1. Introduction and Background
The two landmark student protests since the dawn of democracy in South Africa (SA): #Rhodesmustfall and #Feesmustfall are more than seven years old (Jansen, 2019, 2017; Booysen, 2016). However, the scars and memories are still alive in the higher education space as SA universities continue to grapple with many of the issues that triggered these student protests. Racial hierarchies, resilient institutional cultures and the coloniality of knowledge are still influencing the way students and academic staff think, construct and share knowledge in higher education (Mbembe, 2021; Jansen, 2019; Tabensky & Matthew, 2015). While some universities have made significant strides in responding to calls for higher education transformation and precisely curriculum decolonisation, it is naïve to think that South African (SA) universities are fully committed to the curriculum decolonisation project. Before I share my reflections on curriculum decolonisation in the aftermath of #Rhodesmustfall and #Feesmustfall and bring them to bear on academic literacy (AL) pedagogies, it is important to remember that these landmark protests and SA universities’ sluggish commitment to decolonise knowledge reaffirm the perspective that knowledge production and dissemination are never neutral or apolitical (Mbembe, 2021; Bergin, 2019; Giroux, 2014; Freire, 1996). Put differently, “the university is essential to society because education is essential to the struggle for a democratic future” (Bergin, 2019, p. 1). Whilst I criticise and certainly do not condone the crude violence experienced during the hashtag movements, one cannot dislocate black students’ grievances and the way they expressed such grievances from the broader context of a democratic South Africa, characterised by Black pain, suffering and anger.
Violence during the hashtag movements symbolised the state of dystopia in post-apartheid South Africa, which has played out in different forms during service delivery protests across the country (Angu, 2023; Bergin, 2019). Therefore, the violence on different university campuses was akin to the spectre of violence experienced during service delivery and antiimmigrant protests. Second, the #Rhodesmustfall and #Feesmustfall protests cannot be exceptionalised because they were similar to student protests on the African continent in the 1980s and 1990s, which were equally violent and led to deaths and extended closure of universities (see Nkinyangi, 1991; Atteh, 1996; Balsvik, 1998; Aina, 2010; O’Halloran, 2016). Although the causes of these student protests might have varied from context to context, they had one thing in common: African students at that time were deeply concerned about knowledge production in postcolonial African universities. Just like the hashtag movements, African students had begun to question the relevance of university knowledge to the worsening socio-economic conditions in many post-independent African countries. They saw African universities as “centres for the spread of Western material and cultural values” (Balsvik, 1998 p. 311; Atteh, 1996). Moreover, the protests were reminders that university education in South Africa is still expensive, despite the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Just like in other African countries, SA’s expensive university education has been criticised for entrenching Western epistemic traditions, often excluding African knowledge systems and pedagogies that are responsive to African experiences and its rich cultural diversity (Angu, 2019; Mamdani, 2019; Nyamnjoh, 2012, 2016; Savage et al., 2011). In the case of academic literacy modules, pedagogical and assessment practices have continued to rely heavily on Western modes of constructing and sharing knowledge, mainly the written modes. This approach subscribes to the colonial politics of silencing alternative ways of knowledge production, especially those located in African communities. As such, indigenous pedagogies are often absent in these modules (Angu, Boakye & Eybers, 2020; Marin & Bang, 2015; Nakata et al., 2012). It is therefore not surprising that, after several student protests on the African continent, SA students are still wrestling with the same colonial bodies of knowledge, many decades after the demise of colonialism and apartheid.
Given that postcolonial Africa is yet to disrupt the coloniality of power shaping its social, political and economic institutions, curriculum decolonisation in South African universities is a nibbling process (Nyamnjoh, 2016; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). We should therefore read curriculum decolonisation in South Africa or elsewhere on the African continent as a work in progress and not as a finished project. This is because “no decolonisation would be radical enough without the decolonisation of the bodies and minds of those seeking decolonisation” (Wa Thiongo, 1986; Nyamnjoh, 2016, p. 65). Unfortunately, unlike the physical scars, the mental scars of any form of oppression usually take unexpectedly long to heal. However, there must be substantive evidence of political will and moral commitment amongst academic staff, students and university leadership to expose students to transformative curricula that embrace and promote multiple academic literacies. Here, to be literate is to allow one’s identity, specific context and lived experiences to shape the way they think, construct and share or contest knowledge (Clarence & Mckenna, 2017; Jacobs, 2013). Therefore, the interplay of multiple literacies in academic literacy pedagogies should provide both lecturers and students with the analytical tools to understand and critically respond to academic texts that subordinate other races, cultures and their epistemologies (Savage et al., 2011; Freire, 1996). On the contrary, curriculum decolonisation has been reduced to university committees-based conversations, intellectual spectacles during curriculum seminars/talks while curricula, teaching and assessment practices remain relatively unchanged. One such practice in academic literacy pedagogies is the promotion of the hegemony of the English language, an instrument of the coloniality of knowledge, at the expense of multilingualism and culturally inclusive pedagogies (Angu, Boakye & Eybers, 2020; Angu, 2019; Savage et al., 2011).
In some instances, it has been reduced to colouring of Western-oriented curricula with randomly selected texts from Africa (Jansen, 2023; Angu, 2019; Mamdani, 2019). Here, there is hardly any statement of intent, which clearly articulates what should be or has been decolonised, why and how it should be taught and assessed. Whilst it is important to celebrate the strides that certain universities have made, it is equally necessary to point out that many universities are still dancing on one spot or even backwards if one reads the hashtag movements against the backdrop of student activism against Bantu education in SA and curriculum colonisation on the African continent. Perhaps, #Rhodesmustfall and #Feesmustfall might not have happened if we had learned lessons from previous student movements/protests in South Africa and the rest of the continent. But why are Western epistemic traditions still influencing curriculum design and teaching practices? What is helping to keep Westernised pedagogies alive in South African universities after the removal of Cecil Rhodes’ statue at the University of Cape Town? Why does the aftermath of #Rhodesmustfall matter for academic literacy curricula and pedagogies? In this article, I draw primarily on relevant literature to reflect on the two critical moments in the SA higher education context, which led to calls for radical curriculum shifts, and I explore the implications for the rethinking of academic literacy pedagogies at South African universities.
I have framed my thoughts around two arguments: First, although Rhodes fell literally during the student protests, it unfortunately did not fall with existing institutional cultures that have sustained racial and epistemic hierarchies at many SA universities. These institutional cultures have continued to hamstring curriculum decolonisation post-#Rhodesmustfall Second, given the exponential increase in youth unemployment, curriculum decolonisation should inspire transformative/liberatory teaching and learning practices in classroom spaces (Hooks, 1994; Freire, 1996). I make the second argument on the simple premise that a curriculum document can only become an instrument for social change if the knowledge it seeks to impart can contribute to transforming students’ material conditions and enable them “to stand firm, take risks, imagine the otherwise and push against the grain”, on the one hand. (Giroux, 2014, p. 19). On the other hand, it must expose students to epistemic plurality and equip them with a set of tools that can help them “to distinguish opinion and emotive outbursts from a sustained argument and logical reasoning” and allow them to participate in dismantling the structures that continue to create subalterns in a democratic South Africa (Giroux, 2014, p. 19; Spivak, 2017). Such a curriculum document should focus on producing graduates with cognitive competencies and critical skills for the South African/African markets first and then the global market. Unfortunately, post-apartheid educational transformation especially at primary and high school levels has been a major hindrance to the decolonial agenda. However, when learners enter universities, it is the moral responsibility of academics to socialise them into the multiple/different ways in which knowledge is constructed, shared or contested in higher education (Boughey & Mckenna, 2016; Pineteh, 2014; Jacobs, 2013). From this perspective, AL pedagogies can play a critical role in helping students transition and adapt to these new ways of knowledge production. Critical to this process is the development of curricula and pedagogies that position AL as an area of inquiry and a significant graduate attribute. This means equipping students with a broad range of cognitive competencies and communication skills, in addition to specialised content knowledge (Jacobs, 2013; Boughey, 2013; Leibowitz, 2011)
The first argument has been discussed extensively by different scholars and from different ontological positions in the rich body of scholarship published during and after the student protests. But it is worthy of further intellectual consideration especially since many Black students and academics are still haunted by a painful past that has refused to be buried with its ancestors. Or a past which is persistently immortalised by resilient institutional cultures which seek to promote racial hierarchies and Western epistemologies (see, for example, Jansen & Walters, 2022; Mamdani, 2019; Booysen, 2016; Nyamnjoh, 2016). For Mamdani (2019) university education in African universities should focus not only on academic excellence but equally on knowledge relevance. He contends that the pursuit of academic excellence often excludes certain forms of knowledge, especially those that do not conform to the standards of the West. However, the second argument has not been given adequate scholarly attention in the rich body of knowledge on curriculum transformation and/or decolonisation in SA higher education. This explains why universities are producing graduates, many without graduate attributes aligned with employability and relevance in a world increasingly influenced by ecological, social, political, technological disruptions (Mbembe, 2016; Ramnund-Mansingh & Reddy, 2021). To equip students with the capacities to interrogate the complex politics of knowledge production in SA higher education, requires reimagining academic literacy curricula, pedagogies and assessments (Angu, Boakye & Eybers, 2020). In the following sections, I share some afterthoughts about the hashtag movements and explore the implications for reimagining academic literacy pedagogies in South African universities. Furthermore, I discuss the set of competencies that we should prioritise in academic literacy teaching in the aftermath of the hashtag movements. Finally, I reiterate the need for collective responsibility and sustained collaboration in a higher education context where academic literacy teaching to first-year students across different faculties has been outsourced to under-resourced units and departments.
2. #Rhodesmustfall and #Feesmustfall: Were These Moments of Epiphany?
The #Rhodesmustfall protest uncovered years of paying lip service to calls for higher education transformation and curriculum decolonisation in African universities since independence. As stated previously, what happened at South African universities from 2016 was similar to past student protests during apartheid and at other universities across the African continent (see O’Halloran, 2016; Balsvik, 1998; Atteh, 1996; Nkinyangi, 1991). For UCT students, the visible statue of John Cecil Rhodes exemplified white supremacy and privilege, and revealed the university’s tokenistic approach to transformation (Angu, 2018; Pillay, 2016). This statue did not only immortalise Cecil Rhodes, it equally reminded Black students about UCT’s persistent “exclusionary and oppressive institutional structures and cultures reflecting colonial traditions and logics” (O’Halloran, 2016, p. 184; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Mangcu, 2017; Nyamnjoh, 2016). While some scholars have argued that the past cannot be buried or simply erased from the construction of national memory, for me the statue is an attempt by settler colonialists to preserve the legacy of John Cecil Rhodes. During the protest, Cecil Rhodes’ acts of “kindness” and “generosity” were employed as a sub-plot to defend his strategic positioning on the UCT main campus. This narrative suggests that African students should show some gratitude to the man who provided land for the university and scholarships for students. But Mbembe (2016) poses three fundamental questions: How did he get the land in the first instance? How did he get the money? Who ultimately paid for the land and the money? In other words, African students should show some appreciation for the inhumane acts of land dispossession and material exploitation by colonial and apartheid supremacists such as Cecil Rhodes. Therefore, when Rhodes finally fell, clarion calls for the disruption of colonial/apartheid institutional cultures and for curriculum decolonisation spread across all South African universities (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Nyamnjoh, 2016; Akoojee & Nkomo,2007). A protest that began with a student throwing faeces on the statue eventually spread into a nationwide student movement. The movement was therefore an expression of Black pain, anger and a struggle against different forms of oppression and injustices that still prevail unchecked at an erstwhile white South African university (Angu, 2018; Jansen, 2017; Francis & Le Roux, 2011). This Black pain and anger equally resurface in academic literacy spaces especially when lecturers intentionally promote the unassailable position of the English language in SA universities, disregarding the fact that the majority of students do not speak English as a home language. This often happens when they mis-frame AL as a discipline for fixing students’ English language flaws and technical inaccuracies rather than enhancing their critical reasoning. Such AL pedagogies result in stigma, tensions, anxieties and apprehensions in AL modules (Maringe & Jenkins, 2015, p. 609; Banda, 2017; Angu, 2019; Bozalek & Boughey, 2012; Boughey, 2002).
Another parallel protest during the #Rhodesmustfall movement was the call for a fee-free higher education for all. Here, student leaders claimed that free education was a constitutional right that has been neglected by the ANC-led government. Before this movement, South African universities had been increasing tuition fees annually, often ignoring public concerns about the widening social equality gap and higher education affordability (Habib, 2019; Booysen, 2016). These exemplars of modern universities justify high student tuition as the only way to maintain the financial sustainability of universities and the quality of their academic projects, while still operating visibly “under the influence of market-based pedagogies” (Giroux, 2014, p. 37; Marginson, 2010; Mamdani, 2008). However, what is the value of a quality academic project if it does not concern itself with disrupting socioeconomic and epistemic injustices in South Africa? In fact, South African public universities had become rather “bastions of what the striking students perceive as white, European cultural and economic privilege” (Griffiths, 2019, p. 143). This explains the higher education conundrum: global massification of universities and the exponential decline in university funding from states. Therefore, the #Feesmustfall movement in South Africa must be understood against the backdrop of widening inequalities, higher education access and disproportionately low success rate (Jansen, 2017; Badat, 2010; Akin, 2010; Waghid, 2002). The protest was an impassioned attempt to address a longstanding public concern about the economic predicaments of many Black students, which keep influencing university access and success. And #Rhodesmustfall was an expression of students’ conviction to dismantle the coloniality of knowledge production, sharing and consumption in South African universities (Raghuram et al 2020; Mbembe, 2016). The disproportion between university access and success is still a major challenge in SA higher education today because of mass higher education and the dominance of Western epistemic traditions. As a result, universities continue to receive students who are not only underprepared but also lack adequate English language and literacy competencies to cope with the levels of critical thinking, reading and writing at university. The inclusion of AL courses in different degree programmes, was therefore seen as a strategy to address this challenge (Weideman, 2022; Pineteh, 2014; Bozalek & Boughey, 2012).
While the student protests were clearly driven by legitimate student concerns, they were ignored and undermined by government officials and university leadership until students began burning university properties. In response to the violent protests, elite universities resorted to transforming public universities into high-security spaces controlled by biometric technology and private security patrols on campuses. This militarised response to student protests exacerbated the situation, leading to more crude violence and disruptions (Angu, 2018; Jansen, 2017). The violence and securitisation of campuses raised several questions about universities as spaces for academic freedom, intellectual dialogue and negotiation. For example, the deployment of violence and intimidation tactics to push through student grievances were criticised and student leaders were considered cognitively incapable of using the power of argumentation and persuasion. On the contrary, the new security measures on campuses and the presence of security guards were construed as reasonable, justifiable and intellectually significant if the academic project had to be protected (Sooliman, 2019; Hodes, 2016; Mbembe, 2016). This suggests that although undergraduate students take academic literacy modules in different faculties and degree programmes, these modules have not adequately equipped their leaders with the requisite cognitive competencies to negotiate student grievances with university management during such protests. However, it equally points to the fact that perhaps students had been talking about their unpleasant learning and social experiences but the university top management had not been listening.
In defence of universities’ response to the violence, Adam Habib, the then Vice Chancellor of the University of Witwatersrand maintained that “despite the legitimacy of the students’ demands, their struggles had to play out in ways that did not undermine the university as a safe and free space for ideas” (Habib, 2019, p. xiii). But how was turning universities into security fortresses in order to manage and control marginalised students, an academically sound strategy to maintain the university as a free and safe space for ideas? Besides, universities have always been and will always be sites of protests because they are microcosms of the broader society. For me, the display of violence and intimidation by students or the securitisation of campuses by university management were two sides of the same coin. This raises key concerns about staff and students’ collective responsibility to meaningfully transform university spaces and students’ “intellectual and moral lives as independent individuals [with] the capacity to make disciplined inquiries into those things we need to know but do not know yet” (Mbembe, 2016, p. 30). In other words, university staff and management need to commit unwaveringly to good and transformative teaching. However, the universities’ response to the protests revealed how modern universities are shaped by market-related pedagogies based mainly on “large systems of authoritative control, standardization, gradation, accountancy, classification, credits and penalties” (Mbembe, 2016, p. 30). These market-related pedagogies have had direct implications for academic literacy curricula, teaching and assessment practices. Today, the primary focus of many academic literacy modules has shifted from developing critical thinkers, readers and writers to ensuring that exponentially high faculty/university pass rates are achieved.
After the protests, SA university communities experienced significant moments that resembled genuine commitment by university leaders and academics to the decolonisation project. To maintain this façade, curriculum transformation featured prominently on many universities’ transformation projects and existing language/curriculum transformation policies were rapidly re-drafted to respond to student grievances (Le Granger, 2016; Jansen, 2017). But curriculum decolonisation in Africa is not an academic spectacle or performance. It is the development of curricula and classroom pedagogies that seek to systematically and intentionally dismantle European epistemic hegemony in Africa and resituate African ways of being, knowing and doing at the core of teaching and learning (Mbembe, 2015; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013; Asante, 2007). It is not an impassioned attempt to replace European knowledge systems but rather to place African knowledges on par with their European counterparts. To this end, African knowledges should be in conversations with other knowledges not from a position of inferiority and African students should be able to read different texts whether African or European, as contested bodies of knowledge. Significantly, African students should be reading the rest of the world from an African perspective, and not reading Africa through a Eurocentric lens. How then do we reimagine academic literacy pedagogies to respond to the aforementioned perspectives about curriculum decolonisation in South African universities?
3. Decades of Teaching Academic Literacy in English in South African Universities.
In an era of global massification of higher education and in light of higher education transformation in SA, university access has increased exponentially, particularly amongst previously marginalised communities. The conundrum today is addressing increasing access to higher education and decreasing success rates amongst the same marginalised communities. This is because universities are expected to enrol students, many without key learning attributes required to think critically, construct and share or contest knowledge in higher education, simply to meet enrolment targets, set by the government (Snowball & Mckenna, 2017; Mckenna, 2012). While many of these students enter the university with adequate basic interpersonal communication skills, they lack the cognitive abilities to engage critically with different disciplinary knowledges. Therefore, alongside, curriculum decolonisation, one of the preoccupations of universities in South African has been to provide language and literacy support to all first-year students through generic or customised foundational academic literacy modules (Bozalek & Boughey, 2012; Winch &Wells, 1995). Given the unassailable position of English at these universities, the provision of academic literacy support to students whose mother tongue is not English is seen as critically important for their academic success (Pineteh, 2014; Carstens, 2012; Weideman 2013; Ngqwashu, 2009). But when some academic staff justify language and literacy support as an intervention for students who are not proficient in English, this global challenge is approached simplistically as an English language instead of a critical reasoning problem (Boughey & Mckenna, 2015; Ngqwashu, 2009).
As Boughey and Mckenna (2016) and Lea and Street (1998) argue repeatedly, higher education is about adapting to new ways of knowing, new ways of understanding, interpreting and organising knowledge in different disciplines. Framing academic literacy around students’ inability to communicate fluently in English tends to stereotype a particular group of university students. A common narrative from many academics is that students cannot read and write because they are products of poor and under-resourced schools in rural South African communities (Boughey & Mckenna, 2015; Pineteh, 2014; Bozalek & Boughey, 2012). By implication, they are referring to mainly Black South Africans. But earlier research on student writing in higher education has shown that the quality of student writing had been on the decline globally for decades because of the massification of higher education and South Africa is no exception (Lillis & Turner, 2001; Lea & Street, 1998). In the context of South Africa in particular, the problem has been worsened by educational inequalities in the public schooling system. However, universities cannot shift the blame to the schooling system when their own curricula and academic literacy pedagogies still promote different forms of racial and epistemic injustices through deficit models (Angu, 2018; Mbembe, 2016; Mamdani, 1997).
As a product of colonial education and a Black scholar teaching academic literacy in English in a previously white university, one is constantly wrestling with stereotypes and myths about the English inadequacies of African students. These supposed inadequacies are presented deceptively as the main reason why African students struggle with academic literacy at university level. However, academic staff who construct this narrative often exclude Afrikaans students whose abilities to use academic English are equally inadequate or worse. I am always questioned about my own understanding of academic literacy principles and how to apply them across disciplines. Also, African students who struggle to communicate ideas in English are perceived to be intellectually weak and incapable of engaging with academic discourses at higher education level (Joubert & Sibanda, 2022; Pineteh, 2019). Consequently, the teaching of academic literacy in erstwhile white universities is always a delicate process of negotiation with disciplinary specialists, many of whom are unapologetic about promoting Westernised curricula and upholding the misconceptions that academic literacy is about stringing sentences together, technical accuracies and adhering to the rules of English language (Angu, Boakye & Eybers, 2020; Pineteh, 2014; Boughey, 2002). Of course, the question of language is central to curriculum decolonisation because one of the consequences of Western epistemic domination is the marginalisation of African languages in university spaces. In fact, western languages remain one of the instruments to promote the coloniality of knowledge in African higher education or “the decimation or near complete killing and replacement of endogenous epistemologies with epistemological paradigms of the conqueror” (Nyamnjoh, 2012, p. 129). African students are therefore victims of both an epistemicide and linguicide (De Sousa Santos, 2016: Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013).
The idea that knowledge produced from Africa and African languages used to share this knowledge are inferior and therefore not worthy of intellectual inquiry, is reading Africa through Joseph Conrad’s feeble imagination and the colonial logic that Africa is inhabited by savages yearning to be civilised (Nyamnjoh, 2012). The likes of Ngugi wa Thiongo, Kwesi Prah and Neville Alexander have repeatedly spoken against the unassailable position of English in African higher education and the urgency to promote multilingual education concurrently with the recentring of African knowledge systems at universities (Prah, 2017; Makalela, 2014a, 2014b; Wa Thiongo, 1986). For example, Ngugi wa Thiongo’s emphasis on the use of African languages to produce and share knowledge reminds us that language is not just a vehicle for transporting one’s ideas but most importantly it is “central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment …” (wa Thiongo, 1986, p. 4; Joubert & Sibanda, 2022). While one promotes the development of African languages into languages of scholarship, I imagine that the call for the development of African languages does not stop African students from equally thinking, constructing and sharing knowledge in English. It is about how one uses the coloniser’s language or any other language to communicate their thoughts. For instance, Amos Tutuola’s use of English to share his artistic representation of the natural and supernatural worlds in Yorubaland in The Palmwine Drinkard is still an exceptional literary piece despite criticisms about his lack of mastery of English language by his Western schooled peers. Although “his understanding of English is incomplete … this does not diminish his ability as Yoruba storyteller with ambitions of reaching out and cultivating readership over and above his immediate Yoruba cultural context” (Nyamnjoh, 2020, p. 90). Since “colonialism and colonial education encouraged the adoption of the colonial language in its purest authentication”, his western schooled critics naively misjudged his English inadequacy “as a measure of his intelligence” (ibid., pp. 90/93). This is, in fact, a common misconception amongst many disciplinary and academic literacy practitioners who continue to imagine academic literacy at university level as a process of regurgitating Western knowledge in fine English with the utmost grammatical accuracy, instead of a mode of reasoning or a cognitive process (Nyamnjoh, 2020, 2012; Pineteh, 2014).
Despite Tutuola’s incomplete mastery of the English language, his artistic prowess has still transcended boundaries and borders. His writings are canonical texts comparable to any on the African continent and beyond. Similarly, Chinua Achebe’s response to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Things Fall Apart, published after Tutuola’s novel, exemplifies how Africans can use the coloniser’s language to tell not only their stories in creative ways but also to contest myths about Africa and African knowledge systems. Since academic literacy is partly about socialising students into discipline-specific ways of constructing and sharing knowledge, the inclusion of relevant Indigenous and culturally inclusive pedagogies in academic literacy modules can contribute significantly (Angu, 2018; Marin & Bang, 2015; Jacobs, 2013; Nakata et al., 2012; Savage et al., 2011). Although Chinua Achebe was a Western-trained scholar with an exceptional mastery of the English language, Tutuola and Achebe had one thing in common: the ability to use Ibo and Yoruba to influence and reconstruct the English language. This shows “how Africans have never been passive in their embrace, internalisation, consumption and reproduction of European languages” (Nyamnjoh, 2020, p. 90). Here, the intention is not to undermine commitment to develop African languages and use them as an instrument to dismantle the unassailable position of the English language in African universities. Rather, I wish to draw on both arguments to explore how to reimagine the teaching of academic literacy in English in the context of curriculum decolonisation and the promotion of African languages.
4. What Academic Literacy Competencies Should Be Taught to Students Post the Hashtag Movements?
What does a decolonised curriculum mean for an AL practitioner who is expected to teach across faculties with different academic literacy expectations? Is it enough to simply embellish our AL pedagogies with African forms of knowledge that excite our students? How do we decolonise AL curriculum and pedagogies in such a way that students graduate not only with faculty-specific graduate attributes but also with the set of cognitive competencies required in a global and ever-changing workplace?
As a teacher of AL in English, I subscribe to Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogy or the notion of transformative education (Giroux, 2012; Freire, 1996). Therefore, banking education in SA higher education acts as a disservice to African students who are expected to challenge power structures and institutional cultures from a resilient South African past, which continues to influence their academic aspirations. But when these students study Western scholars, cultures and historical/political experiences from the West, teaching and learning is reduced to a banking process. But bell hooks challenges us to teach to transgress and for this transgression to happen and teaching to be truly transformative, it is imperative to think about our students, where they come from and the cultural and social experiences they bring to the classroom as well as their career aspirations (Angu, 2018; Clarence & Mckenna, 2017; hooks, 1994).
To reimagine academic literacy teaching is to start with the recognition that academic literacy is a social practice as well as a mode of reasoning or a cognitive process, which can facilitate students’ understanding of the multiple and complex ways that knowledge is constructed and shared in higher education, whether in English or any other language. It is about “epistemological access”, considering disciplinary norms, and the cultural and contextual aspects of student writing (Angu, Boakye & Eybers, 2020; Weideman, 2013; Jacobs, 2007, 2013). Therefore, this area of study should be approached without prior assumptions that some literacy practices are better, more appropriate and effective than others. To this end, academic literacy should be embraced as a social practice, which should allow students to draw on their backgrounds and knowledge of the world to challenge hierarchies of knowledge and the invisibility of African ways of knowing in university curricula.
Although African students are expected to do this in English, I see the English language the same way that Amos Tutuola and Chinua Achebe saw it. For Tutuola, language was “nothing more than a container, an envelope or a messenger, even if an active, lively and enlivening one … He cautions against dwelling on language at the risk of losing out on the contents or the message” (Nyamnjoh, 2020, p. 90). In teaching AL in English or any other language, we should open up spaces for our diverse students, to draw on their unique cultural and linguistic repertoires and bring them to bear on their learning. In this case, academic literacy contents should allow for the plurality of ideas and texts, which speak directly to the social and political contexts of students, but also create opportunities to engage more critically with texts from their different contexts.
As mentioned previously, the coloniality of knowledge is equally about silencing alternative forms of valid knowledge to hinder the development of an intelligentsia that can challenge the very essence of colonial power (Mbembe, 2016; Mamdani, 1997). Therefore, reading a mixture of texts means students are able to interact with different ways of being, knowing and doing. This can nurture a culture of critical thinking, reading and writing as students can begin to see and model how different writers use modes of writing to express their experiences, cultural orientations and identities to entrench or resist/disrupt particular ideologies in higher education. In addition, this reading process can help students to realise that universal knowledge is a colonial construction and that any meaningful knowledge should be relatable and contextually relevant (Hardy, 2018; Angu, 2018; Boughey & Mckenna, 2016; Pineteh, 2014; Mdepa & Tshiwulu, 2012). Furthermore, AL curricula should be designed to include discipline/context-specific indigenous and culturally inclusive pedagogies. This can help students to recognise and appreciate community-based practices such as storytelling and oral performances as valid knowledge comparable to those from the Global North (Marin & Bang, 2015; Nakata et al., 2012).
In essence, AL curricula and classroom pedagogies should focus on developing cognitive competencies, which can empower students not to read European texts/knowledge as the golden standard that other texts must emulate. By recentring African knowledges, we are equally positioning them at the centre of intellectual scrutiny, which means students should read even a decolonised curriculum with the same critical authority. Transformative education is developing students’ sense of agency so that they can critically respond to the challenges in their society. A transformative AL approach is therefore about developing critical thinkers and ethical citizens who can help to address the world’s wicked problems and still be able to compete favourably in a rapidly changing global economy. It is not developing students who simply mimic knowledge in different languages.
5. Who Should be Responsible for Providing Such Academic Competencies to University Students?
Ndlovu-Gatsheni describes curriculum decolonisation or what he terms epistemic freedom as “the struggle for African people to think, theorize, interpret the world and write from where they are located, unencumbered by Eurocentrism” (2018, p. 3). Therefore, thinking about Africa and African knowledge systems through the prism of AL teaching at a SA university, is about recognising the fact that teaching and learning in SA higher education is influenced significantly by the country’s resilient past. A past which still allows for the practice of racism, ethnicism, xenophobia, homophobia and toxic masculinity in higher education. The teaching of academic literacy in a decolonial space is about providing students with critical skills to challenge new and subtle forms of racially motivated stereotypes about Blackness and Black students’ abilities to read and write in English (Prah, 2017; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018, 2013). It is about navigating through disciplinary literacy expectations still rooted in European ideas of what constitutes valid knowledge in SA higher education. AL practitioners who do not conform to and promote the superiority of Western forms of knowledge are strategically positioned to train students to be critical thinkers and problem solvers, if curricula, pedagogical practices and assessment modes are reimagined. Given that AL is about socialising students into the multiple ways knowledge is constructed, shared or contested in their respective disciplines and broadly at university level, it is conceptually and practically difficult to achieve this goal without sustained collaboration between like-minded disciplinary lecturers and academic literacy practitioners (Boughey & Mckenna, 2016; Pineteh, 2014; Jacobs, 2007, 2010, 2013). Second, SA universities have recognised that effective academic literacy support is one of the main predictors of cognitive development, academic access and work readiness. Therefore, university management should capacitate units and departments tasked with such a mammoth responsibility.
6. Conclusion
In a multiracial post-apartheid SA and a higher education context constituted around Western ideals and knowledge systems, racial and epistemic hierarchies and how they implicate university access and success still matter. The one question that has preoccupied my mind in the aftermath of the hashtag movements is: what quality of graduates are we sending to the world? Rhodes has fallen but it did not dismantle Eurocentric epistemologies that students fought, destroyed universities infrastructure and even lost lives for. The curriculum is still very much colonised in all shapes and forms. This is common knowledge and therefore not the main focus of the article, as I have shown in the previous sections. While different stakeholders in SA’s higher education sector navigate the aftermath of the hashtag movements and participate in conversations about curriculum decolonisation, AL practitioners should approach pedagogy as
a mode of critical intervention, one that endows teachers with a responsibility to prepare students not merely for jobs but for being in the world in ways that allow them to influence the larger political, ideological and economic forces that bear down on their lives. (Giroux, 2014, p. 37)
Although decolonising knowledge in SA universities has been reduced to some talk shows in academic forums or one of the trendy projects that academics research and write about when it is time to apply for promotion, there are still ample opportunities for transformative pedagogies that can aid students in their struggles for socio-economic and ideological freedom and self-discovery (Giroux, 2014; hooks, 1994).
As AL practitioners attempt to reimagine pedagogies, it is important to be mindful that many South African universities have moved on and are now preoccupied with the fourth industrial revolution and generative artificial intelligence (AI). Curriculum decolonisation is now a side project. Additionally, neo-liberal public universities are not for public good and as students struggle to navigate a higher education context riddled with different academic and non-academic challenges, academic literacy practitioners should at least be “good teachers”. I mean teachers who understand that higher education for many South Africans is a poverty exit strategy and their pedagogical practices should prepare them for a changing marketplace where generative AI is seriously threatening the job opportunities they are studying for. For me, good teachers are constantly mindful of the fact that access is not simply a matter of demographics but “the possibility to inhabit a space to the extent that one can say this is my home” (Mbembe, 2016, p. 30). Whether the curriculum has been decolonised or not, the hashtag movements and more recently generative AI have engendered the return to developing critical and ethical thinkers as a practice of good teaching. Academic literacy pedagogies in the aftermath of the hashtag movements and in the context of new higher education disruptions such as generative AI, should prioritise “breaking the cycle that tends to turn students into customer and consumers” (Mbembe, 2016, p. 31). This means an intentional curriculum and pedagogical shift from banking education and the “mania of assessment” which is driving the endless pursuit of throughputs (Mbembe, 2016, p. 31; Giroux, 2014; Freire, 1996). As stated previously, AL is about developing those key cognitive competencies for a deeper appreciation of the world and how it influences knowledge construction, dissemination and contestation, through different disciplines in higher education. Knowledge production and sharing in an era of curriculum decolonisation should therefore prepare students to always question what is being taught, why, how and by whom.