Influencers of the Lecture Experience for Future Helping Professionals The Time and Need for Change Has Come Jaishika Seedat and Thobeka Nkomo Contents 1 Introduction ................................................................................... 2 2 Contextualizing Speech Pathology and Social Work Degrees and the Need for Transformation ............................................................................ 4 3 When Was the Need for Transformation in Higher Education Realized? ................... 5 4 Why Transform These Degrees? ............................................................. 9 5 What Needed Transforming in Social Work and Speech Therapy and Evidence of Change ..................................................................................... 10 6 Conclusion .................................................................................... 16 7 Cross-References ............................................................................. 17 References ........................................................................................ 18 Abstract The evolution of the helping professions in South Africa has triggered a demand for transformation in the lecture space. Reasons for this evolution include the downfall of apartheid, free healthcare, poor access to services, human resource constraints, increasing demand for service delivery, financial constraints, and a healthcare system that is in transit in its move towards a national health insurance framework. The training and education of helping professionals require that graduates leaving academic institutions are responsive to the changing needs of society and clients at the receiving end of health service provision. Systemic changes, the need for a decolonized curriculum and model of teaching, and a demand for diversity among professionals have meant that the dialogue, physical space, and composition of the lecture room today are considerably different from J. Seedat Speech Pathology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa e-mail: jaishika.seedat@wits.ac.za T. Nkomo (*) Social Work, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa e-mail: thobeka.nkomo@wits.ac.za © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 R. Baikady et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Global Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87624-1_46-1 1