Scenario
An international conglomerate has set up a new headquarters in South Africa in order to tap into the local market. It has many new local hires and has developed a number of training programmes to upskill staff, using templates from existing programmes that have been implemented internationally.
However, the South African office is running into many issues regarding how its staff is being trained and what is being taught. The main issue is that the training does not reflect what needs to happen on the ground in terms of building client relationships. For instance, many of the trading and marketing programmes are falling through as a result of not attracting South African clients because the staff are trained to target an international audience as opposed to a local one. What is the issue here and what needs to change in the training programmes? How can you, as an instructional designer, go about addressing this issue? What needs to happen on the ground?
Response
They are ignoring both the diversity of their staff as well as that of their clientele. By applying internationally implemented training templates they are homogenising both their staff and clientele and are solely focused on their own perspectives and values. Firstly, they need to decolonise their knowledge base and secondly approach both their staff and clientele within the ethics of care.
The instructional designer in this scenario must consider the context not only of the staff in need of training but also of the clientele and of themselves. The South African context is multicultural and consists of a diversity of colonially marginalised voices. It is within this context that the educational content needs to be situated. Education does not take place in a vacuum; it is mediated through the social-cultural and political environment it is enclosed in.
In a South African context, a staff complement will have a diverse multicultural makeup. The instructional designer needs to engage with the staff to come to an understanding of who they are developing for. Incorporating their multiple voices in the co-construction of knowledge will result in a curriculum that is more inclusive and interconnected and which can be delivered to the staff in a meaningful way.
The same considerations need to be made for their clientele. Diverse social, cultural, and political frameworks inform the identities of individual clients. Seeing as the staff are trained in engaging with these clients the training curriculum needs to be inclusive of these different voices. Considering the beliefs, value systems and world views of the clients will inform the content of the training.
Furthermore, these aforementioned frameworks also govern the engagements between staff and clientele. Both clients and staff exist within communities that are interconnected and responsive to each other.
The instructional designer must try to understand the values, beliefs and world views of the clientele and staff, as well as how these may possibly impact their interactions with each other. This is imperative to adequately develop and structure the content of training material that is relevant to the lived context of both.
Building on this, the instructional designer also needs to examine and evaluate their own social, political, and cultural makeup. Any context, be it cultural, social, economic, or political come with a degree of naturalisation. Certain viewpoints and beliefs are seen as natural or universal truths and often exerts an unconscious influence on one's worldview. Therefore, it is imperative that the instructional designer critically evaluate their own knowledge and value systems, i.e. the mediation structure through which the design takes place, in order to eliminate any pre-existing biases.
The possible transformative solutions are to co-construct knowledge through the inclusion of the multiple perspectives of the staff and to base the content on the consideration of the social, political, cultural, and historical contexts that envelop the clientele and inform the staff and client interactions.
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