Abstract

There is currently a clarion call to address social injustice in South African higher education (HE) in order to achieve greater equity in access. Within this context, current social injustices pertain to financial exclusion as well as epistemic marginalisation and are embodied in the predominance of expensive textbooks which are authored in the Global North, meaning that they are unaffordable for many students and do not represent local realities. This paper provides evidence from the Digital Open Textbooks for Development (DOT4D) project at the University of Cape Town (UCT), on the potential of open textbooks to address social injustice in South African HE and the practices utilised by UCT staff to address these challenges. The paper uses Nancy Fraser’s (2005) trivalent lens to examine inequality, specifically as relates to the following dimensions: economic (maldistribution of resources); cultural (misrecognition of culture and identities); and political (misrepresentation or exclusion of voice). This enables the authors to critically analyse the UCT context and the extent to which open textbook production as well as open education practices within the classroom promote social justice through “parity of participation”. The findings presented demonstrate that open textbooks have the potential to disrupt histories of exclusion in South African HE institutions by addressing issues of cost and marginalisation through the creation of affordable, contextually-relevant learning resources. In addition to this, they provide affordances which enable lecturers to change the way they teach, include student voices and create innovative pedagogical strategies.

Highlights

  • Current social justice imperatives in the South African higher education system In the period 2015–2017, the #RhodesMustFall1 and #FeesMustFall2 protests rocked South African universities

  • This paper demonstrates that open textbooks and their associated open practices provide a powerful means to address economic, cultural and political injustices

  • They have the potential to play an important role in enabling pedagogy for social justice and the transformation of South African higher education (HE)

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Summary

Introduction

Current social justice imperatives in the South African higher education system In the period 2015–2017, the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall protests rocked South African universities. Protestors were animated by two central demands: the decolonisation of higher education institutions (HEIs) and the provision of free education These “Fallist” movements called for the dismantling of institutionalised obstacles that limit the full, equal participation of students and staff in South African higher education (HE). South African HE continues to experience pressure to address issues of social justice This inequitable state of affairs is not unique to South Africa’s HE system, but is rather symptomatic of a broader, national condition of deep inequality deriving from a long history of colonialism and apartheid. Despite liberation in 1994, South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world It has a Gini coefficient of 0.63,4 where the average black-headed households earn less than a quarter of the average of white-headed households (StatsSA 2017). The predominance of English in all spheres of education massively privileges Western knowledge sources over local ones (Kaya & Seleti 2013) and the persistence of patriarchal social forces continues to elevate male voices above women’s in numerous fields (Akala 2018)

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