Towards Decoloniality of the Education Training and Development Third-Year Curriculum: Employing Situated Learning Characteristics to Facilitate Authentic Learning

This article reports on how the traditional way of teaching and learning in a third-year undergraduate education, training, and development (ETD) module was transformed at a traditional university in South Africa. Many ETD scholars argue that curricula taught to students in the ETD profession are not relevant to the South African context and do not prepare students for the workplace. Thus, transforming the learning and teaching in the ETD module was deemed critical because of the theory vs practice gap, and, more importantly, for the students' development of South African workplace skills and competencies to strengthen their employable opportunities. The study was located within a Critical Social Science perspective because the lecturer did not only want to understand the issues, but she wanted to effect positive change. Two experienced ETD industry practitioners were involved in the learning and teaching of the ETD module, and a decoloniality strategy, using six situated learning theory characteristics was employed to effect the transformation. The practitioners introduced students to authentic experiences, the students observed the practitioners at their workplaces, and the tasks and assessments were adjusted to the South African workplace context to enhance the students' learning experiences and strengthen their development of indigenous South African ETD skills and competencies.