Toward a borderless, decolonized, socially just, and inclusive Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

In the context of global curriculum transformation and from a global South perspective, this article explores the imposed and self-created borders that continue to “discipline” us into reproducing scholarly processes, practices, and traditions that privilege dominant forms of knowledge making and knowing in teaching and learning. Drawing on Africa as a case study to explore a framework for thinking outside borders, the author invites the reader to embrace a global social imagination that disrupts and transcends the epistemic, social, and cultural borders designed to produce knowledge that is ahistorical and decontextualized. Using a social mapping of how we thrive on neatly delineated borders that detach the known from the knower by marginalizing or delegitimizing knowledges of the Other, this article, which draws on an earlier version presented as a keynote at the 16th annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, presents a theory of change geared toward borderless, decolonized, socially just, and inclusive pedagogy and scholarship

Fatima Meer’s ‘Train from Hyderabad’: Diaspora, Social Justice, Gender and Political Intervention

Fatima Meer’s memoir, Prison Diary: One Hundred and Thirteen Days, 1976 (2001), and the short story ‘Train to Hyderabad’ (Meer 2010) as an anthologised entity drawn from it, symbolise women’s isolation under male scrutiny, male rage at female autonomy and the compulsion to gag female critique of male government whether domestic, provincial or national. Behind the historical fact of colonial pseudo-slavery termed indenture, which was not gender-specific, lies the surviving, wide-spread and less-recognised phenomenon of female subjugation which may be termed female indenture. This reading of ‘Train to Hyderabad’ re-enacts a liberatory process: freeing the text in a way which reflects Meer’s own scripting of her work in a pattern of self-denial and socialist concern for the oppressed about her

Conditions enabling or constraining the exercise of agency among new academics in higher education, conducive to the social inclusion of students

This study, which is part of a National Research Foundation project on Social Inclusion in Higher Education (HE), focuses on the exercise of agency among new academics, conducive to the social inclusion of students. Transitioning from varied entry points into higher education, new academics face numerous challenges as they embed themselves in disciplinary and institutional contexts. Given the complexity and contested nature of the current higher education landscape, new academics are especially vulnerable. Using Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism as meta-theoretical framing and Margaret Archer’s social realist theory, with its methodological focus on analytical dualism and morphogenesis, this study offers a social realist account of how new academics engage with enabling and constraining conditions at institutional, faculty, departmental and classroom levels. Through an analysis of six individual narratives of mediation, this study explicates and exemplifies the range of agential choices exercised by new academics to mediate their contested spaces. A nuanced social and critical account of the material, ideational and agential conditions in HE shows that the courses of action taken by these new academics are driven through their concerns, commitments and projects in higher education. Yet, despite the university’s espousal of embracing change, the current induction and transition of new academics is inadequate to the task of transformation in higher education. Systemic conditions in HE, conducive to critical agency and social justice, are not enabling. Bhaskar’s Seven Scalar Being, used as an analytical frame and heuristic, guides the cross-case analysis of the six narratives across seven levels of ontology. The findings highlight that, despite difficult contextual influences, the positive exercise of agency is a marked feature of new participants in HE in this study. This has immediate implications for ways in which professional and academic development, and disciplinary and departmental programmes, could create and sustain conducive conditions for the professionalisation of new academics through more sensitised practices. Using alternative research methods such as photovoice to generate its data, this doctoral study proposes that new research methodologies, located in the third space, are needed now more than ever in HE sociological research, to recognise the researcher and the research participants as independent, autonomous and causally efficacious beings. To this end, this study includes a Chapter Zero, which captures the narrative of the doctoral scholar as researcher, who, shaped and influenced by established doctoral practices and traditions in the field, exercises her own doctoral agency in particular ways

Between a rock and a hard place, third space practitioners exercise agency

Academics as well as educational and academic development practitioners often find themselves in an ambiguous space in which personal and professional transformation can take place. Moving constantly between contexts and cultural learning environments at the university, these practitioners inhabit a strange, in-between space between mainstream academic support work, leadership and advocacy and other roles at the periphery.This space known as the third space from which other positions emerge, displaces the histories that constitute it and sets up new structures of authority, practice and discourses which are not always congruent with the university at large. This paper critically reflects on the experiences and insights of academics in a specific professional development course for new academics.Using a critical discourse analysis of in-depth, semi-structured narrative interviews, the authors explore the journey of new academic practitioners as they exercise their agency to carve out a hybrid identity in the third space across institutional boundaries.While resistance and struggle are challenging aspects of third space work, these constitute legitimate processes of identity construction and socialisation through contestation of traditional roles at the university. This paper interrogates the university’s role in creating and sustaining enabling institutional conditions so that academics can work in creative, responsive and relevant ways in a changing higher education landscape

Between a rock and a hard place, third space practitioners exercise agency

Academics as well as educational and academic development practitioners often find themselves in an ambiguous space in which personal and professional transformation can take place. Moving constantly between contexts and cultural learning environments at the university, these practitioners inhabit a strange, in-between space between mainstream academic support work, leadership and advocacy and other roles at the periphery. This space known as the third space from which other positions emerge, displaces the histories that constitute it and sets up new structures of authority, practice and discourses which are not always congruent with the university at large. This paper critically reflects on the experiences and insights of academics in a specific professional development course for new academics. Using a critical discourse analysis of in-depth, semi-structured narrative interviews, the authors explore the journey of new academic practitioners as they exercise their agency to carve out a hybrid identity in the third space across institutional boundaries. While resistance and struggle are challenging aspects of third space work, these constitute legitimate processes of identity construction and socialisation through contestation of traditional roles at the university. This paper interrogates the university’s role in creating and sustaining enabling institutional conditions so that academics can work in creative, responsive and relevant ways in a changing higher education landscape

How to be or not to be? A critical dialogue on the limitations and opportunities of academic development in the current higher education context

In the tumultuous time we find ourselves, debates about pedagogy have taken centre stage once again. Concerns raised by the student protests of 2015 and 2016 have highlighted the urgent need to re-think traditional teaching, learning and assessment practices, as well as the development of decolonised and transformative curricula.Traditional notions of academic and professional development are now being tested and contested, insofar as they are able to respond to student challenges in appropriate, responsive, legitimate and relevant ways. As a professional organisation dedicated to supporting learning and teaching, the executive team of HELTASA responded to the challenge in this article by engaging with perspectives on the purpose, role and conceptualisation of academic development in the current decolonial moment in the South African Higher Education landscape. Critical processes that enable academics to engage, share thoughts and debate epistemological, pedagogical and methodological options to support students and academics are much needed. And the context and spirit in which these debates occur may be as important as the debates themselves.At its annual conference, the executive team facilitated a critical dialogue with conference delegates on the limitations and opportunities of AD in our current context. Given the diverse teaching and learning contexts and institutional differentiation in the sector, this article explores individual and collective theorised observations, reflections and experiences of the seven facilitators who led the CD. These reflections were analysed and discussed against the backdrop of AD as well as the affordances of CD as a participatory learning and engagement methodology. The findings showed that there is dire need to re-imagine, not only AD’s role but alternative forms of critical engagement in the sector

Book review: Discerning critical hope in educational practices. Bozalek, V., Leibowitz, B., Carolissen, R. & Boler, M. (eds).

Review of: Bozalek, V., Leibowitz, B., Carolissen, R. & Boler, M. (eds). 2014. Discerning critical hope in educational practices. Abingdon: Routledge

Generic gold standard or contextualised public good? Teaching excellence awards in post-colonial South Africa

Publisher versionTeaching Excellence Awards have raised the profile of teaching as a scholarly project. There are however a number of questions about what constitutes teaching excellence and how ‘excellence’ is understood in current higher education. In a post-colonial South Africa, where significant injustices permeate our society, we question whether excellence can be understood in a generic manner. Furthermore, we argue that as universities are a public good, teaching excellence needs to explicitly attend to the ways in which universities contribute to broad goals of transformation and inclusivity. We analysed data from the national Teaching Excellence Awards and 13 South African universities’ awards to interrogate the discourses that underpin ‘excellence’ in this context of social inequality. We found that while the awards have gone some way to enhancing the position of teaching in institutions, ‘excellence’ was largely articulated in fairly generic ways which failed to take into account the enablements and constraints of the discipline and the institution. Furthermore, the guidelines and criteria privilege a decontextualised notion of excellence that seeks a ‘gold standard’ and validates performativity, rather than a contextualised response to the needs of the students