Students as Producers, Not Consumers?: Digital Capabilities, Higher Education Transformation and the Futures of Learning in Southern Africa

Abstract

This paper reflects on lessons learned about contemporary teaching at two very different universities located in Mauritius and South Africa. Thinking with digital capabilities as a crucial dimension of transformation, it traces the evolution of a series of commitments to pedagogy first written up in a Conversation article in 2017, which emphasised the need for undergraduate students to actively contribute to global discourses through both academic and non-academic knowledge production. This paper reflects on insights gained through assignments based on knowledge production, which included social media interactions, academic writing practice and contributions to an ongoing project entitled the Archive of Kindness. These insights call for the development of new curricula-based interventions pertaining to digital capabilities. The paper elaborates upon these digital literacies in light of Sushona Zuboff’s work on the paradigm of surveillance capitalism, expanding this to explore its implications for students located in the global south. It develops the notion of “digital capabilities” as a missing component of transformational discourse and practice, arguing that, without the conscious development of digital capabilities, ontological transformation will be critically stymied.