Case Study: The Impact of Contextual and Institutional Difference on SoTL Collaboration

Introduction to SoTL in the South African context

In 2025, the Department of Higher Education reported that South Africa had 26 public universities, 131 registered private higher education institutions, 50 technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges, 149 registered private colleges, and nine community education and training colleges (Department of Higher Education and Training, 2025, p. 2).

This diversity can also be understood in other ways. As far as universities are concerned, Essop (2020), for example, distinguished between Research Intensive Universities, Historically Black Universities, Universities of Technology, Distance Universities and Other Universities. Regardless of how we categorise South African universities, these distinctions reflect differences in institutional purpose as well as historical legacy. For example, staff at different universities have access to very different levels of resources.  There are also significant differences in the students attracted by these institutions, with many top-performing school-leavers gravitating towards traditional research-intensive universities. The differences often overlap with South Africa’s historic distinction between White and Black universities.

In this diverse context, it is, I think, natural to find different ways of thinking about the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). In South Africa, SoTL does not develop in a neutral space; it is shaped by national history, inequality, and ongoing debates about knowledge, power, transformation and immediate contextual needs. In a recent ISSOTL blog post, South African colleagues (Cupido, et al., 2023) made at least two arguments about SoTL in South Africa. First, our country’s higher education sector has a history of deep engagement with SoTL. At the same time though, significant questions about SoTL remain unanswered in South Africa. These questions concern the meaning of the concept and the ways national and institutional contexts shape its understanding and application. In the inaugural editorial of SoTL in the South, Leibowitz (2017) argues that more work is needed to develop a shared understanding of SoTL in the global South and to challenge the conceptual hegemony of the global North in higher education practice. It is against this backdrop of national transformation and global North–South tensions that I reflect on my experience of cross-institutional SoTL collaboration in South Africa.

Cross-institutional SoTL collaboration in South Africa

The biggest challenge I experienced in cross-institutional SoTL collaboration is the extent to which different national and institutional  realities impact how people think about what SoTL is and why we engage in it. In terms of the former (how we think about SoTL), the conceptual diversity that characterizes SoTL in general has been acknowledged (Gansemer-Topf, McCloud & Braxton 2024; Mckinney 2013) and holds true for my context (Vorster 2020). In my experience there seems to be agreement that we need conceptual clarity (Leibowitz 2017). But the decisions we make about how to define and apply SoTL differ across institutions. In other words, we clarify the concept in ways that help address concrete challenges in a specific context.

And this brings me to the second way in which SoTL differences manifest – the factors that motivate us to engage in it. While there is general agreement that SoTL aims to enhance teaching and learning, this shared goal carries different nuances across institutions. Geertsema (2016) has explored some of these. Even within my institution I find expression of these nuances in at least three ways (to varying degrees). Some see SoTL as a form of professional development and link professional development to enhanced teaching and learning. Others see SoTL as an extension of teaching practice and thus see SoTL as a way of experimenting with teaching. Finally, there are those who see SoTL as a ‘simpler’ form of research and thus either discount it or employ it to satisfy the ever-increasing pressures for research outputs.

I became acutely aware of the impact of these conceptual and motivational differences when I joined colleagues from five other institutions to compare our teaching and learning policies. Our comparison showed that our institutions have different concerns regarding student success and, as a result, different SoTL goals and needs. The different concerns arise from various complex factors. These include differences in institutional organization, institutional culture and institutional history.

The institution I have been part of for more than 20 years describes itself as a research-intensive university and, as is the case with other South African universities that share this description, is historically privileged. In practice, this means the institution attracts some of the strongest secondary school performers in the country, as well as students with significant social capital—an important factor in student success (Pincince, 2020). Compared to many other institutions, it also has access to substantial teaching and learning resources. In short, this means that the institution remains among the top-performing institutions in the country in terms of student success. Some co-participants in this project were from institutions that are very different to mine in many respects. In comparing our teaching and learning policies we found that for them student success often means improved performance while for us, given that we have some of the highest retention and graduation rates in the country, student success often means improved graduate attributes and holistic development. Where student performance is part of our thinking, it relates more to closing the performance gap between students of different backgrounds. As such SoTL for us is a strategy to enhance our teaching staff’s ability to facilitate such achievement while for some of my colleagues in this project SoTL is a strategy to improve student performance. This distinction between SoTL as a professional development strategy and a student performance strategy has been explored by Geertsema (2016).

Engaging with the formulation of our different teaching and learning policies, we also found that SoTL for many academics in my institution is a way of developing a well-rounded career, something that is important in the pursuit of a career advancement. For my colleagues from the other institutions, SoTL is often a way of enhancing research outputs. As some of them work in institutions where staff have access to fewer research opportunities and resources, they sometimes turn to SoTL as an ‘easy’ way of producing more publications. Their goal is probably the same as the goals of staff in my institution – career advancement. But because of the constraints they encounter, they often need to find other ways of achieving their goals.

Finally, we found that most institutions frame SoTL in their teaching and learning policies primarily from the perspective of teachers, rather than academic or educational developers. My institution was the exception. While I only have anecdotal evidence for this, it does suggest to me that academic/educational development is differently positioned and has a different status in my institution. As such the relationships within which SoTL collaboration plays out in my institution can be different to those in the institutions of my colleagues. In my institution we need to think about the role of the academic/educational developer in SoTL while for my colleagues there is less of a focus on the collaborative relationship and more on the SoTL practices.

This experience illustrates that SoTL leadership cannot be separated from national context. What counts as “student success,” “professional development,” or even “research” is shaped by institutional history and resource distribution. International collaboration therefore requires not only shared goals, but shared understanding of context.

This reflection is based on only one collaborative experience, and the reality is likely far more complex. But reflecting on this collaboration highlighted for me some things that we need to be clear on when engaging in cross institutional SoTL collaboration. To me these are best expressed as a series of questions that we need to answer before engaging in actual projects. They are: What, formally, is the purpose of SoTL in our institutions? What place does SoTL have in the culture of our institutions? What needs do we attempt to address with SoTL in our institutions?

References

Cupido, X., Naidoo, K., Chitanand, N. & Vorster, J. (2023). SoTL in South Africa: Emergence, Evolution, Possibilities. ISSOTL. https://issotl.com/2023/10/16/sotl-in-south-africa-emergence-evolution-possibilities/

Department of Higher Education and Training. (2025). Statistics on post-school education and training in South Africa, 2023. Department of Higher Education and Training. https://www.dhet.gov.za/Information%20Systems%20Management/Statistics%20on%20Post-School%20Education%20and%20Training%20in%20South%20Africa%2C%202023.pdf

Essop, A. (2020) The Changing Size and Shape of the Higher Education System in South Africa, 2005-2017. Ali Mazrui Centre for Higher Education Studies, University of Johannesburg. https://www.uj.ac.za/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/size-and-shape-of-the-he-system-2005-2017.pdf

Gansemer-Topf, A. M., McCloud, L., & Braxton, J. M. (2024). Defining the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). New Directions for Student Services, pp 9–17. https://doi.org/10.1002/ss.20502

Geertsema, J. (2016). Academic development, SoTL and educational research. International Journal for Academic Development, 21(2), 122–134. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2016.1175144

Leibowitz, B. (2017). The significance of SOTL in the South. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South, 1(1), 1-3. https://doi.org/10.36615/sotls.v1i1.7

McKinney (Ed.). (2013). The scholarship of teaching and learning in and across disciplines. Indiana University Press.

Pincince, M. (2020). Effects of Social Capital on Student Academic Performance. Perspectives: Vol. 12, Article 3. https://scholars.unh.edu/perspectives/vol12/iss1/3

Vorster, J. (2020). SoTL: A mechanism for understanding and finding solutions to teaching and learning challenges. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South, 4(2), 6-21. https://doi.org/10.36615/sotls.v4i2.149