Rural Students and Science: Curricular Justice, Epistemic Justice and Epistemic Freedom

Teaching and learning in higher education can no longer be assumed to be a ‘neutral’ interaction between students and academic teachers. In this chapter, I consider the teaching and learning of science in the context of rural students in a previously privileged institution in post-apartheid South Africa. I argue that in this historical, political and institutional context, access to higher education has to go beyond inviting marginalised students onto courses. University knowledge, based on colonial ways of knowing, needs to be questioned and academics must consider access on an epistemic level as an essential part of the learning experiences offered in the university. The currently privileged ways of knowing and curriculum are examined in this chapter. Working with the students as co-researchers, I explain and exemplify how their existing knowledges, which are not generally recognised as scholarly or rigorous, were drawn upon to teach scientific concepts, and how these rural knowledges often have scientific underpinnings.