Student engagement, ideological contest and elective affinity:the Zepke thesis reviewed

This paper takes up issues raised in two articles by Nick Zepke and portrayed here as ‘the Zepke thesis’. This thesis argues that the literature on, interest in and practices around student engagement in higher education have an elective affinity with neo-liberal ideology. At one level this paper counters many of the assertions that underpin the Zepke thesis, challenging them as being based on a selective and tendentious interpretation of that literature. It also points out the misuse of the concept of ‘elective affinity’ within the thesis. However, more significantly the paper argues that an understanding of how ideas are taken up and used requires a more sophisticated ontological understanding than the Zepke thesis exhibits. That thesis has strayed into the territory of the sociology of knowledge while ignoring the accounts and debates in that area developed over more than a century

Change theory and changing practices::enhancing student engagement in universities.

This chapter argues that initiatives designed to enhance student engagement in universities need to be underpinned by an explicit and workable theory of change and change management. It sets out a social practice approach to conceptualising the operation of workgroups in higher education and goes on to elaborate the corollaries of this in terms of the management of change. The chapter concludes with a vignette designed to illustrate how these concepts might be elaborated in a departmental situation

Navigating specialty training through agency : The Fellowship of the Colleges of Medicines of South Africa

This thesis examines the experiences of trainee medical specialists in South Africa's national medical specialist certification framework, implemented in 2011. The framework aimed to integrate specialist medical education and establish a unified, quality-assured national certification system. This research project responds to the need for teaching and learning (T&L) research in higher education that considers agency, context, and different research methodologies and philosophies in its conceptualisation of T&L in this field. It is also motivated by my curiosity about how structure and agency interact in specialist medical training, given the health system and educational challenges reported in this area. The thesis seeks to explain how trainee medical specialists use agency to navigate structural constraints during specialist training. The study is grounded in the interpretive-constructivist research philosophy and employed a constructivist grounded theory methodology to investigate the interaction between trainees' agency and structural constraints in the postgraduate (PGME) training environments. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 trainees and recently qualified medical specialists in four specialist disciplines: Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Paediatrics, and Surgery in Gauteng Province, South Africa. Participants were selected using purposeful and theoretical sampling techniques. The sample size was determined based on data adequacy. This approached ensured that sufficient data was generated to address the research questions. Interviews were digitally recorded, professionally transcribed, and analysed according to the constructivist grounded theory research methodology. The study provides insights into the structural challenges faced by trainee medical specialists during their training. These challenges seek to hinder them from achieving their personal dreams or aspirations. These challenges include, among others, the organization and structure of the specialist training programs, institutional culture and practices, supervision related challenges, gender and racial discrimination. Some of these constraints (e.g. gender and racial discrimination) reflect the lack of transformation within the PGME training environments and the persistent legacy of apartheid. The study’s findings suggest that, instead of yielding to the constraints, the trainees utilised individual and collective agency to successfully navigate and overcome them in pursuit of their personal dreams/aspirations. Internal dialogues (autonomous and communicative) and social support emerged as important mediators of the trainees’ agency. The above findings are in contrast with the structuralist and individualist perspectives on the relationship between structure and agency which assigns determining power to structure and agency respectively. On the conceptual level, this thesis contributes to the conceptualization of T &L learning in PGME from the perspective of structure and agency, including using different research methodology to conceptualise the structure and agency interaction. It proposes that reflexivity, personal history, and social support are crucial factors that influence personal agency, and as such, should be taken into consideration in all endeavours aimed at comprehending the interplay between structure and agency. From a practical standpoint, this research offers valuable information on the challenges facing medical specialist training in study sites that can be utilised to improve training and to inform PGME policy direction

'A kind of exchange':learning from art and design teaching

This paper analyses pedagogic practices in four fields in art and design higher education. Its purpose is to identify the characteristics that might be called signature pedagogies in these subjects and to identify their role in student centred learning. In a time of growing economic pressure on higher education and in the face of tendencies for normative practices brought about through mechanisms such as quality assurance procedures the authors seek to articulate and recognise the issues relating to spaces and pedagogies from this discipline that might be made to wider debates about learning in the sector

Students as co-producers in a multidisciplinary software engineering project: addressing cultural distance and cross-cohort handover

This article reports on an undergraduate software engineering project in which, over a period of two years, four student teams from different cohorts developed a note-taking app for four academic clients at the students’ own university. We investigated how projects involving internal clients can give students the benefits of engaging in real software development while also giving them experience of a student-staff collaboration that has its own benefits for students, academics, and the university more broadly. As the university involved is a Sino-Foreign university located in China, where most students are Chinese and most teaching staff are not, this ‘student as co-producer’ approach interacts with another feature of the project: cultural distance. Based on analysis of notes, reports, interviews, and focus groups, we recommend that students should be provided with communicative strategies for dealing with academics as clients; universities should develop policies on ownership of student-staff collaborations; and projects should include a formalised handover process. This article can serve as guidance for educators considering a ‘students as co-producers’ approach for software development projects

Understanding the everyday designer in organisations

This paper builds upon the existing concept of an everyday designer as a non-expert designer who carries out design activities using available resources in a given environment. It does so by examining the design activities undertaken by non-expert, informal, designers in organisations who make use of the formal and informal technology already in use in organisations while designing to direct, influence, change or transform the practices of people in the organisation. These people represent a cohort of designers who are given little attention in the literature on information systems, despite their central role in the formation of practice and enactment of technology in organisations. The paper describes the experiences of 18 everyday designers in an academic setting using three concepts: everyday designer in an organisation, empathy through design and experiencing an awareness gap. These concepts were constructed through the analysis of in-depth interviews with the participants. The paper concludes with a call for tool support for everyday designers in organisations to enable them to better understand the audience for whom they are designing and the role technology plays in the organisation