Community engagement (CE) has been identified as an important pillar alongside teaching and research in higher education. Despite this it has emerged slowly within the South African landscape due to a lack of understanding regarding engagement. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this study sought to explore how academics (N=14), at a University of…

South Africa faces an education crisis that has significant implications for the freedom of citizens and development of the country. A context of government incapacity necessitates that other modes of improving the education system be explored. This paper examines the Nine Tenths Mentoring Programme to gauge the potential of community-based…

Social movements are at the forefront of fighting for another world as conceptualised through Arundhati Roy's portal. COVID-19 and state measures imposed to contend with it have severely impacted not only the activism of movements, but also their capacity to learn. Translocal social movement learning offers one way in which such learning can…

This article seeks to address what it means to be an 'engaged' university and, in so doing, to contribute to current discourses -- in a fast growing field -- about how to collaborate with communities for meaningful social transformation. As a group of researchers from the faculty of education in a South African university, we share our thinking…

The project review as outlined in this article explores the questions: What is transformative research and what is transformation as far as the community stakeholders are concerned? To what extent has the transformative research achieved its intended outcomes? The Bokamoso project (founded by Lesego Serolong as facilitator and investor) is an…

Universities in South Africa have the potential to advance various dimensions of human development, including well-being. However, this potential can be constrained by historical processes of oppression and the negation of indigenous ways of being and doing. Applying the capabilities approach (Sen, 1999) as a normative framework for the outcomes…

Arts and cultural practice are gaining attention in numerous disciplines and sectors as a vehicle for community building, and to promote wellbeing and social change. In this article we overview the links between community and liberation psychologies, community arts, and public pedagogy. We put forward the notion of community pedagogies to capture…

This article highlights both the internal educative practices of social movements and how these practices can effectively link to building Freirean pedagogies within higher education institutions. At the heart of this possibility lies the democratic transformation of relations between students and teachers on the one hand and researchers and…

Studies have shown how social media, including Facebook and Twitter, are reshaping communication, news, and information. It is therefore important to explore the role social media plays in student protests and campaigns in order to determine to what extent social media allows participation and audience inclusion during #FeesMustFall and other…

The need to work in partnership with communities in a meaningful and impactful way has become a core part of university planning in many countries around the world. In the Global South, the potential for the Eurocentric knowledges and power structures to dominate such partnerships is pervasive. This article reports on findings of a participatory…

During South Africa's apartheid era, the social and political ideology of Afrikaner nationalism Othered those who disrupted an idealised vision of white heteronormative Afrikaner masculinity. While protections from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation were enshrined in the post-apartheid constitution in 1996, anti-LGBTQ violence…

This article argues for the inclusion of Empathetic-Reflective-Dialogical Restorying as a teaching-learning strategy for Religion Education. This strategy, employed in three small-scale research projects in a South African Higher Education Institution, addresses decolonisation of the Religion Education curriculum in the following ways: changing…

This timely book features rich examples of students and teachers, defined as learning partners, disrupting hierarchy in education by collaborating on social change projects. At the book's core is Paulo Freire's theorization of students and teachers working together toward co-liberation. Co-written by learning partners, each chapter in this…

Student teachers in South Africa need to realise that although their classrooms are multilingual and multicultural, English remains the dominant language. Preparing student teachers for diverse classrooms require a pedagogical approach that will enable them to be agents of social change. This view supports transformative ideals in teacher…

Township-dwelling Black South African women must cope with an array of traumatizing stressors that stunt individual voice and diminish the creation of supportive female communities. At issue was the capacity of women under these conditions to thrive as individuals and contributing members of society, thus the rationale for this project study. The…