Paper 2: The Online turn in South African higher education: academic leadership in times of crisis

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

Proposal

Leadership provides the fulcrum for organisational development and change. Without effective leadership, organisations tend to flounder and underperform and can indeed dissipate completely in times of crisis. In this paper, we explore the leadership implications and enactment that help to keep higher education projects in motion, but equally, to identify the critical factors that appear to promote organisational resilience in times of crisis. Specifically, the paper explores the role of university management and leadership in curriculum transformation amidst the crises. The paper utilises qualitative empirical evidence from university leadership collected from two universities, one, a comprehensive university in South Africa’s Gauteng province and the second one University of Technology in the Western Cape. Ethical clearance was sought and approved. Data was analysed using the MaxQDA, a software for qualitative data analysis.
The paper explores resilient higher education leadership as based on four crucial factors namely adoptive, adaptive, anticipative and transformative capacities. These four capacities provide the scaffolding through which effective and frequent communication, the decentralisation of leadership roles, the provision of accurate data, balancing organisational priorities and the ongoing training and reskilling of members of the university community are utilised as the glue that keeps the institutions not only intact and responsive, but agile and transformative in the face of crises. The paper further recommends integrating these capacities with transformative, distributive and instructional leadership theories in order to realise effective leadership in universities in times of crises.

Author

• Otilia Fortunate Chiramba, University of Johannesburg