Challenging Deeply Held Paradigms 3

The Sharing Cultures Project challenges me with the question of how the local and the global can be facilitated in the context of a curriculum. How does one prevent "local" knowledge from becoming closed, parochial knowledge? And how does one prevent “global” knowledge and the forces of globalization from overriding local knowledge and deeming the local irrelevant in a global world? How do we, as Nussbaum (1997) urges throughout her book, “cultivate humanity” so that our students become citizens of the world?

To translate Nussbaum’s notion of world-citizenship into the South African context, we face the realities of economically disadvantaged and academically underpowered learners, who rarely have the occasion to travel or join the digital highway of the internet. Using the powers of technology-assisted learning and inviting learners to bring their "locality" into a virtual "global" space, the Sharing Cultures Project curriculum provided a secret key by changing the paradigm of what a teacher was. Lecturers became co-sojourners and facilitators, rather than agents in the transfer of knowledge.

A crucial insight emerges in that a changed paradigm of the notion of a "teacher" is a prerequisite for a changed global curriculum – both in terms of content and delivery mode. If we take the relation between culture and knowledge seriously – if we consider radical new roles for teachers – it is clear that the Sharing Cultures Project is but a drop in the bucket in the university ocean. How do we "sell" and replicate this model across the university into so-called main-stream courses?

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