LCT is having real social impact in places such as South Africa. LCT, or Legitimation Code Theory, is a framework for understanding and changing knowledge practices in different areas of social life. It allows people to explore the ‘rules of the game’ in different fields and to then develop ways of teaching more people to succeed, or to change those rules.
In South Africa, the rules that many feel need to change are those that continue the segregation of education. The movement exemplified by the hashtag #RhodesMustFall demands that South African tertiary curriculum is decolonised and desegregated, and made available to all. Using LCT, some South African scholars are doing just that.
Dr Hanelie Adendorff, of Stellenbosch University, uses LCT to analyse the science curriculum and to see which methods of decolonising are actually working. LCT is uniquely suited for this kind of analysis, as it explores the very thing that decolonising the curriculum seeks to address – that is, knowledge practices. With such a various and controversial movement, finding a way to achieve decolonisation is both vitally important and very difficult. In the following video-cast, Dr Adendorff explains how LCT can be used to cut a path through the arguments to some real-world solutions.
The video is here.
LCT continues to have a profound impact in South African universities, transforming the education landscape to the benefit of all.