‘As the world becomes more globalised with values, attitudes and beliefs which are shared from one corner of the globe to the other, the scope for a degree of cultural universalism and enlightened cosmopolitanism becomes increasingly imminent’. (Kwesi Kwaa Pra, 2018)
The purpose of higher education encompasses more than preparing graduates for employability. While knowledge and skills are important, attributes and values contribute to holistic graduate development for the profession and society. The complexities of the society in which we live, such as dealing with the prospects of decolonization, cannot be divorced from education – on the contrary, society and higher education have a reciprocal responsibility to ensure that graduates contribute to uplifting their communities by ensuring that social justice practices and a culture of non-discrimination are upheld.
Introduction
Most students consider the purpose of higher education to be primarily about acquiring knowledge and skills for employability. This perception is limiting and does not necessarily factor in the importance of attributes, values and qualities in contributing to holistic student development. In other words, the purpose of higher education should be about knowing (knowledge), doing (skills) and being (values, attributes, qualities and dispositions) (Barnett 2009).
These three aspects of learning are interrelated and inter-dependent. For example, knowing the theories, concepts and principles of disciplinary knowledge is necessary to be able to act professionally using skills and qualities in professional practice. Similarly, you would need to have knowledge of a subject to think critically about the content, or be creative and innovative with content knowledge. Knowing in turn contributes to improving qualities and dispositions such as developing confidence, thinking independently, being flexible and adaptable to different knowledge systems and developing a sense of ‘Self’.
One way of including ‘being’ in curriculum is to focus on graduate attributes.
What are Graduate Attributes?
Graduate attributes are generic competencies or capabilities that graduates of a university are expected to acquire during their course of study. These attributes would be personified in graduates’ ‘being’ and would be practised in places of work, in their communities and in society. Each university has its own graduate attributes, or graduate outcomes that all students would have learnt in various ways, that would equip them to be global citizens with a sense of social and environmental responsibility. The international perspective of graduate attributes focuses on four broad conceptions of employability, lifelong learning, preparation of an unknown future and being agents of social justice, i.e. showing a sense of responsibility to the various communities of which they are a part.
Graduate Attributes and Internationalization
Graduate attributes not only prepare students for local environments and communities but also for internationalization by developing agency and resilience to adapt to different contexts. The two domains of internationalization, i.e. internationalization at home and abroad, use different mechanisms to develop intercultural competencies which have their roots in graduate attributes. Internationalization at home uses mainly curriculum instruction from which graduate attributes and intercultural competencies emerge, and internationalization abroad is usually associated with mobility and developing intercultural skills in authentic foreign learning and living environments. With the reality of the world being a global village it is imperative that students are equipped with attributes, values, qualities and dispositions that would prepare them to participate as global citizens.
The importance of valuing and respecting difference and diversity in culture, race, language, religion, and sexual orientation, to mention a few, may be acquired through developing cross-cultural competencies in both home and abroad internationalization programmes. The value attributed to culture, which embodies language, race, ethnicity and religion is profound since ‘culture nurtures and identifies who we are’ (Kwesi Kwaa Pra, 2018). This inherent importance of culture is especially prevalent in colonized countries like South Africa where indigenous populations were deprived of indigenous identities by having to assume cultural aspects of the colonizers.
Culture, Language and Decolonization
The current debates on decolonization is South Africa have several biases, depending on who the author or presenter is. However, several common elements have emerged from discussions and institutional debates. These include the language debate, inclusivity, Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism and the consequences of these for curriculum. South Africa has 11 official languages amongst which are the local indigenous languages of Afrikaans, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Sotho, Siswati, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, Zulu and English which is the most universal official language. The majority of universities in South Africa have English as the language of teaching and learning, leaving most students in higher education marginalized with having to learn in a language different to their own first language. This has major personal social, educational and political consequences for students who have to immerse themselves in learning in a language which they might not fully understand linguistically speaking and having to access and produce knowledge with limited vocabulary inventories.
Decolonization is essentially about inclusivity such as acknowledging one another’s cultural roots and identity, having non-discriminatory educational and social environments and valuing indigenous knowledge systems. Scholars of decolonization claim that inclusivity does not imply eradicating one school of thought such as Eurocentrism and replacing it with Afrocentrism. Kwesi Kwaa Pra (2018) suggests that decolonization ‘implies the recentering of the focus of education away from Eurocentric perceptions and preoccupations which are non-African, non-local concerns, to issues which focus on essentially resident African interests’.
This is currently a work in progress with many higher education institutions in South Africa currently grappling with what decolonization means within their own institutional and disciplinary contexts.
References
Barnett, R. 2009. Knowing and becoming in the higher education curriculum. Studies in Higher Education 34(4): 429–440. An Outline of Decolonized Education in Africa
Kwesi K.P. 2018. An Outline of Decolonized Education in Africa. An Institutional Inaugural Seminar on the ‘Relevance and Scope of the Decolonization of Education in Africa’. CPUT, Cape Town. 25th April 2018.