UNDERSTANDING HIGHER EDUCATION, alternative perspectives

171pp., illus., paperback, Somerset West, 2021

"This book is an original and significant contribution to an important set of debates around the purposes and possibilities for contemporary higher education. Boughley and McKenna draw on an incredible breadth of expertise to tackle this analysis at a whole new level sophistication. The core of their work is quite exceptional for its ability to the in the diversity of institutional cultures which compromise the South African higher education system, and then to develop their analysis across macro levels of funding and accreditation through to mesa considerations of curriculum for students and staff development for staff through to the very micro details of lived realities of the people who find themselves in these contexts. An extraordinary contribution is their empathetic juxtaposition of the situations of both students and staff who find themselves culturally adrift in these institutions with huge hangovers of their colonial and apartheid pasts." Professor Jennifer Case, Head of Department, Virginia Tech, USA and Honorary Professor, UCT 

"The authors provide a fascinating reflection on the discourses that dominate our higher education system. They use Social Realism to analyse the higher education system and offer an alternative for understanding students by challenging common sense beliefs such as the notion of the untalented and unmotivated student. This book turns on its head the idea that universities are a meritocracy." Dr Simpiwe Sobuwa, Durban University of Technology, South Africa

Professor Chrissie Boughey is Dean: Teaching and Learning at Rhodes University.

Sioux McKenna is Director of Postgraduate Studies at Rhodes University where she also coordinates the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning PhD programme.