Curriculum Inquiry In South African Higher Education

"At once evocative and suggestive, this exemplary book gives me hope that educators and scholars across the world will seize the opportunity to self-reflect and enlarge and enrich both their research and their practice in ways that will markedly contribute to the revitalisation of the higher learning in the twenty-first century. The urgency of the need for revitalisation of both research and practice in this domain of inquiry cannot be overstated." Prof Clifton Conrad ? University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Higher Education in South Africa should be of considerable interest to higher education researchers outside of South Africa, as well as within, for the general and comparative assessments it makes. The South African higher education researchers included within its covers have clearly engaged with research and writing from many parts of the world, which they have then applied to make sense of their own condition. - Malcolm Tight Lancaster University, UK

'The authors aim to stimulate discussion about the nature and purposes of critical citizenship education in higher education. Rather than promoting a blueprint for change, the authors thoughtfully consider a generative research agenda for transformative higher education and focus on how this orientation in higher education plays out on the ground. This book, together with its Coda that takes the conversation beyond critical citizenship education to include responsible citizenship, provides compelling reasons and sound suggestions for a way forward.

What is transformation in contemporary South African higher education? How can it be facilitated through research and pedagogic practices? These questions are addressed in this edited collection by established academics and emerging research students from nine South African universities. The chapters give us access to students? worlds: how they construct, experience and navigate their complex spheres, on and off campus. By engaging with students as knowledge producers, we transform popular ways of thinking about race, gender, class, sexuality, disability and age as singular and natural markers of difference and diversity.ÿ Rather than taking diversity as fixed and rooted in nature, we explore how diversity is imagined and lived in particular contexts on and off campus.

In what ways does access to undergraduate education have a transformative impact on people and societies? What conditions are required for this impact to occur? What are the pathways from an undergraduate education to the public good, including inclusive economic development? These questions have particular resonance in the South African higher education context, which is attempting to tackle the challenges of widening access and improving completion rates in in a system in which the segregations of the apartheid years are still apparent. Higher education is recognised in core legislation as having a distinctive and crucial role in building post-apartheid society. Undergraduate education is seen as central to addressing skills shortages in South Africa. It is also seen to yield significant social returns, including a consistent positive impact on societal institutions and the development of a range of capabilities that have public, as well as private, benefits. This book offers comprehensive contemporary evidence that allows for a fresh engagement with these pressing issues.

This volume focuses on current demands, challenges and expectations facing African higher education institutions in general, and those in South Africa in particular. Subsequently, transformative curricula, pedagogies and epistemologies that define diverse practices of access and inclusion within the context of transformation and decolonisation are explored.

This book offers an important contribution to the field of curriculum studies and higher education by examining the impacts of colonialism and neoliberalism in the South African education system and addressing ways to decolonise curriculum and teaching. Drawing on Pinar's work in curricular theory, the authors call for integrating self-reflective curriculum development into the national curriculum process to promote indigenous education and knowledge.

In this discussion of higher education studies in South Africa we attempt to illustrate how higher education studies in South Africa reflect both global and local trends and concerns, and how the publications by Eli Bitzer over the course of his involvement and dedication to the field for thirty years have contributed to our understanding of this field.