This paper explores a participatory process between a Law lecturer, an academic literacy practiti... more This paper explores a participatory process between a Law lecturer, an academic literacy practitioner and students as teacher agency was conceptualised and theorised as a means of promoting student success. This position paper identifies and advocates a shift in the role of the lecturer as discipline expert to practitioner to provide students with the much needed community of practice (Wenger 1998) and to bridge the gap between epistemological access to disciplines (Morrow 1993) and student identity. This investigation is premised on the notion that students are usually identified as the only ones lacking in effective academic practices; little attention is given to lecturers ’ reluctance or inability to embrace methodologies that make disciplinary practices explicit to students to enable them to become academically literate in the discourse of the university as well as their specialist disciplines. The study draws on interviews with the lecturer and focus group discussions with stu...
This paper explores a participatory process between a Law lecturer, an academic literacy practiti... more This paper explores a participatory process between a Law lecturer, an academic literacy practitioner and students as teacher agency was conceptualised and theorised as a means of promoting student success. This position paper identifies and advocates a shift in the role of the lecturer as discipline expert to practitioner to provide students with the much needed community of practice (Wenger 1998) and to bridge the gap between epistemological access to disciplines (Morrow 1993) and student identity. This investigation is premised on the notion that students are usually identified as the only ones lacking in effective academic practices; little attention is given to lecturers’ reluctance or inability to embrace methodologies that make disciplinary practices explicit to students to enable them to become academically literate in the discourse of the university as well as their specialist disciplines. The study draws on interviews with the lecturer and focus group discussions with stud...
Fatima Meer’s memoir, Prison Diary: One Hundred and Thirteen Days, 1976 (2001), and the short sto... more Fatima Meer’s memoir, Prison Diary: One Hundred and Thirteen Days, 1976 (2001), and the short story ‘Train to Hyderabad’ (Meer 2010) as an anthologised entity drawn from it, symbolise women’s isolation under male scrutiny, male rage at female autonomy and the compulsion to gag female critique of male government whether domestic, provincial or national. Behind the historical fact of colonial pseudo-slavery termed indenture, which was not gender-specific, lies the surviving, wide-spread and less-recognised phenomenon of female subjugation which may be termed female indenture. This reading of ‘Train to Hyderabad’ re-enacts a liberatory process: freeing the text in a way which reflects Meer’s own scripting of her work in a pattern of self-denial and socialist concern for the oppressed about her.
‘Pedagogies in context’ are explored through a national project working with academic staff devel... more ‘Pedagogies in context’ are explored through a national project working with academic staff developers and new academics' induction and transitioning into higher education. Causal-layered analysis is used to explore the interplay between academic staff, institutional development, and contextual influences in shaping professional learning processes. Data generated by the project’s steering committee (SC) reflects on pedagogical encounters with the NATHEP participants and conference delegates (HELTASA, 2019). The outcomes of each intervention were compared by reflecting on who was in the room and how epistemological and ontological depth in each engagement was achieved. The study was guided by whether pedagogies are mobile and agile, irrespective of context. The SC asserts that pedagogies in context are relative to the participants, purpose and the project embedded in a specific context to achieve the epistemological, ontological, methodological, and axiological breadth and depth required. The portability of pedagogies from one context to another depends on aspects intrinsic to knowledge generation, transformation and decolonisation, engagement, being and becoming, and socio-cultural and historical conditions. This is also incumbent on the agility and flexibility of facilitators to adapt their repertoire to draw on a suite of contextually relevant pedagogical approaches.
The task of decolonisation is convoluted as the complexities of meanings as well as the multiple ... more The task of decolonisation is convoluted as the complexities of meanings as well as the multiple dimensions of decolonisation are vast and textured, depending on one’s vantage point and vested interests. This situation warrants a critical examination of what decolonisation has come to mean in the global South and how different subjectivities at a particular academic institution in the country are responding to the call for change. The academic, social and political movement of decolonisation evokes a variety of reactions, responses and repercussions from a wide spectrum of the university community and its stakeholders. Ranging from conservative to radical, these responses reflect the range of discourses, values, beliefs and actions that the academic community embraces and might determine the extent to which the decolonisation movement can in fact succeed in its goals. This chapter critically analyses responses to the calls for decolonisation of the academy by #Fallist student moveme...
The #RhodesMustFall (RMF) movement of 2015 and 2016 challenged universities across the nation to ... more The #RhodesMustFall (RMF) movement of 2015 and 2016 challenged universities across the nation to interrogate how the curriculum serves as an alienating and marginalising device that stymies student success. Consequently, the HE sector has been challenged to respond to student calls for decolonisation by reviewing existing university curricula which promote forms of knowledge production that do not reflect an African worldview or a global South context. Academics have refocused their attention on exploring what an alternative, decolonial curriculum would entail. This paper reports on a professional development course, designed to support academics to ‘decolonise their curricula’, and explores what it meant to facilitate and participate in a course that disrupted who they were as disciplinary experts in the university. Drawing on decolonial scholarship, the authors use auto-ethnography to engage with two disciplines, namely midwifery and journalism, to see how the metaphors of (de)col...
In the context of global curriculum transformation and from a global South perspective, this arti... more In the context of global curriculum transformation and from a global South perspective, this article explores the imposed and self-created borders that continue to “discipline” us into reproducing scholarly processes, practices, and traditions that privilege dominant forms of knowledge making and knowing in teaching and learning. Drawing on Africa as a case study to explore a framework for thinking outside borders, the author invites the reader to embrace a global social imagination that disrupts and transcends the epistemic, social, and cultural borders designed to produce knowledge that is ahistorical and decontextualized. Using a social mapping of how we thrive on neatly delineated borders that detach the known from the knower by marginalizing or delegitimizing knowledges of the Other, this article, which draws on an earlier version presented as a keynote at the 16th annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Atlanta, Georgia, U...
This paper explores a participatory process between a Law lecturer, an academic literacy practiti... more This paper explores a participatory process between a Law lecturer, an academic literacy practitioner and students as teacher agency was conceptualised and theorised as a means of promoting student success. This position paper identifies and advocates a shift in the role of the lecturer as discipline expert to practitioner to provide students with the much needed community of practice (Wenger 1998) and to bridge the gap between epistemological access to disciplines (Morrow 1993) and student identity. This investigation is premised on the notion that students are usually identified as the only ones lacking in effective academic practices; little attention is given to lecturers ’ reluctance or inability to embrace methodologies that make disciplinary practices explicit to students to enable them to become academically literate in the discourse of the university as well as their specialist disciplines. The study draws on interviews with the lecturer and focus group discussions with stu...
This paper explores a participatory process between a Law lecturer, an academic literacy practiti... more This paper explores a participatory process between a Law lecturer, an academic literacy practitioner and students as teacher agency was conceptualised and theorised as a means of promoting student success. This position paper identifies and advocates a shift in the role of the lecturer as discipline expert to practitioner to provide students with the much needed community of practice (Wenger 1998) and to bridge the gap between epistemological access to disciplines (Morrow 1993) and student identity. This investigation is premised on the notion that students are usually identified as the only ones lacking in effective academic practices; little attention is given to lecturers’ reluctance or inability to embrace methodologies that make disciplinary practices explicit to students to enable them to become academically literate in the discourse of the university as well as their specialist disciplines. The study draws on interviews with the lecturer and focus group discussions with stud...
Fatima Meer’s memoir, Prison Diary: One Hundred and Thirteen Days, 1976 (2001), and the short sto... more Fatima Meer’s memoir, Prison Diary: One Hundred and Thirteen Days, 1976 (2001), and the short story ‘Train to Hyderabad’ (Meer 2010) as an anthologised entity drawn from it, symbolise women’s isolation under male scrutiny, male rage at female autonomy and the compulsion to gag female critique of male government whether domestic, provincial or national. Behind the historical fact of colonial pseudo-slavery termed indenture, which was not gender-specific, lies the surviving, wide-spread and less-recognised phenomenon of female subjugation which may be termed female indenture. This reading of ‘Train to Hyderabad’ re-enacts a liberatory process: freeing the text in a way which reflects Meer’s own scripting of her work in a pattern of self-denial and socialist concern for the oppressed about her.
‘Pedagogies in context’ are explored through a national project working with academic staff devel... more ‘Pedagogies in context’ are explored through a national project working with academic staff developers and new academics' induction and transitioning into higher education. Causal-layered analysis is used to explore the interplay between academic staff, institutional development, and contextual influences in shaping professional learning processes. Data generated by the project’s steering committee (SC) reflects on pedagogical encounters with the NATHEP participants and conference delegates (HELTASA, 2019). The outcomes of each intervention were compared by reflecting on who was in the room and how epistemological and ontological depth in each engagement was achieved. The study was guided by whether pedagogies are mobile and agile, irrespective of context. The SC asserts that pedagogies in context are relative to the participants, purpose and the project embedded in a specific context to achieve the epistemological, ontological, methodological, and axiological breadth and depth required. The portability of pedagogies from one context to another depends on aspects intrinsic to knowledge generation, transformation and decolonisation, engagement, being and becoming, and socio-cultural and historical conditions. This is also incumbent on the agility and flexibility of facilitators to adapt their repertoire to draw on a suite of contextually relevant pedagogical approaches.
The task of decolonisation is convoluted as the complexities of meanings as well as the multiple ... more The task of decolonisation is convoluted as the complexities of meanings as well as the multiple dimensions of decolonisation are vast and textured, depending on one’s vantage point and vested interests. This situation warrants a critical examination of what decolonisation has come to mean in the global South and how different subjectivities at a particular academic institution in the country are responding to the call for change. The academic, social and political movement of decolonisation evokes a variety of reactions, responses and repercussions from a wide spectrum of the university community and its stakeholders. Ranging from conservative to radical, these responses reflect the range of discourses, values, beliefs and actions that the academic community embraces and might determine the extent to which the decolonisation movement can in fact succeed in its goals. This chapter critically analyses responses to the calls for decolonisation of the academy by #Fallist student moveme...
The #RhodesMustFall (RMF) movement of 2015 and 2016 challenged universities across the nation to ... more The #RhodesMustFall (RMF) movement of 2015 and 2016 challenged universities across the nation to interrogate how the curriculum serves as an alienating and marginalising device that stymies student success. Consequently, the HE sector has been challenged to respond to student calls for decolonisation by reviewing existing university curricula which promote forms of knowledge production that do not reflect an African worldview or a global South context. Academics have refocused their attention on exploring what an alternative, decolonial curriculum would entail. This paper reports on a professional development course, designed to support academics to ‘decolonise their curricula’, and explores what it meant to facilitate and participate in a course that disrupted who they were as disciplinary experts in the university. Drawing on decolonial scholarship, the authors use auto-ethnography to engage with two disciplines, namely midwifery and journalism, to see how the metaphors of (de)col...
In the context of global curriculum transformation and from a global South perspective, this arti... more In the context of global curriculum transformation and from a global South perspective, this article explores the imposed and self-created borders that continue to “discipline” us into reproducing scholarly processes, practices, and traditions that privilege dominant forms of knowledge making and knowing in teaching and learning. Drawing on Africa as a case study to explore a framework for thinking outside borders, the author invites the reader to embrace a global social imagination that disrupts and transcends the epistemic, social, and cultural borders designed to produce knowledge that is ahistorical and decontextualized. Using a social mapping of how we thrive on neatly delineated borders that detach the known from the knower by marginalizing or delegitimizing knowledges of the Other, this article, which draws on an earlier version presented as a keynote at the 16th annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Atlanta, Georgia, U...
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Papers by kasturi Behari-Leak