Towards transforming teaching and learning in higher education: interrogating poverty through a decolonial perspective

This paper aims to address three questions relating to the imperatives of knowledge transformation, the impact of poverty broadly and material poverty in particular, and questions of pedagogy or approaches to delivering knowledge in higher education institutions. Transformation of teaching and learning in higher education is at a crossroads in South Africa. A major driver of this is the recently emerged student-led protests on decolonisation. At these crossroads are a number of factors with the potential to facilitate or inhibit the decolonisation process. First is a conceptual paralysis regarding understanding of the idea in the country’s higher education. Second are competing ideological imperatives which confound universities’ strategic choices. Third is the fact that the academy has a high proportion of staff who themselves are products of the system they hope to transform. The paper utilises conceptual and theoretical arguments to explore the state of teaching and learning in South Africa and to learn how the protests have enhanced or/and diminished educational gains among students who are poverty stricken and facing deprivation. The paper argues for a theory of decoloniality to shape thinking and practices which enable higher education institutions to transform teaching and learning and specially to drive the type of transformation which enhances poor students’ epistemological access. The paper recommends investment in further research to explore the impact of material poverty in higher education and how the transformation of knowledge and pedagogy could be better understood for the majority of students who live with poverty in higher education.