Africanisation of the South African Archival Curriculum: A Preliminary Study of Undergraduate Courses in an Open Distance E-Learning Environment

Autor/inn/en	Ngoepe, Mpho; Saurombe, Nampombe
Titel	Africanisation of the South African Archival Curriculum: A Preliminary Study of Undergraduate Courses in an Open Distance E-Learning Environment
Quelle	In: Education for Information, 37 (2021) 1, S.53-68 (16 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0167-8329
Schlagwörter	Foreign Countries; Archives; Information Science Education; Undergraduate Study; Distance Education; Electronic Learning; Indigenous Knowledge; Open Education; Curriculum Development; Information Management; South Africa + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Ausland; Archivwesen; Archiv; Informationstechnologische Bildung; Grundstudium; Distance study; Distance learning; Fernunterricht; Offene Erziehung; Offener Unterricht; Curriculum; Development; Curriculumentwicklung; Lehrplan; Entwicklung; Procurement of information; Informationsbeschaffung; Südafrika; Süd-Afrika; Republik Südafrika; Südafrikanische Republik
Abstract	Educators and archivists in Africa have repeatedly raised the need for redeveloping university curricula to reflect local and global best practice. An African education curriculum case study by the InterPARES project (2013-2018) that covered 38 countries out of 54 revealed the existence of few available archival training programmes in the continent. Literature further reveals that where educational programmes are available, the curriculum is mostly Eurocentric and thereby addresses archival issues from a Western perspective. As a result, the infinite problems facing archivists on the continent such as resources, skills, technology, infrastructure, advocacy, holdings, collaboration, displaced archives and many more (the list is endless) are not fully engaged. The archival programmes at the institution of higher learning appear not to address grand societal challenges such as unaccountability, poor governance, service delivery, as well as the low usage of archives repositories in the continent. In South Africa, there has been a call to use African epistemologies such as Ubuntu, a philosophy that provides an African overview of societal relations or the Batho Pele, principles adopted by the post-apartheid South African government to guide and direct its public service and address imbalances of the apartheid regime. This study utilised the Africanisation pillar of Sibanda (2016)'s model to analyse the infusion of curriculum transformation into the ten modules for archives and records management in an open distance e-learning (ODeL) environment. In this regard, the content of ten archives and records management modules for a bachelor's degree in an ODeL environment is analysed to explore the transformation of archival curriculum. Only one university in South Africa offers a fully-fledged bachelor's degree with a major in archives and records management. The study established that an attempt was made to transform the archival curriculum at study material development and module delivery level. This resulted in a missed opportunity to transform archival curriculum in the development of the new bachelor's degree being implemented in 2017. The study concludes by arguing that failure to decolonise the archival curriculum will result in archivists being highly unlikely to contribute to solutions to societal problems that are difficult to solve confronting South Africa using local solutions. It is recommended that transformation of the curriculum should start at a programme level rather than module level. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01