Book review: Socially just pedagogies, capabilities and quality in higher education: Global Perspectives. Walker, M. & Wilson-Strydom, M. (eds.) 2017.

Abstract

The collection of studies in the edited volume, Socially just pedagogies, capabilities and quality in higher education: Global perspectives, was published at particularly significant time for higher education – both in South Africa and globally. In response to increasing and increasingly diverse student populations, higher education has been dominated by neo-liberal efficiency discourses of student ‘throughputs’ and ‘success’. South African higher education’s attempts at self-transformation have largely been unsuccessful, as recent student activism has shown, and new regimes of funding, managerialism and quality have emerged to steer the high education system towards state-regulated objectives. The chapters in this edited volume uncover some of the complexities and injustices that underpin ‘hard managerialism’ – and instead propose ways in which university teaching, student well-being, and quality might be brought into a different kind of relationship – one that avoids the positioning ‘quality’ and ‘equality’ in opposition. This collective work offers a very different vision of what higher education might become if socially just pedagogies were placed at its centre.