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

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

A central imperative in the post-1994 dispensation in South Africa has been to undo the invidious legacies of colonialism and apartheid. However, the extant literature shows that the process of decolonisation has been happening at a very low pace, characterised by various understandings and enactment of the very notion of decolonisation. Through the #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall movements, students argued, amongst other things, that despite the transformation imperatives, South African universities continue to prioritise and reproduce Eurocentric knowledge and western canons.
More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a shift from traditional face to face knowledge making processes and with an abrupt online turn to remote learning to contain the spread of the virus. Given current debates, we want to understand how these crises have facilitated or detracted progress towards achieving equity and social justice. We want to explore this from both the angle of the students’ experiences and how leadership manage and negotiate these processes in different institutions probing two questions: What are the students’ experiences of teaching and learning during crises; and, how do institutions manage and lead processes of curriculum transformation during crises?
The focus on COVID-19, has been mostly on exploring the challenges and the disruptions it has had on education systems in general and how the pandemic has contributed to exacerbating the already existing challenges and inequalities in higher education (Motala & Menon, 2020; Sayed & Singh, 2020). There is vast literature which has established that performance gaps between the rich and poor students especially in historically White and historically Black institutions in South Africa are widening because of the COVID-19 pandemic and its disruptions. A great deal of attention has been given to issues of social injustices in teaching and learning in higher education but what constitute a social just education in such times is not sufficiently explored (Zajda, Majhanovich and Rust, 2006). Existing literature has also established that there is absence of frameworks/models for interrogating issues of equity and social justice, and this has resulted in uneven and unimpactful interventions.
This panel presentation emanates from a joint research project between the SARChI (South African Research Chairs Initiative) Teaching and Learning, University of Johannesburg, South Africa, and the SARChI Teacher Education, Central Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa. Epistemic disruptions in reconstituting higher education pedagogy in South Africa: The student and management perspective. The project seeks to understand how curriculum and pedagogy is experienced across six higher education institutions’ Faculties to probe students’ and education leadership’s understanding of decolonised curriculum and pedagogy in the context of transformation debates on decolonization and the COVID-19 pandemic. We also want to specifically understand how university leaders lead in times of these crises, their prospects, and limitations. A cohering argument across the presentations is that both the decolonisation thrust and the covid initiated transformation of teaching and learning modalities presented opportunities and challenges whose impact needs careful examining to create a basis for creation of a more resilient Higher Education system into the future.The project places a specific focus on epistemic disruptions driven by the current and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on the one hand and the student-initiated decolonization on the other. We refer to these events as crises. A crisis is any event that is in any way out of the ordinary or where there appears to be conflict and consequently the outcome is uncertain. However, the outcome is most likely to yield both positive and negative experiences in higher education.
There is now much need to focus on the impactful interventions in our quest to ameliorate the growing challenges (Chiramba and Maringe, 2022). We need research which moves beyond looking at the existing challenges to pave a way for social justice in higher education teaching and learning (Chiramba, 2021). The central argument for this discussion is that lack of impactful interventions partly emanates from a limited understanding on what a social just education system entails. Using the literature review and empirical data from the larger research project, this panel aims to critically engage with what institutions within higher education have done in response to one crisis ie the COVID-19 challenges in teaching and learning. The idea is to bring together different interventions done across higher education institutions in order to begin developing a framework for equity (MacKay & Devlin, 2016), equality (Brenann & Naidoo, 2008), quality (Hackman, 2005) and social justice and relevance (Fraser, 2009). The overarching question for this panel is: how can institutions respond to higher education challenges to contribute meaningfully to the future and allow for the reduction, if not elimination, of gross forms of social injustice?

Sub Unit

• Higher Education SIG

Chair

• Joel Samoff, Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• Epistemic disruption in higher education: Lessons from South Africa and beyond - Shireen Motala, University of Johanne

• Paper 2: The Online turn in South African higher education: academic leadership in times of crisis - Otilia Fortunate Chiramba, University of Johannesburg

• De-colonising curricula in South African higher education - Venise Joubert, University of Johannesburg

Discussant

• Joel Samoff, Stanford University