In this Point of Departure, we build on the scholarship of Suellen Shay. Shay explored the nature of higher education, examining assessment and the relation between curriculum and knowledge structures across several disciplines. She drew on the work of Bernstein and in her later work responded to the calls for decolonisation. We first…

As university teachers of literature, we tend to accept the rhetoric that students lack the capacity to interpret texts meaningfully, without questioning our own biases about the kinds of meaning we expect them to elicit from texts. Often, these are meanings that have little relevance to students' own social or professional lives. In this article,…

This paper offers a critical review of the adopted academic advising strategies at the Durban University of Technology. It is worth acknowledging that academic advising as a scholarly practice is in its developmental stage at South African tertiary institutions. The paper draws on the experiences of the authors as academic advisors to reflect on…

Decolonisation aims at exposing the ills of colonialism in an attempt to undo their long-standing effects. Important criticism of curriculum decolonisation has focused on potential conflicts with academic freedom. However, this criticism has to some extent suffered from a perceived lack of agreement on the concept and status of academic freedom…

Because dominant social work is mismatched to many contexts, alternative practice and educational approaches have emerged. To highlight educational examples, this phenomenological study explores the experience of 28 Canadian and South African educators teaching alternative social work. These educators conceptualized a multidimensional, integrated,…

The present article is dedicated to the hyper-hierarchization of small-scale organizational spaces (and the most immediate ones for most academics)--university departments. By using the anarchist critique of hierarchies to deconstruct the architecture of an undisclosed department located at one of the South African universities, the author…

This paper discusses insights from a larger study of popular educators' deployment of Freire's pedagogical principles during facilitator training. The paper focuses on data from two facilitators and attempts to examine how popular education principles are applied in two different socio-economic and political contexts, Canada and South Africa.…

This article foregrounds the value of using "critical policy historiography" as an analytical/methodological tool in undertaking policy formulation research, highlighting the importance of taking a long-term historical perspective. Using school-funding policies in South Africa as a case study, it argues that while there was wide…

On 20 September 2019 in Cape Town, as part of the global protests on inaction on climate change, the African Climate Alliance submitted a memorandum of demands to South African government representatives, one of which was 'the creation of a mandatory climate-education curriculum for South Africa'. This raises the question of how this imperative…

Kohlberg's theory of moral development has maintained a dominant position in cognitive moral development literature over several decades. This universal influence has been particularly evident in its application to moral education literature and policy. A closer assessment of Kohlberg's theoretical conceptualization suggests the application of…

Institutional research management (RM) is increasingly seen as a strategic force, not only to raise the research output per academic, but also the quality thereof. RM, therefore, has to attend to researcher development (RD). How RD is achieved, as part of RM, is still viewed as an embryonic field with attendant calls for additional research.…

Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in…

The development of urban students' mathematical proving ability is a goal of several curricula frameworks, including some located in the southern hemisphere. However, in achieving this goal, most curriculum frameworks do so from a Western worldview, which is characterized by competition and the role of the individual. The purpose of this study was…