JSAA Vol. 8 Issue 2 "Deepening scholarship on the first-year experience" was published in December 2020 with the following Editorial by Prof. Teboho Moja, Dr Birgit Schreiber, and I:
"The year 2020 is a year that we will remember globally in higher education as having been most unusual, indeed, traumatic. If at the beginning of 2020 the year had a hopeful ring with plenty; as it comes to an end it is hard to just try and make sense of the extent that the experience of higher education has been changed so incisively within a short time for both staff and students. And the signs are already there that the post-COVID‑19 period will not be short of new challenges either. Challenges like addressing the increased mental health issues students suffer due to the crisis, illness, loss of loved ones and more. Moreover, there are many student groups whose ability to learn has been severely impacted by the pandemic and lockdown, including students from poor households, rural students, and students with special needs. As we noted in our last editorial, for these students, the campus environment and the services offered by Student Affairs departments is normally able to level the ‘playing field’ of learning. It will require yet another extra effort by student affairs professionals, academics, administrators, fellow students and the communities and families to ensure that these students can catch up and have access to the same quality and quantity of learning opportunities within supportive contexts over the course of their studies as others who have been less impacted.
The first-year experience (FYE) holds for many student affairs professionals a special place. One group of students that has been particularly impacted by the campus and national lockdowns imposed by the global COVID‑19 pandemic have been first-years. For much of the year, COVID‑19 has robbed this cohort of first‑year students of the thrills and fears, joys and cries, of a ‘normal’ first year. In those universities that start their academic year the second half of the year, the impact has been less profound. But in higher education systems like South Africa’s, where the academic year starts in the course of February, first‑year students experienced just a few weeks of induction into university life on campus.
Indeed, JSAA has been proudly associated with a number of guest editors over the years, starting with “Student power in African higher education”, JSAA 3(1) of 2015, which was jointly guest edited by Thierry Luescher, Manja Klemenčič and James Otieno Jowi. This was followed by “Tutoring and mentoring”, guest edited by Nelia Frade in 2017 and published as JSAA 5(2), and most recently JSAA 7(1) on “Space, language, identity and the student movement” guest edited by Philippa Tumubweinee and Thierry Luescher. A guest-edited issue allows JSAA and the guest editor to focus attention on a specific theme and enables a particular kind of depth of scholarship. It mobilises a number of researchers, employing a range of research methodologies and frameworks to focus on that theme, thus advancing scholarship in this domain. This, too, is what Annsilla Nyar has done with this her third guest-edited issue, and JSAA is proud to be playing a part in developing the scholarship on the first-year experience (FYE).
In addition to the eight research articles and the reflective practice article on the FYE guest edited by Annsilla Nyar, this issue includes a campus report on the Stellenbosch University Experiential Education Conference which explored the intersection of experiential learning with student success. This was a particularly timeous and topical conference as we are moving into an era of distance- and online-learning which raises major concerns about the developmental experiences in the social and community domain of higher education.
