Summary
This reflection presents a SoTL approach grounded in African realities, advancing three principles contextualisation, communal learning, and purposeful resilience, and illustrating them in my UPSA classrooms through locally authored case studies, studentas-partner activities, and light-touch evidence routines that improve learning while respecting ethical safeguards.
Introduction
The SoTL Africa Conference reaffirmed a shared commitment to rigorous, reflective inquiry into teaching that is responsive to our contexts. For Ghana and the wider continent, the central question is not whether global pedagogical frameworks are valuable, but how they are replanted in African soil so that they take root, serve local purposes, and strengthen student learning.
SoTL in African Higher Education: Working Definition
SoTL is a systematic, public investigation of one’s own teaching to improve student outcomes. In African higher education, effective SoTL is distinguished by three emphases: (i) relevance to local social, economic, and cultural realities; (ii) equity, including attention to diverse learners and resource variability; and (iii) publicness, through sharing methods, instruments, and results in accessible forms.
Three Guiding Principles
Contextualisation
Imported methods require adaptation. Content, examples, and assessments should reflect the decision environments that Ghanaian and African students actually face. Contextualisation does not dilute rigour; it enables transfer by aligning theory with lived experience. Practically, this means prioritising locally authored cases, sector examples, and assessment tasks that mirror regional constraints and opportunities.
Communal Learning
Learning is a collective enterprise. Group inquiry, peer feedback, and community engaged activities are not peripheral; they are core expressions of a pedagogy that values collaboration. In practice, this means structured teamwork with clear roles, shared rubrics, and accountability. It also creates opportunities for students to contribute to curricular artefacts, strengthening belonging and academic identity.
Purposeful Resilience
Teaching in resource-constrained settings must acknowledge structural limits while orienting students toward agency. A resilience-informed SoTL foregrounds real-world problems and designs learning activities that connect analytical tools to feasible action.
Application at UPSA: Design and Delivery
Local Case Development
In my teaching at UPSA, I have expanded the use of Ghanaian and African case studies across modules in Ethics, Policy, and Applied Methods. Cases are brief (1–2 pages), decision-focused, and tied to specific learning outcomes. They are refreshed each semester to reflect current data and practice, and they invite students to marshal evidence under realistic constraints.
Assessment Alignment
Assessments combine short applied prompts (e.g., “advise the clinic manager given these constraints”) with low-stakes formative checks. This sequencing supports retrieval, transfer, and timely feedback without over-weighting a single high-stakes event.
Students as Partners
Each semester, a small “students-as-partners” activity is piloted: a pair or trio co-authors a short Ghana-based vignette (with ethical screening) to be used by peers later in the course. The exercise clarifies criteria for a high-quality case and deepens student ownership of disciplinary thinking.
Evidence and Evaluation
To evaluate whether these design choices improve learning, the following unobtrusive indicators are tracked within normal course routines:
- Participation: mean number of distinct contributors per discussion, compared across imported vs. local cases.
- Learning checks: accuracy on short formative items linked to local cases versus generic examples.
- Reflective signals: anonymised one-sentence reflections on when and how a Ghanaian example “made the theory usable.” Where appropriate, small before/after comparisons are reported at the cohort level. All evidence collection adheres to ethical practice: minimal personal data, anonymisation, and transparency with students about instructional-improvement purposes.
Conclusion
A SoTL agenda rooted in African soil does not reject global knowledge; it re-grounds it. Contextualised content, communal learning designs, and purposeful resilience are mutually reinforcing. Combined with light-touch evidence and ethical care, they yield practical improvements in student learning and a shared body of teaching knowledge that is both rigorous and relevant.
