Leveraging Educational Quality in Southern African Educational Systems: A Practitioners� Perspective

Introduction

vii Introduction Patient Rambe The discourse on educational quality is highly momentous and has sustained controversies of epic proportions in African educational systems. Given the nebulous nature of educational quality coupled with the different interpretations evoked by the deployment of the concept across different disciplines, a robust comprehension of the concept calls into question its practical manifestations and application in particular situated contexts, particularly those of emerging economies. In these contexts, however, the meaning of educational quality is often assumed, taken for granted, loosely and uncritically applied despite the paucity of a common, universal definition. To further compound the aforementioned problematique, educational quality discourses the world over and Africa in particular have evolved and continue to be funnelled through multiple epistemological lenses. These range from an examination of the robustness of educational outcomes including the academic significance and relevance of intellectual, emotional and socialstructural processes that give rise to student “graduateness.” Although these differentiated considerations should be conceived individually to understand their impact on educational quality, their synergy also renders a more balanced, constitutive account of the complex attribute of educational quality. Educational outcomes often emphasised the actual student performance, their cogitative capacity including the employing industries and professions’ perceptions of the (absolute or envisaged) quality of graduates. Intellectual manifestations of educational quality call into question the following: enhancement of student critical consciousness (about processes of producing and authenticating knowledge), critical literacy practices, enactment of student agency and self-regulation and closing the articulation gap between them. The emotional aspects, which capture the psycho-social domain, foreground individual student psychology’s transactions with the viii immediate intellectual and social environment, which undergirds the knowledgeable other (academics, peers and extended learning community), knowledge networks and educational technology. Emotional concerns are underpinned by students’ (and learning community’s) experiences and perceptions of the inclusivity of this environment, heightening psychological access to resources, overcoming deprivation, discrimination, exclusion and eliminating a sense of psychological dominance over the academically at-risk students. Socio-structural issues target broadening other forms of access, enhancing student retention rates and heightening the throughput rates in turnaround time. While these issues are inexorably complex to address in their entirety in one volume, they are worthy of further interrogation particularly in culturally diverse, historically fragile (or even tumultuous) educational milieus like those of South Africa, Mozambique Zambia and Zimbabwe, the contexts where the case studies examined in this book emerge. In these nation states, the enigmatic amalgam of a complex history of skewed colonial education with its social vestiges, vices and anomalies, persistent exposure of emerging economies to the vagaries of foreign capital, dwindling external injections of donor funding for education, educational systems that untenably depend on national treasury of fiscus and survival, insurmountable pressure from national governments and general populace to access basic, secondary and higher education, a reality check on the status of educational quality in these countries is befitting and more relevant now than ever. Mindful of these realities, this diverse, impeccable collection strives to contribute to the enhancement of educational quality in the aforementioned Southern African states by rendering insights on and acknowledging the educational potential, possibilities, contradictions and complexities occasioned multiple educational considerations. These include indigenous knowledge systems, instructional practices based on foreign languages, controversial forms of academic discipline like corporal punishment, emerging Web-based technologies and international research collaborations and networks. This volume, therefore, draws on the international experiences, ix diverse knowledge and empirical narratives of researchers drawn from different highlighted Southern African countries, to provide nuanced, thought provoking accounts that richly inform educators and practitioners alike on their endeavours of enhancing quality educational delivery in their institutions. Drawing on his wealth of experience of lectureship and research in Mozambique, Mawere grapples with a handful of highly controversial, morally volatile subjects like the relevance of the deployment of corporal punishment in that country’s primary and secondary schools, the complexity of instructional delivery of foreign languages including the academic relevance of code switching (switching from Portuguese to English and vice versa during instruction). In another chapter, Mawere tussles head on with traditional methods of education in pre-colonial Zimbabwe to locate their locus and relevance for improved educational quality in a contemporary society plagued by social uncertainty about tradition, cultural fragilities and social ambiguities imposed by a globalised world and general instability in a post-crisis scenario. Mawere’s historic contribution concludes with a closer examination of the pervasive privatisation of tertiary education...