41 research outputs found
Teacher as learner: a personal reflection on a short course for South African university educators
Higher education is understood to play a critical role in ongoing processes of
social transformation in post-apartheid South Africa through the production
of graduates who are critical and engaged citizens. A key challenge is that
institutions of higher education are themselves implicated in reproducing the
very hierarchies they hope to transform. In this paper, I reflect critically on my
experiences of a course aimed at transforming teaching through transforming
teachers. In this paper, I foreground my own positionality as a white female
educator as I draw on feminist theorising to reflect on my experiences as a learner
in the Community, Self and Identity course. I suggest that we need to teach in
ways that are more cognisant of the complexities of the constraints on personal
freedom in the past if we are to contribute to the development of social justice in
the future.IS
Conceptualising knowledge for access in the sciences: academic development from a social realist perspective
Whilst arguing from a social realist perspective that knowledge matters in academic development (AD) curricula, this paper addresses the question of what knowledge types and practices are necessary for enabling epistemological access. It presents a single, in-depth, qualitative case study in which the curriculum of a science AD course is characterised using Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). Analysis of the course curriculum reveals legitimation of four main categories of knowledge types along a continuum of stronger to weaker epistemic relations: disciplinary knowledge, scientific literacies knowledge, general academic practices knowledge and everyday knowledge. These categories are ‘mapped’ onto an LCT(Semantics)(how meaning relates to both context and empirical referents) topological plane to reveal a curriculum that operates in three distinct but interrelated spaces by facing towards both the field of science and the practice of academia. It is argued that this empirically derived differentiated curriculum framework offers a conceptual means for considering the notion of access to ‘powerful’ knowledge in a range of AD and mainstream contexts