Teaching and Learning Theories in Higher Education and its Impacts on Africa's Development: A Personal Reflection

In their pursuit of engaging with teaching and learning of an optimal quality, academics employ pedagogical practices that are best designed to be of maximum benefit to the main stakeholders (participants; society and potential employers) in the teaching and learning domain. The pedagogical practices used by academics, consciously, subconsciously or even unconsciously, emanate from established learning theories such as behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism. The objective of this study is to explicate the learning theories deployable in the teaching of a topic inherent in a selected module. This becomes very significant since it compels self-interogation of teaching and learning practices in the Higher Education context and to also establish the idiosyncratic learning theories underpininning pedagogical practices. This enables a personal reflection on the the appropriateness or otherwisie of the type of learning activities and how these align with the learning theories and to reflect on the benefits and limitations thereof.