Join a webinar on decolonising and humanising approaches to teaching in higher education. Michalinos Zembylas will talk about how teaching can change to include non-European ways of knowing.
DEPA (Decolonising Peace Education in Africa) webinar series aims to promote dialogue on diverse theoretical, conceptual, and methodological perspectives within Africa. Our next speaker is Michalinos Zembylas.
Register now via Eventbrite.
4th October 2022
This presentation brings decolonising pedagogies into conversation with humanising pedagogies. The question that drives this conversation is: What are the links between humanisation and the decolonisation of higher education, and what does this imply for pedagogical praxis? This intervention offers important insights that help reshape teaching in more human‑centred ways. It supports the decolonial goal of social change, while still recognising the challenges involved, including the complexities, tensions, and contradictions that come with this work. The presentation looks at different approaches to decolonising higher education and argues that, if real and meaningful change is the goal, educators in South Africa need to question the teaching methods shaped by Eurocentric knowledge. It suggests that they can do this by examining these methods closely and adapting them in new ways. These efforts can provide spaces to enact decolonial pedagogies that reclaim colonised practices. The discussion concludes with some reflections on what this idea might imply for South African higher education.
Michalinos Zembylas is Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus, Honorary Professor at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, and Adjunct Professor at the University of South Australia. He has written extensively on emotion and affect in relation to social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, human rights education and citizenship education. His recent books include: Affect and the rise of right-wing populism: Pedagogies for the renewal of democratic education, and Higher education hauntologies: Living with ghosts for a justice-to-come (co-edited with V. Bozalek, S. Motala and D. Hölscher). In 2016, he received the Distinguished Researcher Award in “Social Sciences and Humanities” from the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation.