Collection B

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https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/8526

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Browsing Collection B by Subject "Decolonization -- Education (Higher)"

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    Decolonial gestures of heutagogy : a postqualitative inquiry into the potential of self-determined learning in Stellenbosch University’s postgraduate diploma in sustainable development
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-03) Dalamakis, Guy Michael Melless; Davies, Megan Lynne; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. Centre for Sustainability Transition.
    ENGLISH SUMMARY: The ideologies governing our socio-economic systems have resulted in a multitude of ‘wicked’ problems – sustainability challenges riddled with unceasing complexity, debate, and uncertainty as to how best respond to these ordeals. While we may have reached a general comprehension regarding the nature of these complexities, we are yet to realise the means of appropriately responding to them. Amidst this uncertainty, numerous global reports have agreed on at least one crucial requirement for aptly responding to the multifarious challenges with which we are faced: a comprehensive reimagining of education and the ways in which we learn as a society. With this, sustainability education has emerged as a means of providing learning experiences that seek to support the systemic change required to address the social-ecological challenges with which we are faced. That said, educational reforms are often underpinned by colonial frames of reference and thus further socio-economic rationalities and consequently perpetuate a world in crisis. Therefore, there exists a certain tension in the realm of higher education whereby, on one hand, it can be utilised as a means of preserving unsustainable engagements with the world while, on the other, it holds the very means of providing learning experiences that more adequately respond to our systemic crises. Thus far, sustainability education has been largely underpinned by the assumption that all offerings are sufficient in and of themselves in that a transformative learning experience is guaranteed due to the inclusion of sustainability content. In other words, there has been a predominant focus on curriculum while pedagogy falls by the wayside. Forming the very foundation of educational experiences, informing pedagogies will require greater consideration if sustainability education seeks to deliver that which it has set out to achieve. Pedagogical approaches to sustainability education thus need to be reoriented accordingly so as to imbue students with a change agency and response-ability that enables them to both transform and transgress the established systems in which they find themselves embedded. Therefore, through the espousal of a postqualitative inquiry, this thesis explores the nascent potential of heutagogy—a learner-centred approach to education—in fostering these necessary shifts. Contextualised within an academic programme in a higher education institution in South Africa, this research inquires into the extent to which heutagogy is an embedded quality within the Postgraduate Diploma in Sustainable Development at Stellenbosch University and the role this might play in contributing toward transformative and transgressive spaces of teaching and learning.