Prof Josef de Beer

Josef is the Deputy Dean Research and Postgraduate Studies in the Faculty of Education, at North-West University in Potchefstroom. Previously, he held the position of Director of the Science Learning Centre for Africa, hosted by the Faculty of Education at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town. Josef has a C1 NRF rating, and worked as principal investigator in several NRF funded projects. His research project “Teachers without borders: Creating indigenous knowledge science labs in rural schools” was selected as one of twelve flagship programmes funded by the Fuchs Foundation.  

Josef’s research focus is on the epistemological border-crossing between indigenous knowledge systems and science education.  During his 2010 study for the MSc degree in Ethnobotany (a second Masters) he came to realise that a teacher can very effectively introduce indigenous knowledge in the Life Sciences classroom, with full consideration of the tenets of science. Josef and Prof Ben-Erik Van Wyk (UJ) (South African Journal of Botany 77, 2011) developed an original, rigorous and practical quantitative approach for conducting ethnobotanical field work- the Matrix Method. However, Josef’s task was now to make this accessible to teachers, who often teach in under-resourced classrooms. He published a series of  articles especially geared towards including indigenous knowledge in school science in The American Biology Teacher (ABT) (2009; 2011; 2012). These publications resulted in an award from the National Association of Biology Teachers in the USA in October 2012. He was awarded the Excellence in Research in Biology Education Award during the NABT Conference in recognition of his contribution in mainstreaming indigenous knowledge systems in the school curriculum. Josef recently completed a second PhD on indigenous knowledge systems, focusing specifically on medicinal plant use by Khoisan people in the Northern Cape. His research was published (amongst others) in an open- source AOSIS scholarly book (2019), ‘The decolonization of the curriculum project: The affordances of indigenous knowledge for self-directed learning’. It can be downloaded from: https://books.aosis.co.za/index.php/ob/catalog/book/133