Reimagining an African university and its implications on pedagogic encounters and transformation in African Higher Education System.

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume V, Issue VII, July 2021 | ISSN 2454–6186

Reimagining an African university and its implications on pedagogic encounters and transformation in African Higher Education System.

Monicah Zembere (Dr)
Visiting Academic, University of Witwatersrand, Wits School of Education, South Africa

Abstract
This paper highlights the implications of a reimagined African university on teaching and learning with special reference to institutions of higher learning in Africa. Interpretive research methodologies and critical inquiry have been employed to gather data. The main arguments advanced in this paper are firstly; higher education in Africa has the potential to make students understand and respond to the socio-economic, political and environmental problems currently confronting Africa as a continent. Secondly, how in becoming pedagogy can hold potentialities that can enable students to determine their own choices on how they co-belong. To achieve these, universities have to embrace active values of democratic citizenship in their teaching and learning. Precisely, universities in Africa should promote active citizenship in their teaching and learning programs as a way of preparing students to deal with violence and other problems confronting the continent. My research conclude that education policies in African universities are a mirror to the political and historical background of the continent and this is why I am calling for the reimagining of the African university pedagogy. Furthermore, I recommend universities in Africa to be pedagogical sites where deliberative and friendship encounters are cultivated and nurtured.

Key words: Higher Education, Democratic Citizenship Education, Active citizenship, in becoming.

Introduction

This paper explains the implications of a reimagined African university on university teaching and learning with special reference to institutions of higher learning in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Kenya. I am arguing in this paper that higher education in Africa has the potential to make students understand and respond to the socio-economic, political and environmental problems currently confronting their countries and those problems Africa faces as a continent. I say so drawing on Dewey’s (1917, 1976: 123) explanation that education has the potentiality to develop the critical faculty of an individual to understand the complexities of social, economic and political environment. Dewey further reiterates that the development of critical faculty does not simultaneously happen because students have attended a school, church or university, but the kind of citizenship as well as the type of

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