Decolonising Teacher Education in Pursuit of Multilingual Teaching and Learning in South African Higher Education

Introduction

South Africa's post-apartheid transition is characterised with many issues that have attracted or raised concerns for transformation in many spheres of the economy (Ajani, 2019). Education remains one of the sectors that require transformative attention. According to the extant literature, education had been used as a tool of oppression during the apartheid (Chisholm, 2005; De Wet and Wolhuter, 2009; Heleta, 2016; Makombe, 2021). It is further established by diverse scholars that education continues to be a tool for social inequalities as well as what disadvantages many black South Africans. Access to education, which according to the 1996 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, is a citizens' right; and is meant to create leverage for an average citizen has continued to be flawed with many issues and challenges (Heleta, 2016). Various HEIs have attempted to review institutional policies to see how they could accommodate students' demand for decolonized higher education. However, research asserts that HEIs in South Africa continue to be a largely Western model of academic organisations and are largely Eurocentric. This chapter will add to the long-overdue debate on multilingualism in teaching and learning, as part of the decolonization of higher education in South Africa.

The institutional structures in many of South Africa's higher education institutions at different times have made policies to amend some of the pronounced indicators of social injustice in the institutions. However, these attempts have failed successful implementation to address the purpose (Machingambi, 2020; Makombe, 2021). Hence, Lebeloane (2017) argues that Student Movements at various times in many of these institutions have continued to register their disappointment and frustrations with the existing social inequalities in the citadel of learning. These citadels of learning witnessed a landmark protest that spanned across universities from 2015-2016 (Ajani, 2019).

Machingambi (2020) asserts that with the series of student protests that rocked South African higher education from 2015-2016, calls for decolonization of higher education were given prominent voices by the protesting students as one of their demands. Though the protests were destructive and violent, the aftermath of the protests strengthened various debates on the decolonization of higher education spaces in South Africa (Lebeloane, 2017). Various extant studies affirm that Higher Education Institutions in South Africa are not only Eurocentric, and westernised but also failed to accommodate 'Africa' in teaching and learning as well as in institutional structures (Chisholm, 2005; Heleta, 2016; Lebeloane, 2017; Ajani, 2019; Machingambi, 2020; Makombe, 2021).

Fomunyam and Teferra (2017) posit that higher education in South Africa is diversely complicated in context and faces a lot of challenges and limitations which include social inequalities and complicated curriculum contents. The curriculum is delivered mostly in English or Afrikaans in most White-dominated universities, a practice during the apartheid era, and continues even after the post-apartheid era. This is one of the visible social inequalities that litter Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the Republic of South Africa. In 2015, various student movement protests which include “#RhodesMustFall”, and “FeesMustFall” protests plagued South Africa's HEIs, prominent among the demands of these protesting students were the calls for decolonization of higher education in South Africa. Their demand for decolonization is a paradigm shift from the Eurocentric dominated education system to a decolonized higher education that recognises and accommodates learning contents and structures in African discourses (Murris, 2016). Thus, the student movements and other academic struggles increase the voices on decolonization, according to Jansen (2017), decolonization of higher education is an intensified discourse in South Africa. Similarly, Sayed, Motala, and Hoffman (2017) opine that the decolonization of higher education continues to be re-energised through political action across South Africa, by the students.