Think Piece. Situating Education for Sustainable Development in southern African philosophy and contexts of social-ecological change to enhance curriculum relevance and the common good
- Authors: Pesanayi, Tichaona V , O'Donoghue, Rob B , Shava, Soul
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/388105 , vital:68307 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/187217"
- Description: The study opens with a brief review of how education in colonial southern Africa was steered by a succession of externally framed abstractions that have been implemented within the prevailing hegemony of western modernisation that dominated and marginalised indigenous cultures. It probes how, within an expanding functionalist framework, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has been similarly constituted as a proposition for implementation. Here the supposition is that implementing ESD as an intervention will transform education into an inclusive and collaborative pedagogy that will shape competences for participants to transform society towards a sustainable future. In an effort to explore the possibility of making a break from a succession of education imperatives functioning as ‘salvation narratives’ to put things right in Africa, the study explores ESD from a more situated and emergent vantage point within African landscapes, philosophy and cultural practices. This requires a shift from a view of ESD as a perspective to be brought in and enacted to foster change, to ESD as a situated engagement in education as a process where relevance is deliberated and brought out in quality education with high order skills. This perspective exemplifies working with a more fully situated framing of deliberative social learning for the common good. It is explored here to contemplate how socio-cultural processes of deliberative ethics and co-engaged reflexive processes of learning-led change might emerge. Here, also, using a capabilities approach might provide useful starting points for ESD as an expansive process of transformative social learning.
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- Date Issued: 2019
Strengthening teachers’ knowledge and practices through a biodiversity education professional development programme
- Authors: Songqwaru, Zintle , Shava, Soul
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/436294 , vital:73255 , ISBN 978-3-319-45989-9 , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45989-9_15
- Description: What constitutes adequate teacher professional development support that enables teachers to engage meaningfully with ESD learning processes? In an attempt to answer this question, this chapter focuses on how continuing teacher profes-sional development programmes can support teachers of Life Sciences to teach biodiversity as a grounding concept to strengthen educational quality and relevance of Life Sciences education. It reflects on how continuing teacher professional development programmes may be designed and implemented to support South African teachers to work creatively with a con-tent and assessment-referenced national school curriculum. The chapter focuses on what content knowledge, teaching and assessment approaches to include as well as teachers’ reflections on the impacts of such a programme.
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- Date Issued: 2017
Indigenous knowledges: a genealogy of representations and applications in developing contexts of environmental education and development in southern Africa
- Authors: Shava, Soul
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984 Education -- Africa, Southern Environmental education -- Africa, Southern Indigenous peoples -- Africa, Southern Ethnoscience -- Africa, Southern Knowledge, Theory of Genealogy (Philosophy) Medicinal plants -- Africa, Southern
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:1885 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1005920
- Description: This study was developed around concerns about how indigenous knowledges have been represented and applied in environment and development education. The first phase of the study is a genealogical analysis after Michel Foucault. This probes representations and applications of plant-based indigenous knowledge in selected anthropological, botanical and environmental education texts in southern Africa. The emerging insights were deepened using a Social (Critical) Realism vantage point after Margaret Archer to shed light on agential issues in environmental education and development contexts. Here her morphogenetic/morphostatic analysis of social transformation or reproduction is used to trace changes in indigenous knowledge representations and applications over time (from the pre-colonial into the post-colonial era). The second phase uses the same perspectives and tools to extend the analysis of power/knowledge relationships into the interface of indigenous communities and modern institutions in two case study settings in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. This study reveals colonially-derived hegemonic processes of modern/Western scientific institutional representations/interpretations of the knowledges of indigenous communities. It also tracks a continuing trajectory of their dominating and prescriptive mediating control over local knowledges from the pre-colonial context through into the post-colonial period in southern Africa. The analysis reveals how this hegemony is sustained through the deployment of institutional strategies of representation that transform local knowledges into the disciplinary knowledge discourses of modern scientific institutions. These representational strategies therefore generate/reproduce and validate disciplinary discourses about the other, constructing disciplinary 'regimes of truth'. In this way modern institutions appropriate and displace indigenous/local knowledges, silence the voices of local communities and regulate individual and community agency within a continuing subjugation of indigenous knowledges. This study reveals how working within modern institutions and disciplinary knowledges in participative education and development interactions can serve to implicate indigenous researchers in these institutional hegemonic processes. The study also notes evidence of a continued resistance to hegemonic Western knowledge discourses as indigenous communities have sustained many knowledge practices alongside Western knowledge discourses. There is also evidence of a recent emergence of counter-hegemonic indigenous knowledge discourses in environmental education and development practices in southern Africa. It is noted that these have been contingent upon the changing political terrain in southern Africa as this has opened the way for alternative discourses to the dominant conventional Western knowledges in formal education and development contexts. The counterhegemonic discourses invert power/knowledge relations, decentre hegemonic discourses and reposition indigenous knowledges in formal education and development contexts. This study suggests the need to foreground indigenous knowledges as a process of knowledge decolonisation that gives contextual and epistemic relevance to environmental education and development processes. This calls for a need for new strategies to transform existing institutions by creating enabling spaces for the representational inclusion of indigenous knowledges in formal/conventional knowledge discourses and their application in social contexts. This opens up possibilities for plural knowledge representations and for their integrative and reciprocal co-engagement in situated contexts of environmental education and development in southern Africa.
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- Date Issued: 2009
Local Knowledge as a Source of Community Resilience: IKS community Development and Resilience
- Authors: Shava, Soul , Zazu, Clayton , Tidball, Keith , O'Donoghue, Rob B
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/433052 , vital:72928 , xlink:href="https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC61567"
- Description: Local knowledge can serve a source of local community resilience that provides an enabling capacity for people to sustain their livelihoods and adapt to environmental changes or new environments. This knowledge was evidenced as capable of resurfacing when contingent opportunities arise. This contribution draws upon case studies of emerging self-mobilised social learning processes in the recollection and application of agricultural knowledge as revealed in immigrant gardeners' narratives in New York City, United States and narratives from relocated farming communities in Sebakwe, Zimbabwe. In these narratives the communities draw upon their reserves of local knowledge to respond to changes within their local environments. Such knowledge can serve as a source of community resilience through enabling people to sustain their livelihoods and community wellbeing, and thus adapt to environmental changes and displacement.
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- Date Issued: 2009
Traditional food crops as a source of community resilience in Zimbabwe
- Authors: Shava, Soul , O'Donoghue, Rob B , Krasny, Marianne E , Zazu, Clayton
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/438804 , vital:73501 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/18186870903101982"
- Description: This article draws on local narratives and observations of food sustenance practices in relocated farming communities in Sebakwe, Zimbabwe. Local knowledge on traditional food crops and related agricultural practices was proven to be a source of local community resilience, enabling residents to sustain their livelihoods. Local community agency in maintaining, cultivating and processing traditional food crops was found to sustain their culture and livelihoods, thereby providing community resilience in a changing environment.
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- Date Issued: 2009
Research on indigenous knowledge and its application: A case of wild food plants of Zimbabwe
- Authors: Shava, Soul
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/373809 , vital:66725 , xlink:href="https://www.ajol.info/index.php/sajee/article/view/122700"
- Description: Research on indigenous knowledge should go beyond documenting and interpreting it. Rather, it should stimulate inquiry into its application in present day community development and education settings. This study intends to steer indigenous knowledge research towards practical application initiatives. The study documents wild food plants of Zimbabwe, highlights some popular wild food plants, and cites some commercially marketed wild food plants and makes recommendations on the application of indigenous knowledge of wild food plants in community and educational settings.
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- Date Issued: 2005
The use of indigenous plants as food by a rural community in the Eastern Cape : an educational exploration
- Authors: Shava, Soul
- Date: 2000
- Subjects: Plants, Edible -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape Wild plants, Edible -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape Human-plant relationships -- South Africa -- Eastern Cape Endemic plants -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MEd
- Identifier: vital:1813 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1003699
- Description: Looking at the use of plants as food reflects how humankind has fashioned nature. There has been a significant change in production patterns from hunter-gathering through subsistence agriculture to technologically advanced commercial agriculture with a subsequent reduction in the diversity of plants used as food. A parallel trend in consumption patterns has occurred, from home-based food processing for subsistence through small- scale production to large-scale industrial processing and the commodification of food. The overall result of such trends is a narrowing of the food resource base and an increasing reliance on processed foods at the expense of traditional diets, accompanied by increasing diet-related health risks. This research is an ethnographic case study on the use of indigenous food plants by the community of Tuku A village in the Eastern Cape using interviews and observations as the main data collecting strategies. A nutritional analysis of some wild food plants was also carried out. An inventory of more than 70 food plant species was compiled, with the knowledge of such plants found among both the elderly and the youth. The incorporation of this knowledge into education systems is recommended. Of the wild food plants documented, some were non-indigenous indicating the dynamic nature of indigenous knowledge. Some wild spinach were left to grow amongst cultivated food plants, hinting at some form of ‘domestication’ in process. This observation together with the observation that wild fruit trees were selectively conserved highlights the possibility of the continued use of wild food contributing to conservation of botanical diversity. Community use of indigenous food was found to be diminishing. Stigmatisation of indigenous food plants, urbanisation, formal education, changes in lifestyle, and media were some of the factors possibly influencing this dietary shift. The community made links between diet and health, which correspond to modern scientific knowledge, with modern diet being lamented for ill health. The nutritional analysis revealed that wild food plants do contain essential dietary nutrients, an area recommended for further research.
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- Date Issued: 2000