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Introduction

As the previous section of this teaching portfolio suggests, a good teacher must be someone who has spent time reflecting on their teaching philosophy. However, a good philosophy will have little meaning if it is not translated into practice concretely in the classroom. It is through the development of curricula that one’s teaching philosophy can come to life. By actually developing and running a particular educational experience, a teaching philosophy can be distilled into a real, valuable learning experience. This section of my teaching portfolio explores curriculum development in order to think through how the ideas informing my teaching philosophy can come to life in a classroom.

 

It’s hard to define what is meant by curriculum development. According to Wilson (Wilson n.d.), the word ‘curriculum’ has Latin origins and originally meant ‘to run a course’. In the university context, the word can be used in several different ways. Perhaps, as a starting point, we can define it very widely – Wilson (n.d.), for example, defines it as ‘Anything and everything that teaches a lesson, planned or otherwise’. Of course, using such a wide definition makes it difficult to discuss curriculum at all, as there is hardly anything related to education that one could leave out of the discussion!

 

To further complicate things, many scholars list a number of different types of curriculum. For example, Wilson (n.d.) talks about the explicit curriculum, the implicit curriculum, the null curriculum, the extra curriculum the societal curriculum, the phantom curriculum, the concomitant curriculum, the curriculum-in-use, the received curriculum, the internal curriculum and the electronic curriculum! While considering all these variations is helpful when thinking about the various aspects of curriculum development, it is useful to keep in mind a more specific and fairly clear definition of what is under discussion in this part of my portfolio. For that reason I will define curriculum in line with Ebert et al. (2013) who describe it as ‘the means and materials with which students will interact for the purpose of achieving identified educational outcomes’ (Ebert et al. 2013). What is valuable about this definition is that it emphasises that curriculum development involves paying attention both to ‘the materials’ (i.e. what is taught) and ‘the means’ (i.e. how it is taught).

 

The rest of this discussion on curriculum development is guided by this definition. The discussion seeks to relate literature on curriculum development to the undergraduate curriculum in my department (the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University). Rather than focusing only on a single course, I will be exploring the whole of our undergraduate curriculum. I have chosen to adopt this focus in this section of the portfolio as it fitted well with ongoing debates about transforming or decolonising the curriculum and allowed me to use the following discussion to inform a curriculum review process underway at my institution (and which will be discussed further below).

Literature on curriculum development will be explored in detail and related in each instance to my department’s undergraduate curriculum. I begin by situating my discussion in the national and institutional context and by introducing my department’s undergraduate curriculum. I then briefly overview some of the broad possible approaches to curriculum development before beginning a discussion on a few key concepts in curriculum development. To keep the discussion succinct, I have decided to focus in particular on a few key concepts: curriculum responsiveness, epistemic diversity, outcomes and alignment, and the decolonisation of the curriculum. There are other concepts that are also often related to curriculum development, but the concepts I have chosen are all of particular relevance to Political and International Studies and, in the case of the final concept (decolonisation of the curriculum), to current raging debates around curriculum transformation. Because of how topical the debate on decolonisation is, I will give special attention to this debate and will discuss at length my department’s grappling with the question of whether and how to decolonise our curriculum.

 

Exploring the National and Institutional Contexts influencing Curriculum Development

Given the many changes to the South African political landscape over the last two decades, it is unsurprising that there have been many changes to educational policy over that time period as well. Several of these changes have important implications for curriculum development and so it is worth providing a brief overview of the South African education policy landscape.

 

In South Africa, the Department of Higher Education determines higher education policy. Two statutory bodies, the Council on Higher Education (CHE) and the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC) play an important role in driving national higher education policy and practice. The CHE was established by the Higher Education Act of 1997 and is responsible for quality assurance in higher education. The HEQC is a permanent sub-committee of the CHE.

 

Also of relevance are the National Qualifications Framework Act (NQF) which provides a framework for the ‘classification, registration, publication and articulation of quality-assured national qualifications’ and the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) which oversees its implementation. While the NQF provides a framework for all national qualifications, a document of greater relevance for curriculum development in higher education is the Higher Education Qualifications Sub-Framework (HEQSF). This document attempts to create a level of standardisation in terms of the higher education programmes in place across the country. Nine different higher education qualifications (such as ‘Higher Certificate’ and ‘Bachelor’s Degree’) are identified and guidelines are given as to what each qualification entails. Each institution across the country has to ensure that its qualifications comply with the guidelines laid out in the HEQSF.

 

While policy documents like the HEQSF lay out details like the admission requirements to each qualification and the number of credits required, they do not provide any clear guidelines relating to the content of the qualifications. This means that universities (and departments and individual academics within them) have significant leeway in deciding what goes into each programme. At Rhodes University, the responsibility for determining academic programmes has generally been devolved down to departmental level with departments each individually determining their programme, although approval by higher authorities (such as Faculty or Senate) is required for some kinds of changes. The Rhodes University Policy on Curriculum Development and Review outlines some general principles which should guide curriculum development, but is not narrowly prescriptive in terms of its guidelines for the content of the curriculum or how it should be administered.

Calls from students for the decolonisation or transformation of curricula at higher education institutions have pressured universities such as Rhodes University to take a somewhat more proactive approach to curriculum development. In response to these calls, Rhodes University initiated a curriculum review process in 2016 to encourage departments to thoroughly review their curricula. This process involves the establishment of faculty level committees to which departments will be expected to submit reports.

 

Introducing the Department of Political and International Studies

My discussion of curriculum development will take the whole undergraduate programme of my department as a case study. In so doing, my discussion can hopefully be of assistance with the curriculum review process discussed above.

 

As I will be using the whole undergraduate programme (rather than only a single course) as my case study, it is helpful to introduce my department and its undergraduate programme in some detail. The Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University offers the subject ‘political and international studies’ as a major that can be taken by undergraduate students at the university. While political studies and international studies are offered as separate subjects at some universities, at Rhodes University they are combined as a single subject. We structure our programme around some broad outlines which are open to interpretation by the lecturers offering each course, rather than having a very set programme which remains identical year after year. The general undergraduate curriculum each year consists of four compulsory term-long modules at each year level:

 

Politics 1: Political Theory, Political Philosophy, Comparative Politics, International Relations

Politics 2: Comparative Politics, International Studies, Political Philosophy, Political Studies

Politics 3: African Studies, African Political Theory, Political Studies, International Studies

 

While these modules are all presented annually, the exact content of each module varies considerably. Each year, lecturers are assigned to each module and develop a specific course related to the general theme indicated. So, while the general theme remains the same, the exact content might differ considerably from year to year.  For example, a course in ‘Political Studies’ might focus on themes in South African politics one year, while in the following year it might focus on Democratization in Southern Africa. Similarly, a course in ‘International Studies’ might focus on the United Nations one year, while looking at Regional Organizations in Africa the next. Consequently, the content of each year course (Politics 1, 2 or 3) differs substantially from year to year as different lecturers launch different courses. Lecturers are given substantial freedom to develop their own courses and there is little departmental oversight to ensure coherence or continuity, although our external examiners sometimes comment on the programme as a whole. During the ten years that I have been in the department, we have not substantially reviewed the curriculum. However, all departments have now been requested to undergo some kind of curriculum review as part of a general university-wide response to calls for the decolonisation of university curricula in South Africa. As such, the department is now under some pressure to look more carefully at our programme. I assisted with the departmental curriculum review process using some of the ideas learnt doing the Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education. The report produced as part of this review process is available here.

Approaches to Curriculum Development

Because there are so many different ways to think about curriculum, it is helpful to review some different approaches to curriculum and consider what each emphasises. Smith (2000:3) identifies four different approaches to curriculum. Firstly, we might consider curriculum to refer to ‘a body of knowledge to be transmitted’. If it is understood in this way, then its meaning is equated with the idea of a syllabus or simply the content of what is to be taught. Secondly, we can focus our understanding of curriculum on the ends of education or the ‘product’. If this is the focus, then the emphasis shifts from content towards thinking about what we want students to be able to do (and be) at the end of their time at university. Thirdly, we might consider curriculum to be a process, which means we stop seeing curriculum as a ‘physical thing’ and begin to consider it as being an ‘interaction between teachers, students and knowledge’; it is ‘what actually happens in the classroom’ (Smith 2000:13). When doing this we would recognise, along with Luckett (2001:49), that curriculum should be understood as ‘an experience rather than a product or a plan, as a process or a play rather than a script’. Finally, we can relate curriculum to praxis. This approach is very similar to regarding the curriculum as a process, but the difference is that an emphasis on praxis includes a consideration of the interests served by the curriculum and explicitly regards the ends of education to be emancipation (Smith 2000:23). To summarise Smith, we could say that a narrow approach to curriculum would concentrate only on the content to be taught in a particular course of study. A broader approach considers the goal of the course, the process through which it is taught and the interests served by the curriculum.

 

In my discipline, political studies, we tend to align best with the first and last of Smith’s approaches. We place great emphasis on the content of what we teach, spending much time carefully deciding what readings to include in each course and which topics to cover. Because my discipline is not governed by an outside body (such as the professional bodies which determine the syllabus in disciplines such as accounting or pharmacy), we have great freedom to determine our course content. Some politics departments choose to use textbooks at undergraduate level which reduces individual lecturers’ freedom to determine course content. However, in my department, textbooks are rarely used and each individual draws up their own syllabus. Thus, in line with Smith’s first approach above, there is much reflection on the body of knowledge that we seek to transmit to our students. However, there is far less emphasis placed on the ‘product’ and ‘process’ of our teaching. Students who take political studies take it for various reasons and end up following various career paths. Our students go on to a variety of careers, for example some become journalists, lawyers, government functionaries, policy makers, researchers, NGO workers, development consultants and so on. Thus we do not have a very clear sense of the kind of student we are producing and therefore focusing on what kind of students we seek to produce does not really make sense for us. In terms of the ‘process’ approach, our large undergraduate student numbers place some limitations on the extent to which we can really understand curriculum as an ‘interaction between teachers, students and knowledge’ (Smith 2000: 13). At postgraduate level, there is far greater emphasis on this kind of interaction and its role in educating students, but at undergraduate level we tend to fall back on transmitting content to a significant extent. Finally, in terms of the last of Smith’s approaches – an emphasis on praxis with a concern that education should be emancipatory – it is possible to see ways in which our department does adopt this approach to curriculum, although not always intentionally. Because we do not think of ourselves as preparing students to enter a particular career, we tend to rather see ourselves as educating people to be critical citizens thereby viewing education as emancipatory rather than being about transferring income-generating skills.

 

When thinking about different ways to approach curriculum development, it is also useful to consider Barnett et al.’s (2001) discussion of two competing approach to curriculum as well as Parker’s (2003) response to Barnett. Barnett and his colleagues identify a traditional approach to curriculum which places emphasis on answering the question ‘is it true?’ when evaluating knowledge claims. Emphasis is placed on concepts, on written communication and on disciplinary skills (see Barnett et al., 2001:436–437). In contrast to this approach, Barnett et al. also identify what they call an ‘emerging curriculum’ which evaluates each knowledge claim not by asking ‘is it true?’ but rather by asking ‘is it useful?’. This orientation to knowledge emphasises issues rather than concepts and places more emphasis on transferable (rather than discipline-specific) skills and on an orientation towards action rather than reflection.

 

Parker (2003) questions the dichotomy proposed by Barnett and proposes an alternative which she calls a ‘transformational curriculum’. In so doing, Parker defends some of the features of what Barnett et al. (2001) call a ‘traditional curriculum’, but in a way that does not entail defending old-school ivory tower approaches to curriculum. Her transformational curriculum draws from features of both the traditional and emerging curriculum in a way that emphasises that education entails the ‘teachers’ and students’ common engagement with the discipline’s material—a messy, open, mutual set of relationships which forms the essential part of the maturing process of the intellectual person’ (Parker, 2003:539). So, for example, her favoured approach to curriculum does not emphasise either ‘knowing that’ (a feature of traditional curricula) or ‘knowing how’ (as emphasised in the ‘emerging curriculum’), but rather ‘valuing while critiquing knowing’. It neither has the traditional emphasis on promoting particular disciplines or not the emerging emphasis on promoting external, transferable skills, but rather seeks to develop in students a ‘critically reflective orientation’ (Parker, 2003:539-540).

 

In my department, we tend to encourage students to engage with knowledge in a way that recognises that knowledge is socially constructed and contested. Doing so means that we differ from both the traditional and emerging approaches to curriculum in that when engaging with knowledge we do not want students to focus all their interest on answering the question ‘is it true?’ (as in Barnett at al.’s ‘traditional curriculum’) nor do we want them to simply evaluate knowledge claims by assessing their usefulness (as in the idea of an ‘emerging curriculum’). Rather we want them to balance a concern with the truth with an acknowledgement that our knowledge claims rarely simply point to truths. This is rather like Parker’s (2003:539) position in favour of ‘valuing while critiquing knowing’. By understanding knowledge as being socially constructed, we suggest that it is always inflected with the experiences of those who produce it and never apolitical. As discussed in the previous section of this portfolio, power affects the production of knowledge meaning that knowledge claims are always in some way related to power relations.

 

This kind of orientation to knowledge does not sit comfortably with either of the two alternatives outlined by Barnett et al. (2001). However, our approach is compatible with Parker’s (2003) ‘transformational curriculum’ in that this approach balances the key orientations of a traditional curriculum (in terms of an emphasis on discipline, concepts and a strong intellectual orientation) with some other features which are suitable for our goals, especially in its emphasis on ‘valuing while critiquing knowing’ and developing a ‘critically reflective orientation’ (Parker, 2003:539-540).

Curriculum Responsiveness

An important way to think about curriculum, is to think about to what or to whom our curriculum responds. Moll’s (2004) notion of curriculum responsiveness can be helpful in doing this. When we ask questions about how responsive a particular curriculum is, we’re asking about whether and to what extent our curriculum is attentive to some or other stakeholder. According to Ogude et al. (2005), in the context of higher education, ‘responsiveness means meeting society’s broad expectations that higher education will adapt to change and contribute to national needs’. It has the connotation of thinking through to what extent our curricula are actually contributing to meeting the needs of those outside the university. Some interpretations of the concept might link it narrowly to economic growth and labour market competitiveness, but Ogude et al. (2005) argue that if higher education is to be considered a public good, then we have to look beyond this narrow interpretation.

 

In order to avoid a narrow interpretation of responsiveness, Moll (2004) identifies four kinds of responsiveness that are relevant in the South African context. It is worth relating Moll’s four kinds of responsiveness to the Department of Political and International Studies’ undergraduate curriculum in order to see to what extent our curriculum can be considered responsive and to what exactly it responds. In what follows below, I will explore each of the kinds of responsiveness discussed by Moll and then relate it to the politics undergraduate curriculum.

 

Firstly, we can ask if our curriculum is economically responsive (Moll 2004:4). This means asking whether or not our universities are adequately preparing graduates to fill labour market needs. We might want to know if we are preparing enough graduates for each sector of the economy and we might want to know if their university preparation makes them able to perform adequately and to continue learning once they have entered the workplace. If we relate this first kind of responsiveness to our department’s curriculum, I think it is fair to say that our department resists pressures to make our curriculum more economically responsive. We do not think of ourselves as preparing graduates to fill the needs of the marketplace, at least not in the sense of teaching them very specific, particular skills which we know to be sought after in the marketplace. Part of the reason for this, and as explained above, is that our graduates are not all following the same academic programme aimed at preparing them for the same career. It is thus difficult for us to imagine ourselves as filling market needs. However, some defence of the ‘marketability’ of our graduates is made on our website, indicating that we do believe that we are preparing students who have abilities that ought to be of use in the world of work:

 

Because our graduates emerge out of three years of studying Politics as articulate critical thinkers who can read widely with insight and understanding and who are capable of coming to reasoned independent judgments, they are sought-after in business, industry, NGOs, government and academic settings. To study Politics is to learn to be an analytical thinker in possession of the complex, higher order literacy capacities that are a requirement in every facet of a world that is increasing driven by the need to interact critically, thoughtfully and knowledgeably with large quantities of information.

 

A second kind of responsiveness is cultural responsiveness. According to Moll (2004:5), a culturally responsive curriculum is one which ‘is responsive to the cultural diversity of students and society by incorporating multiple cultural reference points that acknowledge diversity and constitute various alternative learning pathways for students’. Some understandings of cultural responsiveness include concerns around responsiveness to both genders and responsiveness to many learning styles, rather than focusing only on culture in a narrower sense (Moll, 2004:4). A culturally responsive curriculum would be one that resonates with students and would entail using examples, illustrations and teaching methods which are not culturally alien to students. It is difficult to assess the extent to which the department is culturally responsive as much of the work of being culturally responsive occurs in the day-to-day way in which individual staff members relate to students in their classrooms and offices, which I am not typically able to witness. However, what may be a matter of concern is the fact that our department’s staff profile is not very representative of the range of cultural backgrounds of our students. What is also of concern if the dominance of texts from the West in our curriculum. Both of these issues will be discussed in detail below, in the section on transformation and decolonisation because being more culturally responsive is part of transforming and decolonising our curricula. I will therefore not discuss this issue in detail here.

 

Thirdly, we might explore how responsive our curricula are to our disciplines (Moll, 2004:6). Are those who design the curriculum aware of changes in disciplinary knowledge and have these been included in the curriculum? When thinking about how responsive our curriculum is to our disciplines, we might want to bear in mind what Basil Bernstein (2000) has to say in terms of how disciplinary knowledge is converted into curricular knowledge. Bernstein (2000) argues that in order for disciplinary knowledge to make it into the classroom, it has to be recontextualised (see Singh 2002:573 for discussion). We don’t just teach exactly what is produced within our disciplines; rather, we change this knowledge so that it can work in the classroom. This recontextualisation is obviously very important because students only access knowledge that has been appropriately recontextualised for them. Moll (2004:6) suggests that in order for university lecturers to be responsive to their discipline they need to be active researchers. This will help them be better able to properly recontextualise disciplinary content. The colleagues in my department are comparatively research active (as evidenced by the university’s research reports available here).  Most of us publish regularly and keep up to date with our area of research. However, it should be noted that Political and International Studies can only be very loosely thought of as a ‘discipline’: it is often separated into sub-disciplines such as Political Theory, Political Science and International Relations, and it also operates in a very multi-disciplinary way with close interaction with a range of other Humanities disciplines. In my department, each of us maintains a firm interest in his or her particular research area, but as we are a small department, our research interests do not cover a very broad range of all that can be considered to fall under ‘Political and International Studies’. Thus we might be very responsive to particular areas within our discipline without being responsive to the discipline as a whole.

 

Finally, Moll (2004:7) asks whether our curricula are responsive to our learners. Being responsive to our learners involves teaching ‘in terms that are accessible to them and assessing them in ways they understand’ (Moll 2004:8). This means being attentive to our particular students and their particular needs and preferences rather than imposing a ready-made approach upon them. Our responsiveness to our learners can only be assessed through carefully exploring our students’ experiences of our curriculum as we might imagine we are being very responsive to them even while their own experience of our teaching is very different. In order to better understand the way in which undergraduate students experience our department, I conducted survey and focus group research among undergraduate students. The findings of this research, which reveal some of the ways in which we are – and are not – responsive to our learners are discussed below in the section on decolonising the curriculum.  

 

Outcomes and Alignment

It is difficult to talk about curriculum development in South Africa today without mentioning outcomes-based education (OBE) and some of the concepts that go along with it. OBE has been very influential in South Africa and our National Qualifications Framework was quite explicitly developed ‘in line with the outcomes-based theoretical framework’ (South African Qualifications Authority 2012:3). While some universities and some departments within universities have resisted the push towards OBE, the guiding philosophy behind OBE is very evident throughout our HEIs.

 

OBE entails organising any learning experience around a clearly defined set of outcomes. Spady provides a succinct definition of OBE, saying that it means ‘clearly focusing and organizing everything in an educational system around what is essential for all students to be able to do successfully at the end of their learning experiences’ (Spady 1994:1). In order for a learning experience to conform with OBE, Spady says that it is important both that the experience be focused on a clear set of learning outcomes and that the appropriate conditions and opportunities are present for students to achieve these outcomes (Spady 1994:1–2).

 

OBE is related to another important concept: constructive alignment. Biggs explains that in an aligned learning experience, there is maximum consistency between the expected outcomes of the learning experience, the teaching and learning activities undertaken to achieve these outcomes, and the assessment of the learning experience (Biggs 1999; Biggs 2014). If careful attention is given to the alignment of the outcomes, teaching and learning experiences and assessment, then students are most likely to learn what it is we want them to learn. As Biggs points out, good teaching should be about developing in our students the abilities we believe they ought to have, rather than just identifying and affirming those who already have these abilities (Biggs 1999:57–58).

 

One of the main advantage of OBE is that it shifts the focus away from what the teacher is doing to what the student is actually learning. In outlining this approach to learning, Biggs (2014:6) cites Tyler, an early predecessor of OBE, who argues that ‘Learning takes place through the active behaviour of the student: it is what he (sic) does that he learns, not what the teacher does’. In OBE, the emphasis is clearly on what the learner is supposed to be able to do at the end of the learning experience. A related advantage of OBE is that it makes lecturers’ expectations for their students explicit. Students are told clearly what it is we expect them to be able to do.

 

OBE is not without its critics, however. One problem with OBE is that it does not always do what it claims to do: namely to make explicit to students what it is we expect of them. According to Hussey and Smith (2002:225) the ‘clarity, explicitness and objectivity [of learning outcomes] are largely spurious’. As Knight (2001:373) notes, complex learning cannot easily be reduced to clear, precise outcomes. For example, even if we do clearly specify that students should demonstrate critical thinking or, say, a nuanced understanding of Foucault’s approach to power, the statement of such outcomes does not really make it easy for struggling students to determine what exactly it is that is expected of them. Another important shortcoming identified by Hussey and Smith (2002:228–229), is that OBE is not well-equipped to deal with the unforeseen. An important aspect of university learning is the emergence of new knowledge and ideas and we need to allow for the possibility that students might learn something we did not expect. While OBE is learner-centred in one sense – it is more concerned with what the learner does than with what the teacher does – it tends to assume that the outcomes of the learning experience are determined by the teacher and that students must be pushed to learn what we want them to learn through the alignment of teaching and assessment with these outcomes. It is worth noting, however, that this latter critique can possibly be dealt with a more flexible approach to OBE, such as that described by Hussey and Smith (2003).

 

In summary, whether one favours OBE or not, the prominence of this approach means that when developing our curricula, we need to be aware of its strengths and shortcomings and to that we ought also to engage with the related idea of constructive alignment.

 

In the Department of Political and International Studies, we have largely adopted the practice of identifying learning outcomes for each course and specifying them in our course outlines. Most departmental course outlines include a list of learning outcomes, although these are formulated very differently and the extent to which they are discussed in class or highlighted anywhere other than in the course outlines differs from course to course.

 

The problems discussed above in relation to OBE are evident in our department. For example, while identifying course outcomes is supposed to help students better understand what is expected of them, these course outcomes often include outcomes which are very difficult for students to grasp. For example, we require that students ‘show appreciation of the historical evolution of core political ideas’ or tell them that they need to ‘defend [their] position with careful argument’. As Hussey and Smith (2002) argue, it is not at all easy for students to figure out what we mean when specifying such outcomes. However, it is likely that lecturers provide students with further guidelines about what they mean in class.

 

The critique that learning outcomes do not easily lend themselves to flexibility is also a possible area of concern as lecturers in the department typically draw up the learning outcomes before courses begin and students typically do not have any input into these learning outcomes. However, it is perfectly conceivable that lecturers could invite students to have input into the learning outcomes for at least some of the courses. As Hussey and Smith (2003) note, it is possible for learning outcomes to emerge during the teaching process and the good teacher ought to facilitate the integration of such outcomes into the curriculum. In this way students will be able to contribute to shaping the learning experience.

 

Another point of interest is to note that almost all courses in my department encourage what might be called ‘critical thinking’. Even where thinking critically is not mentioned in the list of learning outcomes (and it often is), it appears in essay and exam questions where students are very often asked to ‘critically discuss’ some or other topic or text. Consider the following typical undergraduate essay questions (all taken from recent exam question papers):

 

 

While thinking critically is such a key outcome for politics students (and, arguably, more generally for students in the Humanities), it is a really difficult skill to develop and simply telling students that they need to ‘think critically’ does not really make the course requirements explicit which is, after all, the idea behind having learning outcomes. Hussey and Smith (2002) discuss this at length when critiquing OBE. They give a very good illustration of the problem:

 

If the learning outcome for a third-year teaching session on an English Literature degree specified that students will be able to evaluate critically Thomas Hardy’s At Castle Boterel, we might be impressed by a student who made an elaborate attempt to employ Heidegger’s notion of Dasein and a feminist interpretation of guilt, but would fail a student who simply said that the poem was old fashioned rubbish. However, both are critical evaluations and we praise one and dismiss the other only because we know roughly what is to count as a critical evaluation at this level: the descriptors themselves do not tell us this (Hussey & Smith, 2002: 226).

 

This kind of problem emerges regularly in our department when students understand ‘critically analyse’ to mean simply that they ought to say something critical (i.e. negative) about the particular thing under discussion. Our department may want to reflect on how we can help students better understand what it is we are wanting them to do when asking them to think critically.

 

Doing so may mean we might need to think more carefully about the concept of constructive alignment. How can we teach and assess in ways that help students become critical thinkers? Our typical teaching method involves four to five lectures and one tutorial per week. During the lectures students typically have little active involvement. Most lecturers in the department encourage students to ask questions and to contribute in other ways to discussion of the course content, but given that the size of our undergraduate classes vary from 100 to 400 students, the likelihood of a significant proportion of the class participating in any given lecture is very slim. During our lectures, it is likely that we demonstrate and ‘model’ critical thinking to our students by critically engaging with various texts ourselves. This is in line with the suggestion by Pithers and Soden (2007:241) that one way in which lecturers can help encourage critical thinking is to put emphasis on the ‘particular forms of reasoning’ within our disciplines so that students can see what is expected. However, it may be that simply listening to us is not the best way for students to themselves develop the ability to think critically. Pithers and Soden (2007:242) argue that research shows that simply presenting well thought out responses to questions does not help students develop critical thinking. We need to model how to reach these responses, rather than just presenting them ‘smoothly and slickly’ (Pithers & Soden, 2007:242). If our lectures are too ‘smooth and slick’, students might come to admire our ability to think critically, but not to develop that ability themselves.

 

In terms of assessment and how it aligns with the outcomes of each course, the department places great emphasis on essay writing. Students typically have to write one long essay each term and then several shorter essays during sit-down exams at the end of each semester. We need to think carefully about whether or not essay writing is a good tool for developing critical thinking skills. We can certainly see whether or not students have developed critical thinking by looking at their responses to questions like the ones listed earlier, but it is not clear whether or not the process of writing essays actually develops the ability to think critically. In an aligned curriculum, we would select assessment methods which helped develop the outcomes we believe to be important so this issue is worth further attention.

 

Epistemic Diversity

When thinking about curriculum development, it is also important to recognise that there are diverse ways of knowing. This is a topic addressed by Luckett in a paper in which she proposes that we embrace an epistemically diverse curriculum (Luckett 2001). She identifies four kinds of knowledge (summarised in the diagram below), arguing that all should be included in university curricula.

C:\Users\Sally\Dropbox\PGDHE\Curriculum\Submission\Epistemic Diversity Graph.png

(This diagram is taken from Luckett, 2001: 55).

 

In the bottom right quadrant, we have propositional knowledge. This is the kind of knowledge most easily and often associated with universities. Here students are presented with facts and information, organised along the lines of an academic discipline. In the bottom left quadrant, is practical or applied knowledge. While this kind of knowledge is often associated with laboratory work or internships, Luckett (2001:56) notes that there is a need for the application of knowledge to move beyond such ‘safe’, structured environments.

 

The top two quadrants represent kinds of knowledge less often included in university curricula. The kind of knowing represented in the top left quadrant (‘experiential knowledge’) relates to some of the ‘critical cross-field outcomes’ that the South African Qualifications Authority wants included in our university curricula – outcomes such as the ability to work in a team or to communicate effectively (for a full list see South African Qualifications Authority, 2000). In order to develop this kind of knowing, we need to be open to different kinds of teaching as traditional teaching methods are not ideal for facilitating the acquisition of this kind of knowledge.

 

Epistemic knowledge, the final kind of knowledge discussed by Luckett, is, she argues, the most intellectually demanding (Luckett, 2001:57). Students can only develop this kind of knowledge if they are able to take a step back from their own frames of reference and their own assumptions and values and are able to recognise the validity of different ways of knowing (Luckett 2001:57). Luckett argues that students are unlikely to be able to acquire this way of knowing if they have not been exposed to the forms of knowledge in the other three quadrants, and particularly experiential knowledge.

 

In my department, the two kinds of knowledge that are most valued are propositional knowledge and epistemic knowledge. In terms of propositional knowledge, we expect our students to acquire basic disciplinary knowledge (familiarity with a range of concepts, for example) and to become more knowledgeable about political phenomena. This can be seen in the following lists of learning outcomes taken from different course outlines in our department:

 

 

These kinds of expectations all relate to ‘knowing that’ rather than ‘knowing how’ to use the terms Luckett uses in explaining Quadrants 1 and 2 above (Luckett 2001).

 

In addition to expecting our students to develop propositional knowledge, we also expect them to develop epistemic knowledge in that we expect them to ‘think critically’ and to be able to question the views they might have had when arriving at university. On our website, when introducing our subject, we say that ‘To study Politics is to learn to argue and defend positions, to critically evaluate the nature of the evidence that people provide for what they believe to be true’. Doing this clearly involves epistemic knowledge. Our course outcomes also have this focus. For example, in a course introducing students to comparative politics, I inform students that I expect them to be able to ‘critically evaluate the field of comparative politics’. Similarly, a colleague who teaches international studies, expects her students to demonstrate ‘An ability to think critically about [International Relations] and speak confidently about this field of study’. Furthermore, as discussed above, typical essay questions in political studies require students to ‘critically discuss’ some or other issue and often require them to evaluate competing claims made by authors with very different positions. To do so requires the students to demonstrate epistemic knowledge. As mentioned above, Luckett (2001:57) argues that the development of epistemic knowledge is harder than the other four so it is necessary for us to think carefully about how we can get our students to acquire this knowledge. They are familiar with the acquisition of propositional knowledge as this is the kind of knowledge that is emphasised in school, but many struggle with the idea that they need to be able to be able to step outside their frame of reference and critically evaluate the texts we ask them to read. It is interesting to note that Luckett (2001) believes that exposure to experiential knowledge (top left quadrant) is necessary for the development of epistemic knowledge. She states that it is through ‘reflecting on theory in the light of meaningful personal experiences, practices or critical incidents [i.e. through experiential knowledge] that learners will be encouraged to deal with epistemic plurality’ (Luckett 2001:57). If that is the case, then as a department we might want to give more consideration to experiential knowledge as this might help students better acquire epistemic knowledge.

 

Finally, it is worth commenting on the absence of practical or applied knowledge (Quadrant 2) in our curriculum. Political and International Studies is a ‘pure’ rather than ‘applied’ science and as such we do little application. This is partly because we are not preparing students for any one career as students majoring in politics go on to pursue a variety of different careers. This makes it difficult for us to introduce applied knowledge into our curriculum.

 

Decolonising the Curriculum

The transformation of South African Higher Education Institutions has long been a topic of debate in literature on education in South Africa. However, recent calls by student movements for the decolonisation of university curricula have intensified the pressure on universities to transform and have brought the question of curriculum transformation (or decolonisation) into sharp focus. Whereas previously the question of the transformation of Higher Education tended to be linked to questions of deracialising the student and staff bodies of our HEIs, the question of changing the curriculum is now receiving much-needed attention.

 

This shift towards giving increasing attention towards the curriculum is not specific to Rhodes University. Internationally, there have been a number of ‘Why is my curriculum white’ campaigns which all seek to highlight the whiteness, Eurocentrism and narrowness of university curricula worldwide. The first of these campaigns began at University College London where this video gave expression to the views of those critiquing the whiteness of the curriculum and led to a broader campaign organised by the National Union of Students in the United Kingdom (see here). At Rhodes University students organised a ‘Rhodes so White’ campaign highlighting the ways in which Rhodes University continues to be a white space (see John 2015). Part of this campaign involved highlighting ways in which the curriculum at Rhodes University privileges white experience. Concerns around curriculum also took centre stage at a conference on curriculum transformation held at the university in April 2015. This conference saw several heated debates occurring and many deviations from the planned programme as student participants challenged presenters and pushed forward their own ideas. Since these events, the topic of curriculum transformation (or, as some prefer to term it, decolonisation) has been constantly under discussion at the institution. The Centre for Higher Education Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) has held regular ‘Curriculum Conversations’ (see here and also Vorster 2016) and the university has begun an institution-wide curriculum review process. Debates about the curriculum were also kept firmly on the agenda during the 2016 Fees Must Fall protests at Rhodes University and elsewhere. During these protests, more and more students began insisting that not only should higher education be free, but that it must also be decolonised (see media coverage here and here).

 

The protests have thus intensified already existing contestation around university curricula. But, while these debates are new to some staff and students, they build upon long-standing concerns around Eurocentrism in university curricula around the world. More generally, these debates can also be linked to the growing recognition that knowledge and power are related as argued by postcolonial scholars like Edward Said (1978) and feminist theorists like Donna Haraway (1988). Such scholars emphasise that we need to reject what Luckett (2010:8) calls ‘naïve objectivism’ which is a position that assumes that it is possible to describe, map out and predict the empirical world in a way that is completely neutral and not in any way influenced by the ‘mediating subjectivities, contexts and interests of the human observer’ (Luckett 2010:9). Postcolonial and feminist thinkers have shown, in different ways, that supposedly neutral knowledge is actually partial and is influenced by the context and identity of those producing the knowledge. Once we recognise that the supposedly neutral knowledge that has formed the canon of so many disciplines is actually more partial and subjective than we imagined it to be, we must surely follow this up by considering introducing different perspectives into our curricula.

 

Recent writing about decolonial thinking and alternative epistemologies also has great relevance for debates on decolonising the curriculum (see for example Mignolo, 2009; Grosfoguel, 2012; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013). Like earlier scholars such as Said and Haraway, Mignolo and his fellow decolonial thinkers reject the idea that those who produce knowledge can be ‘transparent, disincorporated from the known and untouched by the geo-political configuration of the world in which people are racially ranked and regions are racially configured’ (Mignolo, 2009:160). This means that decolonising the curriculum entails both looking at the existing curricula differently (rather than simply discarding it) and also opening up space for other kinds of knowledge to be attended to at our universities. As Mignolo says, decolonial thinking involves both ‘the unveiling of epistemic silences of Western epistemology’ and the ‘affirming [of] the epistemic rights of the racially devalued’. By ‘epistemic rights’ he points to the way in which the oppression of certain groups of people involved the suppression of their ways of knowing – a form of oppression that has arguably received inadequate attention.

 

To decolonise the curriculum must then involve rethinking what we teach our students. Here, scholars like Pillay (2015) argue that we need to think beyond a ‘supplemental’ approach where we simply add African sources into the existing curriculum. As James Ferguson (2006:49) puts it in relation to how to think about globalisation from an African perspective, we cannot imagine that all we need to do is to ‘add Africa and stir’. Rather when rethinking our curricula, we need to imagine how thinking about things from an African perspective affects the way we understand the rest of the world. Furthermore, it is not enough that our focus should now be on Africa (or other parts of the non-Western world) while our approach to the object of study and our intended audience remains the same. As Olukoshi (2006:539) notes, when talking about African Studies, we have to go beyond ‘decoding Africa and Africans for the world’ and begin studying the world (including Africa) in a way that is enhances our understanding of it from the perspective of Africa. Similarly, Grosfoguel (2007:211) draws a distinction between those who produce ‘studies about the subaltern’ and those who produce ‘studies with and from a subaltern perspective’. We have to do more than simply include studies about previously ignored parts of the world, rather we need to think about studying the world from the perspective of and in the interests of those who have been marginalised from the knowledge-production process. What is needed, in the words of the editor of the online African Studies journal postamble, is ‘a radical rethinking of the epistemological biases and ideological positionality underlying the construction of the curriculum’.

 

When thinking about decolonising the curriculum in South Africa, there is some debate about Africanisation. Does decolonisation mean Africanisation? Does Africanisation mean eliminating the presence of knowledge from elsewhere? While there have been some moments in the recent student protests where students have appeared to suggest that knowledge from the West ought to be discarded entirely (see for example the debate around #ScienceMustFall discussed here and here); for the most part, commentators seem to be arguing that there must be a greater presence of African (as well as other non-Western) scholarship in our curricula, rather than that the curricula should consist entirely and exclusively of scholarship from Africa. As Pillay puts it, we need to ‘think the world, now equipped with the intellectual heritages that we have been taught to ignore from across the previously colonized world’ (Pillay, 2015). To do so involves what Said calls ‘contrapuntal thinking’ (1994:51). Thinking contrapuntally means that while we might continue to include some of the texts that have previously been dominant in the curriculum, we now must read them differently – we must read them ‘with a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts’. As Garuba (2015) explains it, a contrapuntal analysis ‘takes into account the perspectives of both the colonised and the coloniser, their interwoven histories, their discursive entanglements – without necessarily harmonising them or attending to one while erasing the other’.

 

Scholars like Mignolo (2009) and Desai (2012) emphasise that decolonising our curricula must mean changing the way we teach rather than just what we teach. We have to think about changing ‘the terms of the conversation’ (Mignolo, 2009). Desai explains this position insisting: ‘I’m not asking only about why particular people do not have a seat at the table; rather, I am asking why is the table built this way?’ (Desai 2012:157). Both of these scholars want us to reconsider not only what we teach, but how we teach and, more generally, who we recognise as knowers.

 

All of these concerns apply very acutely to the curriculum in the Department of Political and International Studies and have been the subject of discussion in the department. However, in the ten years that I have been working in the department, we have never conducted any kind of general curriculum review. As part of the university’s newly established curriculum review process, we now have the opportunity to reflect on our curriculum in terms of the extent to which it can be understood to be ‘decolonised’.

 

One of the main concerns of those advocating for the decolonisation of the curriculum is the question of who it is that is presented as being a producer of knowledge. Who is recognised as a ‘knower’ and who is not? While we might not explicitly at any point say something like ‘Knowledge is produced by white people’ or ‘Men are the ones who produce valuable knowledge’, this is implied if students are only exposed to white or male scholars. In order to get a sense of who my department values as a producer of knowledge, I conducted an analysis of who is recognised as a scholar in our undergraduate curriculum.

 

To begin with, I looked at who teaches in our undergraduate programme, analysing the characteristics of those who lectured in our undergraduate programme during 2016. The results of this analysis are presented graphically below. Note that two staff members taught more than one undergraduate course and they were therefore represented twice. Thus there were 12 courses taught by ten different scholars.

UG lecturers.png

 

The characteristics of the scholars teaching in our undergraduate programme suggest that our department does present people of both genders, different races and different geographical origins as all being capable of being producers of knowledge. Three quarters of the 12 undergraduate courses were presented by black lecturers and almost half by women. All the staff members were African in terms of geographical origin, but there was some diversity in that three of the courses were presented by non-South Africans (all of whom come from other African countries). However, it is important to note that of the ten scholars who taught on our 2016 undergraduate programme, only three were permanent, full-time staff members and two of these three are white. In other words, all except one of the black scholars was a contract lecturer (although one of these contract lecturers has since been employed on a permanent basis). The department’s permanent staff members are not at all representative of the characteristics of our students and the country (5 out of our 7 permanent staff members are white), but the staff we bring in on contract are mostly black.

 

However, the characteristics of the scholars we present to our students in our courses are quite different to the characteristics of those who teach in our undergraduate programme. Basing myself of the 12 course outlines used in our undergraduate programme, I analysed the characteristics of the scholars whose work is prescribed in our undergraduate programme. A summary of my findings are presented graphically below. Details of the methodology I used are provided in Appendix A of the department’s Curriculum Review Report, which is available here.

Figure 2 (left): Gender of scholars whose texts are prescribed to undergraduates

Figure 3 (right): Race of scholars whose texts are prescribed to undergraduates

Birthplace.pngBase.png

Figure 4 (left): Birthplace of scholars whose texts are prescribed to undergraduates

Figure 5 (right): Current base of scholars whose texts are prescribed to undergraduates

As you can see, while many of our undergraduate courses are taught by women and black scholars, the profile of the scholars we prescribe implies that knowledge is produced principally by white men based in the West. Less than 20% of the scholars prescribed were women, almost 70% were white, more than half were born in the West and 65% were based at universities in the West. Indeed, 44% (72 out of 165) of the scholars prescribed were white men who had both been born in and were based in the West. In comparison only 4% (6 out of 165) of these scholars were black women born and based outside the West (and, it is noteworthy that five of these six are based in South Africa).

 

The curriculum review process also involved the solicitation of student feedback on our curriculum. I asked third year students to complete a very general survey aimed at getting a sense of how they experience studying Political and International Studies. After analysing the results of the survey, an outside facilitator was asked to conduct two discussions with third year students to give them an opportunity to further elaborate on the responses given in the survey. The goal of the survey and discussion was to allow us to get a better sense of how our curriculum is experienced by our students.

The findings of these two processes are discussed in detail in the report (available here), but I will provide a more succinct discussion here aimed at highlighting some of the key lessons I learnt from this process for thinking about curriculum development in my discipline in the context of current debates on decolonisation.

One goal of the survey was to see if there are marked differences between the ways in which certain students experience our curriculum and, more generally, being in our department. The first part of the survey required students to indicate some of their characteristics (such as their gender, race, nationality and schooling background). When analysing the results of the survey, I was gratified to discover that there were not marked differences if the responses of students when compared along the lines of race, gender, nationality and schooling background. Students from different backgrounds seem to experience the curriculum in rather similar ways.

The second part of the survey asked students to express their level of agreement with a range of statements, all of which were positive statements, meaning that agreement with the statements would indicate satisfaction. For example, they were asked to indicate whether or not they agreed with statements like ‘What I learn in politics is relevant for my world’ or ‘I feel comfortable in the Politics Department’. This was followed with four open-ended questions to give students an opportunity to raise issues that hadn’t been raised in the survey or to indicate which points were most important for them.

In analysing these responses, I was able to identify the following positive findings:

Some of the more worrying findings relate to the following points:

The survey also included an open-ended section where students were asked to indicate what they felt were the best and worst aspects of studying politics and could also let us know anything else they felt was important. The following themes came up in terms of what students really like about studying politics:

Most of the positive comments were along these lines (i.e. related to feeling that politics had improved their understanding of the world and made them better thinkers) or related to particular subjects or lecturers whose courses they had enjoyed.

As can perhaps be expected, students gave more detail in terms of the aspects of studying politics that they like less. Here the following themes came out quite strongly.

We subsequently held two group discussions (led by an outside facilitator) to get more information about how students experience our curriculum. In this discussion, students highlighted their need for more support in terms of developing the necessary reading and writing skills and also asked for more feedback on assessment tasks. In relation to the content of the curriculum, they requested that we include more of a focus on topics like race, colonialism and African feminism.

The student feedback provides valuable insight into how students experience our curriculum. To wrap up this section, it is helpful to relate this feedback to ongoing debates around decolonisation which highlight concerns about the relevance of South African university curricula and about how alienated some students feel at our universities. The feedback from our students suggests that they do not find our curriculum irrelevant even while they do identify some topics they feel ought to receive more attention. In terms of how comfortable (or alienated) they feel, it is good to note that there does not appear to be any sub-group of students that feels particularly alienated, but of concern that some of the feedback suggests that students feel like the department could do more to make them feel comfortable and supported in their engagement with our discipline.

In closing this lengthy discussion on the decolonisation of the curriculum, it is helpful to return to Moll’s (2004) discussion of curriculum responsiveness (discussed earlier). Two of his four kinds of responsiveness are relevant to the idea of decolonising the curriculum: cultural responsiveness and responsiveness to our learners. Culturally responsive teachers are attentive to our students’ diversity and teach in a way that is enabling for all, rather than only for those from some cultures. Responsiveness to our learners means being attentive to the ways of learning of our particular learners and adapting our teaching in response to their particular needs. The findings of the curriculum review process discussed above can help my department to think of ways to be more responsive to our students, acknowledging that university curriculum in a particular discipline need not be identical in every context. Rather, our curriculum needs to be shaped in response to the particular needs of our particular learners.

Conclusion

Luckett (2001:49) observes that ‘It is well known in curriculum studies that curriculum change occurs most readily in response to major social change or crisis’. I think it is fair to say that the last couple of years constitute something of a crisis in South African higher education, with protests occurring on almost every single campus across the country, often leading to long suspensions of the academic programme. While these protests have been principally about fees, the question of curriculum has definitely been present throughout. Protesting students not only want free access to higher education, but also want a different kind of higher education to the one they are being offered. This opens up the opportunity to radically rethink curriculum development across the country. While this process of rethinking is – and must necessarily be – unsettling, it can be hoped that what it produces will be a more relevant, responsive curriculum.