The role of school managers in decolonizing the curriculum : a case study of selected primary schools

Abstract

In recent years, changes in the South African school curriculum have ensured that the hangover of the apartheid colonial powers that adopted serious cultural imperialistic principles and brutal policies to overpower the inclusion of Afrocentric elements in the school curriculum are repealed. This has attracted considerable debate on the need for the South African education system to be decolonised so that the curricula adopt an Afrocentric decolonised flair. It is in this light that the purpose of this thesis was to explore the role of primary school managers or principals in curriculum decolonisation. The research is located in the pragmatic paradigm and utilised an exploratory sequential mixed methods as the specific design or strategy of inquiry and its target population comprised of members of the School Management Teams (constituted by the principals, deputy principals, heads of department, grade heads and senior educators) from South Africa’s primary schools. A total of 100 participants selected through non-random and random or purposeful and systematic sampling techniques constituted the sample size for the study. The data generation for the qualitative section of the study followed the use of focus group interviews and unstructured interviews while that of the quantitative section adopted a structured survey questionnaire or closed ended questionnaire. The analysis for the qualitative data sets was done in a manner consistent with the thematic and or content analysis aided by the qualitative data analysis computer software called Atlas Ti while that of the quantitative data was done using descriptive and inferential statistics and aided by the use of quantitative data analysis software called SPSS. Key among the findings of this study was the view that school managers have a key role to play in deconstructing and reconstructing the attitudes, values and mind-set that everything European or American is superior to everything African. The study concluded that unless these attitudes, beliefs and values in the school curriculum and pedagogy are deconstructed and reconstructed it would not be easy for classroom practitioners to begin to view the merits of a decolonised Afrocentric education system. The recommendation made from this study is that school managers need to step up effort towards promoting key Afrocentric elements in the school curriculum if a truly decolonised curriculum is to be realised.