Bringing the Science of Learning and Development Into the South African Schools

Eradicating a Colonial Legacy

Transforming an education system from a colonial legacy education is never an easy task. This is even more so when the goal of transformation is to produce equity and citizens in disproportionate countries like South Africa and other similar countries in the Global South. From a historical perspective, educational inequities, social disparities, and structural inequities pose significant challenges to the realization of Sustainable Development Goals (Aramyan & Mironov, 2021). It is, for example, a huge challenge in South Africa to ensure that all children and young adults complete primary and secondary education. It also remains a dream to ensure that all girls and boys grow and thrive.

These and other challenges have been exacerbated by the impact of pandemics, global warming, and ethnocentric nationalism. In South Africa, as anywhere in the world, where these problems are common, policymakers are hard-pressed to find solutions. For example, South Africa’s parliament is currently considering a law amendment bill to address its most controversial provisions of new powers that will allow provisional heads of education to override school governing bodies’ admissions and language-related policies (Kahn, 2023).

While we can acknowledge that these challenges are profound and deeply rooted, they occur at a time when we know a great deal about both the drivers of inequities and ill-being and how to promote thriving. But this knowledge is limited by our epistemological and methodological orientations as well as intellectual silos, both in education research and between education research and other disciplines and domains. I propose that researchers and policymakers harness these too-often siloed resources to leverage what is known about alternative ways of organizing teaching and learning.

Post-1994 Curriculum

Epistemological and methodological orientations rooted in European and American curriculum theories are unlikely to deliver lasting solutions to educational challenges facing South Africa. These theories from the Global North fail to acknowledge an eclectic view of knowledge such as SoLD (Glatthorn, 2005) and its implications for curricula and instruction. I contend (as others have) that such a narrow view of learning and pedagogy is limiting (Bernstein, 1977; Cantor & Osher, 2021; Freire, 1996; Hoadley, 2012; Maluleka & Themane, 2020; Muller, 2012). This narrow view does not embrace a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to learning and development. For example, outcomes-based education has regrettably been a victim of this dilemma. It has fallen short because it does not leverage the emerging syntheses across fields, such as psychology, that focus on human learning, human development, and neurosciences that converge around an integrated understanding of dynamic relations between and among contexts; physical, social, emotional, cultural, and cognitive processes; and perceptions of the self, tasks, settings, and the emotional salience of experience (Glatthorn, 2005; Osher et al., 2021). Consequently, the neglect of this multidisciplinary and broad-based approach to learning and development has compromised important debates around decoloniality, cognitive justice, and ecologies of learning. In other words, postcolonial education in South Africa has failed to embrace this important opportunity.

Science of Learning and Development

Learning and development can be understood as involving dynamically interactive processes between and among people and dialogic relationships that unfold through people’s participation in routine cultural practices within and across spaces and within and across stretches of time (Nasir et al., 2020). Using this high-level definition, I draw from mine and colleagues’ work that validates and illuminates the importance of bringing SoLD into the school environments. To this end, I address two questions: How are issues of race, ethnicity, immigrant status, gender identity, sexual orientation, and experiences of poverty taken up in studies on schools as enabling environments? What are the strengths in this work, and what questions persist, requiring more deepened and critical understandings?

These questions can best be addressed by first providing a brief background. Back in 2014, Themane and Osher (Themane & Osher, 2014) raised the importance of creating conditions conducive to learning, such as safety and security. We stressed that learning cannot take place where learners feel threatened, anxious, vulnerable, or exposed. We pointed out that a person’s body responds, secreting stress hormones such as adrenalin and cortisol, and their heart rate changes, their amygdalas kick in, they may experience a fight or flight impulse in response to risk, and in some cases, they may develop unproductive and physically unhealthy allostatic stress as their neurobiology adjusts to that which threatens it. Several chapters in this special issue supported the importance of understanding SoLD as a pillar of quality education provision, as have follow-up symposia and workshops with colleagues from many South African universities. This collective work underscored the fact that the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and other developmental and learning sciences should be considered when designing teaching and learning programs. At the bottom of this approach is the story about the potential of all learners.

Another related work, also based in South Africa, was a study of UNICEF’s child-friendly schools. After working in 150 schools for 3 years, we concluded that when teachers create enabling environments such as right-based schools, healthy and protective schools, and teacher-friendly schools, children thrive and learn and develop better (Modipane & Themane, 2014), a finding that was consistent with the global evaluation of child-friendly schools that included South Africa (Osher et al., 2009).

The power of SoLD is also evident in the work of Clasquin-Johnson et al. (2023), which outlines that mental health needs to be studied through African lenses and not only from a medical perspective or Western point of view but also from an African perspective. My chapter in the same work called for a holistic approach to teaching children experiencing autism, where I poignantly argued for partnerships between the schools, parents, and the community at large to join hands in teaching all children irrespective of their physical or social disabilities (Themane, 2020). This holistic view is motivated by two core principles that are consistent with SoLD. The first is that contextual influence and ecology are at the center of any initiative that successfully takes root. For example, the relational context is the key driver of sustainable development. The second is that learning is not only just a cognitive process but a social and an emotional one as well and that social and emotional factors are inextricably linked. For example, varied experiences and their processing should drive growth and change.

Realizing the Potential of Whole-Child Education and SoLD in South Africa and the Global South

Whole-child education, which is consistent with SoLD, has been applauded as progressive and transformative (Darling-Hammond et al., 2021). Whole-child quality schooling addresses the complete range of a child’s developmental requirements to make sure that children realize their maximum potential (Chafouleas et al., 2021). Schools can encourage students’ development in their relationships, identities, emotional abilities, and general well-being in addition to academics (Chafouleas et al., 2021). Additionally, “whole-child education” is a strategy that schools are utilizing more and more frequently to make sure that students are learning these larger life skills (Darling-Hammond & Cook-Harvey, 2018). Schools need to provide conditions that support children’s intellectual, social, emotional, physical, mental, and identity development in addition to their academic advancement (Darling-Hammond & Cook-Harvey, 2018). Therefore, this strategy should provide children with the groundwork they need to develop into well-rounded, healthy adults who are prepared with a good education and significant life experiences (Darling-Hammond & Cook-Harvey, 2018). Such broad thinking about education resonates with Freire’s (1996) work that advocates that education should aim at unlocking a person’s whole potential as a human being. Such an education should empower people to change themselves and the world around them.

But its value notwithstanding, the proponents of whole-child education have failed to make an impact in the Global South because in places like South Africa, it failed to embrace other ways of learning or knowing, including the recognition of Indigenous knowledge systems. Such ways of knowing include how schools have failed to tackle race, ethnicity, foreign national status, gender, sexual orientation, and experiences of poverty (Carter, 2012). These and other psychosocial factors make schools dysfunctional. The whole child in South Africa has failed to take root because of the legacy of apartheid. Schools are still battling with inequalities in the provision of education.

South African schools, like many in the Global South countries, need urgent attention to these matters, however, if they are to provide an enabling environment for quality education provision. SoLD and its approach hold promise. This promise will only be realized if SoLD-informed research, policy, and practice embrace and address the local needs and assets of the people it is to serve.