Edward Shizha

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Wilfrid Laurier University

This theoretical chapter discusses the relevance and importance of indigenous African knowledges in promoting sustainable learning for indigenous African students. It argues that sustainable learning cannot be achieved when schooling content and pedagogical practices exclude colonized and marginalised indigenous knowledges. Culture involves politic...

This volume focuses on processes, motivations, policies, and practices that influence international migration, the experiences of migrating and settling in a new country, and how these intertwined facets are influenced by intersectional factors and ecological systems and settings. Chapter contributions are by international and interdisciplinary sch...

This volume focuses on processes, motivations, policies, and practices that influence international migration, the experiences of migrating and settling in a new country, and how these intertwined facets are influenced by intersectional factors and ecological systems and settings. Chapter contributions are by international and interdisciplinary sch...

This volume focuses on processes, motivations, policies, and practices that influence international migration, the experiences of migrating and settling in a new country, and how these intertwined facets are influenced by intersectional factors and ecological systems and settings. Chapter contributions are by international and interdisciplinary sch...

This volume focuses on processes, motivations, policies, and practices that influence international migration, the experiences of migrating and settling in a new country, and how these intertwined facets are influenced by intersectional factors and ecological systems and settings. Chapter contributions are by international and interdisciplinary sch...

This volume focuses on processes, motivations, policies, and practices that influence international migration, the experiences of migrating and settling in a new country, and how these intertwined facets are influenced by intersectional factors and ecological systems and settings. Chapter contributions are by international and interdisciplinary sch...

This volume focuses on processes, motivations, policies, and practices that influence international migration, the experiences of migrating and settling in a new country, and how these intertwined facets are influenced by intersectional factors and ecological systems and settings. Chapter contributions are by international and interdisciplinary sch...

Knowledge constructions are important to peoples’ sustainable livelihoods. How people perceive their socio-cultural well-being and how they determine the course of their livelihoods depends on the available knowledge resources. Each society is surrounded by different webs and networks of knowledges that exist in their ecological settings, whether “...

African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS) and epistemologies are a complex field, which when viewed from an educational perspective, spans several complex concepts across disciplines and cultures. For the purposes of this book AIKS will be viewed as the combination of knowledge, skills and practices embedded in cultural beliefs, practices and tra...

African indigenous knowledge systems (AIKS) and indigenous epistemologies suffer from negative stereotypes in the modernized and globalized African development trajectories. The epistemologies are culturally invalided and marginalized. This exclusionary perspective perceives AIKS as belonging to the past or to rural communities, which are stereotyp...

The chapters in this book present a conceptual, theoretical and application framework on how AIKS are vital for improved livelihoods among Africans. The chapters provide an integration profile of an integrative approach (Knutsson, 2006) that allows for target areas to be pinpointed for the integration and inclusion of AIKS in their practices. The a...

All over the world people are coming together to make the places they live in better through various initiatives like community engagements, localized businesses and home-grown synergies. Community business can be any type that trade products and services by the local people for the local people. While Zimbabwe boasts of many migrants in the diaspo...

One of the challenges facing the Zimbabwe education system is poor performance in mathematics, which is a result of western methodologies, which are mechanistic and promote rote learning. Learners struggle with mathematical concepts and processes because many of the concepts are beyond their lived cultural experiences. This has resulted in mathemat...

In recent decades, immigration has increased in many countries resulting in arise of immigrant children in schools. In Canada, immigrant youth experience resettlement challenges that include language difficulties, prejudice, and lack of educational opportunities, and culturally appropriate services in schools. Many do not speak the language of inst...

This article employs a life course perspective to examine the life experiences—expectations, disappointments and second chances—of young men from West African immigrant families who did not complete postsecondary education. Specifically, it demonstrates the discrepancy between the education and career expectations that parents have for their sons a...

Canada targets between 250,000 and 300,000 new permanent residents every year. Immigration and translocation confer new forms of identity and citizenship on those who have crossed national boundaries. The idea of being a citizen of a nation-state is gradually being replaced by global transnational citizenship that broadens the immigrant’s sense of...

This article examines how young African immigrant men in Southern Ontario cope with the dominant racial identity at school in an effort to improve their academic performance and access postsecondary education (PSE). Critical race theory in education is employed to explain how the young men distance themselves from stereotypes about Black masculinit...

It is without doubt that in today’s world, the relationship between globalization, immigration and transnationalism cannot be overemphasized. We are all affected by this phenomenon, particularly those who are mobile and have become transnationals. The subject of this book is to examine some of these transnational mobilities and how they have affect...

Canada’s high and steady annual immigrant intake has undoubtedly contributed to the nation’s growth and shaped the countries overall cultural composition. For numerous scholars, the residential patterns of immigrant and minority ethnic groups within Canada are a significant aspect of understanding Canadian “culture”. Some of these residential patte...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop and test an accessible and culturally appropriate social support intervention designed to meet the support needs and preferences identified by African refugee parents of young children. Design/methodology/approach – The study was built on the research team's preceding study assessing social support...

School governance and the involvement of indigenous communities and parents in the affairs of the school contribute significantly to the school performance and educational outcomes of indigenous students. For indigenous peoples and communities, parental involvement is strongly influenced by ethnic or cultural backgrounds that are different to the s...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine support needs of African refugee new parents in Canada, and identifies support preferences that may enhance the mental health of refugee parents and children. Design/methodology/approach In all, 72 refugee new parents from Zimbabwe ( n =36) and Sudan ( n =36) participated in individual interviews. Al...

African higher education, which is perceived as the panacea for challenges afflicting Sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA) social, human and economic development (Ndofirepi, 2014), is facing challenges resulting from neoliberal globalisation. Higher education is supposed to yield significant benefits for both young people and society by providing better empl...

What have postcolonial Sub-Saharan African countries achieved in their education policies and programmes? How far have they contributed to successful attainment of the targeted 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on education? What were the constraints and barriers for developing an education system that appeals to the needs of the sub-region?...

This volume delineates the critical link among security, education and development in Africa and provides a multidisciplinary framework of analyses and possible solutions. Africa has had a long history that embodies layers of mass-scale criminality and exploitation not merely from neocolonial and apartheid policies but also from political greed. Th...

The foundations of education and schooling in Canada are based on Eurocentric worldviews, ways of knowing, cultural capital, and pedagogical practices. Canada is regarded as an open and tolerant multicultural society that is receptive to cultural differences. However, when it comes to education and schooling, multiculturalism becomes contentious an...

The production, dissemination and archivization of knowledge are important processes in contemporary knowledge economy. Questions on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) arise when Indigenous Knowledges (IKs) are examined and evaluated on how they benefit the knowledge economy and development. These questions seem to be addressed in terms of dominant...

In this chapter we discuss the genesis of science in Africa with reference, first of all, to the South African Cape region, about one hundred thousand years ago (Jacobs, Duller, Henshilwood & Wintle, 2006). We then reflect on aspects of science as it evolved in ancient northeast Africa with some reference to ancient Nubia, Ethiopia and Egypt, highl...

Contemporary African societies bear the imprint of the legacy of colonialism but they are also marked both by their pre-colonial heritage and their different postcolonial experiences. The way Africa is known today is a reflection of the political, economic and historical intrusions and constructions of its societies that resulted from colonial cont...

This book is an intellectual journey into epistemology, pedagogy, physics, architecture, medicine and metallurgy. The focus is on various dimensions of African Indigenous Knowledge (AIK) with an emphasis on the sciences, an area that has been neglected in AIK discourse. The authors provide diverse views and perspectives on African indigenous scient...

The original version of this chapter was published with incorrect name of the chapter author as Gloria Jennings in the online version. This has now been corrected to Gloria Emeagwali.

The cultures in indigenous Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are heterogeneous. Although there is not a common culture shared by all Africans, particularistic cultures exist in areas where common cultural and/or linguistic characteristics exist. However, African education systems are similar in that they can generally be categorized and conceptualized as ci...

With its origin in Greek where ‘diaspora’ as a noun means ‘a dispersion’ or as a verb means to ‘scatter about’, the term is used in this paper to refer to the dispersion or scattering of Africans from their original African homeland and now live in countries other than their own. Indeed some Africans have dispersed from their own countries to other...

This is a collection of bold and visionary scholarship that reveals an insightful exposition of re-visioning African development from African perspectives. It provides educators, policy makers, social workers, non-governmental agencies, and development agencies with an interdisciplinary conceptual base that can effectively guide them in planning an...

Both indigenous knowledge and curriculum reform are currently contentious topics in science education in South Africa. When South Africa became a democracy twenty years ago, one of the immediate tasks of the new government was to reform the education system. Among the goals of the ongoing educational reform is social transformation and redress (Dep...

"What are the benefits and risks for Africa's participation in the globalisation nexus? Remapping Africa in the Global Space is a visionary and interdisciplinary volume that restores Africa's image using a multidisciplinary lens. It incorporates disciplines such as sociology, education, global studies, economics, development studies, political scie...

This study examines challenges faced by refugee new parents from Africa in Canada. Refugee new parents from Zimbabwe (n = 36) and Sudan (n = 36) were interviewed individually about challenges of coping concurrently with migration and new parenthood and completed loneliness and trauma/stress measures. Four group interviews with refugee new parents (...

Sub-Saharan African countries have been politically independent since the late 1950s but they have not done much to free their school curricular from remnants of colonial education. The current postcolonial African school curriculum ignores the voices, indigenous knowledges (IKs) and cultures of African indigenous populations. Students, in Africa,...

Globalisation is a universal and pervasive phenomenon and process that is affecting people’s lives in various ways. People in this globalised world interact with and affect one another “in ways previously unimaginable” (Singer, 2002, p. 10). International migration has become a genuinely global phenomenon.

In contemporary societies, education is regarded as a catalyst for economic and national development. Economists hypothesise that investment in education benefits the individual, society, and the world as a whole and that a broad-based education of ‘good quality’ is a powerful instrument for reducing poverty and inequality.

The school system in many regions of Africa does little to cater for the unique challenges to psychosocial adjustment and cultural identity development that students experience when they enter the school gate. Schools and the education system in general promote poor academic performance, low self-esteem, and high dropout rates for students who do n...

Globalisation has had both positive and negative impacts on Africa. Many scholars have examined its impact from an economic perspective while others have focused on the cultural and technological dimensions of globalisation. Whichever perspective is used, globalisation is not something new for Africa. The process can be traced back to both slavery...

African social development is often explained from outsider perspectives that are mainly European and Euro-American, leaving African indigenous discourses and ways of knowing and doing absent from discussions and debates on knowledge and development. This book is intended to present Africanist indigenous voices in current debates on economic, educa...

The aim of the study was to identify the unique support needs and preferences of African refugees in Canada. In-depth interviews were conducted with Sudanese and Somali refugees (n=68) living in two cities in central and western Canada. Refugees were interviewed individually to identify their support needs, current sources of support, available sup...

The school curriculum in postcolonial Sub-Saharan Africa experiences challenges that are a legacy of colonial education that remained in place decades after political decolonization. The case for African school curriculum is contentious in contemporary Africa because it negates the voices of African indigenous populations. Despite the advent of dec...

The paper examines the concept, strengths and shortcomings, role and implementation of the reconciliation policy as Zimbabwe emerged from periods of conflict crisis soon after independence in the 1980s, and the current crisis in the 2000s and how the policy can be introduced in schools through ‘education for reconciliation’. The authors argue that...

While Sub-Saharan African economies are currently among the fastest growing in the world, the subcontinent is still the most underdeveloped zone globally and its people are the most economically disadvantaged.

The role of education in human well being and social development cannot be overestimated. After a number of highly commendable policies on education in the first decade of independence, the education system in Zimbabwe has taken a tumble that needs both examining and rectifying. This volume analyses the challenges facing the education system in Zim...

Current healing systems in Southern Africa focus on the holistic approach to the health and wellness of patients. Biomedical approaches and traditional healing systems that incorporate spiritual healing, mental healing, physical and social healing play a crucial and significant role in health delivery systems in Southern Africa. An integrative appr...

This article draws upon a Māori metaphor to describe the theoretical framework underpinning the methodology and findings of a research project completed by researchers from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, in 2010. It explains how and why the project required the research team to synthesise key information from four New Zealand Ministry o...

The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of teaching science to rural primary school students using a second language (English) in Zimbabwe. The study also investigated the opinions and attitudes of primary school teachers toward teaching science using an indigenous language (chiShona). Qualitative data was collected using twenty classro...

The paper examines the concept, strengths and shortcomings, role and implementation of the reconciliation policy as Zimbabwe emerged from periods of conflict crisis soon after independence in the 1980s, and the current crisis in the 2000s and how the policy can be introduced in schools through „education for reconciliation‟. The authors argue that...

The debate regarding the relationship between science and development, and the role of indigenous knowledges in Africa is very controversial. Arguments for or against the use of indigenous knowledge in science or regarding indigenous sciences are informed by what is perceived as the appropriateness or inappropriateness of indigenous perspectives an...

Purpose The aim of this paper is to design and pilot test a culturally tailored intervention that meets the support needs and preferences of two refugee groups. Design/methodology/approach The study employed a multi‐method participatory research design and was conducted in two urban centres in western and central Canada. Support was delivered to S...

Since independence in the 1950s and 1960s, postcolonial African societies have been characterized by civil wars and ethnic conflicts. Many Africans had hoped that independence from European colonial rule would usher in a period of peace and prosperity in all areas of life for the entire population. However, this anticipation has rather been usurped...

Purpose This paper seeks to explore varied interrelated challenges and barriers experienced by immigrant seniors. Design/methodology/approach Senior immigrants representing diverse ethnicities (Chinese, Afro Caribbean, Former Yugoslavian, Spanish) described their challenges, support needs, and barriers to service access. Service providers and poli...

The imposition of neoliberal globalisation and Eurocentric science education in Southern Africa raises questions on how African people develop their African humanity and sociability. Neoliberal globalisation has been imposed on African educational philosophies to determine curriculum developments and implementation, especially in science and techno...

There is little information on global citizenship education within the context of Zimbabwe. Some earlier studies (Nziramasanga, 1989a, 1995) focused on how the Social Studies curriculum could be revised to address citizenship education and thereby create programmes that are more relevant in an independent Zimbabwe. This approach to the concept of c...

In Zimbabwe, higher education refers to postsecondary institutions such as universities, polytechnics, teachers colleges, and other units in government ministries, government parastatal organisations and the private sector as well as other non-governmental organisations. In this chapter the focus is on public universities. Higher education is divid...

With the imposition of neoliberal globalisation and Eurocentric education, there is a pressing need for Zimbabwe to ensure that it is open and inclusive, not only for the development of its economy, but to build a cohesive and stable society. Zimbabwe faces numerous challenges, probably more than any other postcolonial state has ever encountered. S...

School curriculum is a highly politically charged arena. In postcolonial Africa, curriculum reconstruction has emerged as perhaps the most politically contested and contentious phenomenon of educational change. At the same time, curriculum reconstruction represents an accumulating legacy of failure in most countries. The problematic of politics of...

Education is identified as one of the principal means of enhancing socio-economic development and transformation in Zimbabwe. Since independence, the country has made great progress towards achieving the goals of Education for All. The standard of education in Zimbabwe is believed to be considerably higher than in most other Southern African Develo...

Every society has a history that will shape the present and future circumstances of its people and development. Most people from Africa, Asia and South America, live in the aftermath of colonialism, while others, for example the Indigenous Peoples of North America, Australia, New Zealand, Latin and Central America still live in colonial bondage. Th...

Pre-colonial traditional societies in Africa were mostly oral societies that dependent on language and historical narratives. Language played and still plays an important role in communicating a point or opinion and shared sentiments. It has an educational, social, economic, and political role in the narratives of the community and in establishing...

Zimbabwe has one of the highest literacy rates in Sub- Saharan Africa. An examination of the statistics reveals that despite this achievement women fall behind the men in their literacy level. The report of the World Economic Forum (2010) shows that the literacy rates for women have increased from 86% in 2006 to 89% in 2010. The rates for the males...

The development of education cannot be adequately explained without analysing the historical context that focuses on the political, social and economic intersections. In this book, we described the historical and post-colonial developments in Zimbabwe and argued how they have shaped educational policy and practice. Colonial systems of education wer...

Education systems everywhere have experienced changes, influenced both by political and economic considerations. In most “developing” countries, the economic effect of neoliberal policies has created discontinuities in advancing educational progress. Education has, in most instances, been reshaped to become the arm of national economic policy and i...

Higher education in Zimbabwe has moved from a small elite system to a mass system in the last thirty years. At independence in 1980 there was only one university whose total enrollment was 2000 fulltime students but to date there are 8 public and four private universities with a total enrollment of more than 42,000 full time students. There are sev...

Teachers worldwide are currently experiencing ‘difficult times’ as their work is assailed, prevailed upon, reformed and restructured almost beyond recognition by forces bent upon devolution, marketisation, de-professionalisation, and intensification (Smyth, 1998). All these are impacts of economic and political considerations that governments are p...

Teachers are "gate-keepers" in schools. They process what is assumed "valid knowledge" and how it is taught. The process marginalizes indigenous knowledge and legitimizes western science. This book explores and discusses teachers' definitions of science and indigenous knowledge,their attitude towards incorporating the latter in science, and pedagog...

This chapter focuses on inthgenous knowledge recovery in the academy as an anticolonial and antiracist project that needs to be pursued to liberate the minds of inthgenous academics and researchers who have wittingly or unwittingly adapted Western knowledge as the universal knowledge and the panacea for underdevelopment in Zimbabwe. The anticolonia...

This collection makes a unique contribution towards the amplification of indigenous knowledge and learning by adopting an inter/trans-disciplinary approach to the subject that considers a variety of spaces of engagement around knowledge in Asia and Africa.

Zambia, the butterfly-shaped, central African country has a population of about 11 million people, and as other Sub-Saharan African countries, has been trying to democratize since the early 1990s. Clearly, though, the promise of political reform did not fulfill the expectations of the public, and with about 60 percent of the population living below...

In Zimbabwe, as elsewhere in Africa, local communities had well-developed indigenous knowledge systems for environmental management and coping strategies, making them more resilient to environmental change. This knowledge had, and still has, a high degree of acceptability among the majority of populations in which it has been produced and preserved...

In today’s deceptive and selectively globalized world, education is one of the most crucial and critical resources for acquiring the skills and capabilities needed to function in competitive capitalist job markets. Global capitalism and its disequalizing dynamics (Alam, 2003) reflect major structural imbalances in the distribution of global resourc...

Despite the end of colonialism, Zimbabwean rural school teachers still find themselves trapped in the colonial pedagogic practices that undervalue the importance of rural school children's experiential knowledge in science. This article explores the beliefs and attitudes of rural primary teachers towards incorporating Indigenous knowledge and Indig...

This paper explores counselling of the indigenous Shona people and provides an argument for multicultural counselling. The vast majority of the Shona people use both traditional (informal) and modern counselling services. The indigenous approach to counselling tactfully captures the importance of the family and the community as a mode of communicat...

In Zimbabwe the need to incorporate indigenous knowledge in science education to reflect local cultural settings cannot be overemphasized. Current policies on science are situated in Western cultural definitions, thus marginalizing indigenous knowledge, which is misconceived as irrational and illogical. This study used qualitative research methods....

This article is a theoretical discussion on the social construction of knowledge in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe. It examines effects of hegemonic knowledge constructions and how they may be delegitimated through incorporating indigenous knowledge in postcolonial school curricular. The article questions the importance attached to Eurocentric...

Since the early 1990s and, perhaps, as one effect of the emergence of the uni-polar world, there have been a lot of "democratizing" activities in the Sub-Saharan context, with Zambia, a central African country of about 10 million, at the forefront of these processes. While democracy, in one form or another, has come to Zambia, socio-economic underd...

In addressing issues related to problems of democratisation in Africa, this paper attempts to relate the issue to the need for citizenship education and the role that can play in social development. Citizenship should be central to the formation of viable civil societies that claim a tangible stake in national public spaces in post-Cold War Africa....

Teachers are known for their "gate-keeping" roles in schools, especially in the classroom setting. They process and decide what "knowledge" is "valid" and "appropriate" for students. They also decide when and how the knowledge should be mediated to students. Their gate-keeping role marginalizes some forms of knowledge while validating and legitimat...

Education plays a vital role in social and democratic development, especially in “developing” countries. Most African nation-states are going through a transitional period of democratization. They are moving from tyrannical and autocratic rule that was practiced by most African leaders soon after leading their countries to political independence to...

The case for African school curricula is a contentious phenomenon, especially when the definition of “African curricula” has to be considered and understood within the context of contemporary and multiethnic Africa. The contention is how to define and validate knowledge, particularly the official curriculum in the face of globalization, and the int...

In a globalized neo-colonial world, an insidious and often debilitating crisis of knowledge construction and legitimation does not only continue to undermine the local and indigenous knowledge systems, but it also perpetuates a neo-colonial and oppressive socio-cultural science educational system that debilitates the social and cultural identity of...