No student left behind: ‘Pedagogies of comfort’ or ‘pedagogies of disruption’?

Abstract

This article explores the lessons learnt from the short-term emergency remote teaching and learning (ERTL) approach adopted to tackle the continuation of the higher education (HE) academic programme during the COVID-19 pandemic. It first examines the primary goals of the official South African “No student left behind” (NSLB) campaign, which emphasises the agenda to address a social justice concern about students’ participation and access to HE. It reflects on recent research studies around this matter which tended to foreground technical and operational considerations. Instead, this article presents an alternate lens for shifting the discourse of HE, especially postgraduate studies, to activate deep, critical and autonomous engagement in teaching and learning. The theoretical model presented highlights staff and students working outside pedagogies of comfort and expanding into spaces of disrupting previous habituated pedagogies. The article draws on the reflective experiences of facilitating postgraduate education programmes: two PhD cohort programmes in Mauritius and South Africa (involving students who were schoolteachers and HE lecturers) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education Studies (involving students from rural university settings in South Africa). The data reveals that despite intentions to drive an alternative mode of critical, disruptive online modalities in curriculum delivery, students subtly pushed back towards working within the comfort zones of their previous conceptions of front-led, teacher-driven pedagogies. A disruptive pedagogy was not fully activated as students professed preferences to revert to the old routine agendas in pre-COVID times. This article argues that this constitutes a missed opportunity to learn from the ERTL era to inform alternative, more robust, critical pedagogies for the long term. The responses suggest that the HE system will continue to bifurcate disparities between those more willing to look to the past and those embracing a learning opportunity for the future.