Building knowledge for higher education: engaging with the legacy of Suellen Shay

This Special Issue is dedicated to the memory of Suellen Butler Shay (20 July 1961 to 13 April 2021). Suellen Shay made a significant contribution as a scholar, teacher and supervisor in Higher Education Studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa. Suellen’s abiding concern was to promote greater social and epistemic justice in higher education, and, specifically in the South African context, to make the curriculum work for black students from poor schools. Driven by this commitment to working for greater justice and equity in higher education, she contributed to student and staff development, initiated a writing centre, established and led a postgraduate programme in Higher Education Studies, contributed to institutional and national policy development and served as Dean of the Centre for Higher Education Development at UCT. Internationally, she served as Executive Editor for Teaching in Higher Education for almost a decade. In this capacity, she produced a seminal Special Issue on “Curriculum as Contestation” later published by Routledge as a co-edited book. She left a substantial body of scholarship with which the authors of this Special Issue engage. Suellen obtained her PhD in 2003 and from then onwards published prolifically – in under two decades she produced 32 journal articles (the majority of which were single authored), coedited 3 books, and supervised 4 PhDs and 13 Masters students to graduation. She also participated in several national and international research projects. For her many colleagues and collaborators, Suellen has left behind a rich body of scholarly work and fond memories of working with her. Suellen Shay entered the Academic Development (AD) (also termed Education Development (ED)) field in higher education at UCT in the late 1980s. Initially mentored by Ian Scott, then Director of Academic Development at UCT, she belonged to a pioneering generation of AD practitioners who took up a strong anti-apartheid stance during the 1980s. The work was carried out within constraints of the apartheid regime’s legislation and conforming to the policies and norms of historically white liberal English universities such as UCT, the University of the Witwatersrand and Rhodes. This small marginal group of politically motivated, mostly white women usually held junior posts and were employed on soft-funded contracts. They believed it was possible to work within these constraints to enable black students from poor ‘disadvantaged’ schools to access and learn to ‘cope’ with the demands of a university curriculum designed for middle-class white students. Post-1994 they continued to work for the transformation and reconstruction of higher education. During this period, AD programmes were supported and funded by the new democratic state. Although in the historically white universities, the state-funding model based on ‘additional teaching inputs’, meant that the remedial and assimilationist approaches to pedagogy and curriculum inherited from the past were retained. As its influence and credibility increased during the post-apartheid era, so the focus of AD work expanded. From the foundation of student pedagogy and assessment at course level, its scope grew to include staff and curriculum development at departmental and programme level and beyond. Now including contributions to policies