| Abstract | Comprised of Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), state funding for higher education (HE) in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is a low priority. Despite the increased pressure on higher education institutions (HEIs) to meet national development needs and the demands of rapid youth population growth, existing public institutions and their academic communities face major challenges in addressing the low participation rates. This study sets out a social practice approach to conceptualise the perception of rapid enrolment expansion experienced by academic staff in public higher education institutions. It is situated within a multifaceted phase of public higher education in Kenya which is characterised by ‘institutional massification’, that is, where the increasing pressure for student access is applied to existing institutions with inadequate capacity for requisite resources. The study looks at how academics reshaped their understandings and academic practices to incorporate new practices in the context of enrolment expansion. Using a qualitative descriptive research design data was generated from semi-structured interviews with twenty (20) academic staff at a public university in Kenya conducted in 2018. The analysis indicates that academics linked material-cultural and social-political dimensions with teaching, research, assessment, and supervision practices during enrolment. Of particular importance to scholarship of higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa, were the participants’ perceptions that important governance and policy changes in the sector were sometimes imposed in ways that were divorced from the context of practice and its social realities. However, the study found that amidst tight working conditions academic staff were able to adopt new innovate coping practices. By applying the tenets of social practice theory to analyse the perceptions of academics, the findings of this research will contribute to massification discourse with the view of enhancing policies and practices in public institutions of higher learning while helping higher education stakeholders connect with the participants’ perceptions and experiences in order to reflect on how being an academic in a public university has been impacted by massification at the institutional level. The study further contributes to the discourse on broadening of Trow’s dominantly accepted definition of massification that is mostly applicable to the national level prevalent to countries with more resources but less so in LMIC contexts. It is anticipated that the findings of this research will contribute to and enrich the on-going debate on massification in higher education in SSA. |
