Resumen

MULLER, Marguerite et al. Working toward a socially just curriculum in South Africa: A collaborative autobiographical narrative inquiry. Journal of Education [online]. 2018, n.74, pp.85-101. ISSN 2520-9868.  http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2520-9868/i74a06.

In this article, we foreground the lived experiences of a group of post-graduate education students at the University of the Free State who explored issues of social justice in the curriculum. Our contextual and local experiences are situated as part of a call for the decolonisation of the curriculum. In this context, we view curriculum as an autobiographical, lived, and storied practice (Pinar, 2012). Through our creative collaborative narrative, we focus on teacher identity and experience since this has been shown to have a major impact on the curriculum (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Furthermore, we use Kumashiro's (2002) conceptualisation of anti-oppressive education to highlight the messiness and discomfort of our experiences as we relearn, unlearn, and trouble oppressive knowledge in order to imagine alternatives. We posit anti-oppressive education as part of the social justice project as a useful theoretical stance in thinking around the decolonisation of the curriculum. In this article, we use a critical qualitative inquiry (Denzin, 2017) to explore what a process of decolonisation might look like; we offer an entangled view of how a collaborative narrative research methodology, identity, experience, and theory form part of the process of working towards a socially just and decolonised curriculum. Our article contributes to an existing body of work that uses collaborative and narrative methods to research issues of social justice. However, since much of the international literature on social justice education and curriculum is written in contexts far removed from our everyday experiences, we wish to make a unique contribution that is rooted in our local context and that highlights the unique experiences of South African teachers in relation to issues of social justice and the decolonisation of the curriculum.

Palabras clave : collaborative research; autobiographical narrative; decolonisation; social-justice; anti-oppressive education.

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