Grounded collaborative learning: on the misperceived relevance of philosophy in Africa

Given a peculiar sociocultural pressure for knowledge to reap immediate socioeconomic benefits in Africa, philosophy courses have gained a very low valuation by African students. They misperceive the courses not to be relevant to their future careers, leading to a lack of engagement with the courses. Focusing on South Africa, this paper proffers one way to bridge this relevance gap. The central claim is that this perceived irrelevance is fuelled by the construction of philosophy course syllabi solely from the instructor's perspective, such that the relevance gap is bridged by including African students' perspectives.