3 - Sustainable Rural Learning Ecologies: A Pathway to Acknowledging African Knowledge Systems in the Arena of Mainstream of Knowledge Production?

Abstract

This article proposes an idea which to most might seem misplaced and unrealistic. Its aim is to demystify myths around African scholarship and rural learning ecologies that are misrepresented in discourses dominant in the global North. Sustainable rural learning ecologies located within African-centred philosophy should be understood in this context as a transformational agenda and a vehicle for knowledge construction. The concept of sustainable rural learning ecologies is simply about acknowl- edging knowledge constructions within the rural contexts as knowledge embedded in African value systems. Knowledge construction in a rural learning context should be celebrated for its strengths and opportunities, as having its own comparative and competitive advantage in the global discourse arena. Sustainable rural learning ecologies (SuRLEc) should be understood as an epistemological discourse that makes meaning and critiques the dominant body of knowledge by affirming rural context and cultural constructs. The paper examines hegemonic dominant discourses that try to monopolize knowledge production systems and domesticate other parameters for the interpretation of realities as historically obsolete, irrational and pre-modern. It argues that SuRLEc is a platform that holds people’s experiences as sources for the construction of forms of knowl- edge. I therefore argue for learning ecologies that acknowledge different formations and foundations for the construction of pyramids of knowledge. I conclude by dismissing views that hold that any one pyramid of knowledge is by its nature eminently superior to all others.