Open and Distance Learning for Sustainable Development

otherwise open and distance learning will continue to be viewed as an inferior alternative,
good enough for failures and one that only produces mediocre graduates.
We also acknowledge that open and distance learning programmes for teachers do not exist in
isolation from the complex web of social and cultural issues, policies and resource decisions
that exist in any country. As Robinson and Latchem (2003) argue, the decision to use open
and distance learning, its purpose, content and the form it takes, are situated within this
broader environment and is shaped by the agendas operating there. It should also be stressed
that open and distance learning is more than an alternative system and its concerns are more
than operational ones. Its planning and use soon confront fundamental social and cultural
issues in teacher development and the extent to which planners of open and distance learning
engage with or neglect these kinds of issues that affect the quality of the provision.
Consequently, when considering open and distance learning and teacher development in
Africa, it is imperative that we reflect critically on issues of history and context. This means
that we need to rethink teacher development by open and distance learning in Africa.
4. RETHINKING ODL AND TEACHER DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA
Much of the history of Africa has been dominated by colonial occupation. Colonialism in
Africa provided the framework for the organised subjugation of the cultural, scientific and
economic life of many on the African continent. This subjugation impacted on African
people’s way of seeing and acting in the world. In fact, African identity, to all intents and
purposes, became an inverted mirror of Western Eurocentric identity. This state of affairs
gave birth to numerous attempts to reassert distinctively African ways of thinking and of
relating to the world, and is expressed in our days in the call for an African Renaissance.
The call for an African Renaissance has been present in the period marking the nearly four
decades of African post-independence. The process of decolonisation that unfolded during
this period saw Africa asserts its right to define itself within its own African context in the
attainment of independence. Wa Thiong’o (1993) claims that independence was about
people’s struggle to claim their own space, and their right to name the world for themselves,
rather than be named through the colour-tinted glass of the Europeans. In the context of
education, Hoppers (2002) describes this continuing struggle in the following way:
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The African voice in education at the end of the twentieth century is the voice
of the radical witness of the pain and inhumanity of history, the arrogance of
modernisation and the conspiracy of silence in academic disciplines towards
what is organic and alive in Africa. It is the voice of 'wounded healers’
struggling against many odds to remember the past, engage with the present,
and determine a future built on new foundations. It invokes the democratic
ideal of the right of all to 'be’, to 'exist’, to grow and live without coercion,
and from that to find a point of convergence with the numerous others. It
exposes the established hegemony of Western thought, and beseeches it to feel
a measure of shame and vulgarity at espousing modes of development that
build on the silencing of all other views and perceptions of reality. It also
seeks to make a contribution to the momentum for a return of humanism to the
centre of the educational agenda, and dares educators to see the African childlearner
not as a bundle of Pavlovian reflexes, but as a human being culturally
and cosmologically located in authentic value systems (p.2).
What is meant by the African Renaissance in education is, therefore, founded on the
perception that the overall character of much of educational theory and practice in Africa is
overwhelmingly either European or Eurocentric. In other words, it is argued that much of