Inclusive participation in higher education: A multimodal genre perspective from Sweden and South Africa (IpSSA)

Higher education globally is undergoing significant transition due to increasing levels of diversity amongst student populations. This requires universities to adapt their teaching and learning practices in order to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals around inclusive education. The broad aims of this project are to provide an empirical basis for achieving the goals for inclusive education and broadened participation in higher education, and to foster collaboration between Africa and Europe, who are facing common challenges and opportunities in the work towards equitable and sustainable development. More specifically, the purpose of the project is to identify principles for inclusive design of teaching and learning with the potential for transformation of higher education. In this endeavor, the project brings together researchers from South Africa and Sweden in the fields of multimodality and education. Identifying higher education teachers recognized for their teaching excellence, and employing tools from multimodal ethnography, field studies will be performed along with multimodal analysis of academic texts, genres, and environments. The project will identify principles for inclusive (re)design of the genres and practices of higher education pedagogy that can be transferred between South Africa and Sweden (and vice versa) in order to achieve the goals for inclusive education and broadened participation in higher education.