DESCRIPTION OF THE PROGRAMME

1.      Background

In 2006, as part of the celebrations of the 90^th Anniversary of the University, the Vice Chancellor launched a process to re-create the curricular project of the University.[1]

The challenge was a self-critical one: 

·         The leadership of the University initiated a number of dialogues to bring the University community into a more collective discussion of reimagining the future of Fort Hare.  The dialogue process sought to help us collectively shake up our own imaginations of the future, re-see our assumptions of daily practice, build a community of shared curiosity and vision, and identify some strategic leverage points in which to start animating the process of curriculum development both within and across faculties.

·         The process established a tradition of uku’ncoko in the University.  An iincoko is a reflective and inclusive conversation.  The process was designed as an open process for engagement across the community of UFH.  The process encouraged students, academics, and administrators to participate.  It included people on the basis of their interest in participation, rather than on positional considerations.  The student voice was particularly important to the content and direction of the emerging conversations.

·         Four public iincoko were held, whereby the entire University community was invited to share their concerns and imaginations for the curriculum project of the future.  The University community was also invited to participate in a series of reflective retreats.

·         The notions that enjoyed the most attention included;  transdisciplinarity, humanising pedagogy, language policy and practice, post-colonial / decolonising curriculum, HIV and AIDS, new technologies, as well as notions of universalism and African perspectives. 

·         While an array of diverse ideas and imaginations emerged, there was a common vision for a University that was deeply rooted in community engagement, and a University that is an engine for democracy and development in rural Africa.

The Concept Paper for the Grounding Programme was finalised in 2007.  At the end of 2007, the Senate and Council of the University adopted the programme formally, and committed itself to the innovations required to make a process of this kind of work.  In 2008, the University recruited a Director, and established plans, budgets and performance indicators to ensure the success of the pilot in 2009.

2.      Rationale for the Programme

The rationale or raison d'être for the LKA/GP are manifold:

a)      First, contemporary societal (political, economical, cultural, scientific, environmental, social) challenges necessitate an approach to teaching and learning that can unlock the potential of our students in an infinite number of ways that transcend the constraints of knowledge boundaries; generates new forms of thinking and doing; and injects compassion and innovation into our responses to societal challenges.

b)      Second, the academic engagements within which our students participate need to be informed by critical notions of social justice that are defined by and within human suffering and human needs. Such notions of social justice dictate that we, despite our immeasurable challenges, have to - through our different practices - develop a critical national pride as a pre-requisite for self-development (Habermas, 2006: 136) in order for us to rekindle our “moral outrage over structurally anchored inequalities”[2] (ibid).

     We require a new spirit of humanistic radicalism and critical thinking within our academic faculties, research endeavours and throughout our pedagogies so that we do not lose touch “with (our) indignation over social injustices” (ibid)[3] and work against our lack of confidence to throw ourselves into the real work of social engagement and

      community development.

c)      Third, disturbing trends in modern day political practice and limitations to democratic organisation, policy sadism, administrative violence, perpetual human conflicts, weaknesses in conflict resolution strategies, environmental destruction, climate change and hostility towards social and economic justice are genetically linked to our “extraordinary potential for violence, injustice and inhumanity as witnessed by the history of the twentieth century” (Cronin and Pensky, 2006: viii). It is also linked to processes that undermine social solidarity within constitutional democracies. In an ironically fragmented-globalised world, locally felt poverty, ‘native’ development challenges, discriminatory and prejudicial tendencies and political and cultural stagnation are expressed within the micro processes of people’s daily struggles for survival. We require an educational engagement that is in consonance with global, regional, national and local efforts aimed at dealing with these challenges.

d)      Fourth, as is the case with most universities globally and nationally, UFH is faced with challenges that include archaic curriculum constructions; university-community disengagement; questions of the relevance, significance and application of knowledge-generation processes; antiquated pedagogies; conventional knowledge-boundaries; socially detached teaching and learning; an inability to harness students’ full  potential; a lack of new, innovative knowledge development processes; and the silent reproduction and educational justification of systemic inequalities. The LKA/GP is designed to traverse all these challenges as a structured, university-wide attempt to disrupt conventional practices and pedagogies and dislocate standard modes of curriculation, knowledge generation and knowledge application.

e)      Fifth, the organisation of teaching and learning is premised on de-contextualised and a-historical processes where students are for the most part required to detach themselves from their precedent, real-life experiences. Consequently, the design of teaching and learning thus contributes to a process of alienation that ultimately militates against solid community-engagement and intergenerational community investment and reinvestment on the part of students and academia. The LKA/GP is constructed in ways that build resonance between students’ real-life experiences, their histories and the teaching, learning and research processes of the university as an investment to be returned by the collaborative growth of socially engaged students…and a socially engaged and relevant university.

f)       Sixth, self- and community development rest on critical self- and environmental awareness which in turn will generate a commitment to further and higher education and training. The LKA-GP is a development project born from the need to direct the intellectual engagements of our students and lecturers towards an ethic to alleviate human suffering and a commitment to self and community development. In this process, students need to challenge their own anti-educational habits and create the intellectual conditions that will facilitate appropriate choice-making and the expansion of their intellectual curiosity.

g)      Lastly, a central assumption of the LKA-GP is that all education is ‘political’ and value-laden, stated or unstated. An important requirement of the new programme is to make the ‘familiar’ ‘unfamiliar’ and in the process provide education with an overt political purpose of social-engagement, social justice and critical thinking whilst challenging human suffering in all its forms. Love and compassion becomes educational and political concepts with the central objective of working against the reproduction of the ‘unstated’ values that legitimize systemic inequalities through education.

3.      Purposes of the Programme

• To contribute to the advancement of the mission, vision and strategic objectives of UFH;
• To provide students with a progressively rigorous, responsible and compassionate basis for gaining and applying their knowledge and energies to the world;
• To provide students with a deep understanding of the principles of ubuntu, democracy, liberation and decolonising knowledge;
• To provide students with a roadmap of how to use the University space to consolidate their own access to meaningful knowledge, including inculcating a reading and writing culture within the University;
• To provide students with an experience of building a diverse, caring and intellectual community of purpose;
• To provide UFH students and academics with a theatre for diverse and humanising pedagogies, as a basis to both support and demand wider curriculum renewal in the University;
• To provide UFH students with the confidence to engage in lives of authenticity and dignity linked to the creation of dignified lives for others; and
• To provide UFH undergraduates with a critical and de-colonising framework in which to see and understand the world, the Continent and themselves.

4.      Learning Outcomes and Associated Assessment criteria

5.      Architecture, Size and Scale of the Pilot Programme

The course is an innovation in purpose, content, pedagogy and assessment. Through four core themes (a. common futures; b. diversity, democracy and identity; c. science, technology, environment and society; d. inequity, poverty and development) the course aims to expose all students to thinking beyond disciplinary boundaries. In order to recreate the university as a community of engagement and dialogue the course operates on four pedagogical levels. The central ‘unit’ of the course is a self-managed group of six students, called the umzi.  Five imizi make up one ekhaya, supported by trained student facilitators, called ‘abakwezeli’ (‘keepers of the fire’). In these sessions, members of amakhaya do groupwork, watch video clips, read articles, present poems and raise core issues related to a theme and debate, whilst reflecting critically on the issues arising.

• The LKA/GP is a compulsory, credit bearing course for all undergraduate students entering the university. The average figure of students entering the university at this level ranges between 1500-1800. Of the 360 estimated number of students, 336 participated in the pilot during the second semester of 2009.

• An equal number of students from the faculties of Management and Commerce, Social Science and Humanities, Science and Agriculture and Education were selected for the programme and gender, nationality, language and other balances were considered (the Law faculty does not have 1^st year students on the Alice campus and was excluded from the pilot).

• Whilst the pilot phase consists of 336 students in 3 villages, 1800 student will participate in the full roll-out in 2010. There will be 15 villages (120 students x 15 villages = 1800 students). The pilot thus represents close to 1/5 of the targeted student community.