Decolonising audiology education: Epistemic barriers and opportunities for Black African students.
Musa Makhoba, Sarasvathie Reddy, Mershen Pillay
Ten Audiology graduates felt their curriculum trained them for middle-class English-speaking patients rather than the South African communities they serve.
They described biased grading, surface learning, and the absence of African knowledge systems.
Key findings
1Participants described the curriculum as focused on Global North contexts and middle-class English-speaking patients, with Afrocentric knowledge systems, indigenous healing practices, and local public-sector clinical realities absent from teaching.
2Participants reported that their language background and race influenced grading more than the quality of their work, and that clinical supervisors used public, shaming feedback that impaired their performance.
3Many participants described learning 'just to pass' rather than integrating knowledge, which they linked to the volume of content and the gap between what was taught and what they encountered in clinical practice.
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How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
Single university and single programme; findings reflect one institution's curriculum and cannot be generalised to other South African Audiology programmes. All 10 participants were working in public hospitals in the same province, so the range of clinical contexts they encountered is narrow. The principal researcher was a first-language isiZulu speaker who had trained students in a similar curriculum, an insider perspective the authors acknowledge but which may shape interpretation. Member checking was not used, though the authors justify this within the hermeneutic phenomenology framework. Ten participants from one group at one site is a small basis for the broad structural claims the authors make about South African Audiology education.
Declared interests
No funding received from any public, commercial, or not-for-profit source. No conflicts of interest declared.
The easy way to misread this
These are the reported experiences of 10 graduates from one university, not a measured finding that the curriculum is biased. The recommendations for curriculum reform are the authors' proposals, not tested interventions.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →