Using a cohort model, the Scholarship of Higher Education Transformation, Teaching and Learning (SHETTL) Programme in CHED is focused on strengthening scholarship through growth of doctoral work in key thematic areas of digital education, languages and literacies and the critical knowledge project. 

Programme Aims and Objectives 

  • Recruit PhD candidates specifically to these areas of scholarship  

  • Provide a platform for strengthening these areas of scholarship through the growth of doctoral work in these areas 

  • Develop cohorts of staff and students who are working and supporting each other 

  • Provide support for the cohort, for example, in 2-3 annual ‘contact’ (face-to-face/blended) events, and 

  • Provide supervision support especially for new supervisors 

Thematic focus areas and questions

 

SHETTL - Thematic Anchors

 

These thematic focus areas are anchored by: 

  • Critical approaches - such as social justice 

  • Teaching and learning in multicultural spaces in higher education 

  • Anchoring curriculum transformation in higher education transformation (‘restructuring’ or ‘rethinking’, 'disrupting') 

  • Refocusing: responding to local concerns/issues (ID post qualification); interrupting: pausing the uncritical reproduction of literacies (teaching / change agents); inclusivity: with a dialogic approach, and participatory (teaching method) 

Thematic anchors  
Learning and Teaching in Digital Education  
Mathematics education in higher education STEM disciplines 
Exploring theories, pedagogies and practices around languages and literacies for access and success in HE 
Towards a critical knowledge project in higher education: decolonial, feminist and socially engaged modes of knowing 
Key themes 
  

Transformation (e.g. critical using theory), 

Teaching and learning for agency, and 

Theoretical and methodological perspectives (e.g. APOS, anthropological theory of didactics, didactics interactions, feminist perspectives for increasing female participation). 

Equity, access, power in particular contexts and how it is negotiated, what the genres of power are, how students engage and how / the extent to which the space is open / welcoming to students. 

Student voice about meaning-making practices, experiences in context (ways of doing - reading, writing, different modes). 

Decolonial/Southern perspectives on languages and literacies. 

Multimodal semiotics. 

Draws on African, feminist, and situated knowledge-making processes; 

Creates a space to engage with teaching and research through a decolonial, participatory lens; 

Helps scholars develop a critical lens on the role of the university in engaging with society; formalise a focus on co-creation as a method of teaching and research, central to rethinking the relationship between different knowledge constituencies. 
Significant questions that form the focus of this stream 

Exploring the role of digital education in contexts of inequalities through ie: 

  • Online and blended learning design 
  • Critical digital pedagogies / literacies 
  • The role of open Education 
  • Quality & Authentic assessment 
  • Data driven T&L / learning analytics
  • The decolonisation of the mathematics curriculum for STEM and its relevance for local and global challenges,  
  • Innovative pedagogy (humanising), alternative forms of assessment, 
  • Appropriate use of technology such as interactive software, modelling for applications in disciplines, and 
  • Access and success for all (diversity). 
  • How do we disrupt? What other ways of knowing are there? How do we center students as knowledge producers? 
  • Transitions: school-university, but also pathways to postgrad, and entering professions (e.g. as academics). 
  • Working with lecturers to understand: How does power work in teaching contexts? What does it look like? 
  • Engaging the decolonial knower through delinking from colonial forms of knowledge, power, and being in pedagogy and research  
  • African, Situated Knowledge-Making, Feminisms and Power  
  • Engaging society through a critical lens: implications for curriculum, pedagogy, and scholarship  
  • Cutting across the three concentrations is a commitment and focus on transdisciplinary work and research methodologies that disrupt historical definitions of disciplines and that engages communities centrally to knowledge-making.