Theorising Education

A primer for the educational imagination

Between 2013 and 2017, a team of researchers from the Human Sciences Research Council undertook a longitudinal qualitative study that tracked eighty students from eight diverse universities in South Africa and documented their experiences at these higher education institutions. Midway through the study, the student protests erupted and focused national attention on many of the stories we had already heard. In the subsequent years of the study, we also heard from students who were actively involved in these transformation struggles as well as those who sat on the side-lines.

A seminal study, The University in Development explores how the university is indeed 'in development': pursuing a new 'third' mission of external societal development (alongside its two existing missions of teaching and research), and experiencing a major internal revolution as this impacts on its structural organisation. Already prevalent in many institutions internationally, this third academic mission has begun to pose troubling challenges to existing academic research cultures and systems in South Africa.

Revised and reprinted several times, this tertiary textbook introduces students to key demographic methods and concepts using South African examples that illustrate a wide range of demographic trends. Emphasising the interrelatedness of economic, social, political, environmental and population variables, this book is an invaluable reference for all students of the science of human populations.

The practice of Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) in the education of adults seeks to affirm and accredit the knowledge and skills which they have already attained in the course of their working lives. This monograph explores the implementation of RPL in a programme designed to upgrade tens of thousands of under-qualified teachers and finds a baffling dilemma: how does one value prior learning which one believes to be misguided, outdated, or inappropriate?