Developing epistemologically diverse learning frameworks

Abstract

Education in South Africa is referred to regularly as being in crisis, with learners and educators struggling with various local and international assessments. This state of affairs persists despite considerable efforts having been made to reform and revise the national education system. I contend that these efforts will meet with limited success for as long as schooling continues to be grounded exclusively on the current dominant epistemological bases. I argue for the need to diversify the epistemological foundations of educational systems in South Africa and in Africa in general and offer a strategy for pursuing such aims. I suggest that the notion of an historical epistemology together with expansive learning and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) may offer useful conceptual and methodological tools for developing a counterhegemonic epistemological framework in the form of a networked-relational model of learning.