EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book takes an expansive view of vocational education and training. Drawing on case studies across rural and urban settings in Uganda and South Africa, the book offers a new way of seeing this through an exploration of the multiple ways in which people learn to have better livelihoods. Crucially, it explores learning that takes place informally online, within farmers’ groups and in public and private education institutions.
Indicators and metrics have gained increasing prominence in international higher education in recent years, and global rankings have become a powerful force in shaping ideas of what the university is and should be. Yet these measures do a poor job of capturing the broad role of the institution, and particularly in recognising its actions in promoting the public good and addressing inequalities. African higher education institutions have struggled to perform well in the conventional rankings, whose indicators rely on extensive resources for high-level research. This article explores the possibilities of alternative metrics for understanding the public good contribution of universities in the context of four African countries: Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. After assessing the shortcomings of the existing indicators and metrics, and the challenges of the availability of data, it puts forward a dashboard approach as a possible new model. Dashboards have the advantage of avoiding the conflation of diverse qualities of importance and allow different profiles of an institution to be compared. The article proposes six main elements for the dashboard: solidarity with society, equitable access and deliberative space (which correspond to the intrinsic notion of public good and graduate destinations, knowledge production and community engagement (which correspond to instrumental notions). Finally, the challenges of implementing public good metrics in practice are discussed.
Worsening poverty and inequality continue to affect large segments of the South African population. Universities are critical in contributing to overcoming these challenges. This article looks at the relationship between South African universities and the communities and places in which they are located. The history of South African higher education shows different kinds of relationships with the places in which universities were set. Data collected from interviews in 2018 with key informants in South African universities notes their criticisms of government development policies that lacked vision with regard to the development of place-based relationships for the public good. This data indicates that in the absence of an enabling policy framework to link communities and places, certain universities, individuals who work in them and members of communities around universities have developed their own approaches. I argue that these activities indicate actions by certain members of a spatial community, which can be understood as practices associated with a public sphere. Through this process individuals and institutions can play a central role in defining and contextualising the public good role of universities in their communities.
In this reply, I make three comments on the article ‘Education, decolonisation and international development at the Institute of Education (London): a historical analysis’ by Elaine Unterhalter and Laila Kadiwal (2022). Unterhalter and Kadiwal foreground the meanings and implications of the department’s changing organisational titles over time, illustrating that these titles can be interpreted as metonyms that symbolise shifting registers of colonial and post-colonial identification for the department as a whole, as well as among individual staff at the UCL Institute of Education (IOE), London, UK. Geographies and positionalities are extensively elaborated in the analysis. Expanding on this, I suggest that the authors’ initial line of thinking begins to show, and can show even more, the limited recognition at the IOE that decolonial identities and discourses are underlined by an affective dimension. This connects with Unterhalter and Kadiwal’s observation that although recently decolonial theories and praxis at the IOE have taken on a more nuanced, multidimensional perspective, further institutional and individual work is required. Thus, my response engages with questions around the modalities through which a narrative of history is constructed and naturalised.
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