Curriculum in the context of transformation: reframing traditional understandings and practices

Curriculum is central to the pedagogic project of the university, and like all aspects of education, it is underpinned by values, beliefs and ideologies. Curriculum choices are made based on what disciplines and professions value and what academic departments and / or individual academics find interesting and believe to be useful for students to learn and know. Decisions about how to teach and assess curriculum knowledge is very often made on the basis of lecturers’ preferences and beliefs about good teaching and learning. At the current conjuncture, academics in South African higher education are also called upon to take into account a number of transformation imperatives when making curriculum choices. The case studies in this collection present examples of how some lecturers at Rhodes University are thinking about curriculum in the context of cur - rent educational concerns and show some of the ways in which they attempt to ensure that greater epistemological access becomes a reality for more students