Premised on the disruption and lessons learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic, and in meticulous response to the impact of the pandemic on higher education – especially in South Africa – this collection of chapters spotlights the effects, consequences, and ramifications of an unprecedented pandemic in the areas of knowledge production, knowledge transfer and innovation. With the pandemic, the traditional way of teaching and learning was completely upended. It is within this context that this book presents interdisciplinary perspectives that focus on what the impact of Covid-19 implies for higher education institutions. Contributors have critically reflected from within their specific academic disciplines in their attempt to proffer solutions to the disruptions brought to the South African higher education space. Academics and education leaders have particularly responded to the objective of this book by focusing on how the academia could tackle the Covid-19 motivated disruption and resuscitate teaching, research, and innovation activities in South African higher education, and the whole of Africa by extension.

Undoubtedly, Covid-19 caused major disruptions in several realms of human life. Not least affected is higher education. New modes of learning, teaching and research had to be introduced to avoid a total shutdown of this crucial function of society. Educational institutions around the world had to devise ways and means to carry on with their core business of teaching, learning and research that could not be delayed due to the restrictions imposed by Covid-19. The arrival of this timely compendium makes its mark in this context. Focusing on the Social Sciences, the contributions in this volume show how an unexpected eventuality of a social situation can be handled and how teaching, learning and research are managed in the new situation. Through creative, innovative and transformative pedagogical approaches, academics are able to handle the situation quite successfully. The models and the examples presented in the book have applications in both pandemic and post-pandemic contexts. Although evidence is drawn from a single higher learning institution in South Africa, the findings have significance in other contexts.

Teacher education is a known variable that impacts the quality of teaching and schooling, yet while research on practices in teaching and teacher education abound in other contexts, there seems to be no comprehensive reference work on teaching and teacher education in Africa. With Africa and the diaspora boasting rich, diverse political and educational contexts and practices, this gap in knowledge requires that attention be focused on investigating issues that shape the pace, course, and direction of teaching and teacher education in these contexts. Practices and Perspectives of Teaching and Teacher Education in Africa facilitates scholarly discussions among scholars and practitioners about practices, innovations, and future possibilities for educating the next generation of competent students and teachers in Africa. Covering topics such as educational reforms, equity, career progression, and curriculum development, this major reference work is ideal for administrators, industry professionals, researchers, academicians, scholars, practitioners, instructors, and students.

Given the high degree of immigration in the current world, institutions of higher learning are increasingly hosting people of various different cultures and nationalities as employees and students. It has thus become important for universities to invest in their human capital by equipping employees and students with the necessary skills to meet the demands of their institutional diversity in a bid to become culturally flexible in the current multicultural context of higher education across the world. This book is an academic adventure that addresses issues of communication and interculturality in higher education. It provides rigorous details and several contexts through which to understand intercultural communication in higher institutions. The book unpacks a number of barriers with contextual references central to understanding contexts in which intercultural encounters take place in higher institutions. It shows how institutions of higher learning can be a great vehicle for building intercultural awareness and competence, and provides robust discussions of culture and the possible barriers that could affect intercultural relationships in higher institutions.

This edited collection addresses the need of evaluating innovative or non-traditional academic schemes for understanding their feasibility in extraordinary educational environments. The individual chapters are enriched with robust appraisals of policies and practices linked to academic innovations in higher education during the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. The case studies report wide-ranging teaching, learning and academic support practices within online, open, blended and distance learning models. The findings supply two domains of scholarship: evidence-based scenarios through real-world case studies, and a critical evaluation of educational quality through research-informed argument. The evidence gathered from countries, such as Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, China, India, Malaysia, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and the UK show empowering and deterring elements of academic innovation amid disruptions. Although this book highlights academic innovations in disruptive situations, they emerge as powerful tools and approaches to be considered in traditional face to face learning.

Several factors have resulted in increased intra- and inter-state migration. This has led to an increase in the enrollment of students with diverse linguistics backgrounds, placing more academic demands on educators. Linguistic diversity presents both opportunities and challenges for educators across the educational spectrum. Language ideologies profoundly shape and constrain the use of language as a resource for learning in multilingual or linguistically diverse classrooms. While English has become the world language, most communities remain, and are becoming more and more multicultural, multilingual, and diverse. The Handbook of Research on Teaching in Multicultural and Multilingual Contexts moves beyond the constraints of current language ideologies and enables the use of a wide range of resources from local semiotic repertoires. It examines the phenomenon of language use, language teaching, multiculturalism, and multilingualism in different learning areas, giving practitioners a voice to spotlight their efforts in order to keep their teaching afloat in culturally and linguistically diverse situations. Covering topics such as Indigenous languages, multilingual deaf communities, and intercultural competence, this major reference work is an essential resource for educators of both K-12 and higher education, pre-service teachers, educational psychologists, linguists, education administrators and policymakers, government officials, researchers, and academicians.

This volume brings together contributions from scholars across the globe interested in the representation of embodied minds in literary texts, ranging from George Eliot to Hilary Mantel. It focuses specifically on the experimental formalism of canonical modernism, as well as on innovative works in literary history which interface with avant-garde poetics. Approaching textual aspects such as time and space, character, gender, the social mind and readers’ participation through the parameters of cognition, emotion and consciousness, the contributions here will broaden the reader’s understanding of the nexus between mind and narrative, as well as of how the modernist aesthetic enriches the conditions of that nexus. Significantly, the book also collectively illustrates how experientiality, considered by many narratologists to be equal to narrativity, to the very ontology of narrative, remains a cross-generic phenomenon, an inherent feature of poetry and documentary reporting no less than of the novel proper.