Guest Editors:
Siyabulela Sabata (Mr), Senior Teaching and Learning Specialist, Office of the
Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic), University of the Western Cape
Valile Dwayi (Dr), Senior Director: Centre for Global Engagement (CGE),
Central University of Technology (CUT)
Introduction
This special issue commemorates the 21st anniversary of the Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa (HELTASA). The anniversary provides an opportunity to take stock of the organisation’s history by reflecting on key achievements, identifying tensions and contradictions, and re-imagining the future of the field of Academic Development. The issue foregrounds collective reflexivity among academic developers whose professional identities and practices have been shaped through sustained engagement with HELTASA over time.
We proceed from the premise that the strengthening and sustainability of HELTASA require continuous engagement with the past as a resource for identifying blind spots, while remaining oriented towards future possibilities. Accordingly, this special issue adopts a practical evaluative stance, situating past practices and future projects within the contingencies of the present.
We invite submissions for consideration in a special issue of Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTal), a peer-reviewed journal that publishes scholarship making substantive contributions to the field of teaching and learning in higher education. CriSTal provides a rigorous and critical forum for authors to describe, theorise, and reflect on teaching and learning practices, with particular attention to work situated in, or relevant to, the South African higher education context.
Contextual Background
HELTASA emerged from complex and uneven foundations. Over more than two decades, however, it has consolidated its position as a significant voice in South African higher education. Its genesis is closely tied to the emergence of Academic Development (AD) in the late 1970s within former white, liberal universities, and its subsequent expansion into Afrikaans and historically Black institutions. A substantial body of scholarship has traced the evolution of the field, its knowledge practices, and its problem formulations (see Boughey,
2021; Boughey & McKenna, 2021; Shay, 2012). While this literature has been generative, it has often paid limited attention to the extent to which colonial structures continue to shape professional identities and condition possibilities for social agency.
Muller and Hoadley (2017) have traced the enduring influence of Dutch and English colonial curriculum traditions across South African universities. Related legacies are also evident in Academic Development discourses, particularly in distinctions between ‘academic support’ and ‘academic development’ (Volbrecht & Boughey, 2004). In the post–COVID-19 context, these orientations have increasingly been rearticulated through intensified emphases on quality assurance, technologisation, and performativity.
Across many institutions, Teaching and Learning Centres are under- resourced or repurposed to focus on driving compliance and performance metrics. The growing reliance on learning analytics and data-driven
interventions has reconfigured the figure of the student as an object of measurement, often detached from questions of identity and subjectivity. Academic leadership in teaching and learning portfolios is increasingly framed around managerial expertise and regulatory compliance, with limited engagement with education as a practice of freedom.
Focus and Guiding Questions
This special issue invites historically grounded and conceptually oriented contributions that revisit the evolution of HELTASA while engaging critically with contemporary and future challenges. Authors are encouraged to address one or more of the following questions:
1. Teaching and Learning as a Central Focus
To what extent does the continued centrality of teaching and learning within HELTASA remain an adequate response to current challenges in South African higher education? Contributors may engage with earlier calls to reconceptualise Academic Development beyond teaching and learning (Volbrecht & Boughey, 2004),
including its expansion into:
• strategy and policy (Academic Development leadership),
• capacity-building across curriculum and support domains, and
• higher education scholarship, research, and academic planning.
2. Knowledge, Reflexivity, and Decolonial Scholarship
To what extent has the knowledge base developed within HELTASA enabled the cultivation of a critical reflexive gaze capable of addressing the conditions of post-colonial, neoliberal higher education? This question foregrounds HELTASA’s contribution to decolonial debates and interrogates whether a narrow focus on teaching and learning enables or constrains the development of decolonial scholarship that takes the university as a colonial structure in its entirety.
3. Shifting Identities of Academic Development
How have recent shifts, particularly following the decolonial turn and the COVID-19 pandemic, enabled the extension, relocation, or dislocation of Academic Development identities?
Possible areas of engagement include:
i. (Un)conferencing practices
ii. Induction practices
iii. Student–staff partnerships
iv. Critical engagements with technologies, data analytics, and AI
v. identity formation and professionalism
vi. program development, reviews and accreditation - quality enhancement
vii. Excellence in teaching and learning
viii. decoloniality projects
ix. Centres for teaching and learning and the challenges of centralisation
Important Dates
1. Call for papers: 15 December 2025
2. Proposal submission: 10 January 2026
3. Notification of acceptance: 15 January 2026
4. Draft article submission (±6,000 words): 08 March 2026
5. Review process: March–April 2026
6. Feedback to authors: May 2026
7. Minor revisions due: End June 2026
8. Major revisions (first resubmission): Mid-July 2026
9. Second review round: End August 2026
10. Final resubmission: Mid-September 2026
11. Copy-editing: September 2026
12. Publication: 30 September 2026
Proposal Requirements
Proposals must include:
• A title of no more than 16 words.
• An abstract of up to 500 words to be sent to Ssabata@uwc.ac.za or Vmdwayi@cut.ac.za
• Clear alignment with the focus of this special issue.
• Journal information is available at: http://cristal.epubs.ac.za (CriSTal is an open-access journal and will charge page fees of 5000 ZAR per paper)
Queries
Queries may be directed to the corresponding editors of this special issue:
Siya Sabata Ssabata@uwc.ac.za and Valile Dwayi Vmdwayi@cut.ac.za