Towards a critical re-conceptualization of the purpose of higher education: the role of Ubuntu-Currere in re-imagining teaching and learning in South African higher education

ABSTRACT

The 2015–2016 South African higher education students’ movement proved historical for our country in bringing to our dinner tables: issues of higher education transformation and decolonisation; institutional culture(s); curriculum reform; the need to foreground and make inclusive assessment in education; the coloniality in our knowledge production, and more. Influenced by the emergence of the student movements and the critique they have brought to South African higher education, we bring to the fore the often silent critical reflections on the purposes of higher education in general, and in South Africa especially, as they relate to teaching and learning. We propose that the purposes of higher education in relation to teaching and learning ought to respond to (1) context, (2) democratic difference, and (3) cosmopolitan perspectives. We argue that discourses, phases and logics about South African higher education have tended to disregard and, at times, blur the context and differences as well as cosmopolitan perspectives. Using the notion of Ubuntu-Currere, we re-imagine how teaching and learning could respond to context, difference and cosmopolitanism with examples from the South African higher education experience.     

New Zealand as a Provider of Transnational Education

New Zealand, a relatively small country, has decided to increase its presence on the international market for higher education. To this effect, it has liberalized its visa requirements and has formed a national NGO, Education New Zealand, to co-ordinate the promotion abroad of New Zealand education, particularly higher education, in a number of ways. New Zealand strongly favours the removal of trade barriers in education, including barriers to the recognition of qualifications earned internationally.     

Negative instances and the acquisition of the mathematical concepts of commutativity and associativity

The effects of negative instances in the acquisition of the mathematical concepts of commutativity and associativity were examined. Two treatment levels for commutativity (positive instances or positive and negative instances) and the same treatment levels for associativity were crossed to form a 2×2 factorial design with 21 subjects per cell. Subjects were undergraduate elementary education majors. Criterion variables were number of correct responses, stimulus intervals, and postfeedback intervals. Results supported the contention that negative instances enhance concept acquisition but also appear to require more time during treatments. No evidence for a transfer effect for negative instances from one concept to another was found.     

Professional Pathways: a case for measurements in more than one dimension

Recent developments in UK professional education are leading to competence-based National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) being offered alongside academic awards made within the Credit Accumulation and Transfer (CAT) system. Although dual accreditation of this type may be a welcome development, the NVQ and CAT systems have different philosophies and cannot easily be linked in structural relationships. The context-specific notion of competence represented by NVQs is only one dimension of effective professional practice, as in order to operate intelligently in many of the situations with which they are faced, practitioners increasingly need transcendant abilities of reflection, enquiry and creative synthesis. A solution lies in a coherent approach to professional development and accreditation which is based in a constructivist epistemology and allows these overarching abilities to be recognised through the CAT system independently of NVQ requirements, while enabling students to work towards awards through both systems simultaneously without duplication of effort     

The Construction of Qualification Levels and Frameworks: Issues from Three UK Projects

The United Kingdom is gradually moving to develop national frameworks of qualifications, with the aim of identifying all publicly-funded qualifications according to level, focus and, where appropriate, size or credit volume. Existing frameworks designed for use in higher education and occupational contexts reflect assumptions concerning things such as the nature of knowledge, the academic or occupational context of the learner, and the nature of access and progression within education and training. These assumptions do not hold for the full spectrum of qualifications, and need to be challenged if a fully inclusive framework is to emerge that is coherent while supporting requisite variety.     

Learning Neuroscience: An Interactive Case-Based Online Network (ICON)

We have developed an interactive case-based online network (ICON) that provides a new learning environment and integrates the student's thinking across the different concentration tracks of one of Harvard's interfaculty science initiatives. ICON takes advantage of this cross-disciplinary, undergraduate curriculum as a model system to bring a compelling, integrative focus to bear on reshaping how Harvard students learn neuroscience. ICON contains 9 learning modules specific to each case: Case, Working Papers, Blackboard, Neuroimaging, Research Programs and Trials, Decision Tree, Learning Objectives, Virtual Contact, and Brainstorm. Modules allow the student to get away from interpreting vast amounts of available information, move toward selecting useful information, recognize discriminating findings, and build a conceptual understanding of real and meaningful problems in neuroscience. The result is that ICON introduces a new landscape within the academic curriculum where the active participation of faculty and students effectively intersects and captures an immediate, integrative learning experience for the student. The benchmark of ICON is the time spent by students and faculty to create a user-defined learning network that engages faculty to participate in the students' learning and transforms the way the student thinks.     

Gender Microaggressions and Learning Environments: The Role of Physical Space in Teaching Pedagogy and Communication

Career and technical education (CTE) programs account for a large proportion of student enrollments in community colleges each year. While women tend to dominate CTE enrollments overall, they remain concentrated in historically feminized fields contrary to nontraditional occupations in which less than 25% of workers are females. Drawing on the emerging research on microaggressions and classroom learning environments, this classroom observation research project of more than 80 hours of observations with supplemental student interviews sought to further an understanding of why women are underrepresented in specific CTE fields. The findings of this study indicated two distinct aspects of the classroom environment that helped stew a culture of gender microaggressions: the instructor pedagogy and communication style, and the impact of physical space. Physical structure, instructor pedagogy, and communication create an environment that often emphasizes and perpetuates social norms connecting men and masculinity to CTE and science, technology, engineering, and math education (STEM), which historically have been male-dominated environments. Results from this study extend the research on microaggressions and learning environments and fill a significant gap on gender and CTE.