Decolonising the Curriculum: Fostering Sustainability in Higher Education in Zambia

Abstract

Zambia continues to experience escalating environmental challenges that threaten not only the country’s biodiversity but also the well-being of the population. The higher education environmental education curriculum has been recognised as crucial to solving these sustainability challenges. However, the curriculum is more than a neutral assemblage of knowledge, it is, a selective tradition that values and validates knowledge rooted in how human subjects are conceptualised and are produced in curriculum making processes. In contemporary Zambian society, efforts towards environmental sustainability are connected to colonial legacies and embedded in various historical contingencies. In an education system charged with addressing issues of environmental sustainability, the history of colonial presence influences how Zambian environmental policies affect local interests. I argue that contemporary Zambian environmental policies and curricula are entangled in the ongoing and incremental dismantling of local people’s environmental knowledges and ways of acting. In addition, international declarations concerning the environment and environmental education also marginalise local ways of knowing and being. These complex forces are rooted in Zambia’s colonial past implicating Zambia’s present environmental management practices, policies, and curricula. This study seeks to better understand the environmental education curriculum and entanglements with the colonial past to facilitate the inclusion of knowledges appropriate and responsive to Zambia’s local and national environmental challenges. It investigates the curriculum at one public university in Zambia by highlighting the use of Western knowledges and subjectivities. The study poses the following research questions: (a) what does the higher education environmental education curriculum in Zambia include and exclude? (b) what informs and influences the development of the higher education environmental education curriculum? and (c) what is the effect of inclusions and exclusions on the higher education environmental education curriculum? Using Foucauldian and decolonial conceptions of power, knowledge, and subjectivity, this study investigates struggles over the Zambian environment and the production of Zambian students’ knowledge and subjectivity. A decolonial genealogy connects De Sousa Santos’ (2014) epistemologies of the South to Foucault’s (1984) history of the present. Both Foucauldian genealogy and decolonial perspectives are concerned with the possibilities of ‘emergence’, and each is interested in the way that Western rationality seeks to represent what counts as knowledge and subjectivity and how these representations legitimise power relations. The theoretical orientation of this study thus takes the present as radically prescribed by colonial logics. The study draws on the memories, accounts, and practices of local traditional leaders, lecturers, policy makers and Non-Government Organisation (NGO) representatives as well as environmental policies and documents, to explore how certain knowledges and modalities of being and relating to the environment are excluded from national environmental policies in general and university environmental education curricula in particular. The genealogical analysis of the study begins with an investigation of the “problem’ as represented by local leaders, lecturers, policy makers, NGO representatives, environmental policies, and curricula. Here, present tensions of ‘problem’ representations between local traditional leaders and environmental policies are brought to light. These tensions are then examined to locate their emergence through Zambia’s colonial past and their entanglements with the and present. Finally, the study examines how the historical emergence of the ‘problem’ affects what is deemed as worthwhile environmental knowledge, the process by which curricula are produced, and the subjectivities that are desired. The analysis of the historical present shows that the environmental education curriculum is informed by Western epistemologies which mobilise, normalise, and preserve an environmental cosmopolitan, that is, a Western(ised) rational, individualised and accumulation-oriented subject who overshadows indigenous ways of knowing and being in the environment. The thesis concludes by proposing and developing the concept of Southern environmentality to advance the decolonisation of environmental knowledge and subjectivity. It argues that the environmental education curriculum and the production of its knowledge should be an activity that reconciles different stakeholders creating the possibility of an ecological subject and a sustainable future.