Academics and universities have come under fire for using decontextualised textbooks in their lecture halls.
Professor Dap Louw, from the University of the Free State’s department of psychology, said students were increasingly questioning “irrelevant” content in the humanities, in particular where foreign books with a Western perspective are prescribed. This meant they lacked local context such as statistics and case studies.
“This is a crisis. We are sending thousands of students from universities who were educated according to irrelevant study material. The inevitability of using irrelevant learning material is that you only prepare students for tests and exams … they can’t apply their learning,” he said.
“If somebody can say to me it is academically and morally justifiable to prescribe a book in the human sciences in which the word ‘South Africa’ do not appear, then there is something seriously wrong in higher education,” he said.
Louw said the South African academic textbook market had been flooded with American books, which were impressive because of their supplementary features such as DVDs and Powerpoint presentations but which were too removed from the local context.
The availability of these materials, which the small local academic publishing industry could not always compete against, meant academics opted for foreign material instead of sourcing and producing local books.
“The human sciences in South Africa are at least 100 years old. If academics have not been able to produce their own relevant books after a century then something is terribly wrong,” Louw said.
He called for incentives for academics to publish academic books and for higher education bodies such as the Council on Higher Education (CHE) to investigate the matter through its quality audits.
Lis Lange, executive director of the CHE’s Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC), said “the issue of decontextualised textbooks”, particularly in the area of professional education, is a problem that is often mentioned among academics and students. She said the HEQC institutional audits are not designed to pick up the issue in a systematic and conclusive way.
But academics from other universities accused Louw of making generalisations without an exhaustive study of textbooks.
Thoko Mayekiso, dean of humanities at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, said academic departments that have not kept abreast with trends in the disciplines and professions are to blame for the use of irrelevant material.
“Technology also makes it impossible to confine students to local material. There is a general awareness of the need to provide students with study material that would provide them with the requisite discipline knowledge that is informed by local and global contexts,” said Mayekiso.
Professor Louise Vincent, acting head of the department of political and international studies at Rhodes University, said the institution has a strong ethos of relying on the expertise and integrity of the academics it employs. “There is no doubt that many academics in the faculty do try to draw on local examples where possible. That simply makes good pedagogic sense. There is an attempt to relate theoretical material, philosophies, paradigms and so on to local problems because that aids students’ understanding,” she said. Vincent said she believed no academic worth their salt would dream of assigning something that they thought to be “irrelevant”.
She said that universities would be condemning their students to irrelevance if they failed to induct them into the cannon of the discipline, wherever it may emanate from.
Professor Wendy Kilfoil, director of the department for education innovation at the University of Pretoria, said textbooks have to be relevant in terms of what is internationally accepted in a particular discipline or field.
“How it becomes relevant to the local context is a teaching and learning issue,” she said. Some books would only be South African because of the nature of the professional context, such as law, said Kinfoil.
Steven Naudé, MD of Pearson Education South Africa, and a member in the Publishers’ Association of South Africa’s academic sector group, said that foreign books had been used significantly less since the first currency crunch in the early 2000, which meant a spike in the cost of foreign textbooks. He said at that time about 70% of books were imported and 30% were produced locally. This ratio was now the other way around except for the hard sciences such as chemistry, physics and engineering. He said the local publishing industry battled to compete with the cutting-edge support provided by many of the American products.