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,…

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…

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.…

Teaching in higher education poses unique sets of challenges, especially for academics in the engineering, built sciences and information science education disciplines. This article focuses on how reflective collaboration can support academics in their quest to find unique solutions to challenges in different academic contexts. A reflective…

Wenger (2000, 229) describes communities of practice as the "basic building blocks of a social learning system" since they are the "social containers" that make up such a system. By practising in academic communities, academics define with one another what constitutes academic competence and, for that matter, what constitutes…

Introduction: This paper examines the persistent problematic issue of engaging business students in teaching computer programming. Studies continue to document challenges in teaching computer programming and various methods have been proposed with varying degrees of success. From an educator's perspective, the concern is how to engage students to…

Apartheid-designed higher education institutions continue to have a major influence on students and higher educators in South Africa. There is a need for innovative approaches for engaging with difference in higher education. One means of doing this could be through innovative pedagogical approaches. The Community, Self and Identity project…

Studied the contribution of feminist pedagogy to the task of reconceptualizing English language teaching in multilingual classrooms. Narratives of five South African educators show how participants attempt to negotiate barriers and balance rights, justice, morality, and care. (SLD)