ABSTRACT
Globally, the academic profession faces many challenges, including the pressures of mass higher education, fi scal constraints, rating systems, new technologies and changing attitudes towards accountability and how universities are managed. In the South African context, the post-apartheid expansion of student enrolment and the expectations of a society undergoing signifi cant social change place particular pressures on university teachers and their institutions. There are concerns across the higher education sector in South Africa that 20 years of postapartheid higher education policy and legislation have not produced suffi cient changes in the system. South African higher education is marked by social and material inequalities that continue, through deeply embedded cultures and practices, to reproduce these inequalities (Cooper 2015, Bozalek & Boughey 2012). While there have been funds available to redress historical imbalances, many of the diffi culties are systemic and related to broader socio-economic factors. The disparity in staff-student ratios, access to resources and demography of the student population across different universities serve to perpetuate historical inequities (Leibowitz & Bozalek 2014, Badat 2012). A particular concern is the low participation and success rates of black South African students (CHE 2013a). This has led to the proclamation of a crisis in South African higher education, with a particular focus on a need to enhance teaching and learning through quality enhancement mechanisms (CHE 2013b), a summit on ‘Higher Education Transformation’ (DHET 2015), and growing student activism, calling for the ‘de-colonisation’ of the higher education system and for the provision of free higher education (Baloyi & Isaacs 2015). These turbulent environments make South African higher education an extreme case, particularly for university teachers seeking to practice socially just pedagogies in support of student learning and development.
