Call for abstracts will be announced soon.

The sixth biennial SoTL in the South Conference brings together scholars, educators, students, academic developers and institutional leaders from across the world to explore how teaching and learning scholarship can be reimagined through perspectives emerging from the Global South. Hosted by the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED) at the University of Cape Town, from 1 to 3 December 2027, the conference provides an opportunity to engage with new ideas, build international collaborations and contribute to shaping the future of SoTL through dialogue across diverse contexts.

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1 - 3 Dec 2027

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Conference Theme

From the South, with Love: Recognising the Gifts of the Global South

A global conversation on the scholarship of teaching and learning

This conference begins from the premise that the Global South is not simply a place from which we speak, but a way of seeing, knowing and imagining higher education differently. What might the Global South offer the world when it is approached not as a site of deficit or in need of ‘development’, but as a source of intellectual generosity, pedagogical innovation and scholarly leadership?

This conference invites participants to explore the distinctive contributions that southern contexts, histories, philosophies and educational practices make to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Rather than viewing the South as a geographical location or a recipient of knowledge, we position it as an epistemic stance, one that foregrounds relationality, care, plurality, resilience, creativity and justice. Together, we seek to recognise and extend the gifts of the South in ways that enrich global conversations about teaching, learning and higher education.

Exploring the Gifts of the Global South Through the following Thematic Foci:

The South as Epistemic Stance

  • Epistemologies, methods, and forms of knowing from the global South
  • (Re)defining SoTL as method of inquiry
  • Storytelling and alternative genres of knowledge-making
  • Multilingualism and translanguaging
  • Multimodal literacies in SoTL
  • Languages of description for SoTL in the global South
  • Identity and voice

Affective, Embodied, and Relational Pedagogies from the South

  • Belonging and recognition in pedagogical spaces
  • Pedagogies of care: engaging the affective
  • Pedagogies of play and embodiment
  • Pedagogies of discomfort
  • Decolonial love
  • Indigenous pedagogies
  • Inclusive teaching and learning practices

Innovation, Abundance, and Curriculum Responsiveness

  • Curricula imagination and creativity
  • Ubuntu currere
  • Curriculum relevance
  • Assessment innovation
  • Students as partners in co-creation

AI: Authenticity and Integrity in Teaching and Learning

  • AI for epistemic justice
  • Care, empathy, and relationality in AI-mediated pedagogical spaces
  • Recentering the human: AI, dignity, and relational ethics

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SoTL in the South Conference 2027