Public defence: Maren Seehawer

The aim of this doctoral study is to contribute to what I have come to understand as the Southern African project of integrating indigenous and Western knowledges in school education. For more than three decades, but increasingly so after the end of Apartheid in 1994, scholars have called for the decolonisation and indigenising of African education. 

In these calls, the integration of indigenous knowledges is, amongst other things, emphasised as a way of contextualising education to students’ lived realities and enabling sustainable strategies to address the world’s ecological crisis that is not solvable by Western technology alone. 

In South Africa, indigenous knowledges have long been recognised as having a place in the curriculum, but have to date remained a marginalised add-on that has hardly found entrance into the taught content. Teachers are invited to integrate indigenous knowledges, but are left without guidance how to do so. 

In a research team of five Makhanda science teachers and myself as the initiator and facilitator of the study, this participatory action research (PAR) sought to generate practical knowledge about how South African science teachers can integrate their students’ indigenous knowledges into their regular teaching. 

Following an action research cycle, the research team first engaged in reflections about issues related to (integrating) indigenous knowledges. 

Subsequently, each of the five teachers planned and taught one or several lessons that integrated indigenous content. The lessons were then evaluated collaboratively in the team. My aim was that both the generated knowledge and the research process should be directly useful to the people involved in it. 

Methodologically, the study is situated at the intersection of a transformative and an indigenous research paradigm and I understood PAR as a way to bridge the two. To supplement the research team’s collaborative learning process, I engaged in several qualitative data generation strategies such as classroom observation, keeping a reflexive research journal, semi-structured conversations with the members of the research team and focus groups with students. 

The study has been (but) an attempt to decolonise both research purpose, agenda and methodology. This attempt results from engaging with the coloniality of conventional ‘Western’ research and reflecting on my Western researcher positionality. These reflections led to Article 1, which addresses methodological and ethical questions of conducting indigenous knowledge research in Southern Africa. 

In the article, I employ the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu as a theoretical lens to reflect on the PAR process and conceptualise Ubuntu as an indigenous research paradigm that can serve as a basis for decolonised research. 

Both Article 2 and Article 3 present and discuss research findings regarding the question of how South African science teachers can integrate indigenous knowledges into their regular teaching, but with different emphases and audiences in mind. 

Article 2 focuses on the first two phases of the action research cycle (reflection and planning) and is the most ‘practical’ article in the study. Written as a contribution to the South(ern) African knowledge integration discourses, the article details the concrete steps in which the integration of knowledges in my co-researchers’ science classes was planned and how challenges that prevented knowledge integration were overcome. 

Theoretically, the article is framed within the discourse on decolonising African education and the writings of Franz Fanon, Steve Biko and others on intellectual decolonisation. I frame knowledge integration as bottom-up decolonisation and suggest that our very practice‐oriented research pro-cess was also a process of intellectual empowerment and decolonisation. 

Article 3 aims at contributing to the international discourse on quality education in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals. It does so by connecting this discourse to the issue of epistemological diversity in education and by framing knowledge integration as an aspect of quality education. 

The question of how knowledges can be integrated is here addressed by conceptualising dialogue between epistemologies as an approach that allows indigenous and Western knowledges to interact and inform each other in the classroom. To discuss the article’s theoretical proposals, we focus on the latter two phases of the action research (action and evaluation) and draw especially on the case of co-researcher Sipho Nuntsu’s experience with integrating knowledges in a grade 6 science lesson.

In the extended abstract, I situate and discuss the study’s contributions in the overarching theoretical framework of decolonisation, Ubuntu, dialogue between epistemologies and the PAR methodology. 

Based on the study’s practical attempts of knowledges integration I take forward some of the central discussions and outline a decolonial research agenda. Further-more, I emphasise the research process as a transformative learning journey of the research team members.