It is my belief that a prevailing colonial mentality in higher education dance spaces, as it relates to jazz dance, is responsible for the lack of serious engagement and appropriate regard. This article makes the argument for the decolonization of higher education spaces, advocating for fuller engagement with the jazz genre and positioning it to…

As we write this paper in late 2023, Advanced Placement (AP) Black history, psychology courses and the use of diverse literature written for children and young adults is being banned by many school districts across the United States. Educators are being threatened, sanctioned, reprimanded, and fired. Despite this, some teachers stand steadfast in…

The Library of Congress has acquired the Omar ibn Said Collection, including an exceptional artifact, the autobiography of Omar ibn Said, written in ancient Arabic by an African enslaved man. In this article, I analytically examine the role of literacy in Omar ibn Said's life as informed by African cultures, ethnicities, histories, languages, and…

South African education has become used to dealing with an array of new policy and strategy initiatives. Often these policies and strategies appear on the scene only to disappear into the sand later on. When President Ramaphosa announced the Thuma mina initiative in February 2018, educationists would have been tempted to ask questions about the…

In this R. Freeman Butts Lecture, the authors engage this year's AESA theme, "Dreaming of Otherwise Worlds and Alternate Nows: Unsettling Colonialisms and Racism in the Social Foundations of Education," through a set of Black knowledge traditions and schools of thought and how these implicate our ideologies about education, specifically…

"Systemic racism" implies that racist policies are embedded in laws and institutions. That claim is patently false as evidenced by Americans having elected a biracial president for two terms and, more recently, a biracial vice president--not to mention blacks serving in the cabinet, in the highest ranks of the armed services, and in…

David Adeyemo works at the Department of Guidance and Counselling at the University of Ibadan in Ibadan, Nigeria. This article presents a transcript of an online interview with Adeyemo, focusing on his experience providing counseling services at the University. Topics in the interview include the percentage of campus students that come for…

There is a kernel of truth in the claim that Western philosophy and practice of education is individualistic; theory in Euro-America tends to prize properties that are internal to a human being, such as her autonomy, rationality, knowledge, pleasure, desires, self-esteem and self-realisation, and education there tends to adopt techniques focused…

This essay outlines how Black placemaking, a sociological framework used to study Black residents in urban contexts, might be used to study Black students' experiences at historically White institutions (HWIs) of higher education. Black placemaking engages with the intersection of Blackness, place, structure, and agency. The author argues that…

Policy for young children in South Africa is now receiving high-level government support through the ANC's renewed commitment to redress poverty and inequity and creating "a better life for all" as promised before the 1994 election. In this article, I explore the power relations, knowledge hierarchies and discourses of childhood, family…

This paper argues that lifelong learning can be a torch for education that is relevant, appropriate and appreciated by many Africans if conceptualized within the African Indigenous Learning (AIL) framework. Such learning is entrenched deep in the practices, cultures and ways of knowing of many Africans. The fundamentals or the ideals of lifelong…

This article reports on the power (influence) of music to develop intercultural understandings to better internationalise the curriculum. It argues that through internationalisation, we learn more about other people's cultures hence, by providing an international/intercultural dimension into the teaching unit of "Discovering Music A",…

In this essay, Joyce King attempts to interrupt the calculus of human (un)worthiness and to repair the collective cultural amnesia that are legacies of slavery and that make it easy--hegemonically and dysconsciously--for the public to accept myths and media reports, such as those about the depravity of survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans…

In this response to Hewson and Ogunniyi's paper on indigenous knowledge (IK) and science teaching in South Africa, I seek to broaden the debate by setting the enterprise of integrating IK into science education in its cultural and socio-political context. I begin by exploring the multiple meanings of indigenous knowledge in Africa, next consider…

Southern African Development Community (SADC) nations in principle endorse lifelong learning (LLL) as a useful framework for sustainable development. However, in spite of the rhetoric, only a few member states such as South Africa, Botswana and Namibia have officially endorsed LLL in their educational policies. The sub-region is plagued by social…