Rural Transitions to Higher Education in South Africa: Decolonial Perspectives
Abstract
This unique and timely book focuses on research conducted into the experiences of students from rural backgrounds in South Africa; foregrounding decolonial perspectives on their negotiation of access and transitions to higher education.
This book highlights not only the challenges of coming from a rural background against the historical backdrop of apartheid and ongoing colonialism, but also shows the immense assets that students from rural areas bring into higher education. Through detailed narratives created by student co-researchers, the book charts early experiences in rural communities, negotiations of transitions to university and, in many cases, to urban life and students’ subsequent journeys through higher education spaces and curricula.
The book will be of significant interest and value to those engaged in rurality research across diverse settings, those interested in the South African higher education context and higher education more widely. Its innovative, participatory methodology will be invaluable to researchers seeking to conduct collaborative research that draws on decolonising approaches.
... Government's will is evident to some extent in the provision of essential ICT developments especially for universities, however, in such cases, the challenge sighted by literature is the absence of training in subject specific integration skills for educators (Venketsamy & Zijing, 2022), instead, most training offered in these environments are digital literacy skills (Tunjera & Chigona, 2020;Mangundu, 2023). If this is happening in higher education (Olayinka et al., 2024), the product, from the preservice teacher training joins the world of work to perpetuate traditional modes of instruction with a cosmetic application of technology (Timmis, et al., 2021), that is some form of digital literacy skills as modelled by teacher educators. ...
... This can be achieved by building digital innovation on the diverse cultural and socio-economic contexts within the country (Du Plessis, 2021), establishing capabilities needed by preservice teachers for navigating digital transformation within those contexts. We will do that by focusing on the major tenets of the capability approach and converging them with those of the agency theory in relation to digital transformation for the South African context, which besides being sub-Saharan, is also post-colonial (Timmis et al., 2021). ...
... When preservice teachers come into higher education institutes, they are from diverse circumstances and contexts. The impact of apartheid on South Africa as a country was not uniform (Timmis et al., 2021). Some rural schools were never exposed to digitalization in all its facets (Radovanović et al, 2020). ...
... It is for this reason that the Scholarship in Higher Education (HE) teaching and learning, particularly in decolonising contexts such as South Africa (SA), constantly emphasises the need for academics as university teachers to engage in a continual and systematic inquiry into student learning (Mgqwashu et al., 2020;Vandeyar, 2020;Leibowitz, 2017)". This is more urgent in a decolonising higher education context where diverse groups of students, the majority of whom literature (Timmis et al., 2021) describe as non-traditional, have already raised a concern during the 2015 #Rhodes Must Fall student protests. ...
... This challenge is not unique to South Africa. It is equally a global concern as HEIs around the world have had to respond to students with different prior learning experiences from traditional or mainstream students (Timmis et al., 2021) they are used to. In post-conflict, decolonising societies globally, this more diversified undergraduate student population has included first-in-family, 'non-traditional', 'historically under-represented' or 'atypical' students, descriptors that have also been applied to students from low-income households (Fry et al., 2009). ...
In this chapter, the diverse histories of formerly different universities that were merged into one is the focus of this study. It illustrates how academic developers’ (ADs) commitment post the merger to continuously re-think strategies to effectively offer responsive academic development support to students and academic staff continues to produce good results. Tasked with a mandate to render academic development support to academic staff, postgraduate, as well as undergraduate students to achieve equity of outcomes, ADs continue to re-think the strategy and approach in fulfilling their mandate. The chapter draws from New Literacy Studies (NLS) as the theoretical lens to advance its argument for the critical role ADs play to professionalise academics as university teachers.
... Their accounts surface the complex identity work and acts of strategic resistance required to foster African language pedagogy within a broader educational field marked by the coloniality of power (McKinney, 2020). Despite progressive shifts in language-in-education policy with the transition to democracy, the racially defined language hierarchy from the apartheid era remains deeply inscribed in the culture, practices, and structure of South African higher education institutions (Timmis et al., 2021). Thus, lecturers had to contend with ongoing marginalization of African languages that degraded their status, value and utility in the academic space. ...
... However, it is critically important to recognize that under apartheid, Black South African academics faced systemic barriers to acquiring and activating certain forms of capital, including limited access to advanced educational credentials, restrictions on international travel to participate in conferences and networks, and segregation from elite research communitiesreflecting the wider policies of exclusion of the time (Maphaka & Rapanyane, 2021;Timmis et al., 2021). Critical race theorists have illuminated how such historic restrictions engender durable race-based capital and opportunity deficits that can continue to linger even after formal deracialization of policies, as the benefits of intergenerational capital accumulation remain uneven (Taylor, 2023;Yosso, 2014). ...
Post-apartheid policies aimed to promote African languages in higher education, yet lecturers face lack of institutional support and resource scarcity. This qualitative study explores experiences of African language lecturers at South African universities, using Bourdieusian theory to understand broader discourses around language, identity, and power shaping efforts to revalue these languages. In-depth interviews were conducted to gain insights into lecturers' journeys and lived experiences. The findings revealed that their habitus was oriented towards language teaching by familial, socio-political, and educational contexts. In addition, accumulating cultural capital through credentials facilitated academic lecturers' progression while leveraging social capital through professional networks provided them crucial access and advocacy. Within competitive academia, lecturers continuously pursued prestigious positions and various forms of capital. Collaborating with language communities enabled developing localized, culturally validating pedagogies to counter institutional barriers. Technology access empowered effective role performance, research publishing, and career advancement. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by African language lecturers and highlights the need for institutional support, resource availability, and community engagement to promote and sustain African language education in higher education institutions.
The Black Lives Matter movement foregrounded, once again, racism in education in myriad contexts and across the educational sectors. It brought into sharp relief the inappropriateness of many curricula for those who are not white and (largely) middle-class. In this chapter, I will draw on a range of experiences related to Ubuntu, from my first encounter with the philosophy to my work on projects related to it, to extrapolate ways in which Ubuntu, with its emphasis on unity and connection, may be able to speak to current, ongoing efforts to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum and higher education in the UK. I will explore how a critical consideration of the fundamental principles of Ubuntu might work alongside current decolonisation strategies to build ‘the anti-racist university through a dialogue grounded in dignity’ (Hall et al. in Teaching in Higher Education 26:902–919, 2021, 904) mindful that ‘Ubuntu attests to a respect for particularity, individuality and historicality, without which decolonization cannot be’ (Louw in Ubuntu: An African Assessment of the Religious Other, 1998, 3). Further, although exploring the potential for Ubuntu to free higher education curricula from ‘the fetters of Cartesian duality’ (Dennis in Decolonising the University, 2018, p. 200) may not be original, certainly not in contexts such as South Africa where it is often intrinsic to discussions, Ubuntu is rarely mentioned in related literature and discourse in the UK. Through an articulation of the relationship between racism and the continuing coloniality of UK higher education, I will engage in a critical exploration of how Ubuntu principles could be used judiciously to both underpin and strengthen decolonisation processes in UK higher education and be a constructive way forward in anti-racist endeavours.
Teaching and learning in higher education can no longer be assumed to be a ‘neutral’ interaction between students and academic teachers. In this chapter, I consider the teaching and learning of science in the context of rural students in a previously privileged institution in post-apartheid South Africa. I argue that in this historical, political and institutional context, access to higher education has to go beyond inviting marginalised students onto courses. University knowledge, based on colonial ways of knowing, needs to be questioned and academics must consider access on an epistemic level as an essential part of the learning experiences offered in the university. The currently privileged ways of knowing and curriculum are examined in this chapter. Working with the students as co-researchers, I explain and exemplify how their existing knowledges, which are not generally recognised as scholarly or rigorous, were drawn upon to teach scientific concepts, and how these rural knowledges often have scientific underpinnings.
This is a self-study of practice investigating the trajectories of Arts and Culture students transitioning from rural secondary contexts to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). The main objective of this paper was to propose support strategies for first-year university students majoring in Arts and Culture at a specific HEI. First-time entering students (FTENs) struggle to transition from secondary to postsecondary education for a variety of reasons. The paper was based on Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems theory, which states that individuals are still influenced by their environment but become important through interactions with other influencers in each system. This research inquiry utilized an interpretive paradigm and a qualitative approach through a self-study of practice, and data was gathered using a qualitative questionnaire, observations, and document analysis. The data was thematically analyzed concurrently with data collection. Participants were selected from several ethnic groups, such as Xhosas, Zulus, Sothos, and others. They were selected purposefully, but Xhosas and females predominated. The findings revealed insufficient exposure to advanced and modern cultural activities; a lack of enthusiasm and passion for arts subjects; and the negative impact of transitioning on students’ learning. These hiccups have a detrimental effect on students’ transitions to HEIs. The paper recommended these support strategies: capacity building of students with proficient skills to transition effectively; use of teaching and learning strategies that cater for students’ different learning styles; and consideration of students’ backgrounds and indigenous knowledge. These variables may help first-year Arts and Culture students transition smoothly into higher education. Keywords: Transition, Arts and Culture, Rural students, teaching and learning, support strategies
This piece is the creative, critical product of constructive dialogue between graduated doctors, Josephine Mwasheka Nghikefelwa (Namibia/South Africa), Frances Wyld (Australia) whose doctorates are in literary-related work and who are transforming what is possible in decolonised doctorates in terms of perspectives, voice, research and writing and Gina Wisker (UK), researcher and examinerexaminer(s).
The 2015-2016 #FMF movement presented an important moment that questioned the South African social order. ‘Rioting and writing: Diaries of Wits Fallists’ presents unique insights as it is written and grounded on the particular positionalities, experiences and perspectives of the #FMF movement activists. The volume is based on an open and collective process driven by the student activists. The #FMF movement challenged the power relations within a neoliberal university in a post-colonial context and brought to the fore other struggles within the broader society. The book provides a critical analysis of the movement, drawing from its key pillars of Pan Africanism, intersectionality, Black radical feminism and student-worker solidarity. It explores how the movement reopened and deepened the call for decolonization, redefining the struggle for decommoditised education.
Think piece for HELTASA website - Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa.
Current epistemic governance analyses in higher education ignore systemic power relations between Northern and Southern researchers. This paper does focus on previous approaches to understanding epistemic governance, but rather moves beyond these towards a Southern evaluative and prospective comprehension. The paper is primarily theoretical. We draw on Fricker’s theorizing of epistemic justice, but note the importance of the institutional. Amartya Sen’s capability approach enables envisioning possibilities for change at individual and systemic levels, placing agency and epistemic freedoms at the centre of epistemic governance to foster solidarity and reflexive actions for change. To make the case, the paper explores testimonial and hermeneutical (including hermeneutic obstruction) injustices in research, presenting unfair practices and the unjust consequences for scholars in the South arising from ‘the colonial epistemic structure’. The paper proposes that this structure, and its West-centric episteme, shapes epistemic governance which, among other effects, invisibilizes race and racism and is unable to account for the experiences of Southern subjects. The paper concludes by suggesting that it is a moral responsibility in higher education to exercise reasoned agency to promote equal epistemic opportunities, especially for those situated on the wrong side of the epistemic line. This requires epistemic humility and ethical responsibility.
The extraordinary expansion of higher education has not been accompanied by more equitable access to universities for various disadvantaged groups. Rural youth is at the heart of this study that draws on secondary data and literature to examine rural-urban disparities in higher education access in two high-participation systems in the Caucasus and Central Asia. This multiple case study uses a historical-comparative lens to offer a synthesis of the evidence on the subnational and cross-national differences in the three domains of higher education access-academic preparedness , HE aspirations, and HEI/programme choice-making-to point to the existence of prominent rural-urban disparities in Georgia and Kazakhstan. The study contributes to an improved understanding of the structural-territorial foundations of inequalities in higher education access and charts future directions for policy. The framework used in this study can be applied to examining disparities in access to higher education in other national contexts.
African philosophy of higher education and its concomitant link to teaching and learning on the continent, is a concept that remains contestable, as much about African thought and practice is presumed to exist in narrative form. However, even if African thought and practice were to have existed in narrative form only, it would not necessarily be justifiable to dismiss an idea of African philosophy of higher education as seminal works by leading African scholars over the last few decades corroborate the significance of higher education in Africa. In this article, I attempt to offer an account of African philosophy of higher education, in particular teaching and learning, underscored by a notion of ubuntu—human interdependence and humaneness—on the grounds that such a view of African thought and practice is constituted by meanings that could engender a credible defense of higher education in Africa. From my analysis of the concept ubuntu, practices such as social responsibility, deliberative engagement, and an attentiveness to others and otherness seem to be most salient in enacting a reconsidered view of African higher education.
This article is based on an address that I presented at the Higher Education Close Up (HECU 9) conference in Cape Town recently. It is intended as an invitation for conversation about the purposes of the South African university. The argument of the article pivots on locating students at the 'epistemic centre' of a reframed conception of the university. I present an account of the logic of practice of the 'misrecognised' university student who 'lives' inside the university. I argue that recognising, embracing and aligning with the practices of students would place universities in a position to establish an institutional platform that would properly engage students in their intellectual becoming. And, I suggest that such a platform should be based on a view of curriculum knowledge that promotes powerful conversations between disciplinary knowledge, decoloniality, and students' life world knowledge.
This paper makes visible the experiences of students transitioning to higher education from rural communities and backgrounds in South Africa. In line with decolonial perspectives, the research adopted a participatory methodology that involved students as co-researchers. We argue that there is a lack of recognition of students from rural contexts, and their potential to reshape higher education. We highlight their challenges of applying, entering and participating in universities and the loss of agency experienced. We then show how they found new agentic possibilities by analysing the cultural capital, practices and local knowledges that students bring into the university space, and the improvisations they make to negotiate challenges. We argue that to reshape higher education and transform curricula, institutions need to bring multiple knowledges into dialogue through a transformation process that links places, people, knowledge(s) and skills, offering students spaces for recognition and visibility to make sense of their own experiences.
The research on cross-national research cooperation, including the categories of Global South/North, tends to leave out the issue of research funding. However, research funders are no neutral infrastructure by and for the scientific community, but represent societal, political, or economic stakeholders, whose expectations shape funding policy goals and practices. In consequence, funders need to be integrated as intermediary organization when discussing the ideology and effects of geographic pairing. In our article, we develop and sustain the proposition that an analysis of funders’ views is imperative to understand the ways international research collaborations of unequally equipped participants are perceived, maintained, and sometimes reframed over time. Building on interview data and policy documents from six countries, we analyze the semantics employed to make sense of North–South relationships. We find that narratives from development cooperation complement and sometimes supersede the traditionally liberal meta-narrative of scientific collaborations.
This paper focuses on widening participation in relation to under-represented student negotiations of and trajectories through university by drawing attention to students’ informal digital practices for studying and social interactions associated with undergraduate student life. Drawing on a two-year UK study and Holland et al.’s [1998. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press ] framing of agency, culture and identity making across ‘figured worlds’, we consider the importance of informal studying and socio-academic practices and the role of digital technologies in fostering agency and identity making. The significance of this study lies in revealing the particular importance of improvisation and collective agency for under-represented students participating in university. Whilst acknowledging that the technologies can also reproduce social inequalities, we conclude that, through the increasing interconnectedness of academic and social interactions, the digital improvisations offer creative opportunities for students to negotiate spatial, social and academic inequalities and lead to new/alternative identities and develop stronger social, cultural and educational capital.
The students’ views, from the secondary education in the rural areas in Lesotho, have been sought on the impact of rurality in relation to their transition from secondary education to higher education (in this regards, the National University of Lesotho (NUL). The students’ views were sought through their autobiographies. Autobiographical narratives were employed because it was assumed that they are a good tool for knowing oneself better. The study was qualitative, with the adoption of a case study research design. The participating students were drawn from three of the ten Lesotho districts that are situated in the rural areas. The purpose of the research study was to find out whether studying at the university has an impact on the students who have transited from secondary education in the rural areas and whether university education assists and prepares them to achieve their intentions and to reach a successful outcome. A purposively selected number of eleven (11) students from the rural areas formed the sample of the study. A one question questionnaire was designed to collect information on the students’ experiences from their NUL studies in relation to the transition from secondary education to higher education. An interpretative analysis was employed to unveil the results of the study. The research study finds that the students have deficiencies. Secondary education has not moulded them to have a sudden engagement with their studies in higher education. Many of them still require further training in study skills in order to cope with the academic demands of higher education. It is therefore recommended that NUL should have a programme that serves as a bridge between secondary and higher education.
Despite wide-ranging policies and practices intended to address historical inequalities in South African higher education, and calls for decolonisation to include more local relevance, little attention has been paid to the experiences of rural students, especially their digital participation once at university. Previous research has highlighted limitations in technological access in rural areas and the importance of mobile phones for transitions. Whilst universities offer wide-ranging digital support, there remains a tendency towards universalist mechanisms. Drawing on a longitudinal study across three universities, and employing Holland’s theory of figured worlds, we highlight rural students’ experiences of digital transitions across different cultural worlds, prior to university and once they arrive, including the bewildering technocratic systems and practices and resulting conflicts and positionings encountered. We show how students improvise to decode the digital university and figure out new practices. Decolonisation of universities involves rethinking the ‘technocratic consciousness’ (both colonialist and neoliberal) and its apparatus including digital systems and structures. For rural students to become successful digital practitioners in higher education, universities should acknowledge prior digital experience and forms of knowledge and focus on expanding individual and collective agency in supporting transitions, as mechanisms for shaping a decolonised digital education.
In order to understand how students from low-income rural backgrounds in South Africa experience higher education and the opportunities and obstacles they encounter, the paper draws on two waves of interviews with 30 students currently studying at three large urban universities. Using concepts of capabilities and functionings, monetary resources and ‘capitals’, the paper outlines common factors which shape rural students’ well-being and their agency in accessing an urban university. Student voices indicate the particular importance of being able to exercise the functioning of navigating and manoeuvring through unfamiliar and often intimidating institutions. The discussion also indicates that it is the intersection of rurality and low income which shapes, even if it does not over-determine, their lives at university. It is suggested that universities could do more to support these students’ well-being, and to recognise the agency and admirable determination which students bring to the challenges they face.
This article is an attempt to bring theoretical concepts offered by decolonial theories into conversation with ‘humanising pedagogy.’ The question that drives this analysis is: What are the links between humanisation and the decolonisation of higher education, and what does this imply for pedagogical praxis? This intervention offers valuable insights that reconfigure humanising pedagogy in relation to the decolonial project of social transformation, yet one that does not disavow the challenges—namely, the complexities, tensions and paradoxes—residing therein. The article discusses three approaches to the decolonisation of higher education that have been proposed and suggests that if the desired reform is radical, educators within the sector in South Africa will need to interrogate the pedagogical practices emerging from Eurocentric knowledge approaches by drawing on and twisting these very practices. These efforts can provide spaces to enact decolonial pedagogies that reclaim colonised practices. The article concludes with some reflections on what this idea might imply for South African higher education. © 2018, South African Journal Of Education. All rights reserved.
The recent student unrest in South African public higher education institutions highlighted the call for the decolonisation of education across post-colonial countries. This research explored the construct of the “decolonisation of education” through the lens of students of different nationalities across Africa, their perspectives on approaches to the actualisation of a decolonised curriculum, and the applicability of technology in education. Qualitative research methods and the Transformative Learning Theory were employed. Findings show that decolonising education for students means addressing past injustices and marginalisation by valuing and leveraging indigenous languages and culture, while incorporating relevant and cost-effective technology. The authors recommend that decolonisation ought to involve glocal initiatives from the perspectives of young people, where education is foregrounded in indigenous knowledge and integrated international worldviews. © 2018, South African Journal Of Education. All rights reserved.
Misrecognition of South African university students is at the heart of this article. Misrecognition refers in this article to the exclusionary institutional discourses and practices of this country’s universities, which continue to prevent the majority of their (Black) students’ from achieving a successful education. It is a conceptual account of the ways in which these misrecognized students develop a complex educational life in their quest for a university education. The article argues that at the heart of students’ university experiences is an essential misrecognition of who they are, and how they access and encounter their university studies. I suggest that gaining greater purchase on their (mis)recognition struggles may place the university in a position to establish an engaging recognition platform to facilitate their educational success. Divided into four sections, the article starts with a rationale for bringing the institutional misrecognition of students into view. This is followed by a theoretical consideration of the notion of recognition, which opens space for what I call the recognitive agency of the education subject, who remains largely unknown to the university. The third section provides an account of the nature and extent of Black students’ survivalist educational navigations and practices in their family, community, school, and university contexts. The final and concluding section of the article presents a normative argument for developing an education platform for facilitating a productive encounter aimed at animating students’ educational becoming. This, I argue, should proceed on the basis of a decolonizing knowledge approach, involving curriculum recognition, which would accord students the conceptual tools for developing the epistemic virtues necessary for complex decolonized living.
Science is increasingly defined by multidimensional collaborative networks. Despite the unprecedented growth of scientific collaboration around the globe—the collaborative turn—geography still matters for the cognitive enterprise. The spatial location and distance between scholars and research organisations affect their likelihood to collaborate and to achieve results that expand the knowledge frontier. At the same time, the developmental prospects of cities, regions, and countries result from, and depend on, their place in the global network of research collaboration.
This book explores how geography conditions scientific collaboration and how collaboration affects the spatiality of science. Addressing these questions requires the reconstruction of historical developments that led to the collaborative turn in science, the examination of mutual relations between science and places, and the analysis of spatial patterns of research collaboration at various levels: from individual to global. By combining a vast array of approaches, concepts, and methodologies, the volume offers a comprehensive theoretical framework for the geography of scientific collaboration.
The momentous role of collaboration for contemporary science implies that understanding the processes and patterns of research collaboration is now essential, not only for scholars interested in science studies, but also for policymakers and managers of research organisations. Those more practically oriented readers may be particularly attracted by the case studies of scientific collaboration policies from the European Union, the United States, and China, as well as the catalogue of tools for scientific collaboration policy.
This article explores the way the curriculum could be restructured to promote students' success.
In Ebrahim Patel’s, The world of Nat Nakasa: A collection of letters, Nathaniel Nakasa’s term
‘Native of Nowhere’ describes Nakasa’s experience of leaving South Africa on an exit
permit. Negotiating his classification as an aggressor of the state, Nakasa’s expression signals his confrontation with his expendability as a Native in a country founded on the use of Blackness as Blackbodies that prop up white supremacy and rule. ‘Native of Nowhere’ here details how historically white universities in South Africa perpetuate ontological negations, through denying Blackness in institutions formerly reserved for whiteness.
Through an analysis that implicitly posits education as a public good, I argue for the use of education as an emancipatory tool. Using Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness to analyse negation, I develop the ‘Native of Nowhere’ to articulate a critical pedagogy, which delivers on the emancipatory potential of education.
Widening access has been a buzzword in the arena of South African higher education (HE) since South Africa (SA) became a democratic state in 1994. More than 20 years later, there is agreement that the quantitative aspect of widening access for non-whites (also referred to as Blacks) into HE has tremendously improved. However, the literature reveals that the transformational agenda on widening access is constrained by ever-increasing student numbers coupled with infrastructural incapacity, curriculum reform and institutional supportive elements. The Fees Must Fall movement, which has gathered impetus is an articulation of one example of weak supportive elements in HE with growing student dissatisfaction in relation to their accommodation and tuition fees. Additionally, at a qualitative level, it is valuable to understand the extent to which widening access has indeed infused programme offerings across public higher education institutions (HEIs) and the challenges that institutions are facing in throwing open their doors to a wider subscription of customers. This chapter therefore presents a landscape of achievements, shortfalls and challenges in terms of specifically focusing on issues of institutional support and curriculum reform and the implications these have for the quality of HE. Issues of ‘fitness for purpose’ and ‘fitness of purpose’ are presented to illuminate the conundrum implicit in current HE provisioning in SA. The authors undertake this through a case study of three distinctly different public HEIs in SA, demonstrating the current HE terrain in widening access within a transformational HE plan.
This article is set against the backdrop of calls for the decolonisation of the curriculum in higher education institutions in South Africa. It is an attempt to contribute towards the debate on decolonising the curriculum, with a focus on the tasks of academics and academic developers. The first half of the article outlines several key aspects of current theorising about academic development or teaching and learning in higher education, informed by more general debates about education. These aspects limit the potential to imagine a more inclusive or socially just, decolonised curriculum. The second half of the article proposes cognitive justice as a useful concept to lead thinking about how to change the curriculum. It discusses what cognitive justice is and how this intersects with writing on decolonisation. It outlines some of the gaps in this conceptualisation, which would need more attention if this concept were to be useful to take the process of transforming teaching and learning forward.
This paper presents a case study of two first year sociology courses run at an elite South African university in order to speak to student perspectives on the sociology curriculum. The paper provides a comparative analysis of the academic experiences of extended degree (ED) students registered on two first year courses, one of which drew on literature and sociological theory which was mainly Euro-American in origin, and the other of which attempted to situate sociological theory within local contexts. In so doing, it contributes to debates on the role of identity in teaching sociology. We highlight the tension that occurs between the need to make content accessible and relevant for students-particularly for first generation students-and the need to also give students access to the powerful knowledge (Young, 2009) that comes with familiarity with the theory-dense sociological canon.
In this work, we contribute to the debate on the transformation of higher education institutions (HEIs) in post-apartheid South Africa by examining the changing demography of academic staff bodies at 25 South African HEIs from 2005 to 2015. We use empirical data to provide initial insights into the changing racial profiles of academic staff bodies across age, gender and rank and then summarise our findings into a transformation ‘scorecard’ which provides an indication of how all racial groups in the country are performing in terms of their representation in higher education. Initial results indicate that most academics in South Africa are middle-aged (between 35 and 54) but an ageing trend is evident, particularly among white academics. In terms of gender, males marginally outnumber females, although we estimate an equitable distribution to be attained within the next 5 years. Significantly, the data indicate that there is an upwards trajectory of black African academics across all rankings from 2005 to 2015 and a concomitant downward trajectory of white academics across all rankings. Both Indian and coloured academics most closely represent their national population representation. Our transformation ‘scorecard’ indicates that the demography of academic staff at higher education institutions in South Africa is changing and will continue to change in the future, particularly within the next 20 years if current trends continue.
Methodological pedagogy within contemporary British social science higher education (through methods courses, textbooks, etc.) constitutes the process through which the researcher is formed, and research designed. It is our contention that methodology – whether positivist or post-positivist – is a form of knowing predicated upon the severance of theory from practice. Methodology presents these as distinct areas, which can only be unified through the synthetic operations of methodological approaches. We argue that the consequence of the separation of theory and practice is that the realm of practice is construed as raw material – as data – to be harvested in the research process, whilst theory is seen as detached from geohistorical–political relations. This serves a neo-colonial process of academic extractivism. We will demonstrate how this is so through an examination of popular methodological textbooks and approaches, highlighting the absence of considerations of contemporary coloniality. We then set out a tentative pedagogical alternative in the form of practical reflexivity and dialogical research. We will show how such approaches are emergent within the social sciences and how they offer a decolonial alternative to contemporary methodological approaches.
In recent years, ‘intellectual decolonisation’ has become so popular in the Global North that we can now speak of there being a ‘decolonial bandwagon’. This article identifies some of the common limitations that can be found in this growing field of intellectual decolonisation. First and foremost, it is suggested that intellectual decolonisation in the Global North may be characterised by Northerncentrism due to the way in which decolonial scholarship may ignore decolonial scholars from the Global South. In order to address this ‘decolonisation without decolonising’, this article offers an alternative genealogy of intellectual decolonisation by discussing some of the most important yet neglected decolonial theory from the Global South. Thereafter, five other common limitations which may appear in discussions about intellectual decolonisation are identified, which are: reducing intellectual decolonisation to a simple task; essentialising and appropriating the Global South; overlooking the multifaceted nature of marginalisation in academia; nativism; and tokenism. The objective of this article is to highlight common limitations which may be present in discussions about intellectual decolonisation so as to provide a warning that some manifestations of intellectual decolonisation may not only be inadequate but may even reinscribe coloniality.
Against a backdrop of historic inequities between Northern and Southern scholars, the UK's Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) calls for "meaningful and equitable" research partnerships between UK-based academics and partners in the Global South. This paper draws on qualitative data from three workshops in the Ethiopia, Rwanda and the UK to interrogate GCRF funding criteria from the perspectives of African-based research partners. The GCRF criteria are considered with respect to African partners' experiences of, and aspirations from, such international research partnerships in order to enrich and extend ongoing debates about power relations in development research. The study finds that GCRF criteria do address many of the familiar historic concerns of African partners, while also identifying ways in which this and similar funding schemes may unintentionally reproduce structural inequities within the South. In highlighting these less visible equity concerns, the paper draws lessons for funders, academics and others concerned with establishing genuinely equitable research partnerships.
This article is based on research about the relations and tensions between secondary students’ subjectivities and dominant discourses as well as education policies in rural contexts in Chile (a well-known case of neoliberal policies in recent decades). Using a poststructural theoretical perspective, the qualitative study is focused on rural students’ subjectivities, through the analysis of their narratives about their lives, their perceptions on secondary schooling, and their educational/labour perspectives about the future. The findings reveal the tensions between the certainty and uncertainty of a future. Specifically, of an educational and work path by which students seek to continue or diverge from the paths taken by previous generations. Here, education policies fail to offer a real upgrade in their future educational and lived conditions or aspirations. Moreover, rural students respond to the neoliberal discourse in an active attempt to de-subjectivise themselves from historical trajectories of precariousness.
The concept of rurality is at the centre of complex geopolitical, geosocial and cultural debates and research which foregrounds the concept of rurality is scarce. This paper seeks alternative perspectives on rurality through a secondary analysis of international doctoral theses contained in the EThOS repository of the British Library, an online collection of half a million doctoral theses completed in UK universities. The doctoral research focusing on rurality and also ethnicity in higher education in a range of countries was explored and twelve theses were focused on. The narratives presented in these twelve theses present alternative constructions of rurality and also raise issues of ideology and politics; deficit and minoritisation of rural students; the importance of intersectionality and the need for universities, including rural institutions, to rethink their agency in engaging with their marginalised communities.
This article focuses on ‘transition’ and how it is understood within higher education. Drawing on data from concept map-mediated interviews at two institutions, we examine the conceptions of transition held by academic and professional staff, who work to support students’ learning into and through higher education. We suggest that normative understandings of transition often draw upon a grand-narrative that orchestrates and reiterates a stereotypic understanding of students’ experiences. Often this narrative involves students’ interpellation into a field of discourse where the subject is constructed as both homogeneous and in deficit: ill-prepared, lacking in independence, as vulnerable and in need of support. However, this study suggests that beneath this discourse lies a more nuanced picture: one where students’ experiences can be conceptualised as diverse and fluid. Moreover, we employ the concept of pedagogic ‘frailty’ to expose the significance of the environments and wider contexts in which students ‘transition’, and to explore the impact of systemic tensions upon students’ experiences. This article further argues that future research should shift discussions away from the deficits of students, and examine how we can make underlying environmental and systemic challenges more explicit, in order to widen our understanding and discussions of these constraints.
The article critiques the tendency in the field of international education to theorize internationalization around the impacts of and policy responses to globalization in local contexts. The central argument of the article is that South Africa’s history and development prospects are so intricately bound up with those of its neighbors in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region that it would be misleading for the country to be talked about in just national/local and global terms. To develop this argument on South Africa’s roles and situation in a regionally interconnected context, I draw on insights from an institutional ethnography of a top-rated, historically White South African public university. While local–global discourses were institutionalized nationally and institutionally through policies for transformation and internationalization, the conspicuous absence of formal institutional structures for regionalization shows the limitations of local–global or global north–south dichotomies in analyzing structures that operate both above and below the level of the nation-state.
The decolonization of Africa, of which the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa is the most recent example, has led to a greater recognition of the wide variety of religions practising on its soil. When confronted with this plurality, and the corresponding plurality of claims to truth or credibility, believers often resort to absolutism. The absolutist evaluates the religious other in view of criteria which violate the self-understanding of the latter. The religious other is thus being colonized by a hegemony (i.e., an enforced homogeneity) of norms and values. This paper deals with an assessment of the faith of others which transcends absolutism without resorting to relativism. More specifically, it aims to show that an African philosophy and way of life called ‘Ubuntu’ (humanness) significantly overlaps with such a ‘decolonized’ assessment of the religious other, and that this assessment can therefore also be explained, motivated or underscored with reference to the concept of Ubuntu.
This chapter frames the discussion of inequality in South African schooling by providing an overview of key features of the country’s education system. Documenting the differences in educational outcomes across five different datasets and multiple dimensions of inequality (race, fees, school-status, province and quintile) illustrates that educational opportunity in South Africa is primarily a function of the colour of a child’s skin, the province of their birth, and the wealth of their parents. The chapter highlights the strategic ways that the minority of fee-charging schools exclude children who cannot pay fees, notably by using feeder zones, language policies and discriminatory admissions interviews. While there have been some important improvements in educational outcomes (primarily between 2003 and 2011), systematic declines in real per-learner expenditure since 2011 have undermined progress subsequently. The distinction between the need for more ‘business as usual’ resources and more ‘targeted’ resources is foregrounded. The chapter concludes that South Africa’s current trajectory is not the only path out of stubbornly high and problematically patterned inequality. A more equitable system will have to address the development and distribution of teachers in no-fee schools, and who has access to the functional fee-charging part of the schooling system.
Since the advent of democracy in 1994, government has pursued equity in education in the context of limited public finances. While discrimination in social spending has been considerably reduced, spending inequalities remain because of the high costs required to achieve fiscal parity in education. In schooling, far-reaching finance equity mechanisms have been put in place, yet increased fiscal inputs are not translating into performance outcomes. Questions persist about whether the current equity approach is adequate, and whether differential redistribution has taken place. Through an analysis of large data sets, policy and quantitative review, the chapter examines four major themes which cut across the schooling sector. These include: fee free schooling; private inputs into public education; the relationship between social equity and education equity; and equitable funding models and approaches. It is argued that differential redistribution must define the equity approach of the country and in the context of limited fiscal resources, new approaches are proposed to ensure that a pro-poor strategy is achieved.
Becoming a university graduate has long been considered the route to individual occupational and social mobility, while educating more citizens has been assumed to add to a nation’s human capital and competitiveness. University education has come to be associated with individual and societal aspiration. However, changes in the labour market associated with globalisation, technology, and fears of graduate underemployment have served to question this. This paper seeks to uncover the meaning that individuals construct about their early careers as they navigate such uncertain contexts. It reports on a study based on the graduate population of one university in England. Analysis tests the value of Figured Worlds theory. Using the construct of ‘self-authoring’, this paper identifies competing voices around employability and career success. Findings reveal how graduates orchestrate varied voices, in order to find ways to figure their experience and what it means to be a successful graduate.
This paper sets out to explore how academics can become agents of meaningful educational change and social cohesion, by implementing a Pedagogy of Compassion. The education triad comprises the teacher, the learner and the content (curriculum), which unfolds within historical, political, social and educational contexts. Changing one aspect of this triad – the curriculum- without due consideration to the others, will not effect the desired change. In the context of the university, the demographics of the learner has radically changed and a massive drive to decolonise the curriculum has been initiated, but little if any attention has been given to academics who deliver the curriculum. I argue that the Achilles’ heel in the decolonisation of the curriculum project of South African universities is the academic.
This papers draws on the compelling example of a political movement in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s to explore both how epistemic justice conditions of possibility and of failure play out in practice. It provides a springboard to understand how and why failures of epistemic justice matter tremendously for democratic and inclusive lives and how the historical example can point us in the direction of higher education as a space for Amartya Sen’s redressable injustices if underpinned by Miranda’s Fricker’s core capability of epistemic contribution being available pedagogically to all. The paper engages with ideas, practices and actions fostered by Black Consciousness against apartheid as both a hermeneutical and a testimonial injustice in South Africa, with both having a relational structure of giving and receiving, as Fricker argues and as Jose Medina elaborates by extending the structure to include the communicative and participatory. The paper then shows the importance of these conceptual frames to transformative higher education practices and how such practices might contribute to more epistemic justice in higher education.
Against a United Kingdom policy background of attempts to widen higher education participation in a socially inclusive direction, this article analyses theory, policy and practice to understand why past efforts have had limited success and to propose an alternative: an “anchor institution” model. A university and a private training provider were the principal partners in this venture, known as the South-West Partnership (pseudonym); the model was developed by them to meet the particular needs of mature female students who want and/or need to study part-time in a rural, coastal and isolated area of south-west England. While the concept of “anchor institutions” has previously been used in government social policy, and in higher education to promote knowledge transfer, it has not yet been adopted as a method for widening participation. The research study presented in this article investigated the effectiveness of the model in widening higher education participation in the context of the South-West Partnership. The study was conducted within an interpretivist theoretical framework. It accessed student voices to illustrate the character of education required to widen participation in vocational higher education by mature female students in rural communities, through semi-structured qualitative interviews on a range of topics identified from relevant theoretical literature, and by drawing on the research team’s professional knowledge and experience. These topics included student aspirations and career destinations, motivations, access, learning experiences, and peer and tutor support. It is hoped the findings will inform the future development of adult vocational higher education provision in rural areas, where opportunities have been limited, and encourage further application of the anchor institution model for widening participation elsewhere.
Experiences as a Work Package leader on a European Union project on internationalization of higher education in Israel motivated the author to use her research on internationalization and university teaching experiences in various countries to facilitate the Israeli partners to interrogate their pedagogical practices. Supported to engage in a pedagogy of discomfort, they confronted complexities in their higher education environment, redesigning programs to integrate principles of internationalization of the curriculum and a social justice agenda.
While access to higher education has increased globally, student retention has become a major challenge. This book analyses various aspects of the learning pathways of black students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds at a relatively elite, English-medium, historically white South African university. The students are part of a generation of young black people who have grown up in the new South Africa and are gaining access to higher education in unprecedented numbers. Based on two longitudinal case studies, Negotiating Learning and Identity in Higher Education makes a contribution to the debates about how to facilitate access and graduation of working-class students. The longitudinal perspective enabled the students participating in the research to reflect on their transition to university and the stumbling blocks they encountered in their senior years. The contributors show that the school-to-university transition is neither linear nor universal. Students had to negotiate multiple transitions at various times and both resist and absorb institutional, disciplinary and home discourses.
The book describes and analyses the students' ambivalence as they straddle often conflicting discourses within their disciplines; within the institution; between home and the institution, and as they occupy multiple subject positions that are related to the boundaries of place and time. Each chapter also describes the ways in which the institution supports and/or hinders students’ progress, explores the implications of its findings for models of support and addresses the issue of what constitutes meaningful access to institutional and disciplinary discourses.
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