Background: Elmarie Costandius was passionate about pedagogy, particularly from a social justice perspective, throughout her career in higher education. Although located as a senior lecturer in the visual arts programme at Stellenbosch University, she pursued the field of education in her postgraduate studies, when she completed a second Masters Degree in Adult Learning and Global Change in 2007 at the University of the Western Cape, as well as a PhD in Curriculum Studies at Stellenbosch University, graduating in 2012. She received multiple teaching awards both from her own institution, Stellenbosch University, as well as nationally. Elmarie was also a teaching fellow in the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) at Stellenbosch University and was chosen to be part of the Teaching Advancement at Universities (TAU) Fellowship programme, a national programme for outstanding teachers in higher education. In 2023, she won the TAU Fellows Award, which she felt honoured to receive-as she expressed it:
Clift, B.C., Costas Batlle, I., Bekker, S., & Chudzikowski, K. (Eds.). (2023). Qualitative Researcher Vulnerability: Negotiating, Experiencing and Embracing (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003349266
South African writing centre scholarship reveals how writing centres have responded to changing circumstances in higher education. Much of this scholarship reflects processes of ongoing reflection and reflexivity, engaging and interrogating notions of resilience, agency and literacy in different ways. In this paper, we identify three broad writing centre narratives apparent in this scholarship. We then trouble some of these stories, including our own, by turning to bystander theory as a lens and diffraction as a methodology. This allows us to question how writing centre narratives assign the roles of victim, perpetrator and upstander in higher education, and in writing centres specifically. We wonder together about the roles assigned in these stories and their effects. We call for a more critical approach to understanding South African writing centre work and argue that our stories and roles, by over-focussing on the micro-level and neglecting the meso- and macro-levels, may unintentionally shield universities from having to enact systemic transformation.
While the effects experienced by the leaders of radical transformative movements at universities in South Africa and other countries have become evident over the last decades, the scholarly discussion and theorisation thereof, especially by those directly involved in these movements, has been scarce. This article addresses this knowledge gap and discusses the consequences suffered by the leaders of a small, albeit no less radically transformative, movement that took place at a middle-size department at a historically white South African university in 2022: #Masivule_i-Antieke_Studies. By exploring an auto-ethnographic method and couching their personal experiences within decolonial theory, the authors – who were among the six Masivule founders and activists – conclude that: contesting (post-/epi-)colonial powers at universities has both negative and positive effects on the architects/leaders of decolonial movements, which are visible in four domains: structural, epistemic, personal, and relational. While structural, epistemic, and relational effects gradually become mostly positive, personal effects remain profoundly (albeit not exclusively) negative. The authors propose that the most promising or effective way to deal with traumatic experiences and render them generative is to embrace decoloniality – not only as a method of transforming a particular department, university, or field, but as a philosophy governing one’s professional career and life.
Summary writing is a core academic activity essential for success in higher education. Proficiency in this skill is crucial for students to perform various academic tasks. However, summary writing poses significant challenges for multilingual students in South Africa, particularly in contexts where monolingual practices prevail. This qualitative study investigates the impact of translanguaging on the summary writing skills of multilingual students at a South African university. Eight participants, who wrote summaries of an English text in English and their home languages, were interviewed in semi-structured interviews. The findings reveal that translanguaging enhances comprehension and engagement with texts, as it allows students to use multiple languages freely. Consequently, this paper recommends implementing language policies that treat all languages equally and encourage the use of students’ home languages as learning resources. Future research should focus on incorporating texts in multiple languages for reading and summary writing in literacy education.
Western scholars have long viewed themselves as the sole custodians of African experiences, ideals, history, culture, and knowledge. The #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall protests in 2015 and 2016 brought the issue of decolonising knowledge systems to the forefront, encouraging decolonial discourse more suited to the African context. Today, there is a rise in African intellectuals, practices, and solutions, especially in academia, but not much is being done to reimagine and decolonise methodology. This article theorises on African methodologies, which are often overlooked in decolonial discourse. Despite increasing awareness of African indigenous knowledge to address social challenges, these solutions are often accompanied by Western epistemological pedagogies. Ukuthunywa, an important method of passing down useful skills that one still finds in African households today, is theorised in this article. This term loosely translates to ‘being sent to run errands’. The inspiration for this theorising came from a PhD ethnographic study on African healers called Mountain Doctors.
This article advances a humanistic vision for higher education by reimagining Life Orientation (LO) – a South African school subject often dismissed as marginal – as a vital knowledge interspace within universities. Situated within the context of teacher education, the article critiques the dehumanising effects of neoliberalism and colonial epistemologies, and advocates for a curriculum that foregrounds relationality, ethics, and holistic learning. Drawing on posthumanist, decolonial, and nomadic theory, particularly Braidotti’s work, the paper conceptualises LO as a transdisciplinary site that supports boundary-crossing and inclusive pedagogies. Through ecological metaphors and examples of courageous scholarly collaboration, the article shows how LO can foster interconnectedness, emotional intelligence, and critical consciousness. It proposes a model for recognising LO as a formal interspace in higher education – capable of addressing social fragmentation and supporting global citizenship. By aligning with the values of the Fifth Industrial Revolution and the Sustainable Development Goals, LO is positioned as essential to a more compassionate and just educational future.
This September 2025 special issue of Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL) brings together a collection of thought-provoking papers on the theme of trust. These contributions originated from the Higher Education Close-Up (HECU) 11 conference, a peer-reviewed biennial international gathering. HECU 11 was hosted by Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa, from July 3-5, 2024. The conference's ethos is to look up close at issues that are important to all who work and study in higher education, and this special issue does exactly that.
Since the release of ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools have become ubiquitous in higher education teaching-learning-assessment (TLA). This paper explores how generative AI impacts trust relationships within the TLA context between students and lecturers in relation to AI technologies. Framed by Rolfe, Freshwater and Jasper’s (2001) reflective model of what, so what, now what, we draw on practical experiences to demonstrate how an integrated model of AI literacies can enhance student engagement and foster critical interaction with generative AI, ultimately cultivating a criticality toward traditional ways of knowledge construction in the classroom. Instead of fostering unquestioning trust, we propose a pedagogy of distrust – an environment of healthy scepticism where students (and lecturers) critically interrogate both generative AI and human contributions to knowledge creation.
Trust has been a central theme in academic integrity discourse for decades. In this piece, I think about trust from a variety of perspectives: student conduct, faculty conduct, and organizational trust. I then discuss the role of trust in addressing misconduct. These framings are drawn from a model of Comprehensive Academic Integrity (CAI), in which academic integrity includes and extends beyond student conduct.
“Feedback trust” is an important, though often take-for-granted component of the feedback dialogue. If not maintained, it may be easily lost or broken, which may impact the effectiveness of feedback. In this paper, I unpack the notion of feedback trust by examining what are the factors that enable (or constrain) it, whether feedback trust is automatic, and whether feedback trust can be repaired. The paper is framed by Tschannen-Moran and Hoy’s (2000) conceptualisation of trust. Qualitative data were collected from Honours students in an Arts and Humanities Faculty at a South African university using questionnaires (15) and interviews (6); data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The results broadly indicate that there are three main factors that influence feedback trust: the feedback itself, the feedback giver, and the feedback community. In addition, the results show that feedback trust is to some degree automatic, as it is tied to the role of feedback giver, but that it may strengthen or weaken over time, depending on experience. Lastly, the results show that feedback trust can be repaired through communication, though it depends on how it was broken or lost. This paper outlines that there are four Cs necessary to build, maintain, and repair feedback trust between students and educators: connection, communication, care, and comments.
A key assumption made in the literature is that trust in education is positive. This assumption underpins the work of notable scholars of education, such as Freire (1970) and hooks (1994), and is reiterated in Magadla’s (2023) remarks in ‘Trust as a condition for radical entanglement’. While I agree with them that it is essential for trust to exist in a healthy and humanising learning environment, I am also mindful of calls for caution, such as those offered by Rice (2006) and Kovač and Kristiansen (2010), which provide reasons to believe that excessive trust can have negative effects on learning and the environments and relationships within which learning takes place. Given calls for and against the promotion of trust in education spaces and drawing on my experiences co-creating and co-facilitating a student-led and student-centred course in ethics, I suggest the need to recognise the ambiguity of trust in higher education.
This paper uses collaborative autoethnography and document analysis to examine the policymaking process during COVID-19 in the public higher education system in South Africa. The conceptual framework outlines the multi-dimensional nature of trust and the complexity of policy-making. The paper argues that system-wide cooperation was grounded in a form of systemic trust that was possible due to the nature of the COVID-19 emergency, the policy context of South African higher education, and interinstitutional relationships that had been built prior to the pandemic. We outline the nature of cooperation, enabling policy directions to be published quickly, supporting institutions to act flexibly within a legal framework that created conditions for the relatively safe completion of academic years. The paper argues that the systemic trust that existed during this time provides insights for the ways in which leadership and collaboration can create conditions for strengthening public trust in the system.
The paper examines the issue of trust in adopting open educational resources (OER) to develop multiliteracies in the field of English and Applied Linguistics. The goal is to intentionally integrate best practices in teaching, ultimately transforming educational resources to be more open, inclusive, equitable, and accessible. A mixed-method approach was employed, purposively involving 22 postgraduate English and Applied Linguistics students. Data collection methods included closed-ended questionnaires and open-ended written reflections. Participants wrote reflections that assessed the credibility of OER, contributing to a broader social understanding of their personal experiences with the phenomenon and focusing on the systemic implications that hinder social transformation and trust-building around OER. The data analysis was themed to assess and develop strategies to facilitate a radical paradigm shift in enhancing the trustworthiness of adopting and using OER across diverse learning contexts.
Transformation, or the lack thereof, student activism, and other day-to-day processes and rules in higher education institutions may lead to situations in which staff witness or are complicit in actions that contradict their sense of right and wrong. As a result, they may experience what is often described as ‘burnout’. It may be more accurate to describe the responses in terms of violations of their moral code, or ‘moral injury’. This conceptual paper draws on the literature on moral injury from other contexts and applies it to the experiences of staff in a higher education context, in South Africa and beyond, through the author’s reflections on her own experiences. Moral injury has numerous potential effects, such as a loss of trust in self or others, feelings of guilt or shame, withdrawal, and interpersonal difficulties. Dealing with moral injury involves grappling with the conditions that create these injuries.
In higher education, trust is possible (or not) based on the dynamic between different components and people in the university. This paper considers the relationship between students and their lecturer in the context of a neoliberal ethos. Using an African feminist lens, the close-up, self-study of a postgraduate course in Political and International Studies at Rhodes University is examined for its intentions and transgressions to determine how trust can be built and ruptured. Two ideas – ‘conscientisation’ and ‘connection’ – are theorised and then demonstrated through the reflections of the students and lecturer.
This paper explores the structural and ideological constraints that militate against the trust required between teachers and students for effective teaching and learning in contemporary South African universities and beyond. The first part of the paper addresses how widespread commercialisation and precarity born of scarcity, in addition to other widely explored issues relating to the legacy of apartheid and colonisation in South Africa, foster distrust between teachers and students in the South African academy. The second part opens with an inquiry into the meaning and power of trust, before bringing this inquiry to bear on the higher education context and presenting recommendations for fostering trust and meaningful connections in academic settings based on our own experiences teaching a student-led course in ethics at Rhodes University in South Africa, named ‘IiNtetho zoBomi’ or ‘Conversations About Life.’
In this think piece, I ask what it takes for research relationships to be centred on trust. My reflections are divided into three sections in which I share some lessons learnt from various research projects. At the end of each section, I pose a series of interrelated questions about the values, principles and practices that are indispensable to building, repairing and maintaining trust in research relationships. To conclude, I outline how these reflections will be brought together in my keynote address.
This poetic inquiry explores the complex dynamics of trust within the context of higher education, particularly focusing on the collective experiences of marginalised communities. Drawing from the themes of the special issue "Reimagining Trust in Higher Education" in the journal Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL), the poem grapples with the deep-seated mistrust that stems from historical and ongoing injustices, such as colonialism, apartheid, and systemic inequality. Through a powerful and evocative use of the collective voice, the poem highlights the shared struggles and resilience of those fighting for social justice, decolonisation, and equity in academia. It interrogates the hollow promises of trust from institutions that have perpetuated harm and exclusion, while also acknowledging the transformative potential of collective action and self-determination. By weaving together personal and political narratives, the poem invites readers to reflect on the urgent need to cultivate genuine trust, healing, and solidarity within higher education. It challenges us to confront the depths of institutional betrayal and to imagine new possibilities for building a more just and inclusive academic landscape. Situated within the broader discourses of critical pedagogy, decolonial praxis, and social justice education, this poetic inquiry contributes to the ongoing conversations about reimagining trust in higher education. It offers a creative and embodied approach to engaging with the complexities of trust, trauma, and resistance, and calls for a radical transformation of the structures and relationships that shape our educational spaces.
The deep and entrenched inequality existing in Makhanda is a microcosm of South Africa. The relationship between the community of Makhanda and Rhodes University is interdependent and interconnected. Community engagement has the potential to mitigate the past image of universities as institutions disconnected from the realities of the local context. However, trust becomes an imperative first step towards unravelling the local radical entanglement and for enacting transformative collaborative partnerships between community and university. This paper is based on a qualitative study which examines the conceptualization of an anchor university for the South African context through community engagement using Rhodes University as a case study. The study proposes that the element of trust is imperative to establish transformational community-university partnerships that supports anchoring Rhodes University in Makhanda. The findings reveal community engagement’s role in anchoring the university and the extent to which the element of trust pervades the relationship between the two systems to unravel radical entanglements of the past that impede holistic development.
