Teacher, don’t teach me nonsense
Students seek resonance and plausibility in the SA higher education teaching and learning space
Challenges in the South African higher education space are layered; the surface ones are mere manifestations of far deeper issues. The first surface challenge presents as the low participation rates in higher education. Although there has been massive growth in student enrolment at universities over the years, only about 12% of African and coloured youth enter this sector.
The second surface challenge relates to the persistently high and racially skewed failure rates. It was recently reported that only about 7% of African and coloured youth are succeeding in higher education.
Beneath this glaring data are deeper challenges. It is an indictment on the higher education teaching and learning sector that the skewed failure rates only become known to the public after students went on protests; in doing so they often sacrificed their own futures. It appears to me that perhaps we collect data for the department of higher education and training, Council for Higher Education and other such structures as a function of compliance, rather than for the system to actually analyse trends and deeply interrogate them.
Access and success in higher education unfortunately continue to correlate with race and social class, which are in turn intricately linked. Where access to university for black students is usually dependant on loans and throughput rates are low, the result is massive debt.
Black students are often among the best achievers at school, yet they perform poorly at university.
There are three factors that I believe play a role in this. The first — and this has been noted by others — relates to how in the teaching and learning space, the curriculum has been traditionally dealt with as a structure rather than as a process. There has not been much attention paid to how students, in their diversity, engage with the curriculum. The focus instead has been on employability within a narrow, neoliberal market economy, while pushing for efficient teaching and learning. Students deemed “at risk” have generally been slotted into extended programs, while the curriculum itself and how it interfaces with the student has not been interrogated.
Secondly, until recently, and again only after students had raised the issues, we had not interrogated the nature of the Westernised university as assimilationist, and how this is experienced by students in a diverse and unequal society.
Thirdly — and this compounds the first two problems — academics often do not see themselves as educators.
The national picture on racially skewed failure rates is accentuated at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Where the national success rate differential between black African and white students is 48%: 63% after five years in the system, UCT has a 58%: 83% differential success rate for a comparable cohort. So you have a 15% difference at national level, compared to 25% at UCT.
We are not going to address these challenges without changing our orientation towards student protests and the academic project itself. On the issue of funding in higher education, we all need to raise our voices to halt the commodification of education, while holding government accountable to deliver on its constitutional mandate to make quality education accessible to all. But within Westernised universities such as UCT, the responsibility to address the challenges I have highlighted is mainly ours to bear.
We need to realise that it is no longer possible to locate teaching and learning outside of the transformation agenda. Most importantly, we need to avoid binary thinking. The binaries that often trap us are: transformation or decolonisation vs excellence; academic freedom vs social justice and accountability; the public intellectual vs the global scholar; self-acceptance vs acknowledging “the racialised, gendered, disabled other” or member of the LGBQTIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer/questioning, transgender/ transsexual, intersex, ally/asexual) community; as well as the good vs the bad about our disciplines or professions.
Kenan Malik, Vivek Chibber and Mahmood Mamdani, as recent speakers at UCT, have sought to help us manage these tensions, but we must do some of the work ourselves. Personally, the most important lesson I have learnt since 2015 is that what students seek in the learning space is resonance and plausibility. Their desire is to discover themselves as “knowers” of at least something in and through the knowledge project. They should not have to lose themselves entirely in order to earn the grades. Where students cannot identify with whatever is shared in the learning space, they should be persuaded through cogent arguments and explanations, and through a contestation of ideas, in a democratic learning space.
In summary, the first thing I wish to emphasise is that if we do not find and use systems to track, interrogate and understand trends in terms of student participation and success in the higher education sector so that we can address problems promptly and meaningfully, we are essentially inviting the next spate of protests.
Secondly, students have pushed us to see the human at the centre of the academic project; the student, the academic and society at large. We have been afforded a rare opportunity to capitalise on what South Africa is known for, through its historical figures of Sarah Baartmann, Winnie Mandela, Stephen Bantu Biko, Robert Sobukwe, Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, and many others — that human courage always triumphs over evil. Epistemic violence and administrative injustice are the dark side of the academy. Our students, in general, have no capacity to tolerate injustices. As educators, we ought not to tolerate injustices meted out against them.
Many of our students bring with them scars that are a result of a racially divided, insanely unequal, patriarchal, sexist, homophobic society and a society intolerant of difference, whether on disability or nationality grounds. Some of our students come having survived trauma; others have experienced or witnessed stigma against mental health issues.
To address epistemic access and the articulation gap, we must use tutored re-assessment programs or “boot camps” where appropriate. But — and I cannot stress this enough — what our students ultimately seek is resonance and plausibility.