Reflections on academics and agency during COVID-19

As South African universities continue to grapple with the changes to teaching and learning wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Council on Higher Education (CHE) says that, while the tertiary education sector has demonstrated incredible responsiveness amid the disruptions experienced over the past 20 months, this agility has not been without costs, particularly to the academics who are central to the functioning of this sector, and to the students who had to navigate numerous challenges and new demands.

The CHE, an independent statutory body and quality council, together with the National Research Foundation’s South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI), specifically the Chair in Teaching and Learning, and the Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa (HELTASA), hosted a virtual seminar and called for a greater focus on the critical role of academics in times of crisis.

Themed ‘Academics and Agency during COVID-19: Reflections and envisioning the future’, it aimed to identify possible areas of research and future initiatives that will reconceptualise learning and teaching in tertiary institutions.

The dialogue brought together academics from the majority of South Africa’s 26 public higher education institutions to consider how the varied conditions at different institutions enabled or constrained individual and collective academic agency in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Academic agency

Academic agency is a notion used to examine the numerous and complex roles that academics fulfil – with the main focus placed on the curriculum, assessment and pedagogy but also including research, community development, leadership and management, as all these roles are interconnected and interface with each other at various points.

Academic agency is increasingly recognised in higher education as an important construct that enables responses, and explanations for certain responses, in rapidly changing environments, such as those caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In centring this idea, the dialogue provided the partnership, as well as participants, with an opportunity to reflect critically on what support is needed, what agency is possible and how we can expand the system to be effective without forgetting about our social compact: to leave no one behind.

The CEO of the Council on Higher Education, Dr Whitfield Green, said: “I think the higher education system has demonstrated a remarkable level of resilience and responsiveness. And, possibly, is emerging stronger. Academic programmes have been able to continue, albeit in different ways and with different outcomes. And I think this is largely due to the efforts of students and staff who have gone the extra mile.”

Professor Shireen Motala, SARChI Chair Teaching and Learning, observed that lecturers during the pandemic had found value in technology, and in many ways it provided an opportunity to rethink their existing teaching methods and adapt them to ensure that the strategies were effective and inclusive.

The dialogue series (which is continuing) provides a unique opportunity to develop a community of practice around shared concerns and to contribute to the Chair’s research agenda.

Meanwhile, HELTASA, a professional organisation concerned with staff, student, curriculum and institutional development in higher education, says that, since academics do not work in a vacuum, their agency needs to be relational, embedded and situated against the rich tapestry of their contexts.

HELTASA Chair, Associate Professor Kasturi Behari-Leak said: “While contextualised agency enables us to respond to opportunities and challenges triggered by the context, we need to do so with a sense of criticality that is relevant and responsive so that systemic features can be addressed.

“This critical agency is what we need to grow and extend so that academics as agents of change can do so with national and institutional imperatives in sight but can also be supported in the right ways.”

The seminar, which was attended by academics and academic developers from the majority of the public universities, was the first in a dialogue series embarked on as a partnership between the three important role players in the higher education landscape.

HELTASA project leaders facilitated the small group discussions. Some of the participants remarked that, even in a post-COVID world, South African universities will never go back to the way they were, and as such there is a need to revise institutions’ teaching and learning strategies.

Others noted that, while the move to online instruction has exposed the deep inequalities in technological access, the forced adoption of online pedagogies has the potential of democratising participation in higher education.

The call now is for the role of academics in higher education to be reimagined, and for institutions to set aside resources to ensure that they are supported and enabled to play their role as agents in an even more meaningful way.

Associate Professor Kasturi Behari-Leak is from the University of Cape Town and Sisanda Nkoala is from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa.