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.