Policy and practice disjunctures: quality teaching and learning in Zimbabwean higher education

ABSTRACT

Although several studies have examined how quality teaching and learning is defined and operationalised in the global North, there is a paucity of such studies in developing country contexts. Using Zimbabwe as a case study, the research applies Sen’s idea of deliberative democracy to a multi-stakeholder evaluation of policy formulation and practices in university teaching and learning. The study reveals a disjuncture between policy and practice, which has implications for the learning processes and valued outcomes of higher education. The paper proposes the broadening of the current technical-rational approaches to quality, to incorporate other stakeholder perspectives in informing a contextually relevant understanding of quality and its practices. Thus, beyond skills and knowledge acquisition, teaching and learning would foster other valued capabilities as quality learning outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Quality assurance
• policy
• quality
• university teaching and learning
• practice

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all the study participants for their contribution as well as Melanie Walker and Sonja Loots for their insightful comments on the thesis from which this article is drawn.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for the PhD was received from the South African Research Chairs Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology and the National Research Foundation of South Africa [grant number 86540].