Implications of Ubuntu as Pedagogy for Local and Global Education

Abstract

The dance pedagogies, which are undergirded by Ubuntu philosophy, have played a key role in advancing knowledge and skills of Indigenous dance forms. By engaging in such humanizing pedagogies, learners and teachers are accorded agency to participate in creating, teaching, learning, and sharing Indigenous dance knowledge and skills. Other Indigenous domains of knowledge such as storytelling, games, drumming, rock painting, children’s games, singing, and poetry are integral to the pedagogic frameworks. Individual innovation and well-being are valued, as well as the creative sensibilities of the communities. Emphasis is laid on fostering inclusion, collaboration, and individual creativity and imagination. The pedagogies enrich Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies and occasions co-construction of meanings and experiences as a result of the interplay between individuality and communality. The Indigenous teaching and learning methodologies avail new ways of thinking which educators, researchers, scholars, learners, and curriculum developers in local and global contexts of dance practice can leverage to advance dance education, pedagogy, research, theory, practice, and policy.