African Higher Education in the Face of a Global Pandemic offers a scholarly account of the impact COVID-19 has had on education in general, with a particular focus on students, teachers and the organisations and institutions associated with the broad education project in Africa (from teacher unions, to schools, community and vocational colleges, and universities). Africa has long featured in global accounts of crisis: whether occasioned by internal factors, such warfare or famine, or external crises, such as the diasporas associated with successive waves of colonialism and imperialism resulting in mass diasporas, some of a global nature (for example, slavery) or of a continental nature (for example, the migrations of the Sintu peoples). The continent has not always been victim to crisis and there are many near-contemporary examples of African approaches to Ebola, or HIV, which have been and are still exemplary and instructive. Familiarity with crisis, and success in either being able to manage or resolve crises, makes it possible also to discuss resilience, wellness and social cohesion, which characterise attempts by both the State and communities during the period of the crisis associated with COVID-19.
Notwithstanding the aforementioned, it must be acknowledged that crisis has a powerful way of upending the old-normal and in so-doing, changing the core business and how we perceive and further conceive of it. In terms of crises then, the development of COVID-19 is both similar, but different to anything we experienced in the past: COVID-19 began as a disruptive emergency, but has not been a singular or repetitive series of crises: its longevity makes it unlike anything experienced in the past and this presents a conundrum in terms of how the university (indeed the sector as well as the state) responds to it. Put simply: how we define the crisis in large measure determines the strategies, resources and energies that need to developed, organised and focused in order to address it. These elements – strategies, resources and energies – are a normal part of how institutions plan and thus, shifting our conceptualisation from crisis-oriented planning towards (a redefined) plan for normalisation, is potentially enabling (rather than only threatening) for the university. This perspective may be more generative in terms of developing longer-term resilience, assisting institutions to refocus efforts as regards wellness, and redefine the whole range of face-to-face interactions typical of a university, for example. Although this book takes Africa and COVID-19 as its localities, the pandemic as noted in the title, has indeed been global and as such, has compelled a change in education, the world over.
COVID-19 has compelled a shift in thinking about social and economic support, also in Africa where governments have moved to support fragile economies by providing, on a wider and unprecedented scale, for the unemployed, vulnerable families, students and businesses as a means of maintaining community stability, as it became evident that there could be no short-term return to “business as usual”. The importance of macro-educational planning, while not new, took new turns with COVID-19, as higher education institutions had to draw more closely together and work in close collaboration with the primary and secondary education sectors. Resilience, wellness and interaction are core also to teaching learning support (of staff as well as of students) towards a better quality of engagement in which face-to-face presence, online presence as well as asynchronous engagement, feature. As COVID-19 endures, it becomes clearer to a wide range of sector and stakeholder leadership bodies (whether government-supported, or private) that a re-evaluation of interventions to support society (social welfare and health), as well as economic and education mechanisms, will become necessary in terms of an assessment of impact and sustainability. Selected chapters throughout the book make precisely this kind of assessment, in the context of the impact of educational experience associated of COVID-19, and argue for specific investments in new conceptualisation of the modalities of education, or for emerging literacies (for example, information literacy).
This book is thus both a timely and an enduring account of educators’, researchers’ and students’ approaches to the organisation of learning, as well as the adaptability of the education profession, more broadly, to ensure that young people continue to develop and grow, and that the clinical as well as psycho-social impact of COVID-19 is not only documented and described, but also subjected to the rigours of academic analysis. Resilience is especially important as a concept when reading this book; it emerges from the interrogation of approaches to technology in education that have come to the fore as a result of COVID-19 and the associated challenges of access, inclusion and participation towards successful education, even in contexts that are characterised by the digital divide. While acknowledged as a critical factor in student success, the book offers accounts of measures taken to address not only the digital divide, but also the underlying factors leading to, or exacerbating this divide, by exploring measures taken by education institutions to mitigate the divide. Such measures include, but are not limited to, provision of data, devices and even food to a range of innovative and adaptive educational approaches to student or learner support. Such support, it is shown, includes investing in the further professional development of teachers, academics and professional development (support) staff, such that meeting the needs of institutions entails this focus on capacity-enhancement, wellness and resilience. The critical point to be made in the chapters that address these issues, is that education (its efficacy, design, development, and implementation) cannot be isolated from the social and environmental context and the learner-identity becomes all the more important in the context of COVID-19 and the emergence of emergency remote teaching (ERT).
As suggested earlier, the very definition of crisis is its unpredictability, and capacity to refute the best made plans in ways that potentially, within the teaching-learning area at least, shake up classroom practices for better and worse. For example, on the one hand, remote teaching-learning can easily lead to an over-reliance on lecture talk, while simultaneously making more precarious the opportunities and facilities for online student group work. On the other hand, many students have really benefitted from the flexibility and dynamism of effective digital teaching. This potential benefit, notwithstanding, the recognition of the importance of class and socio-economic background persists as a factor affecting inclusion, participation and success with education technology in contexts where access to adequate connectivity, data and support to utilise technology is not equitable. In the context of prolonged uncertainty associated with COVID-19, adaptability as a disposition and professional practice needs to be facilitated better for teachers, academics, as well as students, in relation to technology adoption and confident use. Adaptability, resilience and access to resources and support, as already mentioned, entails a readiness to move away from conventional understanding towards actively seeking solutions for the context, within as well as beyond the context (of the institution, the teacher, the researcher and the student/ learner).
As a summary of the above, there are four themes that emerge in education arising from our experience of COVID-19. Collectively, these themes invoke a radical re-think of teaching-learning: one such theme is staff resilience (and this is associated with both professional competencies of skills development support, as well as wellness), together with a focus on teaching-learning, which also develops student resilience. Another theme emerges around the prominence accorded to teaching-learning support, and in particular the need not only for accessible and useful teaching-learning technology, but also for adequate education technologists to support academics and teachers in relation to curriculum design for online environments. Uses and conceptualisations of education modality and the use of space (whether offices in terms of dedicated personalised or shared spaces in terms of remote working) form a third theme. How has face-to-face interaction changed for us, and how might our spaces enable teaching online as well face-to-face teaching, or block teaching? In a technology paradox (technology as access, or as barrier to learning), or which is also an educational irony (technology as enabling of self-direction and pacing or technology as the hard-wiring of prescription and rigidity in the curriculum), we see the following risk: almost all theoretical development and philosophical thinking about education, the long-held beliefs in the efficacy of student-centred teaching, and self-direction in learning development, are risked when online face-to-face teaching becomes at once more personalised and paradoxically also teacher-oriented: along a continuum there are extremes of live Zoom sessions in which face-to-face, let alone eye contact, is almost impossible, to off-line learning in which the LMS (learner-management system) risks becoming a kind of upload-download learning “simulation”, where the teacher is almost entirely absent or disembodied, and features only in a pre-recorded PowerPoint, a podcast or study guide notes.
Critically, the nature of social relationships between teacher and student also thus needs reconceptualisation and affirmation in the context of new conceptualisations of (online and physical) space. A fourth theme emerges around the future of assessments: upended is conventional wisdom on assessment with its focus on formative and summative assessment types towards a reconsideration of continuous assessment as both more humane and perhaps also more authentic in terms of proximity to the actual learning experience of students. Coupled to this theme are serious anxieties: academics’ anxieties about large-scale academic dishonesty, the development and uses of proctoring (surveillance) software and students’ anxieties experienced with connectivity and data issues, whether on, or at a distance from the campus. Such experiences are not unique to Africa; they are confirmed in the global scholarship on the impact of COVID-19 on teaching-learning and student life in higher education (Bergen et al., 2021). Studies undertaken by the Council of Europe on Higher Education demonstrate that while education technology is familiar to students, having to use such technology in unexpected contexts (the home, the remote location), which are not set up for teaching-learning, has proved challenging (Napier, 2021, p. 277).
These four themes do not exist in isolation, but rather accentuate existing inequalities in Africa and affect higher education institutions as well as schools differently: in acknowledging this, the issue of access for success remains critical, given that African education systems remain uneven and unequal. The education profession (teachers, academics and related professional development support specialists) have thus to take seriously the risk of managing and supporting the teaching-learning in a context of volatility and dynamism, which is simultaneously enervating. Often, in the confines of an “in-group”, the criticality of approaches and assumptions comes from voices from the outside: student and support staff leadership are hardly outside the teaching-learning project, but as stakeholders on the opposite ends of the curriculum (from support to consumption) are incredibly important voices to hear, and are critical to the success of any initiative or innovation in the COVID-19 period. Beyond COVID-19, what is evident in this book, are reflections on a point to which all educators must come about not only the “what of knowledge and the curriculum”, but also the “how much” in terms of assessment and types of assessment in relation to the “why is this appropriate” for educational levels (considering modalities in relation to the needs of particular age groups, for example). Readers are invited in these chapters to draw upon the richly textured accounts of education in a number of African countries and thereby obtain insight into how COVID-19 has both changed education and been changed by education.
Note
Parts of this foreword are drawn from an address by the author (Balfour, 2021).
References
Balfour, R. J. (2021, August 23). Crisis and continuity: From COVID-19 contingency to Covid continuity consensus planning for the future of teaching and learning at NWU (Setting the scene) [Address]. The future of teaching and learning colloquium. Retrieved September 4, 2021, from https://news.nwu.ac.za/sites/news.nwu.ac.za/files/files/Robert.Balfour/2021.08.23-Future-of-Teaching-Learning-at-NWU-Colloquium.pdf
Bergan, S., Gallagher, T., Harkavy, I., Munck, R., & Van’t Land, H. (2021). Higher education’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic: Building a more sustainable and democratic future. Council of Europe Higher Education Series, No. 25. Council of Europe.