Decolonising pedagogy in post-apartheid South Africa: the expanded understanding of Vygotsky’s theory and new postulates

<p><strong>Context and relevance.</strong> The paper examines contemporary post-apartheid pedagogy and its underlying epistemologies that position teachers and their students as passively conforming to prescribed knowledge and concepts disconnected from practical realities, goals, and students’ personal pursuit of meanings. <strong>Objective and</strong> <strong>Hypothesis.</strong> Such an approach, premised on values of adaptation to the status quo of preexisting models and procedures, fails to promote knowledge premised on values of contribution to collective social practices and self-identity development. <strong>Theoretical basis.</strong> That is, pedagogy so conceptualised in the logic of colonial orthodoxies and solipsistic epistemologies, inevitably denies students and their teachers their inherent capacities for agency and meaningful engagement with reality. <strong>Results and discussion.</strong> Therefore, in instantiating decolonising approach to pedagogy, a young student the teacher had deemed to be experiencing learning difficulties, enacts her embodied knowledge [1]and is thereby posited as debunking the logic of colonial epistemologies that underpin contemporary post-apartheid pedagogy. <strong>C</strong><strong>onclusions</strong><strong>. </strong>The student is therefore presented as enacting her culturally situated community practices and knowledge traditions which she embodies, despite the continued exclusion of such knowledge practices within contemporary post-apartheid pedagogy. [1]Translator's notes: <strong>Embodied knowledge</strong> is a concept according to which knowledge is not only theories and mental ideas but also related to our personal experience, sensations, and how our body interacts with the surrounding world. This approach suggests that we learn through practical actions and personal experience, demonstrating how the body helps us understand and perceive reality. The concept of embodied knowledge challenges the outdated view that mind and body are separate entities and emphasizes that bodily perception is important for developing our knowledge and skills.</p>