Indigenous music learning in contemporary contexts: Nurturing learner identity,agency,and passion

Data transcription and analysis

In documenting the bigwala project, materials were collected in 12 sites (3 schools and 9 community settings), reflecting numerous instances of teaching and learning of the cultural practice. Participants included school children, non-schooling youths, and adult community members of all ages. The original project was documented by 236 videos, 41 audio recordings, 1,263 photographs, 12 project committee reports, and minutes of six project committee meetings. I sifted through this data to identify the materials that most clearly captured instances of learning and teaching. As one of the chief organizers of this project, I was also present at and a participant in all these learning/teaching situations, and so brought my personal experience of them as an additional perspective. Ultimately, I analysed 63 videos, 17 audio files, a proportional number of photographs, and all the project reports and committee minutes. The themes that emerged from these materials were also reflected across the remainder of the data. This process enabled a dense triangulation across the range of sites (Eisner & Peshkin, 1990).

My data transcription and analysis processes were iterative, as Butler-Kisber (2010) suggests, “working back and forth” (p. 31) repeatedly. I selected the most meaningful videos, audio files, and photographs from among the large number of materials, scrutinizing them carefully before transcribing (Patton, 2002; Saldaña, 2016). I explored the data more deeply and began to allocate codes (Saldaña, 2016), and then read and reread to analyze the coded data until themes emerged. I then considered the emergent themes in relation to one another, to understand their interrelationships, enabling identification of key findings, which I then connected to extant literature, to produce a coherent, contextual report of the study.

Trustworthiness

To ensure trustworthiness, I engaged in a coherent and transparent process, endeavoring to maintain reflexivity and engaging in deep reflection (Butler-Kisber, 2010). I engaged regularly in peer debriefing, sharing my ideas with experienced researchers whose suggestions enhanced my understanding of my subject, stance, and motivations (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).

This research represents a decolonization of the research process (Hess, 2018) in which I, a member of the Indigenous community that was studied, am positioned to “name the conditions that affect” (p. 581) the community, and the research questions listed above emerge from my own lived experiences in the studied society. In this project, as in my continued work with the Basoga, I remain responsible and accountable to the people. I brought “insider-outsider researcher” (Milligan, 2016) lenses to the study: insider lenses of a Musoga, ¹ studying a tradition of my ethnic society, and of a leader of the project that revitalized bigwala, thus some of what I studied was my own work. I acquired lenses of an outsider as I looked at the experiences more deeply. As a result, I viewed some of my own actions and decisions as project leader through a researcher lens and found them to be inappropriate for those contexts. Although negotiating a shifting researcher identity raises a number of ethical and logistical issues (Milligan, 2016), it enabled me to bringing a semblance of multiple perspectives (Barone & Eisner, 2012) to the study as espoused by a constructivist view of knowing.

All data were obtained from public materials that are accessible on the UNESCO website, Singing Wells website, and had been publicized through various media in the country and beyond. As part of the original project, all participants had granted permission for their participation to be shared publicly, including on websites, research publications, and through various public media. The University Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects determined that this "project was exempt from IRB review according to Federal Regulations” because the data had been shared so widely and because there was nothing in my analysis of music learning and teaching processes that could have jeopardized the participants in any way. Some photographs I used were taken from videos, which enabled me to see the inner feelings expressed through body language to get deeper into the essence of what was happening, beyond that which was visible when the videos were playing.

Communal interaction and learning

The culture bearers used Basoga indigenous learning processes and encouraged adults and children to participate socially in all the “sustained intergenerational” engagements (Brannen, 2006; Eunjin, 2008). Throughout the entire project, activities involved people of all age segments and genders engaging in interactive, real-life, problem-solving experiences of bigwala making, playing, dancing, and farming the gourds that are made into the trumpets. By the time the bigwala project ended, 486 youths had learned the tradition.

In the communities, older village leaders explained to the youths the importance of bigwala and sang songs they had enjoyed in the past. At Mawanga village, in Bugiri district, a 68-year-old community leader gave a lengthy and passionate speech about the importance of this intergenerational transmission of the knowledge and skills of indigenous music traditions to the youths (Brannen, 2006; Eunjin, 2008; Poprawski, 2016). Then he said, “I know an interesting song that bigwala musicians used to play. Can these embaire (xylophone) and engoma (drum) musicians play it on their instruments?” He sang the song iyi ndete okudaga n’abaana and asked the musicians to perform it. The embaire players were failing to play the song, so a member hummed and another whistled the two parts ² of the song. It became an interactive, social, and collective process of scaffolding the embaire musicians (Bruner, 1996; Wiggins, 2011). The scaffold enabled the embaire players to learn their parts almost instantly and soon the music was complete. This success brought about joy among all the people as the song was played. One of the youths emerged to lead as a soloist and the rest sang a chorus spontaneously as they clapped. The village leader danced and everyone was excited – women ululated, children made noises, everyone participated happily – as their local councilor sang and tied a jacket round his waist ³ and danced. The context was set by the bigwala master musician and all the people, regardless of age, gender, or social status, participated in various ways. These people shared a musical culture, spoke repeatedly about their envisioned destiny of their society, and worked collectively to develop their community. Through talking, singing, and dancing together, they learned to make, play, and dance to bigwala, with members taking different roles as they became communities of the bigwala practice (Wenger, 1998; Wenger & Wenger-Trayner, 2015). The processes engendered changing identities of the youths as they became bigwala farmers, bigwala makers, bigwala players, and bigwala dancers – allowing themselves to be associated with a music genre that was not associated with youths in a modern context. Members of villages collectively became bigwala communities as they engaged in “intersubjective interchange” through discussions and collaborative efforts to learn together (Bruner, 1996, p. 56).

Children in the communities were also deeply involved, as is evident in the two instances that follow. A boy of about five spotted a group of youths engaged in bigwala making. They were cutting gourds using saws and knives, washing the pieces of gourd, fitting them onto one another long enough for the instruments, then blowing air in to test the sound. The young boy made his way into the middle of a circular formation that the bigwala makers had formed and observed what they were doing. He got so deeply involved that, for a while, he looked at the different activities without blinking (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Young Boy in White Pants Participates in Bigwala Making.

It was a form of intense participation, although he did not make the gourds physically. No one rejected him, although everyone recognized his presence. It was legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and, indeed, it was a primary interest of the project committee to let children participate in different ways so that they could learn the practice.

There were instances when children observed adults engaged in making and playing bigwala, waited for the adults to take a break, and then started to do what the adults had been doing. A girl engaged in legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) as she observed the bigwala youths learning to play the instruments. When the learners she was observing went for a break, she picked up the kigwala (singular for bigwala) and started to blow. She tried it on her own, through a process of constructing her own understanding of the way other youths were blowing. After a number of trials without making sound on the instrument, she poured some more water into the kigwala. Shortly after, she successfully blew and the kigwala made a sound. She went on blowing and other children gathered around her. She not only inspired others but also showed them how she managed to blow (Figure 2). The master musicians were impressed by her brave decision to learn to play the largest kigwala.

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Figure 2.

Young Girl Learning to Play Largest Kigwala.

In both the community and school settings, adult and youth learners facilitated their own learning of the bigwala tradition. Social interactions were both verbal and non-verbal interactions. Various forms of leadership emerged among participants, leadership that was contextual, non-threatening, and participatory, often from the sidelines. A community dancer demonstrates his leadership in celebrating a young boy dancing (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Community Dancer Celebrates a Young Boy’s Effort.

Through these learning processes, knowledge and skills were transferred from the culture bearers to the youths and community members. The culture bearers participated together with learners, treating them with respect, and using social, participatory, and holistic pedagogies, sharing what they knew with the learners, and allowing learners to make meaning of their experiences.

Bigwala as Basoga identity

The tradition was revived because people involved in the project repeatedly said it was an expression of their identity as Basoga people. They regarded it as their culture: their own beloved music tradition that had become part of their lives. While teaching youths in schools and communities, the culture bearers repeatedly made comments that were variations on: “I learnt this music from my father, who learnt it from my grandfather, who also learnt it from his father. I am the fifth-generation player of the bigwala in my family as far as I know”. As far as the cultural bearers could remember, bigwala music was transferred from one generation to the next, across five generations. They saw the music as their identity; they came to be regarded as bigwala players in the communities. When the master musicians saw many youths turning up to learn, they were happy to be doing the right thing: saving their valued music tradition from extinction. Bigwala offered them contexts to express passion for their culture, and to ensure that it would be reinstated in the kingdom. The youths demanded to play the music for their king ⁴ as a means of expressing their sense of achievement.

One video I analyzed captured the actions of the youths’ manifest feelings that the tradition meant so much to them. Two youthful dancers – a male and a female – decided to climb a tallest rock and danced atop it, and at times raised their hands as if they wanted to touch the sky (Figure 4). They risked falling down the slippery surface of the rock but, for them, it was about doing an extraordinary act to express an elevated state of being – identifying with their culture, feeling agentic, and filled with passion for bigwala engagements. The youths acted in ways that engendered hope for a renewed future survival of the bigwala tradition and other related Basoga traditions, in general.

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Figure 4.

Boy and Girl Dance Bigwala Atop Very High Rock.

Among Basoga communities, the word bigwala characterizes various things; it carries diverse meanings – multiple perspectives (Lincoln & Guba, 2013; Shively, 2015; Wiggins, 2015) – and it is a holistic expression (Wiggins, 2011). Bigwala is a holistic construct that embeds farming/agriculture, environment conservation, craftsmanship, singing, playing of musical instruments, dancing, and kingdom politics – royalty. Those multiple perspectives facilitate deeper understanding of the bigwala through various lenses since “learning and problem-solving require exploration of alternatives” (Bigge, 1982, p. 241). Bigwala embeds a system of interrelated perspectives, various forms of participation, practices, and meanings (Turino, 2008), and the total experience was organized “around the social dynamics of mentoring and intergenerational communication, the transmission of knowledge and supporting of intergenerational social relations, where values, experience and meaning [were] shared” (Poprawski, 2016, p. 8).

Learner identity

If learning contexts respect and value learners’ personhood (Elliott & Silverman, 2015), they are willing to take risks that characterize the learning (Rogoff, 1990; Wiggins, 2015). The bigwala master musicians created learning contexts where personhoods – identities of the youths and all other participants – were freely constructed, manifested, interacted, and transformed. Change of learner identity is part of the learning and, if an engagement does not contribute to transforming the identities of learners, then the learning experience is incomplete and possibly unsuccessful. The master musicians facilitated learning when they provided opportunities for learners to meaningfully engage and to be transformed by, during, and after the experiences. As Holquist (2002) suggests, our identity morphs in relation to the time, space, and context within which we engage and interact and, from a constructivist perspective, learning is interactive and social (Vygotsky, 1978).

The master musicians facilitated engagement with bigwala knowledge and skills for the youths both individually and in groups. Georgii-Hemming (2011) emphasizes the meaningfulness of individuality, noting that each learner needs “a space – both a physical and a mental one – where the student can experience acceptance of being different and thinking differently” (p. 205). An experience of acceptance allows individual identity to be transformed through negotiated compromises, and paths for meaningful group identity and transformation – which is the learning – are created. As Swanwick (1988) suggests, when the “individuality and creativity of each child” (p. 15) manifests, and when a teacher honors multiplicity (Vygotsky, 1978), transformation of identity through “intersubjective interchange” (Bruner, 1996, p. 56) – which, again, is the learning – occurs. Elliott and Silverman (2015) describe optimal learning as allowing a “sense of personal worth and dignity, self-confidence, and belonging” (p. 154) to blossom, adding that “a teacher’s actions and words make immediate and long-term differences, positive and negative, on student’s emotions, attitudes, motivations, and abilities to achieve their goals” (p. 154).

The bigwala youths’ experiences meant associating with and promoting a music and dance tradition that is generally regarded as a practice of the old generation. This was certainly conflictual for these youths. Also, it was visible that, in a learning context, identity is personal but also becomes communal – a shared character of the group. Identity as learning can be a manifestation of the individuality of each learner and, through negotiation, it becomes transformed and part of a consensual characteristic of a group that engages. As Higgins (2006) argues, identity “is an interchange between self and structure, a transforming process . . . Identity is about belonging, [and] it is about what is in common and what differentiates” (pp. 226–227). He adds that “identity is also about social relationships, those complex involvements with others, within the vast pool of potentially contradictory identities which battle within us” (p. 227) during an engagement. As Hargreaves et al. (2018) suggest, “How individuals view themselves can actually determine their motivation and subsequent performance” (p. 125) during a learning experience.

Among the Basoga, like other African societies, belonging and relating within community is an ever-present conscious life goal of an individual that is expressed through working in and with members to address existing needs. One is viewed in community and nurses a lifetime objective to be an acceptable member of community by behaving in conformity to society’s norms and values of personhood (Adjei, 2019). This aligns with Elliott and Silverman’s (2015) holistic concept of personhood as “embodied, enactive, social-cultural being” (p. 156). Bigwala contexts manifested the Basoga ideals of sociality and communality that personhood embeds and that changes over time. The youths, upon gaining proficiency, happily acquired a collective identity of bigwala musicians in the community, although each individual retained a role-specific identity among group members as a dancer, player of a drum, and trumpeter or others that interact to make up the holistic group identity.

Joy-filled passion

The bigwala communities manifested joy-filled passion to learn their tradition, and did everything within their power to learn it; the tradition and experiences were meaningful to them. As Ruiz-Alfonso et al. (2018) explains, “Passionate people feel that the activity is in line with their values and other aspects of their life, and they experience higher levels of concentration, flow, affect and energy while performing it” (p. 21). Bigwala participants of all genders manifested joy-filled passion through happy and joyful speeches, actions, and interactions during engagements. As Ruiz-Alfonso et al. (2018) note, during a meaningful learning engagement, “Students usually develop passion for activities perceived as challenges”(p. 24). Passion of the bigwala youths emerged in contexts where the culture bearers used indigenous teaching pedagogies. The pedagogies that facilitators of learning adopted inspired youths – learners – passion. Participants spoke with passion about the importance of bigwala to them and expressed joy in doing whatever they could to learn their tradition. These speakers inspired and transformed passion among those who listened to them.

“Passion is not a fixed characteristic in people” (Ruiz-Alfonso et al., 2018, p. 24). Learner passion can emerge as a result of valuing the knowledge gained from a learning experience. The consistent and intense participation of the communities in large numbers confirmed that bigwala was a highly valued community tradition, which warranted intense and collective involvement. Bigwala engagements visibly demonstrated shared joy through celebrating learning of and from the tradition, and these celebratory social interactions engendered collective joy-filled passion. The communities grew ebidoome and enhendo (gourds) and participated in different events, some of which lasted a whole day. They sacrificed in different ways without monetary benefits and endured all challenges to learn the tradition. “Passion . . . propels persistence . . . impels concentration . . . eases people to fully engage in an activity for a long time” (Ruiz-Alfonso et al., 2018, p. 20).

Cordial relationships among teachers/facilitators of learning and learners inspire learner passion. The master musicians were, as Elliott and Silverman (2015) describe, “effective, caring, respectful, and transformative educators . . . [who] facilitate[d] and propel[led] students’ self-confidence, perseverance, creativity, and success as learners”(p. 154).

Learners engage meaningfully when they participate actively. Bigwala youths enjoyed the participatory nature of the learning workshops where they were encouraged to make their own instruments. The culture bearers inspired passionate learning in the youths; as a result, the youths consistently came on time, participated actively and continuously, and manifested joy during the workshops. In short, the master musicians created “positive, productive, energized, joyful, and cooperative music learning salient environments” (Elliott & Silverman, 2015, p. 154) that were meaningful to the youths, which is why they learned the tradition.

Learner agency (kweikilirizamu ⁵ )

The youths learned bigwala because becoming royal musicians would increase their social capital (Bourdieu, 1986, 2006; Mutekwe, 2015), which is referred to in Lusoga as obutandikiro bw’obuntu. The Basoga believe that obutandikiro bw’obuntu can lead one to attain a higher status in community since it can be used for social, economic, political, and other benefits. It was evident from their actions and praises they received from the community members that the bigwala experiences increased their self-esteem. The master musicians were frail, but they taught the youths with energy and courage, which earned them praises from the project managers and members of the communities. One of the master musicians repeatedly said that bigwala created opportunities for him to get a network of people who celebrate him. He wanted to live a valuable life in society, value that he repeatedly said, accrued from his being a bigwala musician. The master musicians became agentic and told stories of the importance of bigwala and how their lives made meaning to communities. They talked about their past bigwala experiences with a sense of pride and joy, which increased the meaning of the tradition to the youths and to the community as a whole.

Learning of bigwala also generated thoughts among youths and other participants that this tradition was heralding them into a higher status in the Busoga society. Soon they would get close to the Kyabazinga (King) – the most respected person in the Busoga kingdom – because they would play bigwala for him. It was an avenue that presented itself to transform their struggle-filled peasant being. They saw bigwala as having potential to elevate them and get them near the center of cultural power, at least, and this was meaningful to them because, politically, they had no hope. For village youths who could not read or write, hope to rise politically in their cultural institution was beyond their imagination. Thus, bigwala was a great opportunity to bring alternative power close to them. The bigwala youths emphasized the pride of being associated with the king, who is the symbol of the kingdom, and to be closely associated with him was to acquire a higher social status in the communities. This was a shared view among the bigwala musicians, and their higher social status was acknowledged among the Basoga people, particularly during the celebrations for the coronation anniversary of the king.

I asked the youths at Butyabule village why they were spending a lot of time to grow bigwala gourds, cut gourds to make bigwala, and blow air out of their lungs learning to play bigwala all day. They shouted the answer in chorus and in full force: “Twenda kufuughira Kyabazinga bigwala” (We want to blow [play] bigwala for the king). This reflected a strong resolve to work toward and to achieve their collective goal of playing bigwala for the king. During the annual coronation anniversaries in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, bigwala youths were invited to play, and each time they played with pride, moving back and forth, bending downward, and raising trumpets high up in the air with excitement. Their actions were filled with energy and joy, which demonstrated okweikilirizamu (agentive being).

When the king arrived, the bigwala musicians were playing and singing a praise song – ono Gabula eno ewaife, ni kyabazinga (this Gabula, in our area [kingdom], is the king) – for him. The king shook his head in acknowledgment of the sung praises of these youths, and his own agency increased. Any human being would feel elevated by such sung praises. Consequently, when the king played the Busoga kingship drum rhythm (mwenemu alimu – the owner is in [the kingdom]) (Figure 5), I observed from the recorded video that the king played the drum more than 11 times, as it was symbolically meant to be. ⁶ He played with joy and energy that turned the experience into an agentive one – one of okweikilirizamu – for him, the bigwala players, the kingdom officials, and the community members who were observing. Everyone in this context was sharing their agency with others, and agency became contagious (Hogle, 2018).

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Figure 5.

The Busoga King Playing the Symbolic Drum.

When participants repeatedly gave testimonies that manifested okweikilirizamu (agentive being), as a project organizer, I started okweikilirizamu (to feel agentive) as well. Initially I did not realize that there were people whose lives were being transformed. My focus was on the transfer of bigwala knowledge and skills to a new generation, without reflection on what this meant in the lives of the master musicians. With support of the project committee, I worked harder to mobilize more participants, which expanded the project coverage. As the number of places where we set up bigwala communities increased, my own kweikilirizamu (agency) increased. I could see that my testimony as the leader was becoming bigger. The master musicians heaped praises on me during the engagements and recognized my crucial role in reviving a nearly extinct tradition. This inspired me to work harder in the bigwala project, and also become an agent, reviving music traditions even beyond Busoga.

The project committee included women who acted as mobilizers in the communities. This involvement in the project leadership inspired and increased okweikilirizamu (agentive being) among them. They repeatedly spoke about, sang, danced, and ululated praises of bigwala in joy and collectively. Also, learners in schools demonstrated a sense of kweikilirizamu (agency). A teacher at Buwenge Primary School, one of the schools in the bigwala project, danced together with pupils who were learning the dance. He quickly identified a learner as a model, which created a feeling of “we can after all manage this”. Learners found it easier to observe a peer as a model; they were challenged to work harder because among them there was one who had learned. This created a context that nurtured agentive learning.

The communality of the bigwala engagements made them a place for nurturing agency of the people collectively. That everyone was free to speak – and indeed spoke as they felt – was a manifestation of agentive being. Individuals talked about their resolve to be agents of the collective objective of reviving their tradition. Every individual participated in this experience by their own choice, but they immersed themselves in the collective action of learning bigwala music. Agency became communal because it had become contagious (Hogle, 2018). The atmosphere of freedom and respect for everyone and their views during the engagements offered experiences that nurtured agentive being. The committee members, women, youths, and community in general became agentive.

Another instance when agentive being was manifested happened at Mufumi when bigwala musicians climbed a rock that is named Nabirye and played in a procession on top of it (see Figure 4). The musicians climbed and everything that happened at the rock was instantaneous, involving more than 40 people. The engagement went on and on as people kept coming to join. Although there was no prior plan given to participants, the music created a context for communal celebration and a place for nurturing agency as a collective given among the participants. This event had attracted attention of the media. The excitement caused a China Global Television Network (CGTN) journalist to join the bigwala procession.

During a bigwala community meeting at Mawanga village, the council leader requested the project management committee to inspire people to acknowledge their identity and work toward their emancipation – invoking identity politics and activism (Hess, 2019) among bigwala communities. The council leader emphasized discipline as a way one gets to be respected and, when he finished speaking, the whole assembly applauded him. While it appeared, to me, to be a huge expectation from the project to reach out beyond the music tradition, I felt that these might well be the most important issues for the community to address. Then I recognized that if bigwala was creating a context for these discussions, then my work was in a way touching lives of the communities in which I was raised and that have a strong influence on me. I recognized that there were other meanings of bigwala to the communities. In this way, bigwala created a context for a self-awareness that is critical in a society that is on a path toward development. The leader castigated the effects of Western intrusion and inspired a sense of kweikilirizamu (agency) by appealing to people to contribute money that might be needed to support learning of bigwala. These words inspired the community to believe in themselves, and their capacity to make financial contributions toward the bigwala revitalization.

Looking at the data, I realized the applause that the village leader received was because the agency of the whole community had increased. This agency that had become contagious inspired a passion to learn this tradition. As Wiggins (2015) suggests, since “learning requires initiative and intent on the part of the learner” (p. 22), he or she should be “willing and able to enter the learning situation, [and] must have a sense of personal agency” (p. 22). The learner must have an interest in learning and an urge to learn, and this is possible only when the learner is agentive enough to have the capacity and willingness to engage. From a general view, “a theory of human agency raises the issue of freedom and determinism” (Bandura, 2006, p. 265) so that freedom can be perceived as “the exercise of self-influence in the service of [one’s own] selected goals and desired outcomes” (p. 265). This freedom may raise contradictions in a context of different learners working together. This is when the expertise of a teacher is employed to defuse the tensions while sustaining learners’ agency as individuals and as a group. Wiggins (2011) explains,

One universal aspect of selfhood is that selfhood derives from the sense that one can initiate and carry out activities on one’s own . . . .[and it] is at the core of [one’s] capacity for learning . . .[Thus, a] teaching process must be designed to foster and enable learner agency, thereby empowering [the] learner. (p. 91)

This empowerment enables learners to “bring their influence to bear on own functioning and on environmental events” in a manner that facilitates learning and transforms the world of the learner (Bandura, 2006, p. 165). Also, since humans function in socio-cultural contexts, agentive living influences their wider social being such that “agency is socio-culturally embedded . . . [and] extends beyond the skin in that it is socially distributed or shared” (Wiggins, 2011, p. 92). This communal agency is a powerful aspect of being in a community.

I note that there are two fundamental senses of agency: an agentic sense of self that is manifested in self-assertiveness and self-protectiveness on one hand, and a sense of selflessness (communal self) that is expressed in a person’s desire to become one with others on the other hand. In Western societies, people resolve this balance by shifting toward the individualistic sense, exemplified in personal freedom and choice, while people in the African cultural context emphasize obuntu or ubuntu (Bondai & Kaputa, 2016; Oviawe, 2016), the selfless sense of self in which the communal takes precedence over the individualistic. The prevalent cultural ideals of interdependent settings like those of the bigwala communities place emphasis on balancing individual autonomy with responsiveness to the expectations and requirements of a person’s community. This deviates from Western views of agency and might be assumed to be a less developed form of agency. Rather than being conceived as a less developed form of agency, personal agency in postcolonial Africa should be understood as involving normatively situated and intentionally based action that is contextually meaningful.

The indigenous ways of teaching and learning of bigwala coheres with the Basoga notions of personhood and agency (Adjei, 2019), which is why the project worked for the individuals and their communities. On the contrary, the “classroom-based teaching” practice that Africa inherited from the West does not develop these attributes in learners, which makes it unable to meet the needs of its learners and society.

Due to modernity, schools are failing in one of their duty of nurturing learner’s self-esteem (Bruner, 1996) leading to deplorable consequences in society. In-agentive learners fail to transfer what they have learnt into new contexts because they lack confidence to connect new problems to old ones, and apply what they know in new settings (Gardner, 1995; Rogoff & Gardner, 1984/1999). It is important for learners to transfer skills from one problem to another or to several related but non-identical learning problems; as Rogoff and Gardner (1984/1999) suggest, “Knowledge and skills have more general applicability than the specific episode in which they were originally learned or applied” (p. 96).