The invitation to advance the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2063 is simultaneously an invitation to Universities to rethink inherited structures of teaching; modes of delivery, and paradigmatic frameworks -- including the division of nature from society, and natural from social science.
Problem-based teaching, based on a local situation, will advance conversations across disciplines, equipping graduates to bring on board multiple skills and capacities.
Understanding different interpretive frameworks of "Sustainability". Learning how evidence is produced in answer to specific questions and assembled via specific techniques (e.g. maps; spreadsheets; databases) that address sectoral concerns.
Teaching "sustainability literacy" will equip students to read, recognise and respond to different appropriations of the Agendas; understanding and negotiating interpretive frameworks and competing agendas.
Learning how to hear those who most often silenced. African HE graduates trained in advancing sustainability will be characterised by their "response-ability" to the total context.
A focus on lived experience will facilitate the presence of learners as whole selves, in their learning. Embedding learning in a local environment equips students to bring into the classroom what they already know, and test, hone and connect life knowledge with classroom learning. A pedagogy of de-alienation is crucial on the African continent, and in the global south
Students will be invited to develop the skills of generative critique and mutually respectful transdisciplinary engagement. Social science students will be invited to engage with material flows; science students with the power of ideas. All students will engage with policy, governance, infrastructure, planning and decision-making.
Students will understand how research questions can be framed and knowledge is tested in different disciplines.
Our courses avoid the "banking model" of learning. Our students will recognise their learning process is part of world-making practice.