Theorising the Voices of Senior Academics on Decolonising the University Curriculum in an Open Distance E-Learning Institution in South Africa

Abstract

In 2015 and 2016, respectively, South Africans witnessed an unprecedented emergence of the #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall national protests in the South African higher education, with students and progressive academics lamenting the slow pace of transformation in the sector. While there is a plethora of literature post the fallist movements focusing on students, Black academics and government responses to the protests, the voices of senior, tenured academics at an open distance e-Learning institution in South Africa remain under-researched, particularly on how they conceptually understand the calls for decolonising the university curricula. In this paper, we attempt to explore and theorise the voices of senior academics on decolonising the university curriculum at an open distance e-Learning institution in South Africa. Through a qualitative case study, we purposively recruited sixteen (16) senior academics at the main campus of the institution in Gauteng province in South Africa and elicited data through an online qualitative questionnaire administered in line with the institutional COVID 19 and post COVID 19 protocols. Nancy Fraser’s social justice framework was employed to frame data analysis. The findings revealed that senior academics understood the calls for decolonising curricula as responding to the two key challenges; 1) confronting the deeply rooted coloniality of the mind, and 2), the need to challenge the unequal, hierarchical power relations between academics and students. We conclude that when stakeholder minds are decolonised, third spaces are created in which they partake in reflexive conversations which promote parity of participation to accommodate African content and knowledges as equally relevant ways of knowing and doing.