Access, quality and success : Working towards social justice through open initiatives at the University of the Free State

Abstract

Education in the South African context is widely promoted as a tool for achieving equity through increasing the life opportunities for those involved. The promotion of open learning as a strategy for shaping the post-school education and training sector (PSET) seeks to address the historical suffocation of the educational dreams and opportunities of black people, and contemporary poverty, lack of services and limited access to opportunities. The broad ambitions of open learning – improving access, quality and success – find expression in multiple ways in the diverse and complex PSET sector, with institutions taking different paths towards different kinds of ‘openness’. This research explores stories of openness at the University of the Free State (UFS), through tracing the history of five initiatives that seek to open up learning. We adopted an interpretivist case study approach, collecting a variety of data, including four semi-structured interviews, institutional reports, and public facing documentation. Underpinned by Fraser’s social justice framework, we ask in what ways, and to what extent, initiatives supporting access, quality and success respond to historical and contemporary social injustices, and what conditions enabled and constrained their scope and success. Through our interpretation of the data, it emerged that understandings of ‘open’ in this context are shifting and contingent, and are strongly shaped by conceptualisations of, and contextual readiness for, open learning. Many initiatives established in support of ‘opening up’ education may be described as ameliorative responses to inequalities. However, activities such as there imagining of marginalisation and pedagogy in the PSET context and the increasing recognition of the importance of leadership and governance, are working towards addressing economic, cultural and political injustices, creating more enabling conditions for transformative shifts towards opening up education.