In recent years, different places in the world have witnessed demands for the decolonization of education. Nevertheless, it is not completely clear how this ought to be carried out. There are various factors that influence what such decolonization may entail, including the geographical place for decolonization and the discipline being decolonized.…

Given a peculiar sociocultural pressure for knowledge to reap immediate socioeconomic benefits in Africa, philosophy courses have gained a very low valuation by African students. They misperceive the courses not to be relevant to their future careers, leading to a lack of engagement with the courses. Focusing on South Africa, this paper proffers…

Higher education has been deeply affected by neoliberalism and corporatisation, with their emphasis on efficiency, competitiveness and valorisation of quantity over quality. This article argues that in the context of South African higher education, and in the Extended Curriculum Programme (ECP) more particularly, such commodification of education…

Background: The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study of 2016 lays claim to the need for critical thinking to be developed since, in the South African context, 78% of learners could not even retrieve explicitly stated information (lower-order thinking) from texts, as opposed to 4% in the rest of the world. Critical, higher-order…

Conventional teacher education programmes do not equip practitioners adequately to navigate ethically complex situations that arise in teaching. One initiative responding to this deficit is "Philosophy for Teachers" ("P4T"), a 24-hour residential approach to community philosophy. Piloted originally in England, a further…

Supporting a sustainable world in a situation of war is the background to this study. Additionally, interdisciplinarity forms a part of the dialogical ecosystem of searching for suitable solutions in a complex reality. For such purposes, in this contribution, the co-authors reflect on an actual instance of war. The first author provides a…

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the parameters for a construction of a scholarly Cultural History of Education in South Africa. The historiography of South African education reflects the context (demographic and otherwise) of the country. Three clearly distinguishable paradigms are evident: a conservative Afrikaner paradigm, a liberal…

Philosophy teachers owe their students a little more than mere formal instruction of topics popular in philosophy. What they owe their students is largely influenced by philosophy's claims to be a discipline that is principally dedicated to the study and fostering of wisdom. Therefore, there is an obligation to be wise on the part of philosophy…

In a recent article in this journal, Vorster and Quinn offered a set of recommendations on how academic staff developers can advise university lecturers on decolonising their curricula and methods. Their main advice was to integrate more African cultural elements into their teaching. However, Vorster and Quinn's advice is rather general. In this…

Apartheid rested on a division of the senses as much as it did on a reductive politics of racial subjection and its accompanying violence. As an instance of the division of the senses, it produced a condition of stasis in which history and a post-apartheid future were increasingly marked by a politico-religious discourse of apocalypse, and a moral…

This article reports on an analysis undertaken in the field of African philosophies using selected conceptual tools from Maton's Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). In response to calls by South African students for 'decolonising' the Humanities curriculum, the practical purpose of the analysis was to generate theoretically-informed guidelines for…

The recent article by Nieuwoudt, Dickie, Coetsee, Engelbrecht and Terblanche (2019) entitled "Age- and education-related effects on cognitive functioning in Colored South African women" published in the journal Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, attracted considerable negative attention, leading to its official withdrawal from…

This article reports on a philosophy for children (P4C) literacy project in a South African foundation phase classroom that introduces an important new focus in the P4C classroom: the visualisation of philosophical ideas provoked by the picture book "The Big Ugly Monster and the Little Stone Rabbit" (2004) by Chris Wormell, giving voice…

Writing functions as an important tool that spans various spaces in higher education. Moving away from a 'skills approach' to writing, this article argues that the writing centre serves as an intermediary between students and academic lecturers. The article discusses how the current practices at the writing centre promotes the development of…

A primary principle of ethical codes in research involving people is that of informed consent which ensures participants' right to privacy, confidentiality and anonymity. A blanket application of the principle of anonymity to Oral History (OH) research could well be counterproductive to the purported aims of OH research. The research comprised a…