Towards a critical re-conceptualization of the purpose of higher education: the role of Ubuntu-Currere in re-imagining teaching and learning in South African higher education

ABSTRACT

The 2015–2016 South African higher education students’ movement proved historical for our country in bringing to our dinner tables: issues of higher education transformation and decolonisation; institutional culture(s); curriculum reform; the need to foreground and make inclusive assessment in education; the coloniality in our knowledge production, and more. Influenced by the emergence of the student movements and the critique they have brought to South African higher education, we bring to the fore the often silent critical reflections on the purposes of higher education in general, and in South Africa especially, as they relate to teaching and learning. We propose that the purposes of higher education in relation to teaching and learning ought to respond to (1) context, (2) democratic difference, and (3) cosmopolitan perspectives. We argue that discourses, phases and logics about South African higher education have tended to disregard and, at times, blur the context and differences as well as cosmopolitan perspectives. Using the notion of Ubuntu-Currere, we re-imagine how teaching and learning could respond to context, difference and cosmopolitanism with examples from the South African higher education experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Purpose(s) of higher education
• teaching and learning
• Ubuntu-Currere
• decolonisation
• reaffirmation
• curriculum
• difference
• cosmopolitan perspectives
• neoliberalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Mlamuli Nkosingphile Hlatshwayo http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9180-8803

Notes

1 It should also be noted that since the beginning of the early 1990s, protest action had already been taking place in universities in the third tier, that is, in historically Black universities – however, due to media attention, geographic location, and the continuing marginality that universities on this tier still continue to face, these issues have often resulted in their demands or protests not attracting media attention. This results in scholars such as Badat (2016) and Heleta (2016) cautioning us to not think of the 2015–2016 student movement as a new phenomenon in South African higher education, but rather a historical condition that never really ended for those in the third, subordinated tier.

2 Education White Paper 3 refers to South Africa’s Department of Education’s 1997 Programme for ‘The Transformation of Higher Education’, which was used as a guideline in making sense of the fragmented nature of higher education institution during apartheid (see White Paper 3, 1997).