What teachers and students need to thrive
- Ruksana Osman
Are we preparing students for our past or their futures? Universities need to redefine the relationship between student success and teaching excellence.
Universities have existed for over 1 000 years, during which time the role of the university professor was fundamentally that of a teacher, but during the 20th Century, it has evolved to include that of researcher.
By the latter part of the 20th Century, at many universities, the researcher role overtook that of teacher in status, prestige and financial reward, leading many academics to focus less on teaching. Perverse institutional reward structures exacerbated this situation. Status and financial gain drove increasing attention to research and decreasing attention to teaching.
This situation worked when university education was available only to a small elite and governments covered most of the costs. However, it became unacceptable when higher education massified in the 1990s and student populations grew in both size and diversity. Excellence in teaching became essential if the majority of students were to thrive academically.
The advent of the 21st Century brought rapid global changes in technology that make good university teaching critical. Some 25 years into the digital age, we are experiencing the widespread availability of powerful AI tools, the increasing appearance of AI-generated content on the internet (some designed deliberately to mislead) and the use and misuse of social media that make students vulnerable on many levels.
Teaching and research intensity
To enhance university instruction that holds both teaching and research in equal esteem requires systemic interventions nationally and at institutional levels. ‘Dual intensive’ universities balance out the emphasis on research.
Fortunately, many South African universities are taking this seriously by revising probation and promotion processes and by providing professional learning opportunities for university teachers. At the national systemic level, the Department of Higher Education and Training’s 2018 National Framework for Enhancing Academics as University Teachers was an important intervention.
But is this enough?
Social justice education
Globally, universities have come under considerable criticism from governments, corporates and students demanding to understand the relevance of university curricula for the daily lives and realities of students.
Universities have been criticised for being out of touch with students’ lives, for teaching courses that are outdated and for content that is Eurocentric, unresponsive, alienating and disempowering – both for those teaching it and learning it.
Wits University receives thousands of applicants annually but admits only a small percentage. Most of our talented students come from historically underserved communities. Offering students from these communities a world-class learning experience and enabling them to succeed and overcome the legacies of exclusion is about teaching excellence. It’s about being pedagogically responsive and socially just. 足球竞彩app排名 success in our context is not just a pedagogical matter but also a social justice matter.
Are socially just ways of teaching even possible in complex university environments like ours? Are we able – or prepared – to put the student learning experience at the centre of teaching excellence? Do our norms disproportionately burden some staff or students – second language speakers or digitally less experienced students? Through teaching excellence, are we preparing students for our past or their futures?
There are two factors that are integral to teaching excellence: nurturing success and improving the student learning experience. While education is known to reproduce inequality and injustice, it remains the source of hope and aspiration for new imaginaries and possibilities.
Here are four elements that provide a tentative framework for thinking about how we re-centre the student learning experience in our understanding of teaching excellence:
- 足球竞彩app排名 success does not belong in one silo
Teaching excellence that is underpinned by social justice draws on several literacies – artistic, quantitative, technological, digital, visual and affective – to enhance the student learning experience. Herein lies the potential for exploring opportunities within and across university classrooms and structures.
The student experience should be intentionally designed so that students succeed. This implies that students need multiple levels of support – which may sit in several spaces across the university – and that these spaces are connected and communicate in the service of student learning and success.
- Collaboration and solidarity
Connected, un-siloed work opens spaces for working together, for reciprocity and collaboration towards socially just pedagogies and student success. Collaboration advances and endorses a politics of solidarity. It allows for connected ways of knowing our students and how to support them to succeed.
Knowing our students means that data-driven decision making about student success must also identify barriers to learning and institute initiatives that are timely, just and responsive, to ensure teaching excellence.
Most important, such connected work must be supportive of staff workloads, recognise teaching for promotion and provide the necessary resources to advance teaching excellence, student success and staff professional learning journeys.
- Recognition of struggle intersections
A just approach to teaching excellence appreciates the intersection with other social justice struggles in the university beyond those of learning and teaching. It recognises the need to engage the material - structural, epistemic and pedagogical - as constituents of social justice, i.e., there are interconnections between these dimensions when one speaks about teaching excellence.
- Institutional culture
We cannot assume that the university is innocent and its cultures beyond question. A deep engagement with institutional cultures and practices is vital if socially just teaching excellence for student success is to thrive and take root more broadly across the global academy.
As scholars of learning and teaching we must pull together in the finest tradition of academic life to redefine the relationship between student success and teaching excellence to renew the social contract for education.
- Professor Ruksana Osman, the Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Academic, is responsible for coordination of the academic project across Wits University. She was previously Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Advancement, Human Resources and Transformation, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Head of the School of Education. A Professor of Education, she holds the UNESCO Chair in Teacher Education for Diversity and Development and is recognised for the quality and relevance of her work in higher education – as a teacher and researcher – in pursuit of socially just education.
- This article first appeared in?CURIOS.TY,?a research magazine produced by?Wits Communications?and the?Research Office.
- Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.