Responsiveness and Inclusivity Theorisation in the Curriculum Development of Teacher Education at One University in South Africa

A need for a responsive and inclusive curriculum in teacher education requires higher education to deliberately engage in curricular decolonisation. The Eurocentric curriculum has failed to incorporate local African indigenous knowledge, wisdom, and culture; instead, its designers and proponents used colonial power and dominance to cause symbolic castration and epistemicides. Using existing theoretical underpinnings that are Eurocentric in origin cannot help Africa achieve its goal of curricular decolonisation. Themane (2020) argues for an alternative theory that is embedded within an Afrocentric paradigm, emancipatory, participatory, value-oriented, and free from the bias of Western worldviews. The call is to move away from structuralist-oriented curriculum theories. This paper responds to alternative pathways for curriculum theorising in Africa that Fomunyam (2020) suggests can only be achieved through contextual, responsive, and theoretical theorising. Our contribution emanates from the dearth of literature on teacher education curriculum and the decolonisation agenda, where we propose a responsive and inclusive theorisation framework.