Transforming curricula in a rapidly changing world: Red beads within African landscapes: Little Red Riding Hood recontextualised within Foundation Phase education

Abstract

This article investigates how Bachelor of Education Foundation Phase pre-service teachers at a Faculty of Education at a South African university in the Western Cape, have reimagined the canonical fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood through cultural localisation, and multilingual storytelling. This study foregrounds this tale’s transformation from a Eurocentric cautionary narrative into a decolonial, multilingual device for critical engagement. This study is rooted in the decolonial philosophy of Sankofa and the Theory of Adaptation. The philosophy of Sankofa is a Ghanaian concept which when translated says ‘go back and fetch it’. The symbol of Sankofa is a bird which is depicted as moving forward while looking back. This symbol signals the imperative of retrieving cultural knowledges from the past as a resource for constructing a more just and grounded future. Sankofa has been mobilised by academics such as Wane (2008) and Dei (2012), as an anti-colonial and indigenous epistemological framework, particularly in within curricular projects which seek to reposition knowledge within African contexts. Its relevance for this study lies in the fact that Sankofa is particularly supportive when adopted as a lens in the realm of storytelling. As Asante (1990) observes, African knowledge traditions are cyclical, relational, and performative, qualities that stand in contrast to the linearity and individualism characteristics of many Western fairy tales. This study aimed to draw on Sankofa in order to embrace a restorative narrative practice, one that returns to ancestral archives like oral traditions, proverbs, praise poetry, and cosmological worldviews, in order to retrieve motifs, symbols, and values capable of reanimating displaced or marginalised narratives. Participants were encouraged to reclaim their voice through their symbolic transformations of this famous tale, by localising settings, altering symbolic figures, and incorporating indigenous languages through translanguaging. Qualitative content analysis was performed on 30 individual participant stories, and the emergent themes are discussed. The findings reveal that participants’ transposition of the fairytale’s characters, morals, and settings, reflects their local realities and reframe moral lessons, often transforming the wolf into a sociopolitical threat and Little Red Riding Hood into an empowered figure. These adaptations function as knowledge tools that affirm linguistic diversity and foster critical engagement with a recognised global narrative. This study also advocates for the use of adaptation as a strategy for participant agency, cultural affirmation, and inclusive literacy instruction. These retellings signal a departure from the passive acceptance or reproduction of Western/European texts, moving instead towards an active cultural production rooted in lived African realities. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Little Red Riding Hood, when adapted through authentic storytelling practices, becomes a site of resistance, reclamation, and educational transformation in the postcolonial preservice teacher English curriculum.