Dina Z O E Belluigi

This chapter grapples with the question of why decolonising ‘knowledge’ matters for teaching and learning. It shares a selection of important considerations at this point in time. It draws inter-textually to deliberate about (a) why ‘knowledge’ (singular) should be decolonised within the modern western-oriented university; (b) why the decolonisation of knowledges matter, with consideration of their relation to the formations of the self, social and ecological in education; and (c) what the potential act(s) of decolonising knowledges through education holds for engendering critical and generative roles which educators should occupy. As a way into this deliberation, the chapter begins with observations of the phenomenon of what seems like either educators’ avoidance, ignorance or passing-the-buck on the question of the transformation of knowledges in the university in post-colonial contexts.

This chapter provides insights into the intractable ethico-political nature of 'access' in post-colonial, post-conflict higher education (HE), through the reflections of Black academics and women academics who have lived experience of the minority-majority transitions of academic communities in post-apartheid South Africa. To address the lack of 'diversity' of under-represented demographics within historically white institutions, those institutions who provided access to these handpicked academics did so requiring that they undergo rigorous professional development and socialisation programmes for the purposes of assuring their quality. Critical discourse analyses were undertaken of the qualitative responses of these academics made in response to a questionnaire on this subject, which were then confirmed and deepened within small group discussions. In this chapter we discuss how their responses revealed: (1) the mis-educational reception of structural access for troubling homogeneous institutional cultures; (2) the risks encountered in the politics of belonging of an individual's access for success; and (3) the problematic weight of transformative expectations when conditions mitigate against empowering agents access to challenge. Situated within an historical narrative of academic development and the national drives in that country for an HE sector 'transformed' from its historical legacies of injustice and inequality, the chapter highlights the implications of these three constructions of access for disrupting the machinations of the hidden macro-and meso-curricula of power and whiteness.

This chapter is concerned with academic citizenry in higher education, and the conditions created within institutions for transformative leadership. This is central to the fitness-for-purpose of higher education institutions to drive the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Drawing from a mixed-method study, the chapter explores the patterns which emerged from literature, questionnaire responses, and semi-structured interviews about the problematics at play within six institutions in the post-colonial contexts of India and South Africa. The two upper middle-income contexts have strong constitutional commitments to democracy and social justice at the macro-level, with bold policy interventions undertaken at meso-level to address the legacies of exclusion and oppression in student enrollment and staff composition in HE. However, recent fraught dynamics and unrest within the sector in each country have brought renewed attention to the politics of participation and a breakdown in trust of governance and management.

In this study, the standpoint of key stakeholders was prioritized, including those in assigned leadership positions and academic staff. Particular attention was paid to gender and intersectional inequalities impacting academic staff, and what they revealed about the persistence of policy-implementation gaps and their relation to principle-implementation gaps. Concerns are raised about impoverished comprehensions of, and conditions for, sustainable ethical leadership which emerged across both contexts.

This chapter considers how the positioning of the artist-student’s intentionality can operate to resist closure in interpretation, bringing with it a healthy measure of uncertainty and discourse to assessment practices in visual arts practice. The discussion is set within a philosophical context of about constructions of authorship and creativity, and how these inform contemporary art criticism. It then extends to an analysis of the interpretative approaches adopted in the assessment practices of two art schools espousing polemically different approaches to intentionality; with an emphasis on the significance for the student experience, their metacognition and agency.

Educational intention
Situate the problem of authorship more explicitly within discussions about assessment.

Be more cognizant of the significance of assessment practices on the development of authorship.

Describe the significance of such practices for the principles of metacognition and agency.

Situated against an historical narrative of academic development in South Africa, this chapter revisits the intractable politics of access to higher education. The critical reflections of Black academics who endured ‘inclusion’ to an historically White institution in the immediate post-apartheid period reveal fraught negotiations and resistances to transitions of authority. As critical stakeholders of transformation in that country, their perspectives about the different approaches to access offer insights into how discourses of equity, inclusion, diversity and decolonisation operated within a problematic hidden curriculum of academic ‘success’.

Arts-based methods are well-placed to enable disruptions to normative positioning of researcher, respondent and subject. This chapter draws on the author’s reflections of opening the research processes to the possibilities of methodological ir/responsibility. It focuses on a selection of mixed-method projects where a significant contribution to the validity of the empirical research emerged from the arts-based methods employed, including the use of journal writing, story-telling, metaphoric and visual imagery. The discussion is structured around the validity of the methods for the purposes of generating data to inform the evaluation of and research on that which is often difficult
and elusive to analyse in higher education. A particular contribution of the chapter is the discussion of how the construction of research participants informed both the data generation processes, and the analytic approach to the texts they authored. An argument is made for the importance of establishing conditions which enable the possibilities of participants’ agency.

Educational intention
At the end of the chapter, the reader should be able to:
- situate the problem of authorship more explicitly within discussions about assessment;
- be more cognisant of the significance of assessment practices on the development of authorship;
- describe the significance of such practices for the principles of metacognition and agency.
Abstract
This chapter considers how the positioning of the artist-student’s intentionality can operate to resist closure in interpretation, bringing with it a healthy measure of uncertainty and discourse to assessment practices in the creative arts. The discussion is set within a philosophical context of constructions of authorship and creativity, and how these inform contemporary art criticism. It then extends to an analysis of the interpretative approaches adopted in the assessment practices of two art schools espousing polemically different approaches to intentionality, with emphasis on the significance for the student experience, their metacognition and agency.

The evaluation of teaching and courses has the potential to do more than assure quality. However, for many, the emphasis remains on the collection of evidence mandated from the top-down for assuring or furthering one’s career. However, our responsibility to create opportunities to enable student voice  and participation within our pedagogies grows in urgency.  eing responsive to participants and other stakeholders may substantially improve and enhance the quality of student engagement, in addition to enabling staff to develop their teaching and curriculum design practice. Not all lecturers have explored opportunities to think differently or deeply about the potential contributions of evaluation.

Case Studies of the practice of: Caroline Khene; Helena van Coller; Jonathan Davy; Paul Mensah; Mark de Vos;
Monwabisi Peter; Nicky van der Poel; Joy Owen; Kelcey Brock; Miriam Mattison; Mosiuoa Tsietsi;
Dion Nkomo; Georgina Cundill; Brent Meistre; Dina Belluigi; Corinne Knowles; Deborah Seddon;
John Williams; Steffen Buettner; Hannah Thinyane; Tracey Chambers

Drawing from the case of a small South African university which espouses a social justice approach to transformation, this chapter considers the possibilities and challenges created for student feedback within an institutional context that gives the individual lecturer a large degree of autonomy in evaluation. The chapter looks at some of the dominant perceptions of student feedback in addition to how it is collected and utilized, by referring to the Institution’s polices and guideline documents; institutional research in which course coordinators’ participated; responses elicited from forty lecturers on the issues outlined in this chapter; the author’s own reflections as an academic working in staff development at the institution; and specific examples of good practice from lecturers situated within social science disciplines. The emerging concerns which structured this discussion are: the impact of student feedback on improving quality; enabling student voice; increasing student ownership; and the educational worth of evaluation processes.

Introduction

Teachers often approach teaching and learning relationships by mimicking the way they were taught or the way they learnt, in a cycle where academics create images of themselves. In South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past, whiteness hegemony constructed and enabled the white, heterosexual male as the ideal, self - constraining and disadvantaging those who differed as ‘other’, creating injustices in which education was complicit. Rubbing against this grain, formal staff development can provide transformative learning spaces where unconscious assumptions and practices that privilege the status quo are excavated, and alternative teaching and learning relationships between teacher and student are re-imagined. In formal courses, for instance, facilitative roles can be modelled which provoke interactions that encourage ethical relationships between participants who differ in terms of their backgrounds, disciplines, races, gender, philosophical viewpoints and so on. Such critical ‘work’ is underpinned by a contextual mandate towards social justice and a philosophical stance which privileges difference as more than a pedagogical tool, but an ethical one.

Revisiting central concerns expressed at the beginning of this anthology, such as the purposes of the university, and quality as being about transformation, I introduce this chapter by considering how the teacher and student have been constructed in the larger context of the university. Taking cognisance of the implications of this for the roles of the intellectual, I explore some of the possibilities created by difference and disruption. To suggest that we should open our ways of thinking of the other, I draw from Derrida’s argument that the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is neither/nor in terms of sameness and difference, and psychoanalytic acknowledgements that we are strangers to ourselves. In the second part, I explore the reflective and discursive spaces of the Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education (PG Dip (Higher Education)) staff development programme which we offer at Rhodes University, which I argue have the potential to create the disruptive conditions to productively catalyse such ethical relationships. The last part of the chapter turns to how these aspects work at a fundamental level to disrupt notions of the self, and question some of the assumptions of the critical tradition of adult education, within which I believe we at Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) are situated. Interlaced with this discussion, are insights and reflections from participants in the programme.

Abstract:

The development of creativity is enabled or constrained by the conditions created through teaching and learning processes. This chapter looks at how assessment practices, because of their affective import, can impact on these conditions and alter the student experience of learning. The reader’s attention is drawn to four particular areas - the role of the assessor, the assessment focus, the issue of assessment criteria, and the importance of feedback – where suggestions are made about culture, structure and agency in terms of student creativity. The chapter draws from textual and empirical research in a creative arts field.

Abstract:

Providing ‘safe spaces’ to enable the development of creativity may require more creative solutions than the norm. In this chapter, we explore the design and implementation process of a formative evaluation instrument which utilises visual metaphoric storytelling to encourage reflection and feedback from fine art photography students about their experience of a course.

Abstract:

As agents in higher education (HE), a shift is required in terms of how we conceptualise the quality of teaching and courses in relation to student learning. This chapter argues that evaluation should be approached as ethical and valid research into teaching and learning. Consideration should be given to how the conceptualisations of curriculum development and of student learning inform our choices and designs of data collection instruments. Alternative methods to standardised instruments and questionnaires are explored. The central principle underpinning this chapter is that, as a teacher-learner interaction, the processes of evaluating teaching/ courses should both focus on and facilitate student learning. Just as the assessment of student learning is now recognised as an integrated part of curriculum design, so too should the potential benefits of the evaluation of teaching and/courses be maximised in a sensitive and responsive manner.