This paper demonstrates how the use of adequate descriptive feedback on assessment enhances the teaching, learning and academic performance of learners of auditing. Literature shows that this mode of feedback is transformative as it relies heavily on the particular, specific and localised learning styles of the individual learner. It also decolonises learning because learners are required to capitalise on their own meaningful indigenous strategies of learning. In order to generate data, the study used Critical Accounting Research as the theoretical framework, which emphasises the importance of delving deeper into socioeconomic contexts to understand how good performance is created and sustained in the teaching and learning of auditing. Focus was on a selected school in the Free State where one grade 10 class, which used conventional feedback, was compared to another grade 10 class where descriptive feedback was used in the teaching of accounting. Tape recording of lessons in the respective classes was done. These were transcribed verbatim and critical discourses analysis was used to make sense of the data. The findings reveal that learners in the latter class were empowered to be critical and creative in their knowledge of auditing while the former continued to use rote and memorising approaches. Descriptive feedback created transformative spaces in the auditing classroom, made learners aware of multiple positions that can be assumed on any matter, ensured inclusivity of many forms of knowledges and showed that effective and continuous feedback was essential in discharging many misconceptions in auditing. The recommendation is that more classes of auditing should use descriptive feedback to transform and decolonise the learning of auditing.

Teacher education in early childhood learning environments (ECLE) is a generally neglected space in teaching and learning, more so when the focus is on relationality and sustainability. ECLE refers to the Care and Education of children between 2-4 years of age. The focus of this paper is on ECLE from a post-humanist perspective, which goes in tandem with UNESCO’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Emphasis is on inclusive economic development through environmentally sustainable social inclusion for all. Relationality has been chosen because of its power to advance the deconstruction of the hitherto taken for granted canons of humanism and enlightenment that promote hierarchies in knowledge and its production. These hierarchies disregard the voices of the vulnerable and the excluded, in terms of social class and other markers like age, but most importantly their erroneously assumed lack of knowledge. To date, the voices of the aspirant teachers in ECLE, as well as those of the children and parents, are non-existent when teacher education programmes are designed and implemented. This paper reveals that including the voices of these beneficiary communities enhances the quality of the discourse, theorisation and praxis in the provision of ECLE, as well as in the crafting of relevant teacher education programmes. Thus, the design and delivery of a programme is better based on the relationalities among humans, animals and plants; and between them and inanimate entities like infrastructure and resources. The relationality among all of these in the crafting of the beyond human is enhanced using advanced digital technologies. A relational approach recognises our entanglement with our entire universe in a manner that does not centre on identity. Quality therefore is about the ever-increasing complexity of diffractions of multi-layered and multi-perspective engagements across borders.

This paper explores how quality assessment is maintained in the COVID-19 protocols mandatory remote teaching and learning higher education environments. The argument being pursued is that, despite the pandemic, the e-assessment ensures the sustainability of quality thereof even in remote teaching and learning environments. We compare e-assessments in these environments to how conventional assessments happen in in-person contexts. In this comparison, we unearth several challenges afflicting the conventional in-person assessments. These range from ill-prepared lecturers sometimes, who do not take time to formulate meaningful assessment tasks, to students who demand special treatment just because they are physically present and are able to 'bully' lecturers. In the COVID-19 mandatory remote e-assessments teaching and learning environments, despite the attended challenges of costs to install the Learning Management System and train academics, there seem to be many more positive outcomes. These include lecturers' ability to ensure that all students enrolled in the module read the materials provided, spend enough time doing so, and engage meaningfully with the learning subject content. That feedback is provided almost immediately to ensure quality in remote teaching and learning environments. Design research principles that serve as the overarching theoretical framework for this paper are used to identify the challenges to e-assessments, the responses to these challenges, the contextual factors that make the responses effective, those that pose threats thereto and how they are resolved and circumvented.

This study aimed to design a strategy to improve the academic performance of early childhood education and care (ECEC) learners in mathematics, and thence accounting, in a sustainable manner. Accounting is not taught as a separate subject to mathematics at the ECEC level, therefore we focused on those aspects of mathematics that link directly with central learning areas in accounting. We used participatory action research, and posthuman theory framed the study. Multistakeholder participation was used to encourage five key skills of the 21st century (collaboration, communication, compassion, critical thinking, and creativity) in the learners as co-researchers in order to promote sustainability in their learning of mathematics in ECEC as basis for accounting in the future.

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