Knowledge and post-colonial pedagogy

Abstract

This paper departs from the premise that knowledge is a source of power, and that we need to come up with pedagogical and academic tools to ensure that disparately positioned individuals/groups within society can voice their experiences and are heard. Academic institutions found in small, intermediately developed countries such as the Maltese Islands tend to be dependent on Western derived epistemologies and enunciative tools to carry out representation and re-definition exercises. Such exercises are necessary for disenfranchised groups/nations to theorise the past from the location of the present in order to map out the future. A number of issues have to be taken into consideration when such an exercise takes place. The primary objective is to provide the subaltern with agency, agency based on transversal dialogue between disparately positioned groups within academia and the public sphere both within and without particular nation states. Such a dialogue would be facilitated if a post-colonial pedagogy is adopted. This pedagogy would help challenge neo-colonial discourses and practices which have infiltrated academia with the hope that these exercises are adopted in other spheres of life, and hence more egalitarian societies created.