Mediating Learning in Higher Education in Africa (From Critical Thinking to Social Justice Pedagogies)

Historically, African higher education teaching and learning have relied on Western models, paradigms, assumptions, concepts and procedures, among other research related aspects. Western hegemony and ideology has influenced and continues to influence the epistemologies and both the methods and outcome of higher education research. The connection between teaching and learning is that teaching generates new forms of learning and learning challenges methods of teaching. Western claims to universality, objectivity and neutrality have dominated research paradigms in African higher education institutions to the detriment of alternative approaches and conceptions of knowledge. Methods aligned to African teaching and learning are often unrecognised and thus underutilised despite calls for the mantra for decolonial research methods. What are the African indigenous ways of teaching and learning? How are they related to the present African university? These puzzling questions provoke the minds of scholars on Africa to confront the discourse on decolonisation of higher education as they engage head-on and interrogate contemporary teaching and learning methods. Mediating Learning in Higher Education in Africa: From Critical Thinking to Social Justice Pedagogies provides critical reflections to some of the above questions that affect African Higher Education as it seeks to transform itself and provide directions for the future.