Addressing sustainable development goals by leveraging indigenous knowledge: experiences of Science and Mathematics teachers.

Abstract

The post-COVID era has illuminated the crucial role of education in reducing inequalities and promoting inclusive and sustainable growth. Literature is replete with rationales for higher education programmes to be aligned with the sustainable development goals through partnerships to ensure that programmes are globally and locally relevant. Based on these insights I adopted the Ubuntucurrere and decolonial theories as intellectual resources as I departed from traditional education norms which valourise only Euro-Western science and mathematics. I did this by exploring possibilities for leveraging indigenous knowledge to address the sustainable development goals in the curriculum. My study demonstrated the potential for transforming understandings of Education for Sustainable Development to include “low voices” in the production of valuable knowledge about sustainable living. I engaged 36 purposefully selected, practicing science and mathematics teachers who were enrolled in an Honours in Education module to generate qualitative data. I explored how science and mathematics teachers integrated indigenous knowledge to address sustainable development goals. Teachers participated in focus group interviews and engaged collaboratively with indigenous knowledge holders to develop portfolios of evidence, where they documented the stages of their work. They also taught lessons in micro-teaching sessions during which they demonstrated their ideas related to context, content, and pedagogy as they constructed and utilised IK to address the sustainable development goals. Among the strategies that teachers used was to engage Chilisa’s (2012) processes of “Dreaming, Commitment, and Action” by re-imaging and practically enacting lessons for sustainable development using a decolonial lens. Specific ideologies from Ubuntu-currere such as social interactions through collaboration and challenging epistemic othering of IK informed teacher thinking and action. The findings from this study revealed that science and mathematics teachers address sustainable development using indigenous knowledge in sparse, indirect ways in the curriculum. Findings also showed that teachers were committed to exploring indigenous pedagogy and content as a strategy to address sustainable development goals in the curriculum. Furthermore, my study revealed that science and mathematics teachers adopted specific strategies which resonated with work done during the teacher professional development programme in which they had engaged. This study also revealed factors that enabled or constrained teachers who sought to address the sustainable development goals by leveraging indigenous knowledge. The obstructive factors included issues of time management and an inherent lack of teacher capacity about content and pedagogy linked to indigenous ideologies and sustainable development. Enabling factors were linked to the “democratic interactions” that teachers experienced through their engagements with indigenous knowledge holders, with their lecturers, and with one another. Teachers addressed obstructive factors by developing teacher agency and seeking assistance from more knowledgeable individuals who were supportive of their learning processes.