By Basirat Oyalowo.
How can transdisciplinarity in Africa help achieve higher education’s third mission, namely making a contribution to society? What are the best pathways for achieving this? What are the key obstructions and potential ways around them?
Higher education’s third mission involves adding to the first two missions of teaching and research towards providing service to society. However, general pathways to achieving this are still unclear. A few studies have explored how and why the local impacts of universities need to be measured, but these are generally from outside Africa and concentrate more on quantitative methods to measure specific impact, such as economic impact.
Transdisciplinarity provides opportunities to consider the diversity of societal needs and values, to benefit from local knowledge, to involve scientific disciplines, stakeholders and target groups. It therefore offers a platform for advancing higher education’s third mission. Indeed a useful definition of transdisciplinarity is the process of transformation that occurs when collaborative research is decentralised to include the engagement of both academic and non-academic experts on equal terms in seeking solutions to complex societal problems.
Transdisciplinarity encourages researchers to reflective introspection on questions such as: Why are we interested in this problem? Who would benefit, other than us and possibly our funder? Towards whose good should our research be tailored? And where are beneficiaries in the knowledge production process?
Transdisciplinarity is an approach that makes research inclusive, recognizing the limits of science (and its experts) and respecting the knowledge of non-academic experts from society, the governed and the governors. Transdisciplinarity is in harmony with the movement for decolonization and quest for national development. More profoundly, it provides a nexus between academic research and societal change.
Incorporating transdisciplinarity into teaching enhances the learning experience for students by linking taught topics with real life projects. In research, transdisciplinarity goes beyond disciplinary boundaries to immerse the researcher in multiple, yet integrated, means of learning to address complex real-world problems. When the teaching and research arms are brought together, transdisciplinarity in the third mission will add immense value.
Global challenges demand responses at the local level, and today, every city or town with a university faces one particular challenge or another. Conflicts in land use, urban violence, the political economy of corrupt governance, management of natural resources in the face of ethnic diversity, social services bifurcating social needs and economic realities, non-recognition of the opportunities in everyday informality, climate change, and repressive societies are made more complex by their linkages and interaction with one another. These challenges are quite visible, in varying degrees of severity, across most African cities and universities could play a more involved role in their resolution.
Accomplishing the third mission of higher education lies in unravelling these complexities. Transdisciplinary education and research offer a platform for optimising the latent resources African universities possess, in terms of their institutional position and geographical situation within cities.
By incorporating transdisciplinarity into their corporate mission and vision, and actively implementing associated strategies, African higher education can strategically provide actionable solutions to local problems. However, this requires forging transdisciplinary partnerships that provide resources for lecturers to teach global concepts with local knowledge and researchers to co-produce solutions to local problems, whether this is in terms of tackling malaria, closing digital divides, enhancing social capital for stronger subnational governance, tackling flooding, enhancing agricultural productivity or supporting incubation centres to develop local manufacturing and information and communication technology.
However, the demands of transdisciplinarity require that educators and researchers take on new roles outside their scientific and disciplinary knowledge. Skills in collaborating, moderating, negotiating and advocacy become new criteria for expertise across all disciplines. African universities must recognise, facilitate and reward the acquisition and deployment of these skills.
What are the key obstructions to achieving this from an African context and how might those obstacles be overcome? Four key impediments and ways of countering them are described:
- Finding financial investment for transdisciplinarity is daunting. Overall, there is a scarcity of human, financial and material resources.
But failure to address these problems is also inordinately expensive. Partnerships can help to equitably spread costs, and social benefits could tip the scale in favour of transdisciplinary investment.
- Disciplinary fixation could undermine transdisciplinary collaborations. The peculiarities of colonial heritage, coupled with Western influences in defining knowledge, and the difficulties in accessing higher education and obtaining a discipline-based qualification, can make it difficult to move beyond disciplines.
To counteract this, universities must support, at all levels, inter-faculty collaborations and also ensure this connects to partners outside of the academic system, but this must be framed within a solution-minded agenda.
- Internal academic activities such as interdisciplinary conferences, meetings and events are not always designed to translate to solutions.
There is considerable potential to reposition these events, which are often highly visible, so that they contribute to actual solutions for real societal impact.
- International university rankings, that disproportionately outweigh local achievements, local acceptance and local impact, reduce the drive to transdisciplinarity.
This can be countered by assessing university performance from the perspective of local communities to measure impact.
What is your experience of universities achieving higher education’s third mission of contributing to society? Can you point to examples of how transdisciplinary collaborations in your institution solved local problems in the local community? Are there other arguments that you would add to those laid out above?
To find out more:
Oyalowo, B. (2022). An Agenda for Transdisciplinary Research for Achieving African Higher Education’s Third Mission. Journal of Educational Studies, 21, 1: 11-30. (Online): https://journals.co.za/doi/full/10.10520/ejc-jeds_v21_n1_a2
Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Generative artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution. (For i2Insights policy on generative artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)
Biography: Basirat Oyalowo PhD is a senior lecturer in real estate at the School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her research and advocacy straddles housing justice, urban governance and sustainability. She is affiliated to the African Research Network for Urbanization and Habitable Cities hosted by the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and is a member of the leadership board of the Global Alliance for Inter-and Transdisciplinarity.