Daniela Gachago

The idea of co-creating curricula with students has gained momentum in recent years to challenge conventional power relationships within universities through amplification of student voice and advocacy for meaningful student participation in teaching, research, and service. This is a necessary response to facilitate higher education transformation through curriculum reform grounded in students’ lived experiences. This paper explores a student-led process to design a new leadership academy at a large research-intensive university in the Western Cape, South Africa, a context characterised by pronounced disparities in power. The paper brings the literature on student-staff partnerships and equity-oriented learning design into conversation. Based on feedback from the student facilitators involved in designing the creation of this student leadership academy framed by principles developed by the equityXdesign cooperative, we will reflect on how these student-led design spaces can both catalyse transformation and render students vulnerable. The study’s findings have implications for curriculum design and development in higher education, particularly in contexts characterised by significant power disparities.

The goal of liberating learners, educators, educational developers and other stakeholders within higher education from systemic oppression and institutional injustice is unattainable if we consider social justice, well-being, mental health and care/compassion separately. As a collective, we developed a model for compassionate learning design, which is composed of four dimensions: participation, justice, and care, leading to a critical compassionate learning design praxis that itself comprises the fourth dimension. In this article, we select four representative equity-oriented learning designers/educational developers from among 30+ we interviewed in 2022, seeking to identify examples whose practices aligned with elements of our compassionate learning design model in various contexts worldwide. We also explore areas that appear in their praxis that diverge from or are not covered in our model. We discovered that although we did not directly probe participants on the four dimensions, they each had examples of the four dimensions in their practices. We also saw how each person’s positionality and environment influenced: the ways they practised social justice; with whom they were able to create participatory approaches; and the kinds of care they were able to offer and nurture in those around them, an important expansion of our original model.

This paper represents a mid-project reflection on the process of engaging in a student-staff partnership (SSP) established in response to South African student protests calling for decolonisation in higher education. Framed by the concept of critical hope, which acknowledges systemic injustices while believing in the possibility of change, we explore the development of context-sensitive, African-centred principles for SSPs that recognise legacies of historical trauma. In September 2024, our cross-institutional team reflected on the process while a pplying a Theory of Change (ToC) methodology across a three-day workshop. Five partnership principles emerged from an analysis of these reflections: (1) fostering relational trust and generosity; (2) making power relationships visible; (3) accessibility and shared ownership; (4) relational accountability and conflict transformation; and (5) embracing complexity and balance. These principles, aligned with Rendón’s sentipensante pedagogy, represent a departure from traditional academic arrangements toward wholeness, participation, and diverse ways of knowing. The challenges encountered in our partnership mirror broader struggles of decolonising higher education in South Africa, revealing SSPs as potential sites of decolonial practice while engaging in what Freire terms ‘praxis’ – the cycle of action and reflection that enables meaningful change.

As a contemporary and boundary spanning approach, design thinking is gaining traction in higher education, but it has not yet been established in academic staff development. The aim of this study is to reflect on a recent staff development intervention on blended learning course design, aimed at promoting a ‘design thinking mindset’ among university lecturers. By analysing empirical data gathered through participant interactions, we discuss the implications and potential of design thinking for academic staff development. Data analysis shows an increased awareness of the complex and diverse student body, a recognition for interdisciplinary collaboration, mentoring and reflective thinking. Additionally, it is highlighted that adopting design thinking is not without challenges, which include the need for continued practice, securing departmental buy-in and upscaling initiatives. The findings emphasise the importance of creating a ‘safe’ space to experiment, modelling a designing-on-the-go approach, focusing on the iterative processes of (re)design, providing scaffolding for learning, making design thinking processes explicit, building a community of practice, regular feedback and maintaining the balance between playfulness and reflection. Success of such an intervention will rely on balancing the development of design thinking skills, a design thinking mindset and creative confidence.

This paper develops a framework for design considerations that can be used to analyse or design networked professional development (NPD) in higher education (HE) contexts. The model was developed after reflecting on three professional development (PD) courses, each with facilitators who are academic developers across the African continent. Using a collaborative autoethnographic methodology (Bali, Crawford, Jessen, Signorelli, Zamora, 2015), the three authors reflect on design considerations for different forms of blended and online PD courses, based on their experiences of designing and/or facilitating these interventions and with PD more broadly. We argue that design considerations, such as context, have become more complex and that understanding the dynamics between them are important. We suggest that course designs can be positioned along a range of dimensions, namely: open/closed, structured/unstructured, facilitated/unfacilitated, certified/uncertified, with/without date commitments, homogenous versus autonomous learning path, content vs process centric, serious vs playful and individual vs collaborative. Our design considerations framework is not meant to judge courses or provide a formula for how best to design them, but rather to highlight how courses can be understood on each of the dimensions we identify, and how design decisions place a course in particular positions along the spectrum, depending on context. We noted some relationships among dimensions and links to learning theories. We also identified various tensions that arise in the design of NPD, such as between academic developers' pedagogical advocacy vs. usefulness, the need to maintain volunteerism without exploitation of affective labour, and the struggle to create spaces for agency within institutional rules.

This paper examines a specific unconferencing methodology designed for the HELTASA (un)conference, an international online event held in 2021 in South Africa. Drawing from the principles of unconferencing and decolonisation, the description of the unconferencing methodology in this paper is interspersed with collective autoethnographic reflections, collected through individual and collective writing engagements, to engage with our complex narratives as designers, facilitators and presenters/participants of this (Un)Conference. Through selected vignettes of reflective moments in planning and facilitating this (un)conference, we explore opportunities and challenges when adopting both principles of unconferencing and decolonisation in our practice. We end the paper with a discussion of the possibilities of adopting a decolonial unconferencing model in the global South through a colonial matrix of power.

Although assessment theorists have long argued that assessment is a contextually located social practice, objectivist and psychometric discourses about assessment persist. The COVID-19 pandemic, in many contexts, unsettled and denaturalised assessment practices, creating a critical disruptive moment. This paper presents a reflection on what this moment might suggest about academics’ assessment beliefs and practices at a research-intensive institution in the Western Cape. Drawing on an institutional survey, we argue that dominant concerns about academic integrity and mark inflation surface discourses of assessment for certification and accountability. Exploring some examples of assessment practices during the emergency remote teaching period at the same institution, we highlight some factors that influence design. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of practice, we contemplate the conditions of field and capital that create opportunities for change. We propose that change is contingent on the complex interplay of the capital and habitus of agents, as well as the nature of the field. We reaffirm the case for positioning assessment as a social practice, arguing that this enables the conditions for discussion, negotiation, and scrutiny on the purpose of assessments, what is being valued and not valued, and who is benefiting or being marginalised from particular assessment practices.