Short Abstract

Taking the university classroom as a prism through which to examine contemporary African higher education, this panel explores how teachers experiment with new approaches to learning under conditions of rapid educational change and significant constraint.

Long Abstract

What becomes visible when we look at African higher education through the prism of the classroom? Across the continent, universities and governments are calling for competency-based, student-centred and active approaches to learning. Yet university teachers are often being asked to make this transformation within systems that prepared them to teach differently, amid large classes, limited resources, institutional pressures, and students accustomed to more teacher-led learning.

This panel turns attention to the teachers taking on this challenge. Across African universities, educators are redesigning courses, creating learning tools, introducing games and collaborative activities, changing assessment, using digital technologies, and finding new ways to motivate students and give them greater autonomy. In doing so, they are not simply implementing educational reform. They are testing, adapting and inventing what different forms of university education might look like in practice.

The classroom offers a revealing prism onto these transformations because concepts such as “student-centred learning” and “competency-based education” refract differently across institutions, disciplines, countries and classrooms. What problems are teachers trying to solve? What innovations are they developing, and with what resources? How do students respond? What fails, changes, or emerges along the way?

Rather than viewing African higher education primarily through the prism of constraint, this panel foregrounds the resourcefulness, creativity and risk-taking of educators working within those constraints. Bringing diverse classroom experiments together, it asks what we can learn when African university teachers are recognised not simply as recipients of educational reform, but as innovators generating new knowledge about teaching and learning.

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