The idea of transformation in higher education underpins all policy documents, academic literature and on-going debates in South Africa. Transforming Universities in South Africa: Pathways to Higher Education Reform responds to the pressing need to comprehensively review the post-apartheid experience and assess where South Africa’s higher education stands across the continent and globally, particularly within the country’s efforts to overcome decades of socio-economic imbalances. It addresses the question of whether South Africa’s transformation strategy from apartheid to democracy was simply a symbolic new flag-raising and new anthem singing exercise reflecting a transition akin to those limited decolonization projects elsewhere in the world, or whether something more fundamental was possible and was achieved with political and policy implications for other countries in Africa and globally. This volume's ultimate purpose is to provide a basis for imagining new futures in which South Africa higher education in the context of Africa and the global world takes centre stage.

Academic Staff Development: Disruptions, Complexities, Change (Envisioning New Futures) by Nalini Chitanand and Shoba Rathilal delves into the transformative journey of academic staff development. This collection is prompted by the magnification of the challenges faced by higher education institutions during COVID-19, particularly in South Africa and the Global South, and explores the critical role of academic staff development in navigating crises. With a reflexive approach and insights from diverse disciplines, the book extends beyond traditional models, offering new perspectives and possible contributions to postgraduate education, community engagement, and the broader academic role. A timely and insightful contribution, this book propels the evolving field of academic staff development into new horizons, fostering resilience, creativity, innovation, and holistic growth in higher education, for transformative and sustainable experiences.

This book explores the challenges and precarity of higher education post-pandemic, explicitly focusing on higher education in emerging countries. Looking beyond the pandemic, the editors and contributors provide a holistic view of the residual legacies of global health crises like COVID-19 in developing countries. The book calls for the need to reimagine, reevaluate and reposition the higher education system: exploring the challenges experienced by students, staff, administrators and other stakeholders. Bringing forth insights from researchers, practitioners and senior leadership, the book shares theoretical and practical insights on dealing with the aftermath of a pandemic and what can be learned for the future. It will be of interest and value to researchers, practitioners and leaders who wish to understand a develop new approaches for their teaching and management post-pandemic.

This book explores learning outcomes for low-income rural and township youth at five South African universities. The book is framed as a contribution to southern and Africa-centred scholarship, adapting Amartya Sen's capability approach and a framework of key concepts: capabilities, functionings, context, conversion factors, poverty and agency to investigate opportunities and obstacles to achieved student outcomes. This approach allows a reimagining of 'inclusive learning outcomes' to encompass the multi-dimensional value of a university education and a plurality of valued cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes for students from low-income backgrounds whose experiences are strongly shaped by hardship. Based on capability theorising and student voices, the book proposes for policy and practice a set of contextual higher education capability domains and corresponding functionings orientated to more justice and more equality for each person to have the opportunities to be and to do what they have reason to value. The book concludes that sufficient material resources are necessary to get into university and flourish while there; the benefits of a university education should be rich and multi-dimensional so that they can result in functionings in all areas of life as well as work and future study; the inequalities and exclusion of the labour market and pathways to further study must be addressed by wider economic and social policies for 'inclusive learning outcomes' to be meaningful; and that universities ought to be doing more to enable black working-class students to participate and succeed. Low-Income Students, Human Development and Higher Education in South Africa makes an original contribution to capabilitarian scholarship: conceptually in theorising a South-based multi-dimensional student well-being higher education matrix and a rich reconceptualisation of learning outcomes, as well as empirically by conducting rigorous, longitudinal in-depth mixed-methods research on students' lives and experiences in higher education in South Africa. The audience for the book includes higher education researchers, international capabilitarian scholars, practitioners and policy-makers.

Creating the New African University grapples with the existence of African universities, particularly in post-independent Africa, where Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are supposed to live up to the expectations of being adaptive in dealing with prevalent complex, dynamic contemporary and future challenges facing African societies. The book tackles the issue of what ought to be done for African universities to maintain a structure and identity that ensures their relevance in Africa’s development through generating and transforming knowledge into actions for the common good. It engages issues within the context of how post-colonial transformative obligations have been managed in light of the prevalent epistemological and pedagogical underpinnings that form the foundations of these universities as they seek to break from the clutches of colonial legacies. This book further highlights an urgent need to do away with silos and embrace a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary dialogical approach towards knowledge generation. Such an approach is essential in efforts aimed at enhancing the sustainable reconfiguration of university structures and functions whilst linking knowledge produced to diverse social, economic and political facets of African societies in ways that promote and sustain competitiveness in a rapidly globalising world beset with technological advancements.

This edited collection invites educational practitioners and theorists to speculate on - and craft visions for - the future of environmental and sustainability education. It explores what educational methods and practices might exist on the horizon, waiting for discovery and implementation. A global array of authors imagines alternative futures for the field and attempts to rethink environmental and sustainability education institutionally, intellectually, and pedagogically. These thought leaders chart how emerging modes of critical speculation might function as a means to remap and redesign the future of environmental and sustainability education today. Previous volumes within this United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development series have responded to the complexity of environmental education in our contemporary moment with concepts such as social learning, intergenerational learning, and transformative leadership for sustainable futures. 'Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education' builds on this earlier work - as well as the work of others. It seeks to foster modes of intellectual engagement with ecological futures in the Anthropocene; to develop resilient, adaptable pedagogies as a hedge against future ecological uncertainties; and to spark discussion concerning how futures thinking can generate theoretical and applied innovations within the field.