Towards a Model of Mentoring in South African Higher Education

The imperative to replenish the South African higher education professoriate has inspired varied responses, ranging from aggressive recruitment of post graduate students to the induction of academics from outside the academy. One such response is the Staffing South Africa’s Universities Framework (SSAUF), which recognises the challenges facing early career academics (ECAs), especially as they relate to higher education pedagogies, curriculum develop-ment, supervising students, and developing scholarship in teaching. Notable in this framework is the absence of any substantive discussion around mentorship, and its potential to socialise emerging academics into the distinctive culture of the academy in all its manifestations, especially what it means to be an effective university teacher. This article surveys some of the literature on mentoring in higher education, as a precursor to introducing a proposed mentoring model, developed for a South African university. Acknowledging the complexity inherent in the practice of mentoring and the attendant power relations, the proposed model is a departure from the individualistic performance management approach typically associated with the dominant master-apprenticeship model. Instead, the authors offer a non-hierarchical, co-constructed menu of possibilities based on negotiated reflection, arising out of the specific, situated contexts of mentor and mentee

Assessment and Cognitive Demand in Higher Education Accounting Textbooks

Driven by requirements prescribed by professional bodies, the accounting curriculum in many higher education institutions in South Africa and Nigeria demands high cognitive attributes from graduates. Advancing the proposition that assessment drives learning, the authors contend that cognitive demand can be determined by analysing the assessment tasks in students’ textbooks. Using a conceptual framework based on Bloom’s revised taxonomy and levels of difficulty theory, this article analyses the cognitive demand of assessment tasks in selected chapters of level one Financial Accounting textbooks in South Africa and Nigeria. The findings indicate that the bulk of the assessment tasks in the selected texts are pitched within middle and lower cognitive hybrids with limited tasks at higher levels. The article offers new insights into graduate attributes, assessment tasks and cognitive demand. It also suggests an alternative approach to assessing cognitive skills, specifically within the discipline of accounting to ensure a closer fit between training and the demands of the work place

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

Does financial assistance undermine academic success? Experiences of ‘at risk’ students in a South African university

In the current #FeesMustFall activism, financial relief and support for higher education students are promoted as strategies to enhance access, persistence and progression in higher education. However, despite the increases in government and allied funding for higher education students, high-attrition and unsustainably low graduation rates persist. This reality has dire consequences for individual students, their families and the capacity of higher education to meet the development needs of the country. This article draws on data from an ethnographic study which used interpretive methods to explore the academic experiences of South African university students who despite receiving financial assistance for their studies, continued to be classified ‘at-risk’ of academic failure and exclusion. The findings suggest that an ostensibly positive outcome (such as receiving financial assistance) may have unintended negative academic consequences, including increasing students’ risk of academic exclusion, by virtue of the tendency for such funds to be utilised to ameliorate family poverty. While the cultural capital framework is a valuable tool in understanding student spending behaviours from economically advantaged communities, its explanatory power diminishes when applied to students from low socio-economic backgrounds, who manage competing demands on their student funding. The authors signal the need for higher education institutions to design alternative funding models and interventions to curb financial illiteracy in order to minimise the potential for misappropriation of financial assistance, which compromises academic success

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

Student Academic Monitoring and Support in Higher Education: A Systems Thinking Perspective

This article interrogates an Academic Monitoring and Support system (AMS), which was designed to enhance first-year student progression at a South African University. Institutional research evidence produced through engagement with AMS practitioners and university leadership, analysed through the lens of Systems Thinking, reveals a well-intentioned system, whose efficacy is compromised by systemic incoherence. The data suggests that loosely defined roles and responsibilities of AMS practitioners, their level of preparedness to provide academic support, their conditions of employment and job profiles, all act in concert to compromise the intended outcomes of the programme. The authors contend that opportunities do exist to re-engineer the Academic Development system to provide coherent, effective and sustainable support for students ‘at risk’

Towards a Conceptual Framework for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning Dialogues in Higher Education

This paper explores the development and early validation of a conceptual framework for learning-centred teaching by six Teaching Advancement at Universities (TAU) Fellows and their mentor, each representing a different higher education institution and a different discipline. A grounded theory approach was used to construct the framework and its potential utility value was explored though the use of six teaching innovation projects conducted in undergraduate South African university programmes in law, medicine, education, and the arts. The project revealed that interdisciplinary dialogic spaces can be initiated and nurtured through opportunities offered by communities of practice such as the TAU Fellowship when academics suspend their exclusive disciplinary preoccupations to open up possibilities for a generative, emancipatory scholarship. We argue that the conceptual framework is useful to facilitate and promote dialogues across and between the multiple discipline specific ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies offered in higher education

The Illuminative Potential of Organizational Ethnographies

Evaluation studies, especially of South African educational institutions and non-governmental organisations offering educational programmes have been criticised for focussing inadequately on the ethnographic and anthropological dimensions of organisations. The dominant approaches to evaluation have been structuralist and empirical-rational in orientation, serving narrow bureaucratic functions for funders and donors, based on self reports by programme participants. One way of resolving the dilemma of unreliable evaluation reports is producing richly contextualised organisational ethnographies which illuminate organisational contexts beyond superficial analyses. What are the potential benefits of an organisational ethnography, and what are the epistemological and ethical implications of such an endeavour? I shall attempt to answer these questions by drawing on an organisational ethnography of a South African non-governmental organisation offering language teacher development programmes, as I trace its mutating identity over three decades. I use insights derived from the traditions of empowerment evaluation (Fetterman, 1999) and illuminative evaluation (Parlett & Hamilton, 1976) as theoretical lenses to appraise the value of narratives in understanding organisational behaviour. Further, I appropriate Discourse Analysis to interrogate selected narrative data as a methodological lens in organisational analysis, and reflect on my experience of engaging in such a project. In the latter part of the chapter, I revisit the methodological wisdom of engaging in an institutional ethnography, highlighting some of the ethical, representational and epistemological dilemmas in negotiating a non-conventional approach. I conclude the paper with brief allusion to the potential value of organisational ethnographies in mediating an emerging performativity driven higher education culture

Student experiences of the PhD cohort model: Working within or outside communities of practice?

The Collaborative Cohort Model (CCM) of higher degrees supervision is gaining increasing popularity internationally and, in some contexts, replacing the conventional Apprentice Master Model (AMM). Among the motivations advanced for this shift is that the CCM improves completion rates and enhances the quality of research supervision. This exploratory paper interrogates these claims through the eyes of students, by documenting and analysing their experiences of the CCM currently used by the Faculty of Education, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), South Africa. This form of supervision integrates the traditional master-apprentice supervision with cohort seminar sessions. The traditional supervision involves students working one-to-one with what is referred to, in this instance, as the appointed supervisor/s while the cohort seminars draw on the expertise of a team of experienced and novice supervisors referred to, in this instance, as the cohort supervisors. In addition, students benefit from contributions offered by peers within the cohort as they are guided through the various phases in the research process. This paper engages with the experiences of a small sample of students, appraising the key principles of collaboration and collegiality which are integral to the success of the cohort model. The study reveals abundant evidence of successful collaboration and collegiality among students and between the cohort and appointed supervisors. However, there are also instances of students in the cohort working in isolation and supervisors working counter to each other. Through engaging with student experiences of the cohort model, this study offers critical new insights into the strengths, limitations and challenges of using the model to address the unsatisfactory PhD productivity rate in South Africa