Putting teachers at the centre of HE transformation

In the past 18 months, universities across the continent – as across the world – have experienced massive disruption.

Reeling from the impact of pandemic-induced closures, the ensuing financial shocks and the impact of a wider public health and economic crisis, stretched teaching staff, and insufficient digital infrastructure, how can African universities respond?

The crisis of the past year-and-a-half arrives on top of the existing challenge posed by a Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the impact it is predicted to have on Africa’s economies and societies.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are expected to create new jobs while eliminating others, and promise new solutions to established problems, while also generating new risks and ethical questions.

While the nature of graduate jobs within this new world may not yet be known, it is evident that society requires graduates with new skills, dispositions and competencies that wrap around their subject knowledge.

They need to think critically, solve problems and become entrepreneurial and creative in their thinking in order to solve the new problems they will encounter in their professional lives.

Innovative work in East Africa over the past four years has shown that real and significant shifts in practice are possible and resilient to shocks.

This happens when academic staff are encouraged and supported to rethink their teaching and to act as leaders and champions for change in their institutions.

Our own experience has been through the Transforming Employability for Social Change in East Africa, or TESCEA partnership, one of a collection of partnerships within the UK aid-funded Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education Innovation and Reform (SPHEIR) programme.

Our colleagues in another partnership, the Partnership for Pedagogical Leadership in Africa (PedaL), have similarly worked to inspire new thinking in teaching and learning, while our colleagues in the Partnership for Enhanced and Blended Learning, or PEBL, have supported academics to develop new blended learning modules.

Graduates for the 21st century

East Africa’s young people are bursting with talent, but they need support to unlock their ideas and abilities and to bring this to their communities, to society and to the economy. Realising this potential requires a step change in teaching and learning within universities – from content to pedagogy to assessment.

Universities need and want to improve the quality and relevance of their courses. Courses need to be focused on learning outcomes, animated by new ways of teaching in and beyond the classroom, and responsive to gender.

They need to ensure that all students have an opportunity to succeed in an increasingly digital society.

Many initiatives have sought to address these challenges and changes over the years.

Some have focused on funding for African academics to spend time in better resourced universities in the North, while others have sent Northern academics to run training and capacity building programmes in African universities.

Others have provided project funds to universities and academic networks, offered training programmes, or have supported partnerships between African and Northern institutions. In parallel, there have been efforts to improve national and institutional quality assurance systems.

These and other approaches can provide useful tools and knowledge, and they have supported evident improvements to quality. But they often start by assuming that the expertise and the impetus must come from outside.

This encourages African higher education systems to model their curricula and pedagogies on those of Northern universities or from the top down, disciplining academics through new standards.

In doing so, these approaches ignore the talents and passions of African faculty themselves. It is lecturers who inspire students through their studies, encourage their thinking and intellectual development, and create learning spaces that enable them to participate and engage in their own learning.

The challenge is, therefore, to find new ways to support university educators to transform their teaching themselves, and, in turn, to transform the opportunities that universities offer their students.


Teachers taking part in a gender exercise as part of course redesign at Uganda Martyrs University, Image: International Network for Advancing Science and Policy

Six areas of transformation

Educators need to be able to define their own visions for teaching and learning and create their own practice. But they need the support and mentorship of experienced colleagues as they do so.

From our work with faculty over the past four years, we have identified six domains in which educators need support to transform their practice and that of their institutions.

Philosophy: the foundations of teaching practice

To create the right kind of learning environment, teaching staff need to share a common philosophy of education, recognising that knowledge is complex, uncertain, contestable and changing.

Students must be exposed to diverse perspectives and viewpoints in order to come to their own understanding. It is the teacher’s role to facilitate this process.

Learning design: meeting students’ needs

Degree programmes need to be designed to teach for specific skills, competencies and dispositions, as well as introducing students to domains of knowledge.

Faculty need practical tools and support to structure courses and modules with the pedagogical strategies and methods that translate these goals into a facilitated process of learning for students in and beyond the classroom.

Engaging with employers and stakeholders

In order to understand what will be expected of students when they graduate, faculty need to find ways to engage employers and professionals in the learning process, or to enable students to engage in spaces of practice.

Equity: creating learning environments for women and men

Creating a learning environment for all requires that the learning needs of all students are addressed in teaching and learning processes.

This means examining the ways in which pedagogies, curricula and classroom environments create or perpetuate exclusion according to gender.

It also means supporting teaching staff to be gender-aware and responsive in the ways that they design, plan and facilitate learning.

Changing practice: mentoring and support

A guiding philosophy and a curriculum that is aligned to a student’s eventual learning outcomes are essential, but the challenge is to translate this into the classroom environment.

Institutions need a cadre of staff who can both champion the approach and support their colleagues to put it into practice. In doing so, this group of staff can also help to support scale-out to other faculties and schools in their universities.

What institutions need

In order for the practices of individual innovators to be enabled and encouraged, wider change is needed at the institutional level – to policies and procedures, to reward and recognition, but most critically to the overall vision for teaching and learning.

Re-designing degree programmes or retraining entire faculties is a slow process. But, with new cohorts of students enrolling and graduating each year, universities need to find ways to make changes carefully, at a pace and scale that meets an ever-increasing need.

In TESCEA, our partnership of academics, faculty developers, and social entrepreneurs working together, anchored in the universities of Gulu and Uganda Martyrs in Uganda, and Mzumbe and Dodoma universities in Tanzania, and supported by the Association for Faculty Enrichment in Learning and Teaching (AFELT), Ashoka, an organisation supporting social entrepreneurs, and the International Network for Advancing Science and Policy (INASP), has illustrated what can be achieved when these six domains are integrated and used to guide a process of rethinking teaching and learning.

To us, it seems clear that this approach – putting teachers at the centre of the change process, inspiring and enabling them to rethink their teaching and approach to learning, and then ensuring that institutional systems, processes and policies supports this – offers the possibility for real transformation.

What’s more, it puts the power to do so in the hands of the people closest to those needs. These are the people with the best understanding of the environments in which students learn, and with the greatest potential to effect real change.

While it will require targeted additional investment, the framework is one which allows this to be done using the expertise and resources of national higher education systems and universities themselves.

We’re keen to hear from other universities – within East Africa and beyond – who are committed to driving similar change in their institutions. If you share our ambitions, get in touch.

Jon Harle is director of programmes at INASP, an international development charity working with a global network of partners to improve access, production and use of research information and knowledge, so that countries are equipped to solve their development challenges.

If you share our ambitions, get in touch by email: jharle@inasp.info or on Twitter: @jonharle. SPHEIR is managed on behalf of the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office by a consortium led by the British Council that includes PricewaterhouseCoopers and Universities UK International.