Teaching for Global Citizenship Education Online: An African Philosophical Approach

Abstract

Global citizenship education (GCE) has been in vogue for the last decade. The term has been used mostly to espouse and rearticulate some of the democratic, responsible and activist aspirations linked to forms of transformative higher education (HE) in the world today. Southern African HE is no exception, particularly invoking some of the (post)critical and decolonial virtues within matrices of HE for change. In this article, it is described how reflections on a massive open online course brought to the fore several poignant moments in the pursuit of cultivating a (post)critical and decolonial notion of GCE. Such reflections focused on enacting an African philosophy of HE, particularly showing how, first, ukama (iterative action) can be used to engage humans in perspicuous and deliberative ways; second, ubuntu (critical and dissonant action) is drawn upon to show how agreement and dissent about educational and societal matters can be resolved; and third, the notion of umsibenzi (activism) is couched in moderate terms to emphasise the potentiality and impotentiality of action that could subvert societal dystopias on the African continent and elsewhere. In this way, the cultivation of an African philosophy of HE could broaden the notion of a (post)critical and decolonial understanding of GCE.