Acknowledging the cultural and educational value of proverbs in literature: Insights from language lecturers

Abstract

For many decades, African scholars in the education field have drawn from traditional education and philosophy as primary tools to highlight the significance of proverbs and educating children from diverse cultures and communities across the world. This autoethnographic approach explores the effectiveness of proverbs as an educational tool for teaching literature in university classrooms. Drawing on their personal and cultural experiences, three lecturers demonstrated that proverbs and sayings can be successfully applied when teaching literary themes to students. The data was collected from three lecturers from diverse linguistic backgrounds (Afrikaans, English and Setswana) and drawing from extracts from the Shakespearean play, Hamlet and the translated version of the Setswana novel, Mohudi (1999). The extracts were copied into an Excel document for coding and performing a thematic analysis. This article draws from the theories of colonial genocides (‘theft of history’), linguicides (killing of indigenous people’s languages), ‘unthinking’ the ‘order of knowledge’, and indigenous research methodologies as a theoretical lens. The analysis of data includes an examination of the main themes in the novels that align to the English and Setswana proverbs. The findings reveal that the inclusion of non-Western world beliefs and perspectives into the language curriculum is needed to improve understanding, knowledge production and creativity in language education.