This study is of cardinal importance to the researcher because, in its completion, it shall have achieved the following critical outcomes:
1.7.1.1 Self-empowerment as opposed to empowerment
In the positivistic approach, the researched are always objectified and treated like apparatus in a science laboratory. Research is not for, nor with them, but it is about them. There is no way they can benefit from participating in the investigation. This study, however, being qualitative and thus giving respondents full recognition of and all deserved respect as human beings, gives them the space and time to speak for themselves
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and not being spoken on behalf of as is the tradition in qualitative studies. This is therapeutic on its own, hence the realisation of the possibility of counter-hegemony from discursive spaces under the very same oppressive conditions. Only healthy people can engage in emancipatory struggles. Hegemony and ideology kill the mind. They close down alternatives and possibilities and crown themselves as the "only"
truth or knowledge. The subjects of hegemony and ideology live and move in this space to their destiny which is perpetual domination, oppression, marginalisation and disadvantage.
Speaking for themselves allows the respondents from dominated cultures to e the opportunity to empower themselves for the struggle of their emancipation. Self-empowerment as opposed to empowerment is critical to this study. In empowerment the subaltern culture cannot be empowered beyond or above the powers of the empowerer. He who is empowered remains the subject of the empowerer. This study should be a stimulus to the subaltern culture/dominated group to e possibilities and their potential and ability to emancipate themselves from marginalisation and imposed identity.
1.7.1.2 Involvement in meaning construction
The way in which the transformation of higher education has unfolded so far is unacceptable to the dominated culture because it is pro-capitalist.
There is a great suspicion that all commissions in place for higher education policy are not representative of those in the margins of society.
The fundamental aim of research is knowledge production. Under the quantitative paradigm, knowledge production is the sole responsibility of the dominant discourse. This allows the dominant discourse to influence and determine which kind of knowledge filters down to society, and the
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knowledge is manipulated to be biased against the subaltern culture since it perpetuates and maintains the status quo. In the qualitative paradigm, knowledge is regarded as incomplete if it excludes the voices of the voiceless. The subaltern culture becomes part of the meaning construction process, hence empowerment towards emancipation. This study advocates for the inclusion of the peripheral group in the process of knowledge production.
1.7.1.3 Replacing Eurocentricism with Afrocentricism
The inclusion of black academics in learning guide production will allow them the space and time at the centre to contribute in the production of knowledge. In this way, indigenous African knowledge and the African culture become part of mainstream knowledge. This will be the beginning of a genuine transformation of institutions of higher education. The ultimate result of Africanisation of curriculum will be the paradigm shift from Eurocentric to Afrocentric knowledge. The Afrocentric approach produces knowledge that is relevant to the surrounding environment and aimed at social development. This is in stark contrast to knowledge produced to support capital.
1.7.1.4 African institutional identity
Mahlomaholo (2005) argues that curriculum has to do with everything involved in the transmission of culture from one generation to the next and from one setting to the other. The transmission and transference, as modern pedagogy affirms, is not merely a mechanical process of remembering and the use of rote, but it occurs even at higher levels of knowing which are classification, application, evaluation, and recreation of knowledge. The New Academic Policy (2002) explains even more clearly,
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Autonomy of learning is expected of postgraduate learners at the highest level of learning and knowing as a capacity to operate in complex, unfamiliar contexts, requiring personal responsibility and initiative, a capacity to accurately self-evaluate and take responsibility for continuing professional development; a capacity to manage learning tasks independently, professionally and ethically; a capacity to critically evaluate one’s own and other's work with justification (48).
Learning guides in their present form do not produce the kind of learner envisaged by the New Academic Policy, viz. a critical thinker who is not alienated from his people. One serious concern from the dominated discourse is that learning guides are a handicap towards intellectual development. They perpetuate narrow and stereotypical thinking and stunt intellectual growth. Learning guides produce knowledge consumers and not knowledge producers. A graduate, as envisaged in the New Academy Policy, is one that is in the position and is empowered to challenge and influence policy formulation in a way that benefits the marginalised and subaltern culture. The researcher believes that, if everything goes well and according to plan, all institutions will have an African academic identity.
This study will also lay bare the historically specific interests that structure learning guides, the relations among them and the manner in which the form and content of learning guides reproduce and legitimate the dominant discourse. This is the central task of this study, for, if it is to promote an oppositional discourse and method of an inquiry, it will have to embody interests that affirm rather than deny the political and normative importance of history, values, ethics and social interaction.
The analysis of discourses between the dominant and the dominated group will interrogate the knowledge claims and the modes of intelligibility central in defence of the status quo in various departments
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and disciplines as captured in learning guides. Equally important is the indictment of the interests embedded in the questions not asked in learning guides. In other words, it must provide opportunity for the development of methods of inquiry into how the present absences and structured silences that govern teaching, scholarship, and administration within departments as seen in learning guides deny the link between knowledge and power, and refuse to acknowledge the particular way of life that dominant academic discourse helps to produce and legitimate.
Another critical contribution of this study will be its emphasis on studying the production, reception and use of varied learning guides, and how they are used to define social relations, values, particular notions of community, the future and diverse definitions of the self. Text in this sense does not merely refer to the culture of print or the technology of the book, but to all those audio, visual and electronically mediated forms of knowledge that have prompted a radical shift in the construction of knowledge for the ways in which knowledge is real, received and consumed.
Currently, the structure of universities is inextricably tied up with interests which suppress the critical concerns of the subaltern culture and intellectuals willing to fight for oppositional public spheres.