Disrupting the Psychology Canon? Exploring African-Centered Decolonial Pedagogy

The call for decolonisation has led to the unsettling of the status quo within most institutions of higher education in South Africa. We contend that this moment of potential epistemic rupture provides the opportunity for African scholars to reshape the disciplines and disrupt Western canons of knowledge that have dominated African scholarship. Decolonisation has disrupted and challenged transformation discourses that sought to level the playing field without deeply engaging with structural challenges that continue to hinder change. We reflect on our personal challenges, concerns, discomforts and attempts at re-imagining and engaging with decolonial pedagogy. Furthermore, we present our thoughts about the ethical responsibility we carry as African scholars towards epistemic justice. We explore some of these thoughts by presenting three experiential accounts in which we highlight the decolonial and African epistemologies we have adopted in our facilitation of teaching and learning of psychology in general and community psychology in particular at our respective universities. These accounts demonstrate the importance of bringing our histories and communal identities to the pedagogical encounter.