TLC 2024: Curriculum change conversation in sharp focus, Open Textbook Award named

Conversations around curriculum change brought the curtain down on day two of the Teaching and Learning Conference 2024 at the University of Cape Town (UCT) on Thursday, 21 November. The event also marked the awarding of the 2024 UCT Open Textbook Award.

To make the point about curriculum change, a series of case studies were presented; and to fully understand the work done by a host of academics, dean of the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED), Associate Professor Kasturi Behari-Leak said conversations about curriculum change have been interesting and work on it started before the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall decolonisation movement.

“At UCT, before the 2015 [movement], we were involved in the curriculum review task team. Before that, we were also talking about curriculum reform and renewal. But the 2015 watershed moment of the Rhodes Must Fall movement really changed our conception of what curriculum means,” she said.

“We moved away from what might be seen as a very technical approach to curriculum, where we are looking at content and syllabus and course load to [rather] widen that horizon and think about the impact of curriculum on students’ sense of well-being and belonging and inclusion and how those factors affect a student’s ability to succeed and even find their way around the world of work in the country, continent and the world.”

Professor Harsha Kathard, who forms part of the team of academics looking into curriculum change, presented “the four d’s” on this path: delivery, design, drivers and decolonisation. She spoke about drivers in particular. “What is the deep philosophical understanding that we have about the essence of education, of public education, of public higher education in an African university?” she asked. “And if we do not give enough consideration to that, my observation is that we might reproduce the same curriculum in a different way. We may see surface-level change but no real shift in how we’re thinking and what we’re thinking about.”

Ecosystem

Associate Professor Kate le Roux, who is part of the language development group within CHED, has been working with the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics since 2019. “The long-standing concern was how to innovate first-year mathematics, which we know is a central actor in their progression and that a three-year degree in mathematical science has not, for a very long time, been the norm,” she explained.

“All these people bring different disciplinary expertise of curriculum and curriculum change that we have to navigate.”

“That involved us creating a new stream in the maths programme, which enabled students to spend more time on mathematics. An emerging concern as we’ve worked is how to innovate beyond that course level to other learning spaces across the full programme – and that’s through tutor and lecturer professional development. My experience has been it’s an ecosystem of multiple layers at various scales, from individual students and lecturers right through to the ideological level. It also has multiple actors again starting with students up to administrators and leadership and all these people bring different disciplinary expertise of curriculum and curriculum change that we have to navigate.”

In keeping with the Rhodes Must Fall movement, Dr Leigh-Ann Naidoo hailed its impact, noting that next year will be 10 years since its inception. “This moment of self-critique propelled the urgent question of decolonising universities and curriculum into the consciousness of many at UCT and well beyond. We owe a debt to the students, outsourced workers and a few academics for insisting that a project of teaching and learning in a post-apartheid South Africa needs to take seriously the structural conditions of such an endeavour as well as the subjective manifestations and implications of those conditions.”

Open Textbook Award

After the presentations, it was time to hand over the Open Textbook Award, which has a social justice focus and aims to recognise activities that support the university’s transformation efforts. The award carries a value of R30 000 and may be shared between recipients.

Vice-Chancellor (VC) Professor Mosa Moshabela was in attendance to present the award to Disability Studies in Inclusive Education, edited by Judith McKenzie, Kofi Nseibo, Chantal Samuels and Amani Karisa from the Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences in the Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS).

“This body of work focuses on the needs of learners with disabilities. It helps educate and upskill teachers with expert recommendations and practical solutions on how to include learners with disabilities in the classroom,” said Professor Moshabela.

In closing, Moshabela said: “Our students are embedded in our communities, so we have to be intentional about the curriculum change conversation. They form relationships with said communities and sometimes we act as if those communities do not exist, yet we benefit so much from them from a teaching and learning perspective and a research perspective.”