CHAPTER 2: Praxis of a Humanising Pedagogy to Enhance Postgraduate Throughput in South Africa: A Caveat

Abstract

South Africa requires black intellectual leaders who are skilled in objective critical enquiry and possess powerful knowledge that enables them to dare invent the future. However, postgraduate throughput in South African universities is low and slow, especially among black South Africans. Scholars have attributed this to epistemic othering tied to the legacy of colonialism and apartheid that have systematically erased and kept ‘other knowledges’ and forms of social life invisible. This chapter is a dialectical analysis of the praxis of humanising pedagogy, an epistemological approach employed in the Higher Education (HE) environment to bring the student at the centre of their learning. The analysis employs auto-reflexivity from a humanist philosophical approach to knowledge production. The objective is to highlight some shortcomings of the pedagogy, which largely consist in its conceptualisation whose associated praxis favours to project and position black pipeline students as objects of pity. From this approach, the praxis becomes sympathetic towards compassionate handholding models of teaching and learning, which paradoxically entrenches the superiority of the Oxbridge research supervision tradition whose ontological grounding consists in a structured exclusion, marginalisation, concealment, and production of other knowledges and social life as inferior or non-existent. A potent risk that emerges is possible aggravation of existing abyssal exclusions through reproduction of conformity to the logics grounding these erasures. The greatest undoing of deficit positioning is its lack of regard to ‘funds of knowledge’ that the students can bring into their own learning. Conversely, anchoring humanising pedagogy on affordances that a student’s background can yield (for example highlighting individual strengths and critical skills such as good work ethic, commitment, and resilience, which together are critical for postgraduate success) can be humanising, empowering and catalytic for black postgraduate throughput in South Africa.