Students’ constructions of ubuntu and social justice in an African distance service-learning programme.
Date
2018
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Abstract
Ubuntu and social justice are both concepts that resonate with the pursuit of harmony,
wellbeing, and reciprocity that service-learning encompasses. The concept of Ubuntu is
African whilst the concept of social justice has global and often Eurocentric roots. The
aftermath of colonisation in Africa has resulted in an imported pedagogical paradigm from
the West that has suppressed an African pedagogy through the erasure of the African voice
to date. The decolonisation of education in Africa in this study seeks to uncover Ubuntu as
an epistemological underpinning and way forward in transforming education through
service-learning in Africa. This qualitative research used social constructionism to frame the
discourse analysis utilised in this study. Social constructionism explores how shared
experiences and understandings between human beings constitute their reality. Discourse
analysis further explores how the use of language and meaning-making systems can
construct, position and constrain people. Service-learning students from several African
countries that all had experience in a distance service-learning programme spoke of their
understandings of Ubuntu and social justice within two focus groups. Exploration of the
overarching discourses at play within the service-learning students’ talk revealed dominant
power relations and socio-cultural institutions embedded within the talk. The results
explored the deployment of predominant discourses of ‘holon-ness’, moral philosophy and
Africentricism in the construction of Ubuntu and positioned global culture as threat to its
survival. The service-learning students actively engaged with Ubuntu and drew on
indigenous knowledge to construct it as an African moral philosophy. The concept of social
justice was passively placed in the expert field of the law and human rights by drawing on
Eurocentric and United Statesian iterations to construct and make meaning of it. The
construction of social justice in relation to Ubuntu were dualistic, as separate definitions of
the terms were contradictory in isolation but when discussed together, social justice was re-territorialised
to Africa by constructing it as a tenet of Ubuntu on the condition that it
pursued harmony and community welfare.
Description
Masters Degree. Univerity of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.