This edited collection that celebrates the legacy of Suellen Shay, is located in Higher Education Studies and Development in South Africa, the country where she lived and worked. The book has international reach as the authors engage in contemporary debates around how to think about knowledge in education development work, in professional education and more recently around the call to decolonise the curriculum.

Contributions draw on the social realist tradition in the sociology of education to discuss how curricula are or should be structured, in order to make key forms of knowledge accessible to students. The collection includes theoretical debates related to the field of higher education studies as well as chapters that analyse curricula and assessment in engineering, the health professions, tourism and music – including the impact on curricula of interdisciplinary collaboration across different types of institution and knowledge.

This book will be important for scholars wanting to transform how universities and colleges think about curriculum design and practice. It was originally published as a special issue of Teaching in Higher Education.

Margaret Blackie is Associate Professor at the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning at Rhodes University in South Africa. She holds a PhD in chemistry from the University of Cape Town and a PhD in education from Stellenbosch University. Having spent most of her career working in a chemistry department and balancing medicinal chemistry research and STEM education research she now works in higher education studies. Her current research interests are on the knowledge structures in tertiary STEM education and the development of appropriate assessment practices. She has written on decoloniality in STEM education. Her work primarily draws on critical realism, social realism and Legitimation Code Theory.

Kathy Luckett is Emeritus Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Development, University of Cape Town and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching & Learning, Rhodes University. Currently she teaches and supervises on CHERTL’s Higher Education Studies programme and serves as Executive Editor for the ‘Teaching in Higher Education’ journal. She worked recently as Researcher for Policy Development in the Institutional Planning Department, UCT and Director of the Humanities Education Development Programme, UCT. Her research interests are sociology of knowledge and curriculum studies with a focus on the Humanities, Africana, decolonial and postcolonial studies; higher education.