SOTL in the South

2nd Biennial SOTL in the South Conference / Annual CUT SOTL Conference

9 – 11 October 2019

Central University of Technology, Bloemfontein, South Africa

Creating space for southern narratives on teaching and learning

In the postcolonial world of the 21st century, fundamental and urgent questions about the nature of knowledge have profound ramifications for the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL).  Whilst attempts have been made to internationalise the curriculum in many countries around the world since as far back as the 1990s, there have been more recent calls to decolonise higher education curricula.  This involves engaging in innovative curriculum reform that addresses challenging questions such as the following:

• Whose knowledge is significant in higher education?
• How could northern, eastern, southern and indigenous knowledge systems be meaningfully incorporated into university teaching and learning pedagogies and curricula?
• How can university teachers and learners develop approaches that would enable them to productively and sensitively function in the intercultural contact zone of Higher Education?

Whilst these questions are particularly urgent in the global South, particularly in countries such as South Africa in the wake of the #Rhodes-Must-Fall and #Fees-Must-Fall campaigns, they are also significant in the global North. The global North continues to occupy a dominant position in the production of knowledge. If we are to truly democratise the creation of knowledge and address the complex intertwined environmental, health and social problems of the 21st century, we will require higher education institutions (HEIs) that are be able to access all the knowledge systems of the world. These ideas form the starting point of this conference, which is intended to provide colleagues with theoretically grounded and practical strategies to address these important pedagogical debates.  

Invited speakers will include Boaventura de Sousa Santos (University of Coimbra, University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Catherine Manathunga (University of the Sunshine Coast).

Journals and Conference Proceedings

The proceedings of the conference will be published electronically with an ISBN/ISSN. Full papers will be subject to a double-blind peer review process before they are accepted for inclusion in the conference proceedings. Authors and conference participants are kindly requested to participate in the review process. Furthermore, selected papers will be considered for a special issue of the SOTL in the South journal.