutions beyond lipservice to global education?