EDWARD SHIZHA

11. INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS AND THE CURRICULUM

INTRODUCTION The school system in many regions of Africa does little to cater for the unique challenges to psychosocial adjustment and cultural identity development that students experience when they enter the school gate. Schools and the education system in general promote poor academic performance, low self-esteem, and high dropout rates for students who do not identify with the schools’ cultural capital. The school systems ignore cultural capital that learners bring to school and thus fail to provide a supportive home-school learning environment. In the end, teachers and education policymakers, and those who conduct evaluation end up inappropriately “blaming the victim” for their failure. African education has been colonized for over a century. The education system that was introduced by colonial regimes and still continues to be provided in African schools is largely dependent on imported systems, which are Eurocentric in nature. However, reforming African education curriculum in the light of the concept of indigenization or Africanization appears to be at the core of current educational reform debates across Africa. Okeke (2010) argues that although much has been said about indigenization, transformation and renaissance in African education, education policy-makers have yet to forge a new identity to cope with the pressures of frustration amongst Africans. Most policy statements on indigenizing education have been at most rhetorical and political. They have not been acted on or legislated. Any attempt toward the rethinking of the African curriculum must take into account the role and value of indigenous knowledges, which has been a much neglected aspect of Africa’s educational reform. An indigenized school curriculum will enhance success, cognitive development and academic achievements for students. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the benefits of indigenizing the school curriculum in Africa, and the role of indigenous knowledge or traditional ecological knowledge in the indigenization process. The chapter uses a postcolonial or anticolonial discourse to analyze school curriculum in African schools.

WHAT IS CURRICULUM? There are various ways in which curriculum issues can be approached. Ornstein and Hunkins (2009, p. 15) contend that curriculum development encompasses how a “curriculum is planned, implemented and evaluated, as well as what people, processes and procedures are involved ….” Lopes and Macedo (2011) argue that investigations into curriculum practices have always had great prominence in the

G. Emeagwali & G. J. S. Dei (eds.), African Indigenous Knowledge and the Disciplines, 113–129. © 2014 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. SHIZHA curriculum field, to the point where the notion of curriculum in action has become one of the most powerful concepts in curriculum theory. Curriculum in action is a model that focuses on school daily life and teaching knowledge that is based on the experiences of students and on questioning the prescriptive approaches to curriculum. Although there are different models that are used in designing curriculum, Ornstein and Hunkins (2009) submit that although curriculum development models are technically useful, they often overlook the human aspect such as the personal attitudes, feelings, values involved in curriculum making. The questions that need to be noted when designing the curriculum are: What is valid knowledge? Whose knowledge? What is the purpose of that knowledge? Who decides on curriculum knowledge? The decision on the knowledge that is to be taught in schools and how it is taught is based on politics. Education is a key ‘regime of power’ through which a culture’s conception of truth is maintained, and as such can play a critical role in the marginalisation of epistemological diversity (McCarter & Gavin, 2011). The politics of knowledge determines how knowledge is created, used, and disseminated. The decisions on curriculum content are made by those who are in positions of power and control. It is also essential to ask how power affects knowledge. Michel Foucault observes that the criteria of what constitutes knowledge, what is to be excluded, and who is designated as qualified to know involves actions of power (Foucault, 1971). To the extent that knowledge and curriculum are a political text, Marxist theoretical approaches argue that curriculum is characterized by ideas of centralized power in the state apparatus (Pinar et al., 1995, cited in Lopes & Macedo, 2011). In African schools, power and decision on curriculum issues are mainly controlled by the elite who were schooled under colonial education systems. Curriculum is the term that is frequently used to refer to the content of teaching and learning activities. Many conceptions of curriculum have been postulated in many textbooks on curriculum and educational theory which conceptualize curriculum that emphasizes content, learning experiences, and behavioural objectives. Other explanations advocate curriculum that has a nontechnical and more philosophical, social, and personal approach. According to one theorist, Basil Bernstein (1973), curriculum is “what counts as valid knowledge” (p. 85). When it comes to what is defined as valid knowledge Shizha (2005) argues that there are existing debates and contentions on “how to define and validate knowledge, particularly the official curriculum in the face of globalization, and the internationalization of knowledge” (p. 65). Knowledge is diverse, especially in Africa where there are thousands of ethnic groups and sub-cultural groups. Cultural pluralism in contemporary Africa leads to an elusive definition of valid knowledge that can be institutionalized for the official curriculum.

VALID KNOWLEDGE: THE DEBATE There are two schools of thought that attempt to explain what knowledge is valid for curriculum development. According to Shizha (2005), knowledge entails the total experiences that an individual has and the ways that individuals look at and

114