The Phd Experience In African Higher Education

The PhD Experience in African Higher Education, edited by Ruth Murambadoro, John Mashayamombe, and uMbuso weNkosi, addresses the growing call to invest in the humanities and social sciences by exploring the nature of doctoral training in select institutions of higher learning in South Africa. In the past two decades, South Africa has become a key player in the global higher education landscape and dubbed the hub for doctoral training in Africa because of its developed educational infrastructure and highly ranked universities. Given South Africa’s positioning, the contributors in this volume argue that the government, donors, universities, and faculty have a socio-legal duty to ensure that doctoral programs in the humanities and social sciences are not offered to amass numbers of African graduates but are grounded on equipping students with both hard and soft skills necessary to succeed. This is achieved by offering skills training and research apprenticeships fostered in communities of practice because, as the contributors show, the humanities and social sciences are the backbone of society. Furthermore, they argue that treating doctoral candidates as equal partners is emancipatory because intellectual projects are best nurtured through collaborative learning.

There have been institutions of higher learning for centuries in Africa, but the phenomenal growth has taken place in the last fifty years, first in the later days of colonialism and then in the heady days of independence and commodity boom. Without them, there would have been no development. The three highly distinguished authors have written the first comprehensive assessment of universities and higher education in Africa south of the Sahara. As can be seen from their biographies, they draw on experience from both francophone and anglophone Africa and from teaching in both the sciences and the arts.

The dominant global discourse in higher education now focuses on world-class universities inevitably located predominantly in North America, Europe and, increasingly, East Asia. The rest of the world, including Africa, is left to play catch-up. But that discourse should focus rather on the tensions, even contradictions, between excellence and engagement with which all universities must grapple. Here the African experience has much to offer the high-participation and generously resourced systems of the so-called developed world. This book offers a critical review of that experience, and so makes a major contribution to our understanding of higher education.

Drawing on insights from across Africa, this book investigates the discourses and practices that guide doctoral training today. Higher education is regarded as key for driving development and innovation, creating an informed knowledge base equipped to tackle local and global challenges. For too long external forces defined education in the continent, but now African countries are revitalising higher education, designing doctoral training to fit distinctly African needs and contexts. This book investigates the history, present and future potential of doctoral training on international, regional, national and institutional levels. Bringing together expertise from both research and practice, the book analyses the frameworks and structures of the doctoral phase, and how institutions, supervisors, mentors and young scholars meet the challenges of training in real life. The book covers issues such as access to education, proactive recruitment, funding issues, practitioner expertise, enrolment and drop-out, across a range of countries including South Africa, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Benin, Ghana and Morocco. This book will be a rich resource for higher education administrators and policy makers, as well as researchers and academics with an interest in higher education in Africa.

This book will help stakeholders in higher education appreciate service-learning as an innovative and active approach with the potential to enrich students’ learning experiences, while adding value to the service mission of higher education. The approach not only links academic learning to everyday life, but also exposes students to a variety of opportunities for the development of life and career skills. The book will serve to bring university teaching out of the clouds and restore in students’ minds the connection between what they are learning and the people their education is meant to help. The approach advocated here will serve to have a long-term and salutary effect on the whole nature of university learning. When students are given the opportunity to participate actively in the learning process, which includes civic engagement, they will be able to learn not only theoretically, but also experientially through practice, as experience is generally one of the best ways to learn.

Higher education has recently been recognized as a key driver for societal growth in the Global South and capacity building of African universities is now widely included in donor policies. The question is; how do capacity building projects affect African universities, researchers and students? Universities and their scientific knowledges are often seen to have universal qualities; therefore, capacity building may appear straight forward. Higher Education and Capacity Building in Africa contests such universalistic notions. Inspired by ideas about the ‘geography of scientific knowledge’ it explores what role specific places and relationships have in knowledge production, and analyses how cultural experiences are included and excluded in teaching and research. Thus, the different chapters show how what constitutes legitimate scientific knowledge is negotiated and contested. In doing so, the chapters draw on discussions about the hegemony of Western thought in education and knowledge production. The authors’ own experiences with higher education capacity building and knowledge production are discussed and used to contribute to the reflexive turn and rise of auto-ethnography. This book is a valuable resource for researchers and postgraduate students in education, development studies, African studies and human geography, as well as anthropology and history.

The treasure of the Black experience at a Historically Black College/University (HBCU) is that it offers a personal and intimate experience rooted in Black heritage that cannot be found at other institutions. On campus, face-to-face instruction and activities focused on addressing issues that plague the Black community are paramount. This provides students with small classroom environments and the personal support from administrators, faculty, and staff. In March 2020, the Black experience was interrupted when a global pandemic forced governors to declare states of emergencies and mandate stay-at-home orders. The stay-at-home orders forced universities to transition into fully remote environments. Doing so heightened an array of emotions compounded by the reality of previously recognized disparities in resources and funding amongst higher education institutions. As a result of this abrupt transformation, the HBCU experience was impacted by positive and negative implications for Black people at the campus, local, state, and national levels. The Black Experience and Navigating Higher Education Through a Virtual World explores the reality of the Black experience from various perspectives involving higher education institutions with a focus on HBCUs. The book provides an overview and analysis of a virtual experience that goes beyond the day-to-day technological implications and exposes innovative ideas and ways of navigating students and faculty through a remote world. It focuses on heightening the awareness of disparities through the Black experience in a virtual environment, provides guidance on transitioning to fully remote environments, examines leadership dynamics in virtual environments, analyzes mental health balance, and examines implications on the digital divide. Covering topics such as online course delivery, self-health, and social justice, this book is essential for graduate students, academicians, diversity officers in the academy, professors, and researchers.

Makerere University started in 1922 as a humble technical school enrolling 14 day students of Carpentry, Building and Mechanics. Nine decades later, the University has made giant stridesenrolling over 35,000 students in over 145 study programmes hosted by nine colleges spread across various campuses. As one of the first higher education institutions in East and Central Africa, the university has had to contend with a multiplicity of issues, including relevance, curricula reform, community engagement and graduate employability; access, equity, massification and quality assurance; national politics, regulation, institutional autonomy and academic freedom; funding and financial management; student politics and activism; staff unionisation, management and brain drain; physical resources expansion, utilisation and maintenance; liberalisation, privatisation, commercialisation and internationalisation; Information and Communication Technology (ICT); and institutional leadership and integrity. Today, the University stands out proudly as a hallmark of innovation and excellence in teaching, research and community engagement, notwithstanding the challenges it has experienced over the years. As it celebrates 90 years, the higher education scholarly and policy fraternity take the opportunity to honour and continue the Universitys tradition of scholarship and innovation through contributing ideas for dealing with some of the challenges that the University and similar institutions are contending with. Although studies of Makerere University have been included, it must be understood that this book is not necessarily about the University. Additional studies have been drawn from Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania and other institutions in Uganda.