Paradigms of curriculum design: Implications for South African educators

This paper provides an overview of the four major research paradigms and suggests that they provide useful ways of looking at curriculum design. It proposes that worldviews can be roughly delineated along similar categories to those of research and that the fundamental differences between these four paradigms is a major factor accounting for the different ways in which educators approach the task of curriculum design. The paper uses quotes from course evaluations to illustrate these differences and to question how educators with each of the four worldviews would use student evaluations as a means of course improvement. Key words: Research paradigms, curriculum design, student evaluations, academic development [Jnl for Language Teaching Vol.37(2) 2003: 215-223

The Dangers of Student-Centered Learning – A Caution about Blind Spots in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Student-centered learning is an increasingly popular approach that shifts the focus from the teacher to the student. The approach argues that we need to have a clear understanding of who our students are and what their needs are in order for us to provide quality education. This paper applauds the focus on the student but raises two concerns about absences in this approach. Firstly, student-centered approaches rarely consider the actual knowledge being taught and learnt. There is little consideration of how the disciplinary knowledge is constructed and what norms and values underpin such constructions. Secondly, student-centered approaches are often undertaken within the dominant autonomous discourse where student success or failure is seen to result from characteristics inherent in the student. She is understood as an individual rather than as a member of a larger social group and there is equally little acknowledgement of the socially constructed nature of universities and the practices within them

Dangers of generic pedagogical panaceas: implementing sevice-learning differently in diverse disciplines

Descriptions of service-learning in the literature tend to position it as a powerful pedagogic tool as well as an exemplar of ‘best practice’ applicable across all disciplines and institutional contexts. Furthermore service-learning is couched as a moral imperative. In the South African context, this moral imperative is translated into policy pronouncements driving institutions of higher education to demonstrate responsiveness to the transformation needs of broader society. In this article, two departments, Philosophy and Environmental Science, at one university are used as case studies to interrogate what enables the uptake of service-learning as a pedagogic tool. Drawing on the work of Fairclough, this paper identifies the dominant discourses at play and considers how they constrain or enable the uptake of service-learning. We advocate for the infusion of service-learning in curricula, but argue that institutional culture, disciplinary values and the structure of knowledge impact on its uptake and should not be dismissed in the implementation process

Understanding Higher Education: Alternative Perspectives

Drawing on the South African case, this book looks at shifts in higher education around the world in the last two decades. In South Africa, calls for transformation have been heard in the university since the last days of apartheid. Similar claims for quality higher education to be made available to all have been made across the African continent. In spite of this, inequalities remain and many would argue that these have been exacerbated during the Covid pandemic. Understanding Higher Education: Alternative Perspectives responds to these calls by arguing for a social account of teaching and learning by contesting dominant understandings of students as ‘decontextualised learners’ premised on the idea that the university is a meritocracy. This book tackles the issue of teaching and learning by looking both within and beyond the classroom. It looks at how higher education policies emerged from the notion of the knowledge economy in the newly democratic South Africa, and how national qualification frameworks and other processes brought the country more closely into conversation with the global order. The effects of this on staffing and curriculum structures are considered alongside a proposition for alternative ways of understanding the role of higher education in society

Academic literacy and the decontextualised learner

The literacy practices that are valued in the university emerge from specific disciplinary histories yet students are often expected to master these as if they were common sense and natural. This article argues that the autonomous model of literacy, which sees language use as the application of a set of neutral skills, continues to dominate in South African universities. This model denies the extent to which taking on disciplinary literacy practices can be difficult and have implications for identity. It also allows disciplinary norms to remain largely opaque and beyond critique. Furthermore, the autonomous model of literacy is often coupled with a discourse of the ‘decontextualised learner’ who is divorced from her social context, with higher education success seen to be resting largely upon attributes inherent in, or lacking from, the individual. Sadly, alternative critical social understandings have not been widely taken up despite their being well researched. Indeed, such understandings have often been misappropriated in ways that draw on critical social terminology to offer autonomous, decontextualised, remedial student interventions. We argue that these issues are implicated in students’ accusations that universities are alienating spaces

Analysing an audit cycle: a critical realist account

This paper reports on the use of a framework developed from Bhaskar's critical realism and Archer's social realism to analyse teaching- and learning-related data produced as a result of the first cycle of institutional audits in the South African higher education system. The use of the framework allows us to see what this cycle of audits did achieve, namely some change in structural systems related to teaching and learning alongside the appointment of key agents. It also allows us to see how the stagnation of sets of ideas about teaching and learning in the domain of culture may mean that an assurance of the quality of learning experiences for all students remained elusive

Book Review Quinn, L.(ed.) 2019. Re-imagining Curriculum: Spaces for Disruption

This book is in some ways a continuation of the conversation begun with Reimaging Academic Staff Development: Spaces for Disruption (2012), also edited by Lynn Quinn. But the 2019 volume takes a much wider viewpoint including, as it does, twenty chapters by forty-two authors who are academics and academic developers across institutional types from Australia, Canada, South Africa, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and the West Indies. Quinn and Vorster (2019: 2) state in Chapter One that the purpose of the book is 'to share theoretical perspectives and practical ideas for ways in which academic developers (and academic leaders) can work in partnership with lecturers and students to respond to the urgent calls for curriculum transformation and decolonisation'. This captures the four threads that run throughout the collection

A critical investigation into discourses that construct academic literacy at the Durban Institute of Technology

This thesis examines the construction of academic literacy at the Durban Institute of Technology through a discourse analysis of interviews with educators and learners. Academic literacy comprises the norms and values of higher education as manifested in discipline-specific practices. Students are expected to take on these practices, and the underlying epistemologies, without any overt instruction in, or critique of, these ways of being. Lecturer and student discourses are identified and discussed in terms of their impact on the teaching and learning process. This broad context of educator and student understandings is set against the backdrop of the changing educational policies and structures in post-Apartheid South Africa. The changes in approach to academic development are also traced as a setting for the institutional study. The discourses about the intersection between language and learning were found largely to assume that texts, be they lectures, books, assignments etc, are neutral and autonomous of their contexts. Difficulties some learners experience in accessing or producing the expected meaning of these texts were largely ascribed to their problems with language at a surface level rather than to their lack of shared norms regarding the construction of these texts. The study provides an analysis of how the ‘autonomous’ model is manifested iii and illustrates the limitations on curriculum change imposed by this understanding of how texts are constructed and interpreted. Discourses of motivation presume that students’ difficulties in taking on the literacy practices esteemed by the academy are related to attitude. This discourse assumes that learners have a fairly fixed identity, an assumption that did not bear out in the data. The multiple identities of the learners often presented tensions in the acquisition of discipline-specific academic literacies. The learners were found not to invest strongly in an academically literate identity, or were found to experience conflict between this target identity and the identities they brought with them to the institution. The elevation of academic literacy practices is questioned if the surface features, characteristic of these practices, are valued without a concomitant claim to knowledge production. The rapid emergence of a high skills discourse in Universities of Technology in South Africa is also interrogated, given the current emphasis on training for economic growth over discourses of social redress and transformation

Paul Ashwin Transforming university education, a manifesto: A review

This book is wide-ranging in its focus. It tackles student-centeredness, graduate premiums, credentialing, quality assurance, big data and rankings, and yet it offers a coherent engagement with these and many other contemporary issues. The coherence is brought about by the consistent application of one central idea throughout the book. That is that the value of higher education for both the individual and for society is that it brings the graduate into a transformational relationship with knowledge that changes their sense of who they are and thereby makes possible their doing all number of things in the world

How the Teaching Development Grant was used (and the problem of common-sense understandings of teaching and learning)

A professional qualification is required to teach at the primary and secondary level, but at the higher education level, all that is needed is content expertise. This may well contribute to South Africa’s low throughput and retention rates, in response to which, since 2004, the State has provided an amount of ZAR5.5 billion in the form of a Teaching Development Grant to address the slow completion rates. We present an analysis of the grant across the sector using a Social Realist framework. We suggest that many initiatives replicated issues identified in the literature as being of concern in that they rely on common-sense assumptions rather than theorised accounts. We also found that expertise in academic development was unevenly distributed. Given that the grant has continued, in the form of the University Capacity Development Grant, it is worth looking at how the grant has been used to ensure that future initiatives are effective