Epistemic disruption in higher education: Lessons from South Africa and beyond

• In Event: Epistemic disruptions, equity and social justice in higher education: Reimagining teaching and learning beyond the COVID-19 challenges in South Africa

Proposal

South African higher education is a project in perpetual crisis, having emerged from several crises the more recent being the crisis of the student led #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements. Now, in contemporary times, there is the ongoing crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper explores the university interventions on the COVID-19 pandemic that help to keep higher education projects in motion, but equally identifies the ongoing challenges despite the interventions.
The 2020 and 2021 period in higher education has been characterised by pandemic related disruptions to conventional modes of teaching and learning. These disruptions have prompted discussions (Motala & Menon, 2020) on pedagogic shifts, academic continuity, and the future of teaching and learning. The debates on the future focused university have raised system and resourcing issues, as well as teaching and learning practices, including the new ecologies of e-learning. This paper aims to continue with these debates to understand the new pedagogies better, to understand continuities and discontinuities, new learnings and gains, and what universities will do differently going forward. The pandemic has prompted explorations of hybrid models of teaching and learning with radical changes to traditional face to face teaching. The theoretical framework proceeds from assumptions of the necessity for both pedagogical continuity and social justice to analyse its findings from the extant literature and the empirical findings of the larger research project.

Author

• Shireen Motala, University of Johanne