Towards a Realistic Description of Competence for New Radiology Graduates in South Africa

In this article, we trouble the notion of competence in current use to describe new radiological graduates. Against the backdrop of inequalities, a diverse set of experiences and scarce human and clinical resources alongside a lack of criterion-referenced descriptions, we argue that ‘competence’ is open to various interpretations and may unrealistically, include skills that an incumbent may not have acquired but is assumed to have. In this position piece, we suggest that a model to clarify radiological competence is possible by rearticulating Dreyfus and Dreyfus’ model of skills development. We posit that a re-articulated model could be useful to distinguish the nature of expert from novice radiological competence, using perceptual skill as an example. We conclude with an invitation to engage in a conversation with a wider audience to arrive at a consensual framework for a realistic description of competence for new radiologists

A paradox of knowing : teachers' knowing about students.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2008.This study is a critical exploration and post-structural explanation of how and what teachers ' know about students. The intention has been to explore teachers' knowing beyond taken-for-granted iterations, beliefs and conceptions of those they teach and to theorise the nature of teachers' knowing. The route to insight involved deploying critical ethnography to produce data over a six-month period. The study site, a secondary school I named Amethyst, is an apartheid-era creation. Since 1990, political change has introduced uncertainties of various sorts and has destabilised the ethos and culture of the school: conflicts between teachers and students, conflicts amongst students' peers, students' participation in activities that are unacceptable and harmful, severe lack of funds to meet the financial needs of the school and lack of human and teaching resources. It is within such an uncertain space that I produced data to interrogate teachers ' knowing about students. At the site, data production was impeded by various confounding factors that eroded trust between the participants and me (the researcher). Traditionally, an ethnographic approach entails three kinds of observation: descriptive observations at the beginning, followed by focused observations narrowed to the concerns of the study and finally, selective observations to consolidate focused observations. For the data production process to continue, the researcher-researched relationship had to be assessed and reconfigured from a critical perspective. In this study the above-mentioned observations have been renamed and reconceptualised from participants' perspectives as: an innocuous phase, an invasive phase and a reciprocity phase. Furthermore, an explication is provided of how research reflexivity shaped the reconceptualisation and the data production processes. Usual forms of data production were abandoned and replaced by a conscious effort to reveal my story to participants eventuating in the form of an exchange of data - my story for their stories. Reciprocal participation enabled data production to be completed and two sets of data were generated: teachers ' stories and students ' stories. Eight teachers ' stories derived from teachers' to teachers' students' teachers' interviews were woven into texts whilst fourteen students' autobiographical accounts comprising lived ex peri ences were re-presented as they narrated them. Juxtapos ing stud ents' accounts with teachers' knowing has yielded three revelations. Firstly, unveil ing how teachers constitute students through knowing them in particul ar ways. Second ly, it reveals how students' constitution as subjects at home and at school a llow them to be known in parti cular ways and thirdl y, revealing the ways students consc iously prevent teachers from knowing about their li ved ex peri ences. The analyses of both sets of stories have dee pened understanding of teachers' knowing, taking it beyond teachers' persona l be lief systems. Plac ing both sets of data und er a criti cal gaze has yie lded three ways of teacher knowing (so li cited, un solic ited and common) and fi ve kind s of teacher knowing (rac ia li sed, gendered, cultu ra l, c lassed, and profess ional). From th e analyses, I have inferred that teachers' knowing about students, when j uxtaposed with and med iated by students' li ved experi ences, is flawed, incomplete, parti al, complex, contradictory, and uni-dimens ional. I put fo rward a th es is predicated on two abstractions from th e anal yses: one, that teachers ' knowing is dangerous because it prope ls teachers towards act ions that can result in d isastrous consequences for students; and two, that not knowing is use ful because it is a more criti ca lly and soc ia lly j ust approach to teaching as it a llows teachers to functi on without succumbing to marginali sing the non-traumati sed and those without chall enges at the persona l level. In effect it tran slates into practices that treat all students equally in an academic settin g, so that in one in stantiati on, students are dri ven to stri ve for academic ac hievement in stead of focusing on emotiona lly debilitating di stractions th at cannot be resolved by teachers' knowing, understanding, and empathy. Not knowing, I argue, offers viable poss ibilities for working with students whose li ves are compromised by low socioeconomic cond iti ons and pro bl ematic family re lati ons. This in vers ion of common-sense instincts about teachers ' knowing and not knowing IS theorised by deploying a topologica l metaphor, the Mii bius strip, to demonstrate that teachers' knowing and not knowing about stud ents are not polar oppos ites on a continuum, but are paradoxically, cohabitants of a common space, refl ections of each other, res iding in each other. Additiona lly, I charge that teachin g and caring, mediated by knowing, form the foundation of teachers' work, and argue that at Amethyst, teaching and caring cannot be activated simul ta neo us ly within an indi vidual teacher. Kcy words: critica l ethnography, teachers' knowing, paradox of knowin g

Crises, Contestations, Contemplations and Futures in Higher Education

The theme of this special edition once again derives from the Annual Teaching and Learning Conference hosted by the University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2017.For ten years (2007 - 2016), the conference has engaged a cauldron of issues that emerged in Higher Education, South Africa. During that decade, the academy charted a path of what it deemed to be relevant concerns around curriculum transformation and innovation, African perspectives and paradigms, reconstruction, internationalisation, policy analyses, research and teaching excellence, and professional development, all of which were suggestive of deep engagement with issues that mattered to higher education. The student uprisings (#RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall) disturbed the reverie that had lulled the academy’s senses to student concerns and aspirations. In fact, higher education students made explicit the ways in which the academy was complicit in the reproduction of inequalities and the marginalisation of local values and contexts. The outcome of academia’s lethargy to action and its propensity to ‘talk’ rather than ‘act’ to enable relevant and appropriate transformation, has had devastating consequences, culmina-ting in violent uprisings in South Africa. Simultaneously, though, it has also created new opportunities and improved access to higher education for those marginalised by race and class

Editorial: Can Policy Learn from Practice?

At the best of times, higher education is known to be in a state of unbridled turbulence. That it should be any less so, remains (thankfully) a point of unresolved contention. What we do know from the South African experience, is that during times of discomfort, institutions take refuge in policy formulation, policy reform, and less frequently, policy dialogue. This was evident in the decades preceding what has been typecast as the ‘pre-democratic era’, when education policy units were the heartbeats of universities, some boldly located in the portals of campuses – supported by their university communities, others hovelled in more perilous enclaves, often at the mercy of the state security apparatus. Singularly and collectively, these units exposed the brutality of a divided and divisive education system, characterized by governmentality, geared for social engineering. Policy units envisioned a new future of possibility in which universities nurtured human talent for the greater good.In the years following ‘liberation’, policy units redirected their energies from activism and advocacy to an evidence-based approach to systemic reform, providing the signposts for reform and identifying benchmarks to measure the success of transformation agendas. During this period, many of the policy units quietly faded into the landscape, being either absorbed into mainstream academia or into government departments. The ensuing period was one of vigorous policy development by government, accompanied by an emerging evaluation culture, often associated with performativity

Advancing Teaching Innovation and Research Excellence in Higher Education

The theme of this special edition derives from the 10th Annual Teaching and Learning Conference, which focussed on advancing teaching innovation and research excellence in higher education. We were privileged to have hosted one of the world’s most eminent scholars of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), Lee Shuman. Offering profound insights into the intersection of research and practice within the landscape of the Academy, Shulman asked: ‘What is “evidence” for the improvement of teaching and learning in an unscripted and highly contextualized world?’ He argued that ‘whether describing good medical practice, educational design, or management in business, experts insist that judgments and decisions are evidence-based’.Setting up for scrutiny the distinctions amongst evidence, conjecture, speculation, anecdote or fantasy, he challenged us to consider how we use, acquire, create or defend what counts as ‘evidence’ in our pedagogies and our designs. The question of evidence is particularly relevant in the context of challenging the archetypical university teacher who is expected to conduct research, teach, and perform community service. As teaching rises beyond the status of the ‘poor cousin’ of research, academics increasingly have an obligetion to make public the ‘evidence’ that characterises teaching excellence. Performance metrics no longer suffice as indicators of excellence, nor do self-study narratives

Examining pre-service teachers’ subject matter knowledge of school mathematics concepts

This article explores the nature of the subject matter knowledge that pre-service mathematics teachers’ possess by analysing its components, namely, common content knowledge and specialised content knowledge of the high school mathematics curriculum. The data was generated from 59 final year pre-service mathematics teachers’ written responses, which tested three sets of competencies: solving problems on Functions and Inequalities; analysing and interpreting learners’ errors; and their expertise in allocating marks to questions. Analysis of the written responses identified five categories of response patterns and thereafter individual interviews were conducted with four participants to discuss the responses. The results revealed that while the participants were competent solvers of school mathematics problems, they were unable to analyse and interpret learners’ errors for diagnostic purposes. This suggests that teacher preparation should develop pre-service mathematics teachers’ specialised content knowledge. The findings also confirmed the value of learner error analysis as an alternative strategy to cultivate the specialised content knowledge of future mathematics teachers

Teacher knowing or not knowing about students

Based on a critical ethnography of an urban high school that exemplifies the many changes of post-apartheid South Africa, this paper presents data about two teachers who propose opposing perspectives and practices of knowing students. The analysis of the teachers' narratives shows that they came to know their students through solicited, unsolicited and professional knowing processes. A surprise finding for successful teaching, in what may be considered difficult yet not uncommon conditions of schooling in South Africa, is that knowing about students can be dangerous, and that not knowing students can be useful for teachers. These counter-intuitive findings are generative of questions requiring further exploration

Excavating memories: A retrospective analysis of mathematics teachers’ foregrounds

This article offers a retrospective analysis of mathematics teachers’ experiences as learners in school to examine their foregrounds. Based on Skovsmose’s notion, foregrounds are perceptions of possibilities, impossibilities, hope and despair made by an individual whose life chances are compromised by socio-political adversities and economic deprivation. Since foregrounds are imagined it is not possible to be certain about how the future is realised without engaging in a longitudinal study spanning decades. One way to attempt to do so is through memory work, that is, by excavating the memories of persons who are already living in their foreground. Three mathematics teachers were recruited through snowball sampling to share their memories of teachers of mathematics, learning mathematics in schools and how they envisioned the future. The analysis revealed how exposure to mathematics teaching and learning when they were learners is implicated in shaping the foregrounds of teachers, and the ways in which teacher foregrounds are connected to personal and national development. The participants’ narratives confirmed that, although a foreground is shaped by prevailing conditions, a view to a viable future requires an optimism that goes beyond present situations