Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning

Think Piece: Trust as a condition for “radical entanglement”

Siphokazi Magadla — 2025-09-27

When I was teaching first year students the introduction to international relations in July 2023, the coup in Niger took place. Seven coups have happened since August 2020 in west and central Africa. I tell the first years that it is not farfetched to imagine that one day they might come out of class to broadcasts by figures in the South African National Defence Force that they have taken over the country.

I deliberately call the course the “personal is the international” to make clear that, for better or worse, the students’ dreams and gifts are defined by “the international”. Making this point is easier standing in front of a group of students whose lives have been radically redefined by a global pandemic that began in another continent.

As I write this think piece about trust, 6000 bombs have been dropped in the homes, schools, hospitals and universities in Gaza. As of 13 November 2023, about 1063 academics, including the Rhodes University Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sizwe Mabizela, have signed an open letter to Universities South Africa (USAF) and the Academy of Science of South Africa that calls on USAF to “issue a statement that unambiguously expresses solidarity with the universities in Gaza and the occupied territories and mourns the deaths of academics and students who have been killed during the Israeli onslaught”. Among other important demands made by these academics, includes the call for an academic and cultural boycott and the severing of ties with Israeli institutions.

What does it mean to think about higher education and trust at a moment of deepening political, social, economic and psychological crisis in South Africa and the world?

Think Piece: Trust as a foundation for ethics and integrity in educational contexts

Sarah Elaine Eaton — 2025-09-27

Trust has been a central theme in academic integrity discourse for decades. In this piece, I think about trust from a variety of perspectives: student conduct, faculty conduct, and organizational trust. I then discuss the role of trust in addressing misconduct. These framings are drawn from a model of Comprehensive Academic Integrity (CAI), in which academic integrity includes and extends beyond student conduct.

Think Piece: Building, repairing and maintaining trust in research relationships: towards an ethics of trust

Mikateko Mathebula — 2025-09-27

In this think piece, I ask what it takes for research relationships to be centred on trust. My reflections are divided into three sections in which I share some lessons learnt from various research projects. At the end of each section, I pose a series of interrelated questions about the values, principles and practices that are indispensable to building, repairing and maintaining trust in research relationships. To conclude, I outline how these reflections will be brought together in my keynote address.

Editorial

Nicola Pallitt — 2025-09-27

This September 2025 special issue of Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL) brings together a collection of thought-provoking papers on the theme of trust. These contributions originated from the Higher Education Close-Up (HECU) 11 conference, a peer-reviewed biennial international gathering. HECU 11 was hosted by Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa, from July 3-5, 2024. The conference's ethos is to look up close at issues that are important to all who work and study in higher education, and this special issue does exactly that.

Building trust in open educational resources for multiliteracies in English and Applied Linguistics

Aletta Hautemo — 2025-09-27

The paper examines the issue of trust in adopting open educational resources (OER) to develop multiliteracies in the field of English and Applied Linguistics. The goal is to intentionally integrate best practices in teaching, ultimately transforming educational resources to be more open, inclusive, equitable, and accessible. A mixed-method approach was employed, purposively involving 22 postgraduate English and Applied Linguistics students. Data collection methods included closed-ended questionnaires and open-ended written reflections. Participants wrote reflections that assessed the credibility of OER, contributing to a broader social understanding of their personal experiences with the phenomenon and focusing on the systemic implications that hinder social transformation and trust-building around OER. The data analysis was themed to assess and develop strategies to facilitate a radical paradigm shift in enhancing the trustworthiness of adopting and using OER across diverse learning contexts. The findings reveal that OER provides a wealth of tools that empower students to explore diverse genres, fostering the development of multiliteracies. Integrating OER into multiliteracies can create an engaging and dynamic reading environment, ultimately enhancing students' reading habits. However, users may hesitate to fully embrace OER due to concerns about the quality and reliability of the resources, leading to a lack of confidence. Therefore, trust emerges as a crucial factor of contestation in the collaborative process of OER creation, adaptation, use, and sharing that contributes to knowledge-building processes and practices.

Trust in African feminist teaching and learning practices: Conscientisation and connection

Corinne Knowles — 2025-09-27

In higher education, trust is possible (or not) based on the dynamic between different components and people in the university. This paper considers the relationship between students and their lecturer in the context of a neoliberal ethos. Using an African feminist lens, the close-up, self-study of a postgraduate course in Political and International Studies at Rhodes University is examined for its intentions and transgressions to determine how trust can be built and ruptured. Two ideas – ‘conscientisation’ and ‘connection’ – are theorised and then demonstrated through the reflections of the students and lecturer. Through a variety of mechanisms and processes, conscientisation and connection were intentionally built into how the course was run, and students’ reflections reveal their transformational capacity. The final assessment did, however, become a site of unraveling and contestation, and provided an opportunity to look more deeply into how robust these ideas can be in a setting that valorises individualism and competition.

Towards pedagogies of distrust: Higher education learning in the age of generative Artificial Intelligence

Dalene Joubert — 2025-09-27

Since the release of ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools have become ubiquitous in higher education teaching-learning-assessment (TLA). This paper explores how generative AI impacts trust relationships within the TLA context between students and lecturers in relation to AI technologies. Framed by Rolfe, Freshwater and Jasper’s (2001) reflective model of what, so what, now what, we draw on practical experiences to demonstrate how an integrated model of AI literacies can enhance student engagement and foster critical interaction with generative AI, ultimately cultivating a criticality toward traditional ways of knowledge construction in the classroom. Instead of fostering unquestioning trust, we propose a pedagogy of distrust – an environment of healthy scepticism where students (and lecturers) critically interrogate both generative AI and human contributions to knowledge creation. This approach encourages reflective learning, deeper engagement, and the development of lifelong learning skills. It urges lecturers to embrace evolving roles, shifting from sole knowledge sources to facilitators who enable students to navigate complex learning environments independently.

Confronting the dark matter of Higher Education

Anna Christen — 2025-09-27

This paper explores the structural and ideological constraints that militate against the trust required between teachers and students for effective teaching and learning in contemporary South African universities and beyond. The first part of the paper addresses how widespread commercialisation and precarity born of scarcity, in addition to other widely explored issues relating to the legacy of apartheid and colonisation in South Africa, foster distrust between teachers and students in the South African academy. The second part opens with an inquiry into the meaning and power of trust, before bringing this inquiry to bear on the higher education context and presenting recommendations for fostering trust and meaningful connections in academic settings based on our own experiences teaching a student-led course in ethics at Rhodes University in South Africa, named ‘IiNtetho zoBomi’ or ‘Conversations About Life.’

“It’s the lecturers to lose”: Examining ‘trust’ in the feedback dialogue

Martina Van Heerden — 2025-09-27

“Feedback trust” is an important, though often take-for-granted component of the feedback dialogue. If not maintained, it may be easily lost or broken, which may impact the effectiveness of feedback. In this paper, I unpack the notion of feedback trust by examining what are the factors that enable (or constrain) it, whether feedback trust is automatic, and whether feedback trust can be repaired. The paper is framed by Tschannen-Moran and Hoy’s (2000) conceptualisation of trust. Qualitative data were collected from Honours students in an Arts and Humanities Faculty at a South African university using questionnaires (15) and interviews (6); data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The results broadly indicate that there are three main factors that influence feedback trust: the feedback itself, the feedback giver, and the feedback community. In addition, the results show that feedback trust is to some degree automatic, as it is tied to the role of feedback giver, but that it may strengthen or weaken over time, depending on experience. Lastly, the results show that feedback trust can be repaired through communication, though it depends on how it was broken or lost. This paper outlines that there are four Cs necessary to build, maintain, and repair feedback trust between students and educators: connection, communication, care, and comments.

The ambiguity of trust in Higher Education

Lindsay Kelland — 2025-09-27

A key assumption made in the literature is that trust in education is positive. This assumption underpins the work of notable scholars of education, such as Freire (1970) and hooks (1994), and is reiterated in Magadla’s (2023) remarks in ‘Trust as a condition for radical entanglement’. While I agree with them that it is essential for trust to exist in a healthy and humanising learning environment, I am also mindful of calls for caution, such as those offered by Rice (2006) and Kovač and Kristiansen (2010), which provide reasons to believe that excessive trust can have negative effects on learning and the environments and relationships within which learning takes place. Given calls for and against the promotion of trust in education spaces and drawing on my experiences co-creating and co-facilitating a student-led and student-centred course in ethics, I suggest the need to recognise the ambiguity of trust in higher education.

Systemic trust in Higher Education in South Africa: Policymaking during the COVID-19 pandemic

Thandi Lewin — 2025-09-27

This paper uses collaborative autoethnography and document analysis to examine the policymaking process during COVID-19 in the public higher education system in South Africa. The conceptual framework outlines the multi-dimensional nature of trust and the complexity of policy-making. The paper argues that system-wide cooperation was grounded in a form of systemic trust that was possible due to the nature of the COVID-19 emergency, the policy context of South African higher education, and interinstitutional relationships that had been built prior to the pandemic. We outline the nature of cooperation, enabling policy directions to be published quickly, supporting institutions to act flexibly within a legal framework that created conditions for the relatively safe completion of academic years. The paper argues that the systemic trust that existed during this time provides insights for the ways in which leadership and collaboration can create conditions for strengthening public trust in the system.

When trust is lost: Moral injury in Higher Education

Judith Reynolds — 2025-09-27

Transformation, or the lack thereof, student activism, and other day-to-day processes and rules in higher education institutions may lead to situations in which staff witness or are complicit in actions that contradict their sense of right and wrong. As a result, they may experience what is often described as ‘burnout’. It may be more accurate to describe the responses in terms of violations of their moral code, or ‘moral injury’. This conceptual paper draws on the literature on moral injury from other contexts and applies it to the experiences of staff in a higher education context, in South Africa and beyond, through the author’s reflections on her own experiences. Moral injury has numerous potential effects, such as a loss of trust in self or others, feelings of guilt or shame, withdrawal, and interpersonal difficulties. Dealing with moral injury involves grappling with the conditions that create these injuries.

Universities as anchor institutions: Integrating the element of trust for developing transformational community university partnerships

Diana Hornby — 2025-09-27

The deep and entrenched inequality existing in Makhanda is a microcosm of South Africa. The relationship between the community of Makhanda and Rhodes University is interdependent and interconnected. Community engagement has the potential to mitigate the past image of universities as institutions disconnected from the realities of the local context. However, trust becomes an imperative first step towards unravelling the local radical entanglement and for enacting transformative collaborative partnerships between community and university. This paper is based on a qualitative study which examines the conceptualization of an anchor university for the South African context through community engagement using Rhodes University as a case study. The study proposes that the element of trust is imperative to establish transformational community-university partnerships that supports anchoring Rhodes University in Makhanda. The findings reveal community engagement’s role in anchoring the university and the extent to which the element of trust pervades the relationship between the two systems to unravel radical entanglements of the past that impede holistic development.

We Have Trust Issues

Curwyn Mapaling — 2025-09-27

This poetic inquiry explores the complex dynamics of trust within the context of higher education, particularly focusing on the collective experiences of marginalised communities. Drawing from the themes of the special issue "Reimagining Trust in Higher Education" in the journal Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL), the poem grapples with the deep-seated mistrust that stems from historical and ongoing injustices, such as colonialism, apartheid, and systemic inequality. Through a powerful and evocative use of the collective voice, the poem highlights the shared struggles and resilience of those fighting for social justice, decolonisation, and equity in academia. It interrogates the hollow promises of trust from institutions that have perpetuated harm and exclusion, while also acknowledging the transformative potential of collective action and self-determination. By weaving together personal and political narratives, the poem invites readers to reflect on the urgent need to cultivate genuine trust, healing, and solidarity within higher education. It challenges us to confront the depths of institutional betrayal and to imagine new possibilities for building a more just and inclusive academic landscape. Situated within the broader discourses of critical pedagogy, decolonial praxis, and social justice education, this poetic inquiry contributes to the ongoing conversations about reimagining trust in higher education. It offers a creative and embodied approach to engaging with the complexities of trust, trauma, and resistance, and calls for a radical transformation of the structures and relationships that shape our educational spaces.