Indigenisation of the School Curriculum: Connecting Classroom and Community Experiences

Abstract

There are an estimated 300 million indigenous people worldwide, roughly 5 percent of the world’s population (UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2004). Despite this significant presence, national schooling systems have ignored, minimized, or ridiculed their histories pre- and post-Western contact, as well as their cultural contributions towards social and environmental sustainability. This in most cases has led to the education systems offered in most nations less relevant and unproductive for the masses. The sole purpose of any education system is to have a curriculum that offers relevant education to its learners. The aim of this paper therefore was to explore literature for the potentials of indigenising the school curriculum as a way of ensuring that curriculum relevance is upheld. For this to be successful, curriculum developers and policy makers should ensure that indigenous education must continuously re-invent itself so that it honours the basic cultural tenets of the ethnic groups it serves, recognizes the hybrid nature of many indigenous practices, and uses learning as a catalyst to foster social and environmental integrity. This paper therefore, concludes that there is a lot that can be learnt from indigenous education if its best practices are well synchronised with the formal curriculum thereby linking theory to practice for an effective curriculum.