Zayd Waghid

Designing and Implementing a Course on African Philosophy of Education: Cultivating Cosmopolitan Justice

We were asked to initiate our institution’s first ever massive open online course (MOOC). After several discussions, we agreed that African philosophy of education, more specifically, ‘Teaching for Change: An African Philosophical Perspective’ would be an appropriate MOOC to begin with, considering that Teaching for Change would be the first of its kind on African philosophy of education. Already, the idea of an African philosophy of education is considered problematic as it is erroneously and unjustifiably assumed that African traditions and cultures cannot be associated with a discourse as demanding and rigorous as philosophy of education. On the contrary, this is not our view, as every community or all communities for that matter have a philosophy and educational experience to share. African philosophy of education is thus a term we consider significant for relating a story on Africans’ ways of thinking, being and doing. In other words, an African philosophy of education accentuates the traditions, ideologies, cultures and narratives associated with diverse peoples on the African continent, and a philosophy of education from Africa would not be unrealistic at all.

[Re]examining the Role of Technology in Education Through a Deliberative Decision-Making Approach: In the Quest Towards Democratic Education in South African Schools

The perpetual advancements in modern educational technologies have rapidly evolved and altered the way students and educators communicate inside and outside a school classroom. In some schools in South Africa today, where ‘liberal educators’ are considered to be more adaptable to cultural renewal, accompanied by changing beliefs, ideals and practices in the social environment, their more conservative ‘authoritarian’ counterparts in stark contrast would be less forthcoming to this changing social life. The authors consider deliberation as a decision-making approach in the quest to achieving democratic education in South African schools through the use of educational technologies. In this regard, they examine the role of educators and students’ voices, and explore the use of Facebook as a pedagogical practice in cultivating democratic education.

African Philosophy of Education and Ubuntu Justice

The main concern of an African philosophy of education is to be responsive to the African human condition, which is characterised by high levels of inequality and poverty, human suffering and inhumanity. The eradication of the aforementioned concerns goes along with the quest for justice, which, in the context of Teaching for Change, is of three kinds: moral justice, compassionate justice, and restorative justice. In this chapter, we examine the political and ethical thoughts of three luminaries—Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai and Desmond Tutu—in the cultivation of political and social democracy in order to ascertain why the aforementioned forms of justice are inextricably connected to an enactment of African philosophy of education. Thereafter, with specific reference to Teaching for Change, we show how students responded to these three forms of justice, in particular the idea of ubuntu justice that emanates from an understanding of moral justice, compassionate justice and restorative justice.

A Curriculum Response to Pedagogic Dilemmas: Towards Enhancing Teaching and Learning

Teaching for Change represents a snapshot of our response to the predicament about teaching and learning in Africa. In this chapter, we endeavour to highlight some of the challenges we have identified and then set out to offer our response to the dilemmas about teaching and learning in higher education through Teaching for Change. The challenges we enumerate are based on our engagement with higher education discourses. These challenges to teaching and learning at universities include the predicament of the silenced or ‘subaltern’ of which Gayatri Spivak (2008) reminds us; the predicament of not being open to what is new and perhaps unimaginable; and the predicament of pedagogic or curriculum unresponsiveness.

Towards an Understanding of African Philosophy of Education

On having been introduced to massive open online courses (MOOCs), we contrived to devise, develop and implement an online course that would be both relevant and responsive to our pedagogy, more specifically, teaching and learning encounters. As it happened, African philosophy of education became the central focus in relation to which we could situate our educational research interests. We chose the idea of an African philosophy of education premised on the following three considerations. First, we envisaged focusing on a MOOC that would attract students to other ways of knowing, doing and being. Put differently, we considered a MOOC on African philosophy of education because we endeavoured to bring to masses of students a pedagogic discourse which could foreground the African condition. Second, having been initiated into dominant Western discourses of thinking and acting, we thought it apposite to introduce a platform of learning (and teaching for that matter) that foregrounds less dominant discourses, which often have to endure caricature on the part of those who hold a view of education prejudiced towards Western studies. Third, our interest in African philosophy of education has been stimulated by a notion of ubuntu (human interconnectedness and co-existence) through which justice for all might be possible. It is, therefore, not surprising that we selected the figure of the late President Nelson Mandela of the first democratic South Africa as our backdrop to the publicity of the MOOC. As has been argued elsewhere, Mandela’s educational contribution is constituted by at least three aspects: an education for non-violence guided by deliberative engagement and compassionate and reconciliatory actions, exercising responsibility towards others and cultivating a reasoned community of thinking (Waghid 2014a: 4).

A Democratic University Without Ruins: Some Reflections on the Possibilities and Particularities of an African University

Now that we have reflected on Teaching for Change, we want to examine how the rationale of such a form of online learning, namely to cultivate educational encounters and ubuntu justice, could assist us in thinking differently about an African university vis-a-vis the notion of a democratic imaginary. Although Bill Readings’s (1996) pessimism that the contemporary university is “in ruins” is a monumental idea that held sway for more than two decades since its publication, it might neither be plausible nor helpful to think of a university in that way. This is so because one cannot assume that global capitalism, enmeshed in a consumerist ideology, accentuates the importance of graduate throughput and success for national and international markets and, hence, undermines a university’s status as a free, open and responsible institution of higher learning. Furthermore, one would not expect a university to remain in the vanguard of national culture and therefore be perceived to be in peril if it undergoes cultural change. Such an idea of the university rests in any case on an erroneous assumption that culture and society remain the same over time. Ron Barnett’s (2016) Understanding the university announces, “the university is a task without end … [and] since the university is always on the move, always moving in its spaces – economic, social, political, cultural, institutional and so on – its possibilities will always be moving on” (Barnett 2016: 9). We concur with Barnett’s cogent analytical take on the contemporary university, and draw on his three-pronged analysis, namely that a university is an institution and an idea; it is an institution in the present with future possibilities; and it embodies a set of particulars and universals. The particulars and universals want to offer: first, a defence of a university as a democratic educational institution; and second, in line with Jacques Derrida’s (2004) novel thoughts on a contemporary university, we make a case for a university as a responsible institution-in-becoming within an African context, thereby bringing into contestation the notion that a university could ever be “in ruins”.

Reflexive Thoughts on Teaching for Change: Democratic Education Reimagined

In this chapter, we offer an account of three narratives (our stories) about how Teaching for Change, more specifically its emphasis on ubuntu justice, affected pedagogical actions. We show why and how we began to think differently in and about democratic education; that is, our interest in reimagining democratic education. As we show through our narratives, our argument in defence of a reimagined notion of democratic education draws on the practices of cosmopolitan reflexivity, democratic equality and disruption, which we contend should be extended to the idea of decoloniality. Put differently, our argument is for an expansive view of democratic education that connects cosmopolitan reflexivity, democratic equality and disruption to the emancipatory discourse of decoloniality in Africa, more specifically, philosophy of education in Africa.

Cultivating Pedagogic Justice Through Deliberation, Responsibility and Risk-Oriented Action Commensurate with an African Philosophy of Education

In the previous chapter, we made an argument for the cultivation of ubuntu justice as the rationale for an African philosophy of education. As an extension of this view, we contend that an African philosophy of education is aimed at developing a conception of democratic African education that might contribute towards deliberative, responsible and risk-oriented action—actions that could contribute towards enhancing pedagogic justice as an instance of ubuntu justice. In other words, pedagogic justice is one way in which ubuntu justice manifests itself in pedagogic encounters.

Cultivating Assemblages of Learning: From Teaching to Learning and Back to Teaching

In much the same way that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987: 3) describe the concept of a book, we conceive of Teaching for Change as “lines of flight, movements of deterritorialisation and destratification”. Like Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 4), the lines of flight rupture in all directions with measurable speeds constituting an “assemblage”. We shall now expound on the pedagogic notions espoused through Teaching for Change as assemblages of learning. In order to explain what Teaching for Change comprises, we need to show: first, how it functions; second, with which connection it intensifies; and third, which metamorphosis it undergoes. In this way, we examine Teaching for Change as an assemblage of learning whereby we accentuate some of the pedagogical actions as embedded in Teaching for Change.

Decolonised Education: Cultivating Curriculum Renewal and Decoloniality

At the time of implementing Teaching for Change for a second time via the FutureLearn platform, one of us had been invited to offer presentations at two institutional initiatives regarding university curriculum renewal. Considering that Stellenbosch University is celebrating 100 years of existence, the institutional management deemed it apposite to commemorate the occasion by making curriculum renewal one of its primary initiatives. The latter in itself is an acknowledgement that the rationale that undergirds teaching and learning ought to be reconceptualised in relation to a different university context. What is even more poignant about the renewal agenda of the institution is its focus on decolonisation and decoloniality in relation to curriculum change.