Sarasvathie Reddy

• Professor (Associate) at University of KwaZulu-Natal

Amid the call for including a teaching component in doctoral programmes, a Teacher Development Programme (TDP) for doctoral students was organised at the research site. The TDP aimed to equip doctoral candidates with teaching and research supervision skills that could guide them in pursuing a possible university teaching career. An earlier empirica...

While the COVID-19 pandemic may have been subdued, online learning has come to stay not only because of its numerous advantages but because the digitised global trend continues to unravel. This necessitated a project aimed at understanding how a School of Education (SoE) in South Africa prepares future teachers for the digitised classroom. Since th...

Cameroon’s public universities are established on three primary missions: teaching, research, and outreach. Academics are supposed to carry out this triple mission in their key performance areas. Literature, however, highlights growing controversy around academics’ fulfilment of these missions because some universities rank each mission differently...

The appointment of leaders at Cameroonian universities is a tradition that has dominated the operations and autonomy of the institutions since the establishment of state universities under the 1993 reforms. This gave authority to the government to decide the pedagogical and academic activities of these universities and to appoint and dismiss their...

This paper examines the implication of administrative task delegation on academics' professional identity construction at a Cameroonian university. Academics at Cameroonian universities are juggling multiple tasks, including teaching, research, outreach and administrative tasks. Using a qualitative case study design, 11 academics selected purposive...

Higher Education Institutions have adopted technology-based teaching methods to prevent the spreading of the contagious coronavirus (COVID-19). In the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) era, technology-based teaching methods are indispensable for scaffolding teaching, learning and assessment. Mathematics is an important discipline in education, and...

In this empirical article, we argue that while emergency remote teaching (ERT) may have achieved its goal of saving the academic years during the COVID-19 pandemic, it also constructed unintended pedagogical consequences that were possibly overlooked at the time of advocating for it. We also contend that students and lecturers from rural-based univ...

As the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill, many traditional contact higher education institutions, such as the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), embraced the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) to pursue their mandates. Such transitions necessitate transforming existing curricula into digitised versions that in...

In this empirical article, we argue that, while emergency remote teaching (ERT) may have achieved its goal of saving the academic years during the COVID-19 pandemic, it also constructed unintended pedagogical consequences that were possibly overlooked at the time of advocating it. The research question that the article attempted to answer is, what...

At the onset of COVID-19 in 2020, the world-renowned writer and political activist, Arundhati Roy, signalled that the pandemic is "a portal, a gateway between one world and the next . . . [and] we can choose to walk through it." Roy's views highlight how we can imagine our world anew through reflection in the time of COVID-19. In this article, we e...

An important role in socialising first-year students into universities is initiating them into different conventions of academic writing. Support programmes, such as writing centres, have been established in several South African universities to help students with this objective and the broader issue of academic literacy. The assumption is that suc...

Studies on HIV infection and prevalence at South African University Campuses reveal high levels of HIV infection and prevalence among students. Statistics reveal higher infection rates for female students. It is postulated that these statistics may be attributed to sustained high risk behaviour[s] at university campuses. However, these largely quan...

This article examines the University Education Induction Programme (UEIP), an academic development programme, delivered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The authors, who developed and now facilitate the UEIP, deliver the programme to early career academics and senior academics as per a senate-mandated requirement. Drawing on Kolb’s...

The Gender, Religion and Health (GRH) Masters Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) sought to encourage such problem-solving research (focusing on the issue of sexual and reproductive health) through merging three disciplinary areas of study into one programme: gender studies, religious studies and health (sexual and reproductive heal...

Participants in a study on learning the clinical aspects of medicine in a problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum repeatedly referred to themselves as ‘Guinea pigs’ at the mercy of a curriculum experiment. This article interrogates and problematises the ‘Guinea pig’ identity ascribed to and assumed by the first cohort of students who undertook a PB...