(Re)thinking (trans)formation in South African (higher) education
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Date
2011
Authors
Le Grange, Lesley
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Faculty of Education, University of the Free State
Abstract
In this article I outline two broad sets of changes characterising the South African higher education
landscape. The first relates to, among other things, structural changes (such as mergers and incorporations),
the reorganisation of teaching programmes (influenced by the mode 2 knowledge), and the introduction of
performativity regimes, most notably a quality assurance body for higher education, the Higher Education
Quality Committee (HEQC). These changes might be understood as outcomes of forces associated with
the ascendancy of neoliberal politics and forces linked to a rapidly changing and globally interconnected
world. The second relates to the need to transform higher education in South Africa so as to overcome
legacies of apartheid as captured in policies that have been developed to redress past inequalities, including
discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation and so on. It is in this area in particular that
challenges remain, as reflected in the Soudien Report. I suggest in this article that both sets of changes
relate to a broader crisis – a crisis of humanism. Moreover, education might be implicated in this crisis.
And so I suggest that we might need to (re)think (trans)formation in (higher) education by replacing
the term ‘education’ with the term pedagogy, where pedagogy is understood as a transformative event
concerned with the person becoming present in context (Todd 2010).
Description
Keywords
Higher Education Quality Committee, Higher education, South Africa, Past inequalities, Discrimination, Pedagogy, Transformation
Citation
Le Grange, L. (2011). (Re) thinking (trans) formation in South African (higher) education. Perspectives in Education, 29(2), 1-9.