ABSTRACT
Context Each of the university partners has a distinctive history and institutional context that relates to the nature and success of this collaboration. e cross-national institutional collaboration initially involved the University of Port Elizabeth (UPE) in South Africa and MSU in the United States. During the course of the collaboration, the UPE became part of a merged institution that is now called Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. e collaboration has occurred in the context of the new, postapartheid South Africa. e UPE, situated along the Indian Ocean in the Eastern Cape, was an historically advantaged university. In the late 1980s, several years before the collapse of apartheid in 1994, under the leadership of a Vice Chancellor committed to creating a university that would reect the diversity of the country and respond to the needs of the region, UPE began the process of admitting a student body more fully reective of the region’s population. By 1998, about one-quarter of the student body included students of color. With students coming from a diversity of previous educational experiences, the academic sta needed to develop teaching strategies that would enhance student success. e traditional teaching approach had emphasized didactic learning, in which academic sta primarily taught through lectures followed by examinations to test student retention. As the student body became more diverse, and as government policy emphasized outcomes-based learning, university leaders encouraged the development of more engaged learning approaches. Overall, during the early postapartheid period, the university faced the challenge of grappling with recreating itself into a higher education institution that could respond eectively to the needs of the region and contribute to the national agenda to rebuild the country aer many years of conict.
