Cultivating a Decolonial Framework: Curriculum Relevance and the 21st Century African Learner in South Africa

Curriculum reform in South Africa remains contested, with persistent calls to move beyond inherited colonial frameworks and address the disconnection between formal education and the lived realities of learners. This creates a pressing need for pedagogies that are culturally relevant and empower learners within a 21st-century context. This study aimed to develop a conceptual framework for a decolonial curriculum by investigating educators' perceptions of relevance and their strategies for integrating indigenous knowledge systems and contemporary skills within the classroom. A qualitative, interpretive design was employed. Data were generated through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with secondary school teachers and curriculum specialists, and analysed using thematic analysis. Analysis identified three dominant themes: the conflation of relevance with Eurocentric economic utility, the strategic but fragmented inclusion of local cultural artefacts, and a significant barrier being educators' own lack of training in indigenous epistemologies. A key concrete finding was that over two-thirds of participants expressed uncertainty about how to critically integrate decolonial principles into formal assessment practices. The study concludes that without structured support in decolonial pedagogy, curriculum relevance risks being superficial, failing to fundamentally alter the epistemic hierarchies that marginalise African ways of knowing. It is recommended that teacher professional development programmes incorporate sustained training in indigenous knowledge systems and that curriculum policy documents provide explicit guidance on decolonial assessment methodologies. decolonial theory, curriculum relevance, indigenous knowledge, teacher perceptions, South Africa This paper offers a novel conceptual framework that explicitly links the philosophical tenets of decoloniality to practical curriculum design principles for the 21st-century classroom.