Meeting the challenge of HIV/AIDS: Marrying formal and informal knowledge

Abstract

In this discourse, the mainstreaming of HIV/AIDS related content in university lecture halls is recommended to inculcate informed sexual behavioural practices among students. The mainstreaming of HIV/AIDS education is propagated through the marriage between informal (first space) interaction and formal (second space) interaction which leads to a third knowledge space. This stance entails the threading together of the elements of language, the human mind and facilitator cognition and training. This is because facilitators’ applied competence around HIV/AIDS issues, plays a crucial role in their capacities to effectively link sexual cultural beliefs, practices and knowledge to HIV/AIDS content through discourse. As students are social-beings, their minds and meanings around sexual related issues are steeped in their community’s traditional cultural world as the knowledge emanates from their sociocultural practices and experiences. Hence the mainstreaming of HIV/AIDS related content lies in leveraging both formal and informal knowledge so as to create a repository channel of interaction for relaying change in practices, beliefs, behaviours, knowledge and attitudes to do with the effective control and prevention of the spread of the pandemic among university students. Thus, the conceptual framework for HIV/AIDS mainstreaming for university students should be based on the integration of content and languages which is developed through a literature review that takes cognisant of the situatedness of knowledge, experience, practice and messages that are produced, reproduced and expressed in the specific sociocultural milieu.

Keywords: Sexual morality, hybridity theory, third space concept, discourse, teacher cognition