Greening the TVET Colleges in a Posthumanistic Era: The Whole Institutional Greening Approach

This study adopted the Whole Institutional Greening Approach as a strategy to strengthen green skills development in one of the TVET colleges in Mpumalanga, South Africa. The study aims to transform the campus’ processes, programs, products and services in line with the green paradigm. The study was qualitative and adopted the Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology. This allowed the interested and affected stakeholders to be involved in all the interactive stages of PAR through document analysis, workshops and discussion meetings. The Posthumanism Theory framed the study to challenge the anthropocentric and individualistic approaches to education and training in the TVET colleges. The multidimensional and multiple-perspective nature of green skills also requires competencies that are beyond Eurocentric approaches to education and training. Posthumanism theory therefore brings central ideas of multiple relationalities, dependency and entanglement of humans, non-humans and beyond-humans entities in education and training. The Three dimensions of Critical Discourse Analysis, including text, discursive, and social structural practices, were used to analyse and interpret data. The major findings of the study were the inconsistent and uncoordinated green skills practices on the campus. This is a result of individualised, fragmented and ad hoc program approaches to green skills development, with no attempt to mainstream and address challenges of implementation. The adoption of the Whole Institutional Greening Approach was effective in addressing the key integrated aspects of the greening processes, including the institution’s green policy, green competency framework, the greening of the curriculum, and capacity building and support.