Abstract
The thrust of this study is to appraise the agency and contribution of Zimbabwe’s pre-service teacher education programme to epistemic (in)justice given its strategic position in the country’s education system. By adopting the qualitative paradigm, the study found the critical interpretivist framework appropriate for purposes of exploring Zimbabwe’s engagement in the call for recentring the subalternised local knowledges given the nation’s colonial history and it being situated in the Global South. I purposively selected four universities notable for their pronounced participation in the pre-service teacher education programme. In keeping with the essence of my study where focus is on the explication, exposition, and clarification of issues and phenomena, I employed the philosophical hermeneutics technique to analyse documents in order to appreciate the efficacy of the teacher-education programme in advancing the cause of epistemic (in)justice. The study provides evidence of how the pre-service teacher education programme in Zimbabwe lacks positive responsiveness to the epistemic justice concern. The absence of clearly laid out policies regarding the agency of the university as the nerve centre of just knowledge production and dissemination is evinced. The predominance of English as key instructional language across all the universities in all learning areas, save for the local languages themselves, remains a critical impediment for testimonial and hermeneutical justice in knowledge acquisition and distribution. The vestiges of the colonial past, barely consistent with the revolutionary spirit manifest at the dawn of independence exhibit themselves in the structure of teacher education programmes characterised by a misrecognition of the presence of ‘other’ knowledges. A closer scrutiny of the aims and/or objectives of the pre-service teacher education programme points to a status quo teacher education with hardly any sense of agency for the recentring of the local knowledges, languages, and values. Notwithstanding these limitations, the study recommends the adoption of a policy shift on epistemic justice through the agency and function of the pre-service teacher education that provides a programme with direction, consistency, harmony and a sense of purpose for transformative epistemic justice. In keeping with the decolonial discourses across Africa, the study further recommends a reconfiguration of the mission and vision of the pre-service teacher education programme and, by implication, the teaching profession, to embrace the African Renaissance agenda, starting from initial teacher education cascading down to schooling for the realisation of a socially just iii citizenry. Accordingly, I recommend the decentring of the hegemonic epistemologies, the disruption of tendencies bent on the balkanisation and/or binarisation and hierarchisation of knowledges in favour of the pluriversalisation and hybridisation of the different funds of knowledge in the academy with the end being the realisation of epistemic justice, a critical component in the evolution of a socially just society.
D.Phil. (Education)