Decolonising pedagogy in post-apartheid South Africa : the expanded understanding of Vygotsky’s theory and new postulates

Abstract

CONTEXT AND RELEVANCE : The paper examines contemporary post-apartheid pedagogy and its underlying epistemologies that position teachers and their students as passively conforming to prescribed knowledge and concepts disconnected from practical realities, goals, and students’ personal pursuit of meanings. OBJECTIVE AND HYPOTHESIS : Such an approach, premised on values of adaptation to the status quo of preexisting models and procedures, fails to promote knowledge premised on values of contribution to collective social practices and self-identity development. THEORETICAL BASIS : That is, pedagogy so conceptualised in the logic of colonial orthodoxies and solipsistic epistemologies, inevitably denies students and their teachers their inherent capacities for agency and meaningful engagement with reality. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION : Therefore, in instantiating decolonising approach to pedagogy, a young student the teacher had deemed to be experiencing learning difficulties, enacts her embodied knowledge1 and is thereby posited as debunking the logic of colonial epistemologies that underpin contemporary post-apartheid pedagogy. CONCLUSIONS : The student is therefore presented as enacting her culturally situated community practices and knowledge traditions which she embodies, despite the continued exclusion of such knowledge practices within contemporary post-apartheid pedagogy.