Academic staff development in a changing South African higher education context.

Abstract

This study explores the life history of academic staff development (ASD) within the context of South African higher education's significant transformation over the past three decades. Through a multiparadigmatic research design incorporating interpretivism, criticalism, and postmodernism, the research examines how academic staff developers enact their roles in response to changing institutional and national imperatives and investigates the underlying forces shaping these practices. The study employs theoretical pluralism, drawing on Bourdieu's Field Theory, Samuel's Force Field Model, and Mezirow's Transformative Learning Theory as an initial lens for this study. Data was produced from academic developers across a range of institutional types in South African higher education. Data was also produced through engaging senior academic developers located across the SA HE. Through innovative representational strategies including narrative assemblages and a diffractive analysis, the research reveals ASD as a field-in-becoming characterised by rhizomatic features and complex entanglements between human and non-human actors. The study critically examines ASD's paradoxical nature through the concept of pharmakon, highlighting its simultaneous potential as both a benefit to and a constraint in addressing higher education challenges. A key contribution of this research is the development of a southern gaze for ASD, grounded in decolonial praxis and an ethico-onto-epistemology. This perspective challenges the hegemony of Global North theories while advocating for more inclusive and transformative approaches through embracing pluralism for academic staff development. The study culminates in the proposal of the LOTUS RHIZE framework, which conceptualises ASD as a rhizomatous phenomenon capable of flourishing amid complexity through collaboration, dialogue, critique, and decolonial love.