Abstract
During the 2020-2021 academic year, tutors were forced to go online to do their duties as the whole country was in a national lockdown with limited face-to-face contact permitted due to the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. This study sought to investigate and understand the experiences of education tutors and how they support and were supported during the mandatory online learning, as their work is crucial to the functioning of higher education in South Africa. Under the pandemic regulations, the choice of research methods was limited to ‘distance’ research. I, therefore, used a generic qualitative approach and collected data from 13 tutors and the tutor coordinator in the education faculty at an urban Johannesburg University. Interviews were conducted online and via WhatsApp, a conversational style of interview delved into issues around support, the main questions looking into how they supported students, how they were supported by the institution, and the strategies and tools they used for more engagement and critical thinking in online tutorials. The findings speak to high levels of agency and accommodation by the institution and tutors to sanction other technologies due the challenges of the university’s learning management system, BlackBoard. Tutors use of indigenous languages and WhatsApp ensure epistemic and ontological access for vulnerable students. There was an ethic of care in support, which was experienced and given by the education tutors at the urban Johannesburg university. The use of a decolonial lens was an effort to remain critical, even as the research validates claims that the university has become one of the top ranking in Africa, notwithstanding the neo-liberal economic constraints, legacies of Apartheid and the pandemic. The benefits of this research is that it contributes to the documentation and archive of the voices of a pivotal workforce, the tutors, in the higher education setting.