Conceptualisation of Ubuntugogy as a Decolonial Pedagogy in Africa

The concept of ubuntugogy appears as an ordinary grammatical prowess to some, while it also remains unknown to many. This conceptual paper attempts to conceptualise ubuntugogy, not only as indigenous teaching and learning but also as a decolonial pedagogy with liberating potentials. An assumption exists that today’s pedagogical process in Africa is still laced with subjectivism, and it fails to challenge the Eurocentric hegemony that lies within school systems. The failure to address Eurocentrism explicitly leads to the need for ubuntugogy. Ubuntugogy, therefore, needs to be unpacked for better understanding. That is, this study is not to challenge the hegemony of westernised classrooms and their pedagogical process in Africa but to conceptualise the hidden potential of ubuntugogy to fill out the limited literature of the concept in the world of academics. Hence, the study provides answers to questions such as; what is ubuntugogy? What is the epistemology of ubuntugogy? What are the transformative tendencies of ubuntugogy, and how does ubuntugogy relevant in 21st Century classrooms? The study concluded that the idea of ubuntugogy is to create a learning environment where everyone feels empowered, encouraged and free from the burdens of Eurocentric and Americentric imposition with an open tendency of knowing and being human.

De-universalizing the decolonial: between parentheses and falling skies

Departing from the premise that decoloniality is growing in popularity within contemporary Brazilian Applied Linguistics studies, this paper claims in favor of a more performative decolonial praxis so as to prevent decoloniality from universality. In doing so, the text begins with some theorizations on decolonial thought with an emphasis on the triad fundamental in any decolonial exercise, that is to Identify-Interrogate-Interrupt coloniality. The paper, then, claims in favor of thinking communication otherwise which, along with the notions of bringing back the body and marking the unmarked, constitute the necessary decolonial strategies if one wishes to interrupt coloniality. A critical examination of The falling Sky: words of a Yanomami shaman, co-authored by Kopenawa and Albert (2013), is brought to the fore as illustrative of a decolonial pedagogy which attempts to help language teacher educators and researchers to become attentive to socially-just-oriented educational agendas that claim to be culturally-sensitive whereas, in fact, they may be serving the purposes of a still prevailing colonial project.

Escrevivência: um olhar decolonial com recorte de gênero a partir da educação de jovens, adultos e idosos

Para este texto trazemos o conceito de colonialidade do grupo Modernidade/Colonialidade (M/C), de pedagogia decolonial cunhada por Catherine Walsh, e de feminismo negro e feminismos decoloniais, considerando tais discussões para a Educação em Ciências em um grupo de estudantes da Educação de Jovens, Adultos e Idosos como parte de uma pesquisa de mestrado. Como inspiração metodológica condizente com a perspectiva teórica nos baseamos na autora Conceição Evaristo a partir de seu conceito de escrevivência que por meio de subjetividades revela traços coletivos. Refletindo sobre a colonialidade de gênero discutida nos feminismos decoloniais percebemos que as escrevivências revelam dores, angústias e estratégias de resistência que nos levaram a pensar nas condições de ser mulher em uma sociedade sexista.Palavras-chave: Escrevivência. Decolonialidade. EJA. Gênero. Abstract: In this paper we approach the concept of coloniality of the Modernity / Coloniality group and the Decolonial Pedagogy coined by Catherine Walsh to discuss Science Education. The methodology of the article is based on the author Conceição Evaristo based on her concept of clerk, fostering discussions about the authorship of a group of students of Youth and Adult Education. The registries were part of a set of workshops carried out as part of a master's research. From the registries carried out by this group, we selected texts by women who wrote about their lives in order to reveal their pains and anguishes regarding the men who went through their lives. These reports were analyzed in order to address the colonialities and gender issues intrinsic to women.Keywords: Escrevivência. Decoloniality. EJA (youth, adult and elderly education). Genre.

Mapping Pathways for an Indigenous Poetry Pedagogy: Performance, Emergence and Decolonisation

Poetry is notoriously unpopular in high school English classrooms all over the world, and English FAL (First Additional Language) classrooms in South Africa are no exception. We report on a pedagogical intervention with Grade 11 learners in a township school in Johannesburg, where the classroom was opened to indigenous poetry and identities by allowing learners to write and perform their own poetry in any language and on any topic. Rejecting essentialist notions of indigeneity as defined by bloodline or “race”, we work with a notion of indigenous identity as fluid and performative, and as inescapably entwined with coloniality. We argue that indigenous poetry, meanings and identities were emergent in the open space created by the intervention. To further explore this emergence, we discuss pedagogy itself as performative, an interaction between teacher and learners in which knowledge is built, stories told and identities sedimented. We focus on what can be learned about possible pedagogical pathways for an indigenous poetry pedagogy from the learners’ performances. We identify the constraints and potentialities for a decolonial pedagogy that arise when the classroom is opened to indigenous poetry, and ideas for what such a decolonial pedagogy would look like. The findings suggest that new ways of thinking about the ethics and politics of poetry in the classroom are required, some general to all indigenous pedagogies, and some specific to local South African traditions of praise poetry.