Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices: Towards Professional Learning [1 ed.] 9781991201218, 9781991201201

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Professor Vuyisile T. Msila Researcher at the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs, University of South Africa.

Teboho Pitso holds a PhD in creativity and innovation read at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). His research interests involve higher education curriculum as well as teaching and learning transformation within the framework of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship, areas he has published widely on and gained international repute. He serves in multiple international committees that drive, amongst other thing, technological innovation, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and higher education transformation in the age of deep learning. His recent research interest involves examining the collaborative potential of human Ingenuity and intelligent technologies in ideational bricolage, that is, in generation of unique ideas under resource-constrained conditions. He is currently leading the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Vaal University of Technology (VUT).

Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

This book offers insightful reflections on academic development practices. The contributors engage the reader painstakingly in the dynamics of professional learning and effective teaching. This volume facilitates the examination of the need for reflection that leads to professional maturity. All educational institutions seek teachers who continuously search for effective strategies in improving student success. The contributors uncover a variety of approaches as they evince proven suggestions. The chapters are refreshing and edifying. This book is essential for all teachers, lecturers and trainers who want to improve their teaching practice immensely.

Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices Towards professional learning

Ed. | Teboho Pitso

ISBN 978-1-991201-20-1

EDITOR 9 781991 201201

Teboho Pitso

Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices Towards professional learning

EDITOR

Teboho Pitso

Contextualised critical reflections on academic development practices: Towards professional learning Published by African Sun Media under the SUN PReSS imprint All rights reserved Copyright © 2021 African Sun Media and the editor This publication was subjected to an independent double-blind peer evaluation by the publisher. The editor and the publisher have made every effort to obtain permission for and acknowledge the use of copyrighted material. Refer all enquiries to the publisher. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic, photographic or mechanical means, including photocopying and recording on record, tape or laser disk, on microfilm, via the Internet, by e-mail, or by any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission by the publisher. Views reflected in this publication are not necessarily those of the publisher. First edition, first print 2021 ISBN 978-1-991201-20-1 ISBN (e-book) 978-1-991201-21-8 https://doi.org/10.18820/9781991201218 Set in Lato Regular 9/12 Cover design, typesetting and production by African Sun Media SUN PReSS is an imprint of AFRICAN SUN MeDIA. Scholarly, professional and reference works are published under this imprint in print and electronic formats. This publication can be ordered from: [email protected] Takealot: bit.ly/2monsfl Google Books: bit.ly/2k1Uilm africansunmedia.store.it.si (e-books) Amazon Kindle: amzn.to/2ktL.pkL Visit africansunmedia.co.za for more information.

Contents Illustrations ............................................................................................................................................................................. i Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................................................... iii Foreword ............................................................................................................................................................................... v

01

Approaches to Academic Excellence in Higher Education Teboho Pitso

1

THEME 1. TEACHING AND TECHNOLOGY SUPPORT

02

Evaluating concepts of teaching excellence in higher education

03

Student evaluation of teacghing (SET) as a means of improving teaching: A critique

04

Implementing an LMS in a low maturity context: Towards an effective model

05

Implementing blended learning: A faculty-based approach

06

Institutional mapping and scaffolding of entrepreneurship education

Masebala Tjabane

Bruce Matee

37



Pauline Machika

Moegamat Dolley

Teboho Pitso

55

73

91

111

THEME 2. STUDENT SUPPORT

07

SI-based tutorial and mentoring programme: A model

08

Fostering undergraduate mathematical proficiency: My liminal space

09

Student orientation: Towards an extended faculty-based model

Linda Mandewo, Sibongile Hlubi and Tebogo Kekana

127

Jeremiah Madzimure

145

Corneli van der Walt

161

THEME 3. ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT: PROSPECTS AND POSSIBLE FUTURE TRAJECTORIES

10

Emerging paradigms for academic development: Concepts, context, content

11

Epilogue

Teboho Pitso

183

Teboho Pitso

215

F

Illustrations Tables 1.1

Approaches to teaching in higher education..................................................................................... 7

2.1

Earlier concepts of effective teaching.................................................................................................. 41

2.2

Reflective teaching as a harbinger of teaching excellence........................................................... 43

2.3

Comparative challenges facing higher education............................................................................ 44

2.4

Understanding teaching excellence in higher education.............................................................. 46

2.5

Swedish concepts of teaching excellence............................................................................................ 46

2.6

Modes of teaching excellence.................................................................................................................. 47

2.7

Comparison of VUT, HELTASA and the Swedish perspective on teaching quality............. 50

3.1

Areas identified for improvement in teaching and assessment................................................. 68

7.1

SI principles in VUT tutoring and mentoring programmes.......................................................... 135

7.2

Activities of the mentoring programme during the academic year.......................................... 137

7.3

Summary of challenges experienced in the tutoring and mentoring programmes............. 139

8.1

Pass rate and success rate for Mathematics I, 2006–2016......................................................... 153

9.1

Dropout rate per campus of first-time entering students, 2012–2016................................. 165

9.2

Core components of the VUT orientation programme (2015)................................................... 171

10.1

The epistemic positions that model higher education paradigms............................................. 196

10.2

Summary of higher education paradigms and areas of potential academic development theorisation......................................................................................................................... 207

10.3

The emerging higher education paradigm.......................................................................................... 210

Figures 1.1

Stages of reflection....................................................................................................................................... 12

1.2

Scholarly teaching model........................................................................................................................... 14

1.3

Critical reflection model............................................................................................................................ 20

1.4

The epistemic spectrum............................................................................................................................. 25

1.5

The TRIZ inventive problem-solving model....................................................................................... 28

3.1

Student evaluation of lecturer teaching competence.................................................................... 66

3.2

Student evaluation of module quality................................................................................................... 67

3.3

Student evaluation of lecturer assessment competence.............................................................. 67

5.1

Attendee feedback on most valuable aspects of the workshop................................................. 98

i

5.2

Attendee feedback on disappointing/improvable aspects of the workshop........................ 99

5.3

Attendee feedback on instructor communication skills............................................................... 99

5.4

Attendee feedback on the pace of the workshop............................................................................ 100

5.5

Cycle process for implementation of blended learning................................................................. 108

6.1

The innovation model ................................................................................................................................. 120

7.1

The SI-based training model..................................................................................................................... 134

7.2

Our model for integrated student support ........................................................................................ 139

ii

Acknowledgements As part of its efforts to nudge VUT towards becoming an entrepreneurial university by 2030, the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) partnered with the Centre for Academic Development (CAD) to probe and support an innovation-driven curriculum as well as teaching and learning that fosters entrepreneurial spirit. CIE is acknowledged for initiating the project, contributing an editor and funding the publication costs. CAD and the then DVC: Academic and Research, Professor Kuzvinetsa Dzvimbo funded the writing retreats that resulted in this book. It is hoped that similar projects will be undertaken with colleagues in faculties and cognate units.

iii

Foreword Professor Thomas Olsson Centre for Engineering Education Lund University Sweden This book is about important aspects of teaching and learning in higher education. You can find numerous similar books within this area, so what makes this book special? Academics who all are practitioners at Vaal University of Technology (VUT) in South Africa have written the chapters. They take personal standpoints and base the chapters on their own practices and professional development and in many cases present their own original research findings. The book gives you an insight into academic development at VUT but is at the same time linked to the international community and to the scholarship of teaching and learning. The readers of the book will experience new ideas embedded in an interesting framework with individual and institutional perspectives from VUT, related to Africa and the world. The ten chapters of the book deal with ways to professionalise and to enhance the quality of teaching, entrepreneurship education and aspects of supporting the students’ learning. Teaching excellence is acknowledged worldwide as an important aspect of academic development and many universities have implemented different reward systems to support quality assurance and development of teaching and student learning. This book will give the readers additional perspectives on teaching excellence, also from personal and African viewpoints, and furthermore engages them in a critical discussion of students’ evaluation of teaching in relation to teaching excellence. The use of ICT in higher education is right now at the forefront around the world due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Two chapters, written before the virus hit the world, are devoted to this issue from the perspective of a university until now with a slow pace of implementing ICT. Entrepreneurship education is especially important from the developmental perspective of South Africa and the book suggests how academic development could support an essentially different type of teaching and learning. Academic developers work with staff development and support teachers in their important task to support, help and stimulate the students’ efforts to learn the subject they study. The teachers are the disciplinary experts and they perform the teaching, which is complex and depends on a variety of circumstances that affect the student, the subject and the teaching situation. The final chapters of the book focus on supporting student learning. Although there are significant differences between the average student at VUT and for example a student at a Swedish university there are definitely similarities. Supplemental Instruction (SI) is a method widely used in many countries especially to support learning in the STEM subjects. While the notions of post-apartheid or decolonisation are rarely understood in Sweden, underpreparedness certainly is and SI has become an important tool to support students. Discussions on how to teach and learn mathematics are ongoing globally, so also in this book.

v

As an international reader of this excellent book, I – a male, white, North European, academic developer – find it especially rewarding to get a comprehensive and authentic insight into higher education teaching and learning from the perspective of practitioners at a South African university of technology. I have followed academic development in South Africa for the past ten years and actively participated in research projects and collaborations and visited that multifaceted and beautiful country on numerous occasions. Still, this book gives additional perspectives and it demonstrates an effective way to share valuable academic development thoughts and results with other academics. I would specifically like to highlight the philosophical framing that effectively underpins the different contributions in the book. Personally, I must admit that when I read the part about the history of institutions of higher learning (Chapter 1), I was quite ashamed to finally realise, after more than 30 years in academia, that it did not all start in Bologna in 1088 AD… but of course earlier, and in Africa, through the initiative of a woman. Finally, I would like to thank the editor for the opportunity to read an inspirational manuscript and to write this foreword.

vi

1. Approaches to academic excellence in higher education Teboho Pitso

Introduction and overview Academic development in South Africa started off in the early 1970s as a modernist project concerned with providing teaching support to academics (Gosling, 2009). Academics are experts in their own disciplines but are often without a formal qualification in teaching, which is not a requirement for teaching in South African higher education institutions (Gosling, 2009). Implied in supporting academics to become better teachers are notions of creating enabling classrooms for effective learning to take place, and enhancement of students’ experiences of learning. Academic development understood this way operates as a service unit to faculties. In this service mode, development focuses strongly on training workshops for academics, organising events such as orientation of new academics into their teaching roles, and performing consultations with individual academics and faculties. In subsequent years, academic development advised on the use of technology in promoting effective teaching and learning. With concerns being raised about the quality of teaching and that of learning in higher education, especially post-apartheid, academic development also ventured into improving the quality of teaching, measuring its excellence and developing mechanisms for rewarding it. Increasing variations on meanings of excellence in teaching, improving quality of teaching, measuring it, and rewarding such teaching, have become quite complex and controversial matters in higher education. The persisting question around teaching excellence is: When do we know the point at which we have achieved teaching apotheosis, its acme and ultimate outcome? – because each teaching approach has its own target and purpose. Teaching targets can range from social elitism in teaching for purposes of reproducing a dominant culture, to developing an informed citizenry, which is emancipated from societal structures that breed economic inequality and that entrench a glorified modernday “caste” system under the guise of democracy (Skelton, 2005). More recently, a focus on enterprising individuals (Pitso, Lebusa & Kok, 2014), and pragmatic activism (Tjabane, in chapter 2 in this book), have been added as legitimate subjects for development in the approach

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Approaches to Academic Excellence in Higher Education

to teaching, embracing the purpose of improving material conditions of students, in some ways drawing on Freire’s critical theory. In chapter 2, Masebala Tjabane attempts to better understand these variations on how we perceive and understand teaching excellence as she adds another dimension called pragmatic activism. Pragmatic activism draws from social justice discourses and argues that teaching ought to develop students who not only challenge power bases but take practical action to seek equality in society. Using personal accounts of how she came to engage in academic staff development, as well as insights gained in writing retreats, literature review, and years of experience in academic staff development, Masebala Tjabane teases out the many ways that excellence in teaching can be understood and actuated in various contexts. In chapter 3, Bruce Matee similarly looks into excellence in teaching in terms of its quality. He particularly focuses on how it has been historically measured, and whether the measuring instruments comprised in student evaluation of teaching (SET) can muster the rigour of objectivity and applicability to improving teaching, and eventually, learning. He also details the context of use for SET and how it is used in the reward mechanisms of our institution, the Vaal University of Technology (VUT). This chapter is the result of insights deeply reflected on, which derive from critical review of existing literature, personal experiences in overseeing SET, and gleaning from best practices in other parts of the world on measuring teaching and rewarding it. Some higher education institutions in South Africa were slow to embrace the benefits of technology in enhancing teaching and learning as a result most assumed a low maturity status in technology use. Universities of technology in South Africa (UoTs) were generally slow to gain traction in the use of technology in enhancing teaching and learning, and thus recorded the highest level of low maturity. In chapter 4, Pauline Machika shares her insights from efforts to persuade lecturers at an institutional level to embrace technology in their teaching and the learning of their students. Similarly, Moegamat Dolley in chapter 5 concerns himself with similar issues of embedding technology in teaching and learning, but from the perspective of a faculty, rather than institutionally as Pauline Machika has done in chapter 4. Teboho Pitso in chapter 6 looks closely at better ways of teaching entrepreneurship in higher education, given that it is becoming an increasingly important skill to develop in higher education, especially in relation to an emerging global interest in it. This emerging interest in entrepreneurship is particularly important in the Global South context in respect of increased interest in reverse innovation. Reverse innovation is the idea that developing countries now create new products that are sellable in well-established, developed markets, whereas traditionally well-established markets have been producing products for developing countries. Developing markets also leverage “ideational bricolage,” which refers to product development within resource-constrained environments. The global shift from the primary production mode of the economy (which depended heavily on fixed skill sets), towards the creative economy (which is innovation-driven), also means that teaching and curriculum have to transform from discipline-based courses with rigidly prescribed learning content, activities and outcomes. The organising of these courses in a typically linear sequence must also change if the full benefits of entrepreneurship are to be leveraged. Teaching and curriculum now have

2

Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

to create and foster suitable learning environments for nurturing creativity and innovation in addition to disciplinary knowledge. These learning environments would have to have a strong, authentic learning character and encourage students to take calculated risks and become resourceful. Such teaching and curriculum require highly flexible teaching and curricular structures that enable certain levels of “organised chaos” out of which novel ideas could emerge. Chapter 6 sought to open up spaces for critical engagement with these highly topical issues. Another crucial leg of academic development began in earnest in the early 1970s in North America. It had a strong focus on supporting students who struggled with academic studies, especially those coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. One such supporting mechanism for students that started off in North America and gained traction globally is the supplemental instruction (SI) programme. SI is a collaborative, peer-led programme that targets historically difficult subjects such as those in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) – although more recently, it has cut across all subjects. The particular strength of SI, which sustains its global popularity, is its elimination of remediation miasma in student support, as well as the emphasis on collaborative and active participation of all students in its sessions. Chapters 7 and 8 deal with student support in its various forms. In chapter 7, Linda Mandewo, Sibongile Hlubi and Tebogo Kekana draw from their varied experiences in tutoring and mentoring to come up with an integrated model of student academic support that is undergirded by SI and caters for both the psychological and academic aspects of student support. This is a new pathway for student support, as tutoring has tended to reside in academic development units or faculties while mentoring was traditionally positioned in student affairs units. Jeremiah Madzimure in chapter 8 similarly tackles student academic support from the perspective of STEM subjects with particular focus on giving Mathematics support to struggling students from Engineering and Management Sciences faculties. As a result of his scholarly exercise in deeply reflecting on his practice, he has also begun to explore a new pathway that is based on SI principles and the Lawson (2012) model of induction, transition and retention. Like his other student support colleagues, Madzimure appreciates the need to eliminate the offensive odour of remediation in supporting students, especially given its typically racialised undertone in our context. In South Africa, Mathematics has been poorly taught at schools mostly attended by Africans during apartheid by dint of official government policy. One of the issues that concerns scholars opposed to the increasing technicist approach to higher education is “the care” culture it fosters. In chapter 9, Corneli van der Walt makes a case that massification and historical disadvantage emanating from the erstwhile fragmented apartheidera education in South Africa makes it almost impossible to ignore the psychological damage caused to all students. In particular, she concerns herself with those who continue to bear the brunt of the ravages of low socio-economic conditions post-apartheid as the 1994 allure and illusions of an economically equal society have dissipated into thin air. By sketching an impression of the kinds of students our institution tends to attract, she makes a case for focusing on “care and therapy” in the critical period of the first year. This is to ensure smooth transition of students into higher education learning. However, student experience is a highly contested area of higher education, with scholars such as Ruth Mieschbuehler (2017) arguing that the notion of student experience is being used today as a public relations and marketing tool in ways that are neither problematised nor critiqued. In her chapter Van der Walt, similar to Martin and Kennett

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Approaches to Academic Excellence in Higher Education

(2019), does not seek to eliminate the “care and therapy” approach in academia but attempts to understand and implement it. This book is part of a journey towards a critical scholarship of academic development. It is an attempt to challenge the entrenched scholasticism in higher education, scholasticism being the somewhat debilitating and narrow focus on dogma and traditions of scientific knowledge production when efforts should, of necessity, focus on knowledge generation as essentially an expansion project. When knowledge generation is considered as fundamentally an expansion project, knowledge producers become keenly aware and alert about the signification of the Global North episteme and general displacement of other forms of episteme in knowledge generation. The entrenched episteme purports to be neutral, acontextual and universal. The systemic relations between entrenched episteme in knowledge production and the marginalised ones require a sense of history to unravel and make transparent. Once transparent, then intentional corrective and creative action becomes necessary. Approached this way, knowledge production – including in the area of academic development – assumes a broader mandate of interrogating historical vestiges of privileging certain ways of validating and legitimating knowledge, enabling the emergence of possibilities of exploring new knowledge spaces and of developing new pathways for knowledge production. Variants of knowledge production as an expansion project subsume epistemic disobedience – or what others prefer to call decoloniality – which involves problematising and critiquing the Eurocentric mechanisms of knowledge generation as also being instrumental in thought control. It is assumed that questioning these ways of producing knowledge could open up spaces for new possibilities for epistemic justice, and could lead to a platform of equality for Global North and Global South discourses and theories. So far there have been four responses to these knowledge production challenges. There are purists who completely see nothing wrong with entrenched mechanisms of producing knowledge and consider it heretical to even consider questioning these age-old, proven tools of science. Others – weak pragmatists – prefer an incremental but gradual change of the tools of knowledge production to accommodate marginalised epistemes of knowing. Various other groupings include the strong pragmatists, who have recognised that the kind of knowledge generation that leads to stable, predictive and certain knowledge ignores the reality that our global society has entered the era of productive complexity. Productive complexity renders traditional scientific tools of knowledge production inadequate. It compels an opening up of spaces for creating new pathways that could augment science. There is yet another grouping, from mainly the Global South, that seeks epistemic justice. This last grouping can be divided into two categories. Category one comprises the reactionary social idealists that call for epistemic disobedience as well as inclusion of marginalised epistemes of knowing in the grand parlance of scientific knowledge. Marginalised epistemes tend to accentuate the centrality of the knower in knowledge production, and tend to challenge the zero-point perspective of a detached, neutral observer. The second category searches for a more integrative, reconcilatory and inclusive global epistemology as the surest way of scientifically tackling emerging productive complexity in our global society (proactive social idealists). Chapter 10 grapples with these hotly contested aspects of knowledge production within the context of academic development as a phenomenon occurring in higher education. Its focal point is on academic development research and its practices, in terms of how they ought to contribute towards creating new pathways that could transform the broader epistemological landscape.

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

This becomes possible when ontological stances are sufficiently broadened to be illuminated by the insights of Global South metaphysics. Such an occurrence could potentially lead to the development of an inclusve global epistemology that can deal with productive complexity, which is becoming increasingly ubiquitous on a global scale and in real time. This broadened scientific approach could become the plinth of a knowledge production that is relevant to our time and space. Productive complexity deals with the new reality that – in resolving our complex societal problems – at the heart of any production efforts, including knowledge production, there must be multi-perspectiveness resulting from our globalised world, and referring mainly to multiple ways of seeing phenomena emanating from our diverse cultures and contexts. Productive complexity is about the multi-dimensionality of the problems we face in our times, and where acontextual, discipline-based approaches to problem-solving are woefully inadequate.

Reflections on learning facilitation in higher education The underlying rationale in most academic development work across the globe is about supporting learning within mainly higher education settings. Since its inception, the learning of higher education has been different from other forms of learning mainly because it occurs outside the social practice where “natural” learning takes place (Bowden & Marton, 1998) and requires specific systematic methods to thrive. Methods that enable this kind of formal learning vary in terms of theoretical underpinnings, periods of existence and effectiveness in driving different types of formal learning. Effectiveness in driving formal learning refers mostly to gain in knowledge, skills, values, attitudes, insights, new perspectives or new ways of doing things. In this monograph, we attempt to adumbrate another kind of learning that professionals such as academic developers engage in and use to improve their practices in order to support the other types of learning taking place within higher education. In sketching this learning of academic developers, particular attention was paid to gaining a new perspective that could substantially improve the practice of each academic developer as well as to insights that could be extrapolated in similar contexts by other academic developers. While learning is as old as humanity itself, learning in institutions of higher education in Africa can be traced from the establishment of the renowned madrassa of Al-Qarawiyyin in Morocco (Africa) around 859 AD, pre-dating Europe’s University of Bologna in Italy by two centuries. It is also significant to point out that Fatima Al-Fihri, herself a learned woman, is credited as being the founder of Al-Qarawiyyin, which has been the longest continuously operating seat of higher learning in Africa or the West. She was thus a trailblazer in the learning of specialised higher education. It is this learning steeped in history and tradition, capable of being researched, reflected on and improved, that we sought to better understand, and possibly enhance, in this monograph. In this monograph, there were two principal questions on this kind of specialised higher learning we sought to answer ¬– with varying degrees of success. First, we sought to find out what sort of learning could better serve academic developers in order to support other learning taking place within higher education settings. It is a question essentially on the quality of work that academic developers are expected to provide to support student and staff learning. The assumption being made, in this monograph, is that quality of support to student and staff learning improves when

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Approaches to Academic Excellence in Higher Education

better learning takes place amongst academic developers. It is also a question of how academic developers, in the course of performing their work, also engage constantly in learning that improves their practice. Second, this initial question on the academic developers’ learning compelled a secondary one on the kind of learning that these practitioners ought to support amongst students and staff given the hotly contested versions of what constitutes learning in higher education in the information-driven, digital era. We started this project at a time when concerns had already been raised about a type of learning in higher education that is increasingly being commodified and reengineered for serviceability to commerce and industry. This kind of learning is fashioned as learning for economic prosperity, work-oriented learning or “graduate attributes” (Hayes &Wynyard, 2002; Tennant et al., 2010; Hayes 2017 a). Through a number of writing retreats held outside university precincts and lasting for several days, a select group of academic developers at the Vaal University of Technology (VUT) set out to reflect on these questions and how they relate to their practices. The reflection was intended to answer the question of the sort of learning that is necessary, for each one of these academic developers, to enable each of them to better support student and staff learning, as well as to indicate the approach we should take to academic developers’ learning, to sustain the learning momentum beyond the initial project of the writing retreat. We started off by trying to understand the types of learning that take place within the higher education setting. Learning in higher education occurs first at the individual level, where students learn knowledge that is generally unknown to them at the outset, but well known, albeit at varying levels, to others in the environment, especially those already teaching and learning within a particular discipline.

Individual critical reflection in a collaborative context Individual learning is facilitated through the process of teaching (Bowden &Marton, 1998) and can be approached in a highly individualised or collaborative way using contact, online and distance platforms. Various approaches have been developed over the years to facilitate learning at an individual level and certain teaching methods have been created to manage processes of learning. Approaches to learning differ in terms of nature of learning being facilitated, foregrounded method of facilitation or learning orientation, dominant classroom activities, type of facilitation and what ought to be gained in such learning (see Table 1.1 for a comparison of approaches). The pedagogic approach to learning can be traced to the supervision of children of the elite by designated slaves in ancient Greece, hence the term pedagogy derives etymologically from paedos (children) and agogos (supervision). It has a strong mimetic epistemology: hence it could not even be considered in our writing retreats although traces of it could be discerned during the critical reflection exercise for each academic developer. It is also discernible in some chapters in this book as some of the practices of the participating academic developers had a strong service orientation, and they thus offered training workshops with a didactic motif. The key problem with a didactic approach to learning is that by nature it seeks to remedy a “deficit,” and is typified by a strong acquisition mode. It seldom invites people into a critical conversation, so necessary when dealing with experts in their own disciplines. All forms of persuasion are completely unnecessary when dealing with experts in higher education – as

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

is the case with academic developers dealing wth academic professional development. These academic development encounters with experts need to have a strong voluntary basis, set as invitations to critical conversations with outcomes typified by epiphany, not outlined in advance because they need to be collectively agreed upon. While it is becoming quite tempting for national and institutional policy to direct these encounters towards compulsion, such an attempt has to be resisted, otherwise the concept of a higher education institution gets threatened. While andragogy, heutagogy and paragogy refer mostly to adult learning and have some degrees of flexibility, cooperation and active participation in a learning process, they do not capture the essence of the kind of learning that ought to take place, amongst academic developers, and between academic developers and disciplinary experts. Table 1.1 Approaches to Teaching in Higher Education Pedagogy and pedagogy of organised chaosa Nature

Orientation

Dominant activity

Level

Gain

Teacher-centric

Strong passivity of learner

Knowledge acquisition

Individual level

Known knowledge unknown to student

Knowledge-driven

Strong & rigid curricular structure

Mostly textbook/ experiment learning

Rigid

Fixed linear content sequencing

Tests Mostly mimetic

Andragogy Nature

Orientation

Dominant activity

Level

Gain

Learner-centred

Strong on selfdirected learning

Knowledge acquisition

Individual and local levels

Knowledge, insights

Knowledge- and experience-driven

Active learner but strong curricular structure, with some flexibility that includes experiences

Tests (learner determines pace of learning)

Flexible

Pre-set pitching

Note: a   Somerville & Green (2011).

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Approaches to Academic Excellence in Higher Education

Table 1.1 Approaches to Teaching in Higher Education Heutagogy Nature

Orientation

Dominant activity

Level

Gain

Learner-driven

Strong on learner choice

Unique ideas generation: knowledge used to – explore new possibilities – ask new questions – make connections

Local level

New ideas

Ideas generationdriven

Agreement-driven (self-determined)

Brain-storming

Highly flexible

Flexible curricular structure

New ways of doing things Shifts in mindset

Emphasis on experience Paragogy Nature

Orientation

Dominant activity

Level

Gain

Peer-driven

Self-directed

Sharing of knowledge and insights

Local and collective levels

Knowledge

Collaborative

Flexible curricular structure

Insights

Highly flexible

Virtual collaborations

Values

Virtual facilitation

New attitudes

Professional learning Nature

Orientation

Dominant activity

Level

Gain

Learning from expert peers

Negotiated and agreed-upon

Questioning inquiry

Individual

New perspectives

Practice-driven

Voluntary active participation

Reflective critique

Collective

Extrapolation

Highly flexible

Critical reflections

Local

Collaborative

Researching the practice

Experts in higher education already possess high-level competencies and skills, are capable of deep learning and research; and most contribute to disciplinary scholarship – thus a different type of learning becomes necessary. It is noted that most may not have the thorough knowledge and skills of facilitating learning, especially in universities of technology where there has been a tendency to recruit disciplinary experts and industry experts without the requisite skills of facilitating learning (Matee, 2009). However, such highly competent people require that these encounters of professional learning be organised in ways that build on their already

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

well-developed capabilities. This understanding was foremost in my mind when we organised writing retreats for this group of academic developers. First, these academic developers already applied particular practices of working in academic support, and had amassed considerable data around their practices. Second, they were better placed to provide a critical perspective on these practices. Third, by agreeing to participate voluntarily in these writing retreats, they were already intrinsically motivated to improve or even transform their practices. This necessitated creating conditions of learning in the writing retreats that could sustain the momentum of intrinsic motivation into the future practices of the academic developers. There was thus a need to allow for possible extrapolation of the learning conditions in the writing retreats. The presentation at the writing retreats of new skills and knowledge – that is, which were unknown or only vaguely known to these experts, although known to others in the field of academic development – was thus consciously designed to make learning at an individual level highly probable, although negotiated under conditions of invitation and self-persuasion. Learning conditions at the writing retreats also allowed for research into practices undergirding theories and threshold concepts, so provided spaces for sharing of these new insights in ways that allowed collective learning (research) as described further below. Academic developers were also expected to test out these new or improved practices in real situations, so we allowed for local level learning (elucidated below). We have tentatively referred to the kind of voluntary, active, negotiated learning that takes place amongst professionals as professional learning. We see this professional learning as one that eschews pre-set curricular structure (racecourse metaphor) and the miasma of supervision (agogos). It is an open space for collaborative and collegial co-learning. The root of collegial, legare, has a strong sense of being bound together by a common mission or set of values, and calls for mutual respect and professional decorum in these learning spaces. It is a learning of peer experts where topics and themes of learning are negotiated and thoroughly discussed as experts’ experiences and expertise become sources of learning and a good starting point for learning. This way, reflections on these experiences and expertise become a critical first step in the learning of professionals. There is also no rush (currere) to complete a pre-set curriculum and there is little supervision, so that panic in learning and the “deficit” approach to learning are diminished significantly. The principles of professional learning that emerged from the writing retreats – and that are still subject to rigorous scrutiny – include: • The absolute need to create conditions of learning where peers negotiate and agree on the suitable approach to their learning. The principles of negotiation and agreement on how the learning could proceed is sacrosanct in professional learning as professional learning involves experts who are equal but possess different types of expertise. This principle facilitates co-learning and mutual respect. • Reflections on practices is the first crucial step towards facilitating expert peers’ learning as the second principle of professional learning. The level of reflection on practices differs in terms of previous engagement with reflective practice exercises. For instance, some experts may be using reflection as a learning approach for the first time (so-called unreflective practitioners, who have not discovered significant problems in their own practices whether as disciplinary experts or higher education facilitators of learning). Others may be seasoned master reflectors who have developed a habit of constant critical reflection on their practices. These levels of reflection are crucial in mapping a professional learning environment and setting clear targets of how learning could proceed to the next stage of reflection (see, Figure 1.1 below).

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Approaches to Academic Excellence in Higher Education

• The focus of reflection on practices is on existing theories and threshold concepts that undergird a practice. These theories and concepts that walk practices have to be tested against emerging contextual and global realities. Expert peers also have to take into account the uniqueness of each discipline without losing the opportunity to sense the limits of the disciplinary boundaries in developing an appropriate learning facilitation model. It should not be prohibitive to transcend disciplinary boundaries and enter into territories of other disciplines, because the kinds of problems we can foresee seem increasingly too complex to be resolved within a particular discipline; and this should be taken into account when developing facilitation models. • The efforts of professional learning ought to have a practical end, that is, ought to lead to substantial improvement or transformation of a practice.

Research as collective learning Another means of learning in higher education is at a collective level where all of us learn about new knowledge that has been produced and disseminated through the exercise of research and scholarship. The traditional concept of collective learning is research (Bowden &Marton, 1998), that is, reasoned inquiry that is evidence-led, tested for truthfulness and validity through the exercise of peer review mechanisms, and must always be made public in order to serve a specific area of scholarship.

Learning through local-level engagement Learning can also occur in real-life situations where technical knowledge meets up with the vagaries and exigencies of real life, leading to the development of new insights and solutions that encourage better communities of practice. This “local-level learning,” often called community engagement (Bowden & Marton, 1998), traditionally entails commerce and industry, households and communities, as well as various other private and public sector entities. In this professional learning context, it refers mainly to professional practices and their application in real, cognate contexts to effect a specific change or solve a problem in the facilitation of learning.

Two main aspects of enquiry The chapters in this book look into all three types of learning – individual, collective and local – on two main fronts.

Reflecting on conceptual grounding and practice First, chapters in this book attempt to understand learning in relation to the use of existing theories and ideas that guide each academic development practice; thus committing to bridging the gap between theory and practice. Each academic developer sought to adjudicate the merit of their current practice in relation to the relevance of ideas and theories that undergird their current practices. The purpose of this first-phase reflection on current practices was in order to create conditions for academic developers to engage more meaningfully with the primary ideas or the threshold concepts that have been guiding such teaching and learning practices, and

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

their influence at the classroom level. The main importance of focusing on threshold concepts or core ideas of a practice is that such an approach opens up possibilities of thinking anew about one’s practice (Entwistle, 2008; Paul &Elder, 2003). It puts to the test questions around whether the practice subsisted on commonsensical but mostly untested techniques or whether it was grounded on credible theories that could otherwise be losing their saliences given emerging realities of higher education. The first-phase reflection with focus on core ideas of a practice also allows for critical understanding of the practice and exploration of its new possibilities. These initial reflections on practice could in fact lead to adoption of new core concepts, which could drive the practice and make it more relevant to new demands and expectations: from the university itself; from specialised communities of practice; and from the larger society. Developing or revisiting core concepts of a practice and constantly and critically reflecting on them was a matter that weighed heavily on us as we sought to find better ways of achieving such a feat in our learning. We convinced ourselves that this approach to our learning would provide a pivot around which each of us would develop a deeper understanding of our practices, and open spaces for possible improvement or even transformation of these practices. Our assumption was that a deeper understanding of these core concepts would also help us determine the extent to which our learning could help us in better supporting student and staff learning. We were also aware that these understandings could be opened up at various levels depending on our experiences and the years we had respectively spent in each of our practices. For some, it could be the first time that they really engaged in any meaningful way with the core concepts of their practice possibly because ad hoc, common-sense ideas have been guiding practice rather than deliberately selected core concepts that also subsume existing theories. In such cases, we had agreed on reviews of literature and existing theories relevant to the practice, and the selection of core concepts that could drive practice moving forward. Another level would be where the academic developer had prior core concepts that guided practice: in such cases we have advised on reflecting on these core concepts and deciding whether they still merit undergirding the practice into the future. Lastly, experienced and seasoned academic developers with well-established core concepts that inform their practice, and who have also been involved in researching their practices, were urged to reflect on the distinctive ways they think about their practices. In sharing these ideas about their practices in the writing retreats, academic developers were learning both at an individual level and collectively. Each stage of reflection embeds knowledge and insights made possible by the relevant level of engagement with the practice – formative, developing or seasoned. As readers engage chapters in this monograph, these three distinctive levels of reflecting on the practice will be evident and will offer insights relative to the level of operation and reflection of respective academic developers. Above all, they will reflect the primary purpose of this monograph: to afford opportunities for learning to academic developers like those who contributed to this book and those who may extrapolate lessons accrued from the retreats that otherwise might be lost or weakened. All practitioners can be regarded as being on the journey of reflective practice, from the starting point of the unreflective practitioner, through those who are challenged, to those practising, and ultimately to the master practitioners who constantly reflect on their practices for improvement and, in some cases, transformation (Paul & Elder, 2003). The process of reflection thus begins with one becoming aware of significant problems in one’s practice and finding ways of improving it.

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Approaches to Academic Excellence in Higher Education

The exercise of reflection carries a strong motif of broadening one’s intellectual horizon through researching and updating the undergirding theories, and making relevant integrating core concepts of a practice. These stages of reflection (as demonstrated in Figure 1.1) and the basic principles of reflection served us well as individuals at work in our writing retreats. We believe that these writing retreats fulfilled our expectations in creating spaces for the different levels of reflection to take place, be documented and shared with the wider community of academic developers in higher education.

Problematisation and critique Second, the chapters of this monograph seek to develop ways of not only supporting learning Unreflective Practitioner

Beginning Practitioner

Practising Practitioner

Advanced Practitioner

Master Practitioner (constantly reflects on practice)

Figure 1.1 Stages of reflection

that is conceptualised as workplace-oriented learning at a pedagogic and classroom level (as societal pressure, contrariwise, mounts in bias against this kind of learning) but also to problematise and critique it. Workplace-oriented learning is based on the notion that certain skill sets are desirable in the workplace in order to enable graduates to actively participate in generating economic productivity and competitiveness. These skill sets are needed to bridge the gap between technical knowledge and its application in real situations. Higher education is seen as a legitimate site for inculcating such high-level skill sets through its teaching and curriculum. This expectation from workplace, governments and the larger society poses new challenges to the primary purposes and ideas that ought to underpin, or be the “meaning plinth,” of higher education learning. Universities traditionally have owned the means and tools of knowledge production, decided upon what constituted good learning, and certified it accordingly; as well as having quality assured how that learning occurred. However, the prevailing global circumstances as dictated by hegemonic economic activity have all but vitiated and almost eroded these long-held university autonomies. Market logics drive the valuation of research, which generates money; and of teaching, which produces certain almost

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

prescriptive skill sets under the guise of graduate attributes. However, higher education is not going down without a fight. Amidst these contestations and challenges on the very nature and role of higher education in society, in The McDonaldization of Higher Education (Hayes & Wynyard, 2002), scholars voiced their opposition to the market logics’ narrative that the raison d’être of universities is restricted to achievement of economic prosperity. In the updated edition edited by Hayes (2017a), scholars in higher education continued to promote the rationale behind reclaiming the original meaning of a university, challenging the norms of efficiency, predictability, calculability and control applied by “market requirements”. That struggle is ongoing but the market forces seem to have an upper hand at this stage. Given that, globally, governments have been imposing governance, management and funding models based on market rationality on higher education, these contestations on the real meaning of higher education remain ingrained in our collective psyche, and pose challenges that demand some kind of practical response from all of us in higher education. A good starting point, in my view, ought to be in academic development – and its response has to be, at least, twofold. First, academic developers ought to interrogate their own learning, as well as to decide on the primary ideas and theories that should inform such learning (as earlier stated), and to implement subsequent practical actions that support student and staff learning. Furthermore, they ought to test the efficacy of these ideas and theories on the real-life turf where practical academic development work takes place, that is, at student and staff learning level. They also need to be conscious of which version of higher education their practices support. Second, academic developers in South Africa ought to decide on how to support student and staff learning including on how such learning becomes responsive to historical disadvantage, equality and social justice in the digital era within a developing country context. This would mean revisiting the notion of workplace-oriented learning and its underlying market rationality that seeks to reconfigure students as “consumers of educational products” (Tennant et al., 2009) who can now decide on the quality of the product, assume instrumental attitudes of entitlement and demand “care” conceptualised as “student experiences”. Another consideration for workplaceoriented learning relates to the reification of creativity, innovation and the entrepreneurial mind-set as new skill sets required for economic optimisation, to which higher education is expected to respond positively. The workplace is thus set to require highly skilled, flexible and adaptable workers, as succinctly captured by Tennant et al. (2009, p.111): Such an adaptable, multi-skilled and flexible workforce implies one which can quickly and willingly apply existing knowledge and skills to new situations and one which is prepared and capable of engaging in new learning as circumstances warrant.

Engaging in such “new learning” would have to develop students who are capable of critically understanding existing knowledge, testing its efficacy in real-life situations, exploring possibilities that emerge as a result of engaging knowledge that way, and who have multiple skills. This may require that learning takes place under different pedagogical conditions, and that the support accorded higher education teachers and students (through academic development) should assume different postures in relation to current practices. These different supportive postures that academic developers may need to craft compel a new engagement with professional identities as well as new ways of understanding the business of

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Approaches to Academic Excellence in Higher Education

academic development and how to develop these different supportive postures. The supportive postures of academic development envisaged would change the working and learning conditions of academic developers and, by extension, those of staff and students, a point similarly made by Lynn Quinn (2012). The need to constantly reflect on and critically evaluate one’s practice, as well as the primary ideas and theories that undergird it, the conditions of its operations and its positioning within the organisational relationships, has become urgent and inevitable. This is one of the main ways of dealing with the uncertainties and complexities of this highly contested terrain of higher education. All of these issues somehow compel academic developers to focus on their scholarly journeys and reflect constantly and critically on their practices (better defined as supportive postures), as they would assume different meanings and understandings as circumstances of the workplace, scholarship and societal expectations alter. These journeys have to be scholarly in the sense that there first has to be a systematic probing of the primary ideas and theories that drive the meaning and practices of each and every academic developer. The supportive postures of academic developers cannot be intuitive and outright subjective, as that would entirely negate the very concept of higher education learning. A certain degree of objectivity is the necessary part of these supportive postures of academic developers, otherwise the project becomes solipsistic, intellectually untenable and represents in form and substance the deification of one’s subjective puffery. For instance, VUT academic staff development practitioner, Masebala Tjabane (in chapter 2), identified the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) as central to improving practices of academic staff. She has been using the scholarly teaching model developed by Pitso (2014) and inviting Pitso to staff induction programmes to embed SoTL in the teaching practices of academic staff (Figure 1.2). The model demonstrates the critical reflection that academic staff ought to engage in so as to improve and even transform their practices. Such academic staff reflection can either be individually or collaboratively undertaken. When reflecting on her practice, it was expected that her improved supportive posture would consider this scholarly teaching model as it already formed a key part of academic staff learning.

PHASE 1 Guided

COLLABORATIVE

- Critical reflection on practice - SET Self - Critical reflection on practice - SET

INDEPENDENT

PHASE 2 INDEPENDENT

PHASE 5

COLLABORATIVE

Assess overall reaction to experience

- Glean trends and shifts in discipline and society (LR) - Glean teaching and learning theories, perspectives, philosophies (LR) - Data analysis (SET)

PHASE 4 PHASE 3

Reconstitute and test alternative teaching

Craft learning vision

Figure 1.2 Scholarly teaching model (Pitso, 2014)

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

Second, once the systematic reflection on practices of academic developers is done and the underlying ideas and theories of each supportive posture have been made transparent, then developers make a write-up, which then gets tested through peer-review mechanisms. Third, these insights gleaned are expected to be made public to foster collective learning, as we do, for example, in this monograph. Critical reflection in relation to these supportive postures of academic developers would then mean that academic developers: • Reconnect with their experiences of coming into the mould of academic development, and take the stance of serving as its practitioners. • Examine the assumptions, attitudes, beliefs and values that guide their existing supportive posture in light of new societal expectations as well as the demands of the profession and scholarship. • Develop new affordances (core concepts, theories, delivery modes, content) that ought to drive supportive postures at a particular point in the academic development trajectory. • Prepare for the next stage of reflection: for constant reflective critique, which has to be a normal part of the practice. In the next section, I outline the scholarly critical reflection approach we developed in the writing retreats, and how it guided chapters in this book.

Methodological approach and concerns Rationale Embarking on such a scholarly journey as we did in our writing retreats brings into sharp focus the appropriateness of the research approach in attempting to better understand academic development and support, and hopefully suggest some way forward. In our case, we sought to make transparent our academic development practices so we could become fully aware of the theories and threshold concepts that undergirded these practices, test their relevance, salience and efficacy in constantly shifting mandates of higher education. We had also hoped that opportunities would prevail in these writing retreats that could map a way forward for each practice. Our objectives were thus fourfold: • To make transparent the theories and threshold concepts that have motivated our practices. • To develop a better understanding of our rapidly changing context within the complex higher education landscape. • To test the relevance, salience, and efficacy of these theories and threshold concepts in generally fluid higher education contexts. • Where possible, to attempt improvement and even tease out the transformative potential of these practices. These objectives compelled us to focus strongly on the appropriateness of our methodology but, in addition, we had to orientate our scholarly journey to a specific scholarly destination. This meant that four issues became germane and had to be painstakingly taken into account in our final decision in respect of an appropriate methodology.

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Approaches to Academic Excellence in Higher Education

Outcomes: Orientation and destination First, the outcome of the writing retreats had to reflect not only achievement of the above four objectives we set out to achieve but also point out where in our academic development journey we stood and where we were headed. We were fully aware that academic development scholarship was an emerging genre in higher education and our insights ought to contribute towards its advancement. We were also fully cognisant that such critical scholarship should serve as an invitation to rethink how we produce knowledge that tends to support a bias in favour of the Global North often at the expense of the Global South, and that this had to form a crucial aspect of our scholarly journey. Critical scholarship as the intended destination of our academic development research endeavours meant that the following matters had to guide our research efforts: • That our research deals with very fluid, uncertain and unstable contexts, in which versions of higher education are hotly contested in ways that affect how curriculum and teaching are understood and deployed to achieve particular outcomes. The fluidity and uncertainty of the higher education context comes with the question of which skills and knowledge forms ought to be developed, that is, what should be the target and outcome of our curricular and teaching efforts in this century; particularly in light of increasing concerns with embedded colonial imprint in the curriculum and our teaching. • That our research carefully considers our lived experiences in our actual university context and its effects on our practices. For instance, it was particularly important to make transparent the positionality of our practices and whether such positionalities are sufficiently justified. Gosling (2009) identifies three positionalities of academic development practices: the service mode of academic development limits our activities to training, events organisation, and consultancy; the management mode reduces such activities to policy formulations, strategy crafting and influencing institutional behaviour; and, within a department mode, offers some kind of formal qualifications, commisions research and offers postgraduate supervision. Each of these positionalities had to be carefully and critically reflected on and a way forward crafted so as to contribute towards critical scholarship – in particular on how we deal with historical disadvantage and deepening inequality in society. • That the search for universal laws and absolute truth would not be our primary concern, as we had to focus on what works and can assist our learning and development of our practices, in order for us to better support other forms of learning taking place in our university, and to pursue bigger agendas of justice and fairness. • That entrenched power structures and the unexamined or poorly critiqued pursuit of efficiency in our context intended to achieve superficial contextual metastability and narrower goals of education, which needed to be challenged. For example, we needed to critically engage and eventually defeat the worrying embedding of the anti-intellectual project within higher education, whose object is to facilitate socially-empty trainability (Bernstein, 1990) that serves the narrower interests of commerce and industry. This can be addressed by realising broader agendas of justice and fairness in society. There is also a growing concern in higher education in our country that university leadership is no longer based on high levels of integrity, scholarly achievements and respect from peers in the area of one’s expertise. The politicisation of university leadership has a direct impact on institutional culture

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

and power distribution. It affects our practices and funnels them into narrower concerns, against their primary objective of driving bigger agendas of social justice, economic equality, ecological sustainability and epistemic fairness. We were also fully aware that historically our practices have been based mostly on entrenhced and well-established theories and concepts whose epistemology had a strong Global North bias. We had to make this issue clearer in shaping our methodology.

The meaning of context and a qualitative approach Second, what we mean by context – the notion that refers to circumstances that form our university setting from whence our experiences and practices develop – had to be carefully captured so we could have a better understanding of how each practice evolved. Our research approach had to capture these unique, deeply contextualised experiences that had shaped existing practices so we could tease out the transformative potential of each practice. Given the importance we had placed on critical scholarship, in terms of its critique of Global North epistemological bias; as well as the need to capture the context of our practices, a more qualtitative approach would make for better sense. There was, however, a need to increase the trustworthiness of our work so we could not reduce this work to some subjective puffery. This was a significant concern, especially if we wanted our work to pass muster as a scholarly work that makes some contribution to the scholarship of academic development. In order to substantially increase the scientifc integrity of our work and ensure that qualitative research continues to have a place in the scientific inquiry landscape, we followed Guba’s advice as further elucidated in Lincoln (2016). Guba (1981) insists on addressing the credibility of the qualitative work by capturing the true picture of our practices and their context. In order to do so, sufficient detail and thick description of the practice itself and its context is crucial. In this work, we opted for some aspects of autoethnography to delineate how each academic developer got interested in their practice. The key to the use of autoethnography is that each researcher has to self-reflect, in order to better understand and explore their anecdotal and personal experiences, and in such a way as to connect them with their own practice and the context that shapes it. For the purpose of our work, we opted for a critical reflection aproach as underpinned by various existing theories, in order to increase the scientific merit of our work so that only fewer aspects of autoethnography were added to our research approach (selfreflection and individual accounts). This critical reflection approach is described in detail in the next sub-section of this chapter. This approach allowed us to provide thick personal descriptions and elucidate their relationship to the constitution of each academic developer’s practice, which increased the authenticity of our qualitative work, so essential in increasing the trustworthiness of this kind of research work. Trustworthiness is increased when the context of the fieldwork is sufficiently detailed to allow the reader opportunity to extrapolate our findings in similar contexts (Guba, 1981; Lincoln, 2016). Our detailed description of the critical reflection approach below also provides for justifiability of our findings and demonstrates that these emerged from data rather than just from our subjective predispositions. Meaning of context, especially within our higher education landscape, provides for accounts of historical advantage or disadvantage of our institution. Our institution was a historically advantaged institution but has since assumed the status of being disadvantaged in the sense that more than 90% of our students are from historically disadvantaged communities.

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Approaches to Academic Excellence in Higher Education

This situation has compelled the stretching of infrastructure to a point of almost wiping off its historical advantage. Our description of our practices needs to be understood within this complexity.

Positionality within the academic development landscape The third issue germane to our objectives was positionality of a practice within the academic development landscape. The first-level reflection on practices had to generate data that describe where each practice stood in terms of the three positionalities or modes of academic development (a service unit, a management function, or a department) as expounded by Gosling (2009). The benefit was that each practice’s current constitution was illuminated and the assumptions that have been carrying a practice made transparent. This allowed for a deeper understanding of existing theories and threshold concepts that have been undergirding a practice. It also opened pathways for alternative positioning of a practice moving into the future. As briefly discussed earlier, each of the three positionalities of academic development identified by Gosling (2009) signify certain activities and marginalise others.

Originality and creative problem-solving Fourth, there was a need for some level of creative problem-solving, that is, working outside known frameworks, theories and ideas of academic development in order to achieve originality of our work and potentially to contribute to the scholarship of academic development. These four issues (outcomes of our scholarly exercise, meaning of context, positionality of each practice and creative problem-solving) were critical in justifying our research approach and its appropriateness. In the following section, a detailed description of the underlying theories that guided our critical reflection exercise is offered as well as a description of the model that guided our work.

Critical reflections on our practices: A model The actual question we needed to answer first and adequately on the writing retreats was whether the core concepts that have been informing our practices still carried potency and saliences that could provide adequate support to student and staff learning, in light of incessant workplace demands and societal expectations, as well as conflicting demands from competing epistemes, or versions, of higher education. The push for higher education to develop employable graduates has been framing the higher education landscape and becoming impossible to ignore. It has created very fluid learning spaces that require higher levels of flexibility so that absolute, fixed, core concepts, drawn from strictly objectivist traditions, no longer serve the practices of academic development well. There was an absolute need to create conditions of learning in these writing retreats that could allow a more meaningful and critical engagement with the uncertainties imposed on us by the prevailing circumstances in higher education. These uncertainties can best be described as overlapping constraints and conflicting objectives that make optimising higher education learning quite daunting. One of those overlapping

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

constraints is the entrenched and persisting individualised, psychologised conceptions of learning that have been bedevilling higher education in an era where teamwork and collaboration (sociological conceptions) in learning have become a premium, and form a requisite part of graduate attributes. This constraint imposes upon learning – in higher education, at least – two conflicting objectives that need resolving in order to optimise higher education learning. One of the objectives of higher education learning is described by Kreber (2006) as supporting students to develop towards a greater authenticity, one which is not limited to students’ academic learning and personal growth but also includes helping students to contribute towards building a world driven by social justice. The other objective of higher education learning involves helping students to be employable by developing what is termed “graduate attributes”. These conflicting objectives of higher education learning compete for pedagogical space, resources and time, imposing constraints and conflicting objectives for higher education learning that were an important focus for our thinking when deciding on the approach to our learning. Our learning as academic developers can easily be mired in similar uncertainties where the professionalisation of teaching meant that ad hoc academic development practices based on commonsense, intuition and experience would no longer be adequate in guiding practices. We had to find an approach to learning, one which could help us develop new understandings that have potential to powerfully improve our practices in supporting students, as well as supporting not only staff learning but also staff professionalisation. All of these considerations also meant that we needed to include, as an integral part of our reflection on our practices, our personal accounts of our practices and of how we came into them, and what influenced us in those developments. It was vital that these accounts were not reduced to anecdotes but became key in weaving a rich, qualitative tapestry of our accounts about our practices. In light of all of this, we had to examine the territory of academic development in South Africa for possible insights. We were encouraged to find that academic development practices and approaches, in South Africa specifically, have an emerging literature, if currently somewhat scant. This literature mainly focused on the area of academic staff development where quite extensive research has been done, although it also showed reliance on two theories – that is, reflective practice and the scholarship of teaching and learning – to inform practice (Boughey, 2012; Quinn 2012). In particular the 2012 book edited by Lynn Quinn entitled Re-imagining academic staff development: Spaces for disruption offered new possibilities for academic development, albeit in narrower terms in relation to what we sought to achieve in this monograph. First, it engaged academic developers at one university in reflecting deeply on their academic development practices (the same genre adopted by this monograph). Second, it deliberately used the nomenclature and techniques of innovation as critical lenses through which to see and analyse the practices of the academic developers, thus making an original contribution to the scholarship of academic development. (This monograph similarly makes use of the innovation framework, and in particular the adaptation of the engineering TRIZ inventive problem-solving approach, to shape our critical reflection model.) Third, Quinn and colleagues sought to improve the different types of learning that take place only within the higher education context, including elements of learning at the individual, collective, and local levels. (In this monograph we seek to be more

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Approaches to Academic Excellence in Higher Education

explicit in terms of the types of learning we deem essential to support, the kinds that help academic developers to better support staff and student learning.) This monograph is about the learning of academic developers as it obtains within the constraints of the higher education context, and how it could better support student and staff learning. As indicated above, it bears some similarities to Quinn (2012) on academic staff development in terms of focus on theories of reflective practice and SoTL in the broader field of academic development, although this study is focused in one context, that of VUT. While reflective critique and SoTL have been extensively investigated and continue to receive substantial attention in research on teaching and learning, our interest was on how the two theories could be integrated to provide a broader framework for our approach to learning, and to cover other areas of academic development not covered in Quinn’s book. Critical reflection as the basis of undergirding our own learning was quite appealing, especially the model developed by Jan Fook in his 2015 chapter entitled “Reflective practice and critical reflection,” as it was broad enough to accommodate other areas of academic development. Fook (2015) uses four existing theories to model critical reflection: reflective practice; reflexivity; critical social theory; and postmodernism. To this, we added aspects of SoTL in order to strengthen our critical reflection model in ways that would make it appropriate to fostering lifelong professional learning amongst academic developers. 1 Description of current and ideal concepts and ideas that ground the practice 2

5

Making overlapping constraints and conflicting objectives transparent

Enacting improved or transformed practices

3 4 Reconceptualising and practising/ sharing new thinking

Mobilising resources

Figure 1.3 Critical reflection model

Reflective practice and critical reflection The origins of reflective practice can be traced to the 1980s, when conflicts between differing objectives of the teaching profession began to intensify (a trajectory that persists to this day). Those conflicting objectives offered different versions of what constitutes a teaching practice and

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

a university learning context. First, the absolute authority of the higher education teacher was increasingly challenged and questioned as increased accountability was expected, mainly from governments and industry. The second, related, conflict emanates from contestation around the traditional meaning of a university as a “self-selecting congregation of scholars dedicated to the pursuit of truth . . . dedicated to following the light of its reasoned inquiry” (Kennedy 2017, p.47) and the contrasting emerging call from commerce and industry that universities ought to churn out employable graduates equipped to make a meaningful contribution to the societal resource accumulation project. These competing versions of the work of a university teacher and varying meanings of a university education meant that some kind of reflection on these challenges was necessary. According to Schön (1983), these reflections had to focus on the system of accountability that was imposed on the teaching practice, and which assumed a character based on objective, routine-based and measurable traits. This technocratic system of managerialism imposed on the tertiary teaching profession has serious implications for academic development, as an emerging area of practice and scholarship that supports teaching and learning in higher education. It not only required a reflection, but a serious dose of criticality. The focus on critical reflection meant that we, as practitioners, needed to engage in ongoing scrutiny not only of the practices of teaching and academic development, but also our own lives. This broader undertaking was necessary because we needed to align our practices and their underlying assumptions with our own personal philosophies. The main professional goal that was pursued in aligning our practices and personal philosophies was to ensure shared values for what constitutes our professional identities. Reflective practice seeks to unearth actual theories and ideas that guide practices, with the purpose of improving these practices. Similarly, critical reflection focuses on uncovering deeply-held fundamental beliefs (values), examining, and changing them where necessary (Mezirow, 1990), leading to transformation.

Power and agency As reflective practice improves practice, critical reflection leads to a fundamental change in perspective (Cranton, 1996). Reflective practice is thus involved in the process of researching theories or ideas that result in a practice with ameliorating impact, while critical reflection offers an analysis of how power affects practices. Critical reflection thus includes researching how power shapes professional practices. Universities as organisations functioning within broader societies command enormous power through their specialised learning. This power gets exercised first at the level of individual learning (teaching and curriculum level) and can be understood, at least, at four further levels. In my own doctoral study (Pitso, 2011), I identified these levels as aspects of a pedagogical practice that determine how learning at the individual level happens. First, power at this level is shaped by how students are positioned in relation to disciplinary knowledge. Students can be positioned in terms of specialised knowledge as “ignorant (not knowing)” so that the task of the teaching practice becomes to move students from a state of unknowing the subject to a state of knowing what is already known by others – a type of knowing, or knowledge, which could include its mastery and application. This approach to learning can be highly technicist as it is premised on objectivity, routines, and measurability. There are fewer opportunities, in this kind of learning, for students to self-

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Approaches to Academic Excellence in Higher Education

construct and attempt to add to the body of knowledge in specific disciplines. Key decisions on content, delivery mode and assessment reside with the academic staff and faculty, with little input from the students. Power relations are significantly skewed towards the academic staff and faculty. It is important to note, though, that the power of the academic staff in manipulating these classroom level issues is also being eroded via faculty-level decisions on academic workload, and choices on content and teaching evaluations (Hayes, 2017 ). However, in his 2011 book titled The fall of the faculty and the rise of the all-administrative university, Benjamin Ginsberg bemoans the erosion of power even at faculty-level through a shift from the faculty as custodian of the intellectual project to top mangement (VCs, DVCs, Deans, and so on), which marshalls for institutional efficiency through the language and terms of business. Hayes (2017) makes a similar point about the ascendancy of institutional efficiency and the compromising of the intellectual project to which the university owes its existence. Another version of individual-level learning, based on fostering intellectual growth, and thus different from the pursuit of institutional efficiency, offers students opportunities to engage actively with the content and attempt to make a meaningful contribution to it through testing its efficacy in real-life situations. In this instance, there is a level of shared power in the teaching practice. However, real sharing of power is when students, mostly advanced undergraduates, get opportunities to engage knowledge that the discipline is still grappling with, and to attempt to add to it. This is the collective learning level and the ideal we need to pursue in university teaching and learning if we are to take control of the future. This type of learning for undergraduates is really not new, as Friedrich Kohlrausch, the 19th-century physicist, used it successfully to develop key concepts of physics with advanced undergraduate students. It is, in my view, the kind of undergraduate learning that academic developers ought to foster in all of our undergraduate studies – mainly because it repositions the classroom actors (students and staff) as learners mutually engaged in some intellectual project to the benefit of scholarship, and eventually of societies. Second, the manner of positioning students in relation to the knowledge of the discipline also determines students’ agency, or relative power base. When positioned as “ignorant” then students’ active agency in learning becomes vitiated to a point of passivity but when students are allowed to self-construct and actively engage in this knowledge at the level of creating opportunities for them to add to it then their active agency in learning is restored. This way, undergraduates get empowered. Similarly, these power issues also map out students’ autonomy in their learning and classroom relations, in that the degree of discretion a student has in classroom learning determines the overall discretionary power of the students, as well as to how students relate to the content and the academic staff. These four micro-features of a teaching practice (students’ positioning, agency, autonomy and classroom relations) form an important consideration on decisions regarding how teaching practices ought to be supported, reflected on and possibly changed or transformed. They also influence choices on the selection of core concepts and ideas that ought to underpin the teaching practice, as well as those core concepts and ideas that bear heavily on supportive postures of

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academic developers. The inevitable tensions between teaching practices and the supportive postures of academic developers are healthy and constitute the very idea of a university as a place for “reasoned inquiry” and robust intellectual engagement. They open intellectual spaces for active and constant engagement and debate on the nature of higher education learning and the very notion of a university, thus creating spaces for professional learning and growth. The tensions result from differences on the chosen core concepts and ideas as ideals that define each teaching practice and the supportive postures of academic development. Given the competing objectives of higher learning as framed by key constructs of learning for its own sake, learning for social justice, or learning for employability, these tensions are necessary and must be deliberately created in the critical interaction between the academic staff and academic developers.

Organisation and culture Another level of power analysis was at an institutional level. Teaching practices and supportive postures can also be positioned in terms of institutional power as mediated through a culture, that is, in terms of underlying beliefs, assumptions and values that give an organisation its distinctive character, as well as influencing power distribution and resource mobilisation (efficiency-driven, nurturing, transformative, results-driven). Organisational cultures have a powerful bearing on practices and map out in terms of two main dichotomous factors: stability and control as well as flexibility and freedom on one hand; internal focus and integration as well as external focus and differentiation on the other hand. An understanding of these basic concepts of a culture are important in better understanding why certain practices are supported psychologically, morally and in terms of resource allocation while others get marginalised. For instance, when an institution’s culture is efficiency-driven, it has a strong internal focus, seeks stability and integration; thus differentiation and a strong external focus in such a culture acquire the status of being “deviant,” and deserving marginalisation and even punishment. In chapter 4, Pauline Machika shows how she had to navigate through such a countervailing tide of entrenched ways of doing things in teaching and learning, in order to successfully implement technology-enhanced education. Efficiency-driven institutions such as our own tend to consider external engagement only when it helps justify branding issues, riding the crest of popular higher education discourses of internationalisation, partnerships and profits. However, care is taken that these external influences do not impact the normal running and culture of an institution. Teaching practices and supportive postures of academic developers receive similar treatment as external engagement when they materially “deviate” from ingrained cultural norms. Once these teaching and academic development practices assume a posture of radicalism, perceived or real, the practitioners often become outsiders in their own institution and, in some cases, even within their own units. Radicalism so defined within an entrenched institutional culture would mean holding different beliefs about what constitutes learning including its purpose, methods, assessment and outcomes. The question we ask ourselves here is: Should such learning pursue the achievement of reproducing dominant societal cultures (“the educated person”), system efficiency (as in workrelated learning), well-being or emancipated students?

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Such questions should be at the heart of our academic development and are ventilated to some degree in chapter 2 by Masebala Tjabane. The competing versions of a university and current academic struggles on the real meaning of a university (Hayes &Wynyard, 2002; Hayes 2017 a) have to be understood as ways of influencing institutional cultures and practices including teaching and academic development practices. These debates on competing versions of a university have to form an integral part of academic development’s semiotic intellectual ecology. The complex issues of institutional power as delineated here compelled us to make critical reflection the framing concept of our learning.

Reflexivity and critical reflection Fook (2015) explains reflexivity as the acquired ability to recognise and appreciate that all aspects of our lives and our context influence the way we research and apply such knowledge in our academic practices. He further identifies four ways this happens. First, he argues that we select, engage and interpret this knowledge in terms of how we position ourselves towards it, as influenced by how it was created. Another level of positioning ourselves to this knowledge is influenced by our positioning within the institution and the wider community of practice. In this way of reflexivity, I argue, our positioning towards this knowledge happens within the epistemic spectrum that has, on one end of the dichotomy, objectivity where our academic practices (teaching, academic development, scholarship) are positioned in terms of what is called “the heritage of positivism” and postpostivism. On the other end of the epistemic spectrum, our practices are guided by informed subjectivity. In the middle of the epistemic spectrum rests pragmatism, where our practices proceed on the basis of what works at a particular point in time and within a particular context, and where instruments of both objectivity and subjectivity are creatively and innovatively applied – in ways that establish pragmatism as a separate genre of research, rather than just a cobbling up of different sets of research instruments (see Figure 1.4). Second, Fook makes a case that this knowledge is mediated through our own subjectivity, experiences and social positioning at an institutional and wider community of practice level, which compel how we see, understand and use it. It is important to note that Fook, while not explicit about this point, refers to knowledge at an application level, that is, as it guides our own practices. In other words, knowledge might as well have been generated by tools of objectivity but its application and use in real-life situations might moderate its original salience and be moderated by subjective influences. Third, and similar to the second point, while we are influenced by how knowledge was produced, our own beliefs about what constitutes knowledge and its legitimate production do not always match what we do at a practice level. We thus do make provision for the eventuality that the knowledge we use to guide our practices might not have the same level of objectivity in practice as that which produced it. There may thus be a strong case to make that a more pragmatic approach to our practice may serve a better purpose. It might allow us to constantly think about core concepts and ideas

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

that underlie and motivate our practices, given that some concepts and ideas might work at a particular point in time with a different group of students and staff, and become impotent in other circumstances. Fourth, according to Fook, this knowledge may be influenced by history and our structured contexts. In this sense, objective knowledge can be subjectively influenced and shaped by the history and culture of a particular society. A good example is provided by the use of fundamental pedagogics during apartheid to train teachers in order to drive a “socially-empty trainability” as Bernstein (1990) refers to it (and as also alluded to in chapter 2 in this book). A socially-empty trainability ignores issues of power relations and those of social justice. This history and context demonstrates how practices of academic development in South Africa can be traced to the supporting of underprepared students who were to increasingly invade higher education. If pure objectivist traditions had informed practices of academic development, then these would have reduced student support to remediation and use of a deficit model. In the process, academic development practices that support student learning would have entrenched inferiority and superiority complexes amongst students. As a result of this general concern with an objectivist approach to academic development practices, pragmatic academic development programmes such as Supplemental Instruction (SI) would not have been developed. The main advantage of SI is that it targets historically difficult subjects and thus allow both performing and underperforming students to help one another in the mastery of the subject content. SI is elaborated on in chapter 7. Reflexivity understood within the framework of critical reflection thus refers mainly to how we can go about researching our practices in terms of the selection, engagement and interpretation of the core concepts and ideas that drive our practices, and and in terms of determining their salience and potency in supporting students and staff within particular institutional and societal contexts – as well as within particular points in the trajectories of the institution and society. Reflexivity helps to make transparent how power in formal learning shapes choices about what must be taught and how it should be taught. It thus becomes instrumental in indicating choices of concepts and ideas that must drive academic development practices under materially different historical contexts.

Objectivity

Pragmatism

Informed Subjectivity

Postmodernism and Critical Reflection

Figure 1.4 The epistemic spectrum

At the heart of a postmodern discourse, itself a form of power, are the following issues that have a bearing on our practices: • That we form a strong sense of history so that we can better understand origins and sources of disadvantage, marginalisation and suppression of certain discourses and other knowledges. This empowers us to advocate for discontinuities and rejection of anything that oppresses. For instance, temporal discontinuities suggest that people describe themselves as modern in respect of all of human history and postmodernism questions the central thesis of modernist thinking and knowledge production,

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Approaches to Academic Excellence in Higher Education

especially its linear and unified thinking (Parton, 1994). Furthermore, postmodernism questions notions that knowledge must be produced in a progressive way and that such knowledge is essentially non-conflictual (Fook, 2015). Another discontinuity brought about by postmodernism is geo-social in that arbitrary ascriptive categories that promote ethnocentric and eurocentric sentiments must be rejected, and efforts that promote cultural understanding and appreciation need to be encouraged. • That a general rejection of a “culture of experts” be supported and a more inclusive culture be encouraged. • This implies more openness, dynamism and embracing of plurality and heterogeneity in our own practices. White (1991, p.146) argues that postmodernism is essentially about “awareness of the perpetual necessity for remaining sensitive to otherness”. It thus explains the rise of “student experiences” as a category of interest in contemporary higher education and social justice discourses. Another danger that postmodernism seeks to avert is “earned dogmatism,” the idea that experts because of their presumed superior technical knowledge tend to suffer from closed-minded cognition, which severely hinders reflection on issues and accommodation of others’ views as part of growing one’s own practices. • We must become increasingly aware of the relationship between knowledge and power. Fook (2015) argues that by exposing the role of dominant discourses in creating what is considered as legitimate knowledge, postmodernism heightens our consciousness of where power rests, and how it is maintained within our institutions and even our practices. This, according to Fook, is what makes postmodernism relevant to critical reflection. It allows us to discern dominant discourses and the power these bestow on certain groupings within our institutions, such that they become the rallying point for decisions on the strategic direction of the institution and its resourcing behaviours. Such decisions do have a bearing on our practices, especially in terms of choices of core concepts and ideas that guide our practices, as well as on framing possibilities of acceptance or marginalisation by the dominant institutional culture. Postmodernist thinking thus advocates for a more nurturing institutional culture, in which collegiality facilitates open, even informal, relations amongst staff, irrespective of institutional positioning, and whether at a strategic or operational level. It further seeks to promote “care,” understood as promoting wellbeing of staff and elevating students’ experiences; including cultural understanding as a special category of strategic concern worthy of resource commitment. These issues thus have a bearing on our practices as aspects of critical reflection on our practices. Within the South African context, students call for a decolonised curriculum, and the insistence of some African Studies scholars that knowledge be produced within the framework of epistemic disobedience suggests a strong advocacy for recognition and appreciation of other forms of knowing, and a rejection of a highly eurocentric knowledge production and its learning framework. Such activism is essentially about challenging dominance and cognitive chauvinism. It thus becomes a crucial element in considering any critical reflection endeavour. It also makes a strong case for consideration of students as possible generators of new knowledge within relevant disciplines, along the lines of Kohlrauschian pedagogy, and thus calls for learning that promotes certain levels of students’ active agency in learning and research – a consideration in higher education teaching and learning that is worthy of attention in the era where heutagogical discourses are becoming increasingly relevant in higher education (Blaschke, 2012; Blaschke,

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2013; Blaschke et al., 2014; Blaschke et al., 2015). Heutagogy has strong characteristics of self-determination, autonomy, active agency, technology savvy, and students’ contribution to disciplinary scholarship, even at advanced undergraduate level. The active role of students in their discipline’s epistemic practices would go a long way towards re-imagining teaching and learning in this century. These debates on learning weighed heavily on us in our critical reflection on teaching and learning.

Critical social theory and critical reflection Critical social theory as a tool to analyse power within institutions offers another layer of meaning that is relevant to critical reflection. It refers mainly to the identification of dominance in terms of legitimised and signified discourses within an institution. It makes the point that such dominance is individually experienced and structurally created, that is, it refers to how institutional culture bears on the individual and how an individual reacts to it – whether conforming to or challenging it. In relation to critical reflection and how we sought to frame it, issues of dominance went beyond just institutional culture: they subsumed the choices academic developers make on core concepts and ideas about their practices, and how they conform to or challenge the institutional status quo. It was a question of whether academic developers have the luxury of actively participating in arbitrarily constructed forms of domination, through allowing those dominant discourses to influence their choices on how the practice should proceed. Participating in such behaviour becomes self-defeating and undesirable in the practice of academic development, since its very raison d’être is change and transformation. Academic developers build their own power through choices they make on core concepts and ideas of their practices and the supportive postures they leverage. Their choices must be made carefully and reflected on constantly, as also ways of guarding against earned dogmatism and creation of new forms of dominance. Hence critical reflection is so important and must form a normal part of all practices in academic development. Issues of dominance also relate to certain epistemic injustices that occur at undergraduate level, where dogmatic focus on learning at an individual level denies the aspiring undergraduate knower the opportunity to access capabilities of collective and local level learning, that is, gaining research skills and their application in real situations.

Scholarship of teaching and learning, and critical reflection Founded by Ernest Boyer in 1990 as a way of challenging the dominance of other three scholarships of discovery, integration and application in higher education, the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) involves a systematic and reflective approach to teaching. Subsequently, Ashwin and Trigwell (2004) advanced a three-stage SoTL model for developing teachers into scholars of their own practices. Stage one of their SoTL model entails teachers probing aspects of their teaching practice and selfvalidating gained insights for use in their own classroom. At stage two, teachers investigate some aspects of their practice, also subjecting them to internal peer scrutiny for internal validation and sharing. This second stage of the model is a crucial aspect of academic development, as insights gained in such an investigation could potentially inform, guide, and possibly improve practices of

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other teachers in their faculties. The third stage involves not only teachers’ researching aspects of their practices but also subjecting these efforts of reasoned inquiry about their practices to external validation by submitting the work to journals and presenting to conferences. In this way, teachers not only contribute to improving or even transforming their practices, but also contribute to the body of knowledge through wider dissemination. This third stage contributes to collective learning and represents the higher form of a scholarly endeavour. The highest form of such a scholarly endeavour, in my view, is when the shared knowledge of the teacher guides other practices on a global scale and in real time, that is, such knowledge forms part of core concepts and ideas of other practitioners’ practices across many learning contexts . In uncovering core concepts and ideas that have been guiding our practices, the work of scholars who contributed to the body of knowledge in our respective practices would also be identified, and their contribution would have gone beyond just sharing, entering the realm of influencing practices. It is when scholarly work reaches this stage that it walks in the realm of real power and thus represents, in my view, the ultimate level of learning. It is the acme of achievement for this process, and worthy of being pursued. Critical reflection makes this achievement transparent and thus contributes to the highest level of scholarship. It is important that we consider these ideas around SoTL because SoTL has over almost three decades become a critical aspect of core concepts that guide teaching practices across the world. Thus, as academic developers, our efforts to meaningfully support student and staff learning had to take into account this crucial concept that influences those activities, SoTL: it is essential that it becomes an integral part of our theoretical arsenal.

The critical reflection model Our critical reflection model is based on ideas explicated earlier, and guided how we approached our own learning during the writing retreats. Our learning in these writing retreats acknowledged that we were reflecting on our practices at the time when competing versions of what constitutes learning at individual, collective and local levels, as well as contested meanings of what a university is, were being hotly debated globally. These competing versions of higher education learning and that of a university created very fluid, dynamic and uncertain institutional ambiences, and somehow required a model that could help us consider these matters more deeply in relation to our practices. We opted to underpin our critical reflection model on the inventive problem-solving model because in our learning we sought to go beyond conventional thinking and reasoned inquiry so as to include possibilities of being creative in shaping and potentially transforming our practices. This model also made it possible to uncover overlapping constraints and conflicting objectives in our efforts to optimise our practices, as earlier stated: that is, it provided opportunities to consider our practices in relation to the uncertainties of our context at this time. The inventive problem-solving model is shown and explained below: Solution Ideality Resources Problem

Contradiction

Figure 1.5 The TRIZ inventive problem-solving model

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The model begins with a problem which, in the context of our practices, meant providing concise descriptions of key issues and their embedded assumptions, which we sought to make transparent in our practices. These issues related to our insights, strongly-held fundamental beliefs, and the core concepts and ideas that have been shaping our practices. The first stage of our learning would then involve identifying gaps between our current insights as well as their undergirding core concepts, and the ideals we sought to pursue moving forward – given the highly fluid higher education landscape. This meant that we critically examined the potency and saliences of our current practices in relation to the support we provided to student and staff learning up to that point of reflection. We understood that if we were to penetrate to the core of what constitutes our practices, we would have to question our fundamental beliefs about what constitutes our practices and the quality of support we provide to students and staff. In fact, there was a need to question even our own attitudes, principles and beliefs, which we have been employing to justify our basic life convictions (stances) in light of the uncertainties imposed on higher education by societal expectations and workplace demands. A 200- to 300-word self-reflection narrative is often used for this purpose of uncovering core concepts, ideas and beliefs that have been driving professional practices. Such an exercise also creates opportunities to reconstruct our professional practices once a greater truth (epiphany) is arrived at, one which explains the current framing of our practices and why it would not survive the muster of prevailing higher education discourses. This process of self-reflection then set us on a course towards professional learning and development. You will notice that some of the chapters in this monograph begin with a personal narration of how some of us came into our practices. Such a personal narration derives from this self-reflection exercise. The second part of the inventive problem-solving technique/professional learning involves identifying ideas, concepts and insights which are opposed to our current framing of our practice (contradiction/conflict) and trade-offs that need to be made in order to resolve the conflict and help us reconfigure our practices. In our own learning, these conflicts were initially of an epistemic nature and involved how we positioned ourselves against our professional body of knowledge and the manner of its validation. Conflicts arise when we position our practices in either objectivist, pragmatist or subjectivist stances. Such stances represent choices we make about the fundamental beliefs we hold, our intentions in our practices and in our lives, as well as courses of action we select in these practices amounting to a commitment. In important ways, these stances also link us to the principles that could provide solutions to the problems of our practices. In our own learning, identifying conflicts represented the second aspect of our critical reflection process. This second aspect of our professional learning consists of identifying conflicting core concepts, and represents quite a fluid, dynamic space that leads to uncertainty, a stage where there are conflicting objectives and overlapping constraints that make optimising our practices a challenge. This is the most crucial part of our professional learning, as justifiable choices need to be made as to the grounds of breaking with the traditions of our practices and embracing new ways of conducting them. The possibility for such existential inconsistencies between our current beliefs and the ones we needed to embrace meant that the scale and magnitude of such dissonance would either lead

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us into retreating into the carapaces of our practices’ traditions, or find ways of accommodating new understandings that can make our practices more relevant to prevailing higher education conditions. In situations where the prevailing higher education conditions were contested – as is the case these days – then the magnitude of dissonance increased substantially, and added a layer of complexity that made choices on how our practices ought to map out, and justifying them, quite daunting. Chapters in this monograph attempt to provide insights into these complex decision-making processes without necessarily trying to provide ready-made solutions. There was also greater recognition in the writing retreats that our practices could only reach metastability in a measure sufficient to allow for certain courses of action to continue in order to impact student and staff learning – in other words, absolute certainty has become impossible in this day and age. The third aspect of the inventive problem-solving model/professional learning entails resource mobilisation to support improved or transformed aspects of our practices. This might sound like a relatively easy part but resource distribution and optimisation within any institution depend a lot on the entrenched institutional culture and its strategic objectives. Institutions are not inclined to deploy resources in areas of innovation that fall outside its culture and strategies. Yet, innovations by their very nature cannot fit nicely with institutional culture and strategies, because they are essentially about transforming not only these very cultures but sometimes even institutional strategies. Academic development as a support structure often tends to struggle to secure adequate resources unless it is a key strategic point in a particular institution and dedicated resources are allocated for its innovations. Other factors that play a role are the positioning of the academic developer in the power structures of the institution, access to a champion in the top echelons of the institution, and perceptions about whether the particular academic development practice supports institutional key strategic goals and objectives. For instance, improved or transformed practices that go against the grain of the core concepts that define an institution and its entrenched culture – its declared or implicit “mission and vision” – could find it difficult to secure adequate resources to execute the mandate of the improved or transformed practice. There could be major challenges for the academic developer especially if additional human, physical and/or financial resources are needed to implement the improved or transformed practice. These additional resource allocations to the practice could even receive greater resistance when they seek to alter the institutional status quo. As an alternative, securing the information resources identified as vital in improving or transforming a particular academic development practice could always be incentivised via processes of research, meaning that mobilisation of the information resources has to be done within the framework of research and advancing scholarship. In this sense, SoTL becomes a crucial aspect of the justification arsenal for each practice in resource mobilisation, as justifications based on research tend to carry more weight in institutional resource allocations. This aspect of resource mobilisation also determines the degree to which improved or transformed practices could realistically implement their new ideals, defined as clarity of focus, where a higher design of the practice has been achieved. This becomes the fourth aspect of our learning and at the time of writing up our findings for this monograph, we were still grappling with this aspect of our professional learning. These are moments when our revamped practices

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meet up with the vagaries and exigencies of real, institutional realities. In a future publication of our ongoing experiences and findings, we hope to share our insights on this level of professional learning.

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Tennant, M., McMullan, C. & Kaczynski, D. (2009). Teaching, learning and research in higher education: A critical approach. Abingdon: Routledge. [https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203875919]. White, S. (1991). Political theory and postmodernism (Modern European Philosophy series). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Theme 1. 1. Teaching and Technology Support

2. Evaluating concepts of teaching excellence in higher education Masebala Tjabane

A passion for excellence During my formative years, growing up in the picturesque mountains of Lesotho, I used to play a make-believe game enacting adult life called Mantloane. In my games, I used to adopt the role of a teacher, an exercise that continued to be a part of my developmental journey through all levels of schooling and tertiary studies. As part of my keen interest in teaching, I quietly observed my teachers throughout my school days and sought to emulate those I considered to be excellent. These experiences reinforced my interest and passion in critically understanding notions of teaching excellence including its meanings, models and theories. Alan Skelton’s 2005 landmark study of teaching excellence in higher education made a significant contribution to this area of scholarship in offering a critical analysis of understandings of teaching excellence at the tertiary level. According to him, there are at least four different understandings of teaching excellence in higher education and each serves different purposes. He labels these approaches, or discourses of teaching, as traditional liberal; performative; psychologised; and critical. Teboho Pitso, Malefane Lebusa and Lawrence Kok (2014) add another dimension to these approaches to teaching excellence, which they call invitational understanding of teaching excellence. In their article (Pitso et al., 2014), they argue that teaching excellence should be measured in terms of the degree to which the agency of those in the classroom is rebalanced – to a point where students can have access to the means of critically understanding the content of the learning offered, and sense its limits in real situations, such that they are empowered to explore new possibilities. Teaching excellence, in the view of Pitso et al., is strongly focused on students’ creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship; thus it is also focused on improving students’ material conditions, similar to the “critical” understanding of what constitutes teaching excellence.

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Evaluating concepts of teaching excellence in higher education

I myself incline towards another version of teaching excellence which, whilst based on improving students’ material conditions, is also underpinned by radical social justice. In my own long journey through the broad landscapes of teaching and learning in higher education, I became increasingly concerned about concepts of teaching excellence that ignored social justice discourses. From humble beginnings, and early forays into teaching excellence, I was progressively exposed to a variety of understandings of what constitutes excellence in teaching. Following my youthful role-playing, I was motivated to register for a degree in teaching at the University of Lesotho. My passion for teaching excellence directed my journey as a professional in higher education first to Giyani College of Education in the Limpopo Province some twenty years ago. My path eventually led me into my current work as an academic developer responsible for promoting excellent teaching amongst academic staff at our institution, the Vaal University of Technology (VUT). Through my own tertiary studies – that is, as a student and researcher in higher education – I learned that teaching excellence is based on certain teaching ideals. In my experience, the nature of excellence as perceived in educational institutions went through changes over the decades that I have been engaged as a teacher and learner. In my own tertiarylevel studies, I was exposed mainly to two perspectives that underlie ideals of teaching excellence, the conservative and the progressive. I became increasingly interested in the progressive approach to teaching and its concern with improving students’ material conditions. Progressive teaching, in this chapter, is understood to embrace principles of student empowerment as well as improvement of students’ material conditions. In this chapter, it is my purpose to show how, from humble beginnings as a teacher in pursuit of excellence, I was exposed me to various meanings of teaching excellence as I progressed through advanced studies in teaching. In the course of my journey, the preferred teaching ideals changed over time as institutional visions changed, affecting understandings of teaching excellence. Alongside my experiences and insights, I present arguments that the current underlying perspective on teaching at VUT, and consequently its prevailing perceptions of the meaning of excellence, drives and sustains the neo-liberal agenda, in effect pursuing the production of employable graduates through socially-empty trainability (Bernstein, 1990). Further, it is my purpose to suggest alternative concepts of teaching excellence based on radical social justice discourse. First, however, I outline my more or less ad hoc approach to academic staff development and explain how my sustained interest in teaching excellence compelled a critical reflection on the concepts, variations in understandings, and applications, of excellence in teaching.

Frameworks underlying notions of excellence How we understand teaching excellence depends on which framework or system of ideals we pursue among many current approaches to education. Historically, ideals of excellence in teaching arose from the purpose of developing “an educated man,” and have evolved to include the current imperative of improving the material conditions of students. Considerable resources and attention have been devoted to achieving the “pursuit of excellence” – the extremely good quality of education that university mission statements uphold as a prime characteristic of what they offer.

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The concept of excellence is complex to define, but commonly signifies a high measure and integration of skill, cognitive intelligence, and emotional and social intelligence, and is regarded as a goal worthy of being pursued and achieved. In most institutions of higher education, excellence signifies the achievement of the highest levels of individual and institutional accomplishment in the three functions of higher education: teaching and learning; research; and service to the community. In principles of ethics propounded in the ancient world, excellence was associated with perfection and ideality, and included notions of courage, moderation, justice, virtue and happiness. Happiness is an important component of excellence that has some relevance in this chapter. It is associated with the Greek word eudemonia, which means doing well and living well (Parry, 2014), thus making a strong association between excellence in teaching and improved material conditions for students. Taking the element of happiness into account, notions of excellence in teaching can thus be justifiably linked to improving students’ material conditions, which can pave the way to eudemonia (living well). When the way we teach contributes towards improvement of living conditions of students and facilitates general happiness in a socially-just society, then teaching, in my view, has reached the zenith of excellence. To achieve this, teaching has to incline towards accommodating the most vulnerable in our society and must be actively involved in challenging systems that oppress and marginalise them – in some senses in line with the ideas expressed by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the oppressed (1970). In many ways this position on the priorities of teaching challenges the underlying neo-liberal agenda that pushes for work-related learning, which goes against the grain of achieving social justice – especially economically. In my view, however, Freire’s view of emancipatory education lacked a practical end. While it made a significant contribution to challenging a great social injustice in our societies perpetuated via formal learning, it failed to go beyond its theorisation of oppression and marginalisation. On the other hand, it did eruditely reveal the complicity of higher education in generating classbased social inequality and perpetuating a neo-liberal agenda: and this was important. In this chapter, I assume a critical pragmatist position, with reference to two main elements. The first is analysis of issues of power that result in oppression and marginalisation of the poor, and perpetuation of this in terms of access to formal education (Boshier, 1998, pp.20-21); as well as acknowledgement of the role of critical theory in seeking the emancipation of the oppressed and marginalised. Secondly, and possibly an area where I attempt to make some contribution to meanings of excellence, is consideration of the practical courses of action that must be undertaken in order for the oppressed to assume active agency in fighting for their freedom. This practical action draws on elements of Dewey’s pragmatism. Thus, aspects of teaching excellence that emerge from linking teaching with critical pragmatism as a version of radical social justice include and form the framework of my argument in this chapter. Teaching should: • Focus on improving students’ material conditions by developing their incipient skillsets. This includes facilitating their ability to resolve, creatively and innovatively, real, practical problems that affect them in society. In other words, at the heart of their learning, students should be focusing on social problems and their historical contexts, thus providing them with opportunities to interrogate how to become social agents with a strong sense of justice and fairness. As Freire (1970) argued, this approach to teaching helps students become independent thinkers and activists for a fairer society.

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Evaluating concepts of teaching excellence in higher education

• Stimulate the kind of resilience that enables students to operate optimally under challenging and uncertain contexts. The very socio-economic conditions that students endure on a daily basis, while traumatic, provide them with opportunities to develop ways of overcoming these conditions, and the teaching–learning context is one of many ways of facilitating them in developing strategies to overcome such types of trauma. • Promote collective and inclusive learning, which accesses all forms of knowledge represented in the group, including discerning critical aspects of a real situation, and developing practical means to ameliorate that situation (Pitso, 2014). • Foster teamwork amongst students as they creatively search for new ideas and approaches capable of improving society. In this sense, teaching efforts must mostly lead to a practical end

Conflation of effectiveness with excellence Until the landmark study of Skelton (2005) on teaching excellence, focus had always been on “effective” or “good” teaching (Chickering & Gamson, 1987; Ramsden, 2003; Ambrose et al., 2010). Table 2.1 below describes this approach to teaching. This approach meant that the “good” teacher paid narrow attention to the process of teaching and its underpinning methods, especially didactics; and, in the South African context, it referred mainly to “fundamental pedagogics.” The main thing about this approach to teaching is that it was bereft of the real social content, and so was highly decontextualised. It pushed for the learning of basic, universal knowledge, with students assuming a more passive role in their own learning. Under the repressive apartheid system of education, this teaching focus was understandable as apartheid was designed to create a socially unequal society, so that attention to social and material conditions would counter the grand project of racially based inequality (Chisholm, 2000). The 1994 democratic dispensation, while it was strong on the social justice discourse, resulted in the bureaucratisation of higher education via structures such as the Council on Higher Education in South Africa (CHE), dedicated mainly to improving teaching and learning in higher Education through activities such as the Quality Enhancement Project (Council on Higher Education in South Africa, 2014). I have elsewhere (Tjabane, 2010) interrogated policy formulations of a democratic state where there is strong social justice language, yet a strong neoliberal approach was adopted at the level of practice and implementation, with the result that outcomes inherently reflect social inequality. Higher education policy and its bureaucracies post-1994 entrenched rather than challenged this apparent contradiction (Tjabane, 2010). It is no wonder that effective teaching remains the most important aspect of quality measures rather than focus on excellence and its measurability. Focus on excellence helps teaching to look closely into its outcomes and underpinnings. For instance, the highly individualised and psychologised notions of teaching had a strong effective teaching focus and thus outcomes would be on “effective” learning. Other conceptions of teaching pay attention to outcomes linked to the capitalist, neo-liberal agenda thus would limit teaching effectiveness to corporate and industry systems “efficiency”. I am wary of referring to these teaching outcomes in terms of “excellence”. You would recall that I make a strong association between excellence in teaching with eudemonia, which means that outcomes of teaching must be centred around the interests of the students and their prospects of living well in a socially just society. Eudemonia, as an undergirding conception

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

of teaching excellence, deals not only with human flourishing in terms of economic prosperity, but includes the search for an equal society. Thus, excellent teaching, in this framework, must also develop students as activists who are empowered to fight for the wellbeing of all people. Notions of teaching underpinned by conceptions based on the traditional liberal (and neo-liberal), performative and psychologised approaches (Skelton, 2005) are more linked to “effective” teaching, as the underlying question should be: effective for what? Traditional liberal notions of higher education sought to reproduce an elite in a culture that was deeply exclusionary; performativity served as a resource accumulation project that produced inequality; and the psychologised approach encouraged individual aggrandisement. My basic point is that teaching can be linked to excellence only when it focuses on improving material conditions of students in pursuance of a socially just society, a point Pitso et al. (2014) make to an important degree. Table 2.1 below reflects my earlier forages into promoting effective teaching amongst academic staff as a newly-appointed staff development practitioner around the year 2000. At that time, our institution, historically one that had served whites under apartheid and the interests of the “intermediate-level apartheid economy,” had been recruiting industry experts with little experience of teaching and professional methods of teaching (Matee, 2009, p.255). It thus made sense, at that time, to focus on teaching methods and “effective” teaching in particular, as illustrated in Table 2.1. Table 2.1 Earlier concepts of effective teaching Teacher attitudea

Teacher styleb

Student engagementc

Workshop topicd

1.

Interest and explanation

Communicates high expectations

Students’ prior knowledge can help or hinder learning

Good teaching practice in Higher Education

2.

Concern and respect for students and their learning

Respects diverse talents and ways of learning

How students organise knowledge influences how they learn, and apply what they know

Classroom management; Understanding Higher Education students

3.

Appropriate assessment and feedback

Gives prompt feedback

Students’ motivation determines, directs, and sustains what they do to learn

Assessor training and principles of good assessment; Classroom management

Emphasises time on task

To develop mastery, students must acquire component skills, practise integrating them, and know when to apply what they have learned

Principles of good assessment; Motivating student learning; Classroom management

4.

Clear goals and intellectual challenge

Source: a  Ramsden (2003). b   Chickering & Gamson (1987). c   Ambrose et al. (2010). d   VUT, Generic Staff Development Workshops (2018). A selection of topics.

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Evaluating concepts of teaching excellence in higher education

Table 2.1 Earlier concepts of effective teaching

5.

6.

7.

Independence, control and intellectual engagement

Learning from students

Develops reciprocity and cooperation among students

Goal-directed practice coupled with targeted feedback enhances the quality of students’ learning

Motivating student learning

Encourages contact between students and faculty

Students’ current level of development interacts with the social, emotional, and intellectual climate of the course to impact learning

Motivating student learning; Developing as an academic

Encourages active learning

To become self-directed learners, students must learn to monitor and adjust their approaches to learning

The scholarship of teaching and learning; Teaching large classes

From effectiveness towards excellence Almost two decades later, and under materially different societal conditions where inequality is deepening, although democracy has long been established, the time has come to rethink my practice: hence my interest in interrogating notions of teaching excellence afresh. As I began to change my focus from effectiveness to excellence in teaching, I was exposed to reflective practice as an important tool for trying to understand my own practice, in terms of my own experiences and subjective understandings of this practice. Reflective practice has been gaining traction within the domain of academic staff development practice in the South African higher education landscape. It has mainly been used in relation to teaching practices, and not so much in academic development. I have now started using the framework of reflective teaching, an important variant of reflective practice, in my academic staff workshops. I have introduced the Osterman and Kottkamp (1993) framework (Table 2.2) in development workshops as a means of elucidating new ways of teaching in the light of prevailing conditions in a democratic society. While this framework in no way reflects measures of teaching excellence, it represents an important move away from the narrow focus on effective teaching. Its main contribution has been to shift the focus of academic teachers towards students’ interests, rather than looking at teaching purely as the means of replicating existing knowledge and industrial processes.

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

Table 2.2 Reflective teaching as a harbinger of teaching excellence Feature

Traditional

Reflective

Purpose

- Knowledge acquisition

- Behavioural change

Assumptions

- Change via standardised knowledge - Change: rational

- Change via self-awareness - Change: rational, emotional, social and cultural

Content

Knowledge: - Public - Given - Content Theory: - Espoused theory Theory/ practice: - Implicit/ discrete

Knowledge: - Public and personal - Given and problematic - Content and process Theory: - Behaviour: espoused and theory in use, action and outcomes Theory/ practice: - Explicit/ integral

Process

- Didactic/ abstract - Individual, molecular - Cognitive - Instructor as expert - Learner as subordinate - Practitioner as passive consumer

- Dialectic/ experimental - Collaborative, holistic, personal - Instructor as facilitator - Learner as agent - Practitioner as active researcher

Source: Osterman & Kottkamp (1993, p.41).

Through further research, and review of the literature on reflective practice, I came upon Stephen Brookfield (2006), whose position on the skilful and reflective teacher has some tenets similar to the list provided by Osterman and Kottkamp (1993). In his book, Brookfield focuses on diverse and unpredictable classrooms and suggests ways of dealing with such classrooms. His critical contribution that was relevant to my work was this focus on students as active agents in their own learning. However, I saw that his work was still focused on teaching methods and how to constantly reflect on them in order to optimise learning – meaning that he was concerned more with effective teaching than with excellence. In the past, profiles of our students often were a contentious discussion point, and their potential for agency was a factor that was generally ignored; until the work of Freire (1970), who advocated for a student-focused pedagogy. This focus on students, in the classroom, represented a shift from knowledge-based teaching and resonated with my views on student empowerment. It is thus a critical starting point for considering teaching within the excellence mould. Brookfield’s work on teaching effectiveness was also important for our post-apartheid context, in which higher education classrooms became complex and unpredictable in that they now included a big portion of underprepared students from historically disadvantaged schools. This context in turn accentuated the underpreparedness of academic staff who had not been prepared to deal with this kind of student profile. Table 2.3 highlights differences and similarities among underprepared students from the US and South Africa, indicating that although not unique, the changing nature of our student profiling demands a reflective approach to academic staff development to mitigate adverse outcomes in our higher education throughput trends.

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Evaluating concepts of teaching excellence in higher education

Table 2.3 Comparative challenges facing higher education USA

South Africa

Low pass rates

Very low pass rates: around 15% of students graduate in time

Low enrolment of minority group students

Participation rates of previously excluded black African students around 12%

Lower pass rates among lower income minority group students

One in three black African students graduate in time; less than 5% of the cohort obtain a degree

Students not adequately prepared in high school

Students not adequately prepared in high school

Increasing demand for graduates in the knowledge economy results in a rapidly expanding student body with unprecedented levels of diversity and large numbers of first generation students

Widening access and an increased demand for graduates in the knowledge economy lead to unprecedented levels of diversity and many first generation students

Source: Strydom & Mentz (2010, p.4).

Teaching excellence and the SoTL perspective Reflective approaches to academic staff development benefited a lot from conceptualising them within the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) framework, a transdisciplinary approach to facilitating better teaching and learning in higher education. At this stage of my journey, there was no longer any doubt that the complex student profile of the South African higher education context required constant reflection on teaching practices. Reflective practice and SoTL are now major concepts that underpin academic staff development (Quinn, 2012). However, reflective teaching has tended to be overly focused on academic staff experiences and have a strong subjective component. SoTL, on the other hand, has a strong research inclination, thus encouraging academic staff to research their own teaching and open it up for scrutiny by peers either internally or externally. Teboho Pitso, a member of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) and the South-African Swedish-Link Project on SoTL, had a profound effect on guiding our initiatives towards research-based teaching and research-driven academic staff development at VUT. His efforts resulted in a SoTL seminar for our academic staff conducted by well-known Mellon scholars, Keith Trigwell, Mike Prosser and Shirley Booth, who facilitated adoption of SoTL into our academic staff development programmes. Pitso also started a project that encourages staff to present aspects of their systematic research of their own teaching to conferences, an initiative which led to our own Centre for Academic Development annual in-house conference for academic and non-academic staff. Pitso’s major contribution to academic staff development (Pitso et al., 2014), however, is in the study he conducted with fellow academics on students’ accounts of their experiences of being taught. This resulted in a repositioning of teaching within the “material condition” mould alongside the work of Skelton (2005). This was particularly important for me, as I had already linked excellence in teaching with eudemonia, that is, with students’ wellbeing and prosperity, the key concepts on material conditions.

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

Questions raised by Skelton SoTL has now become the core concept that informs my practice in academic staff support. But in order to properly locate my views on excellence in teaching, I had to review the history. My starting point was to look closely at the 2005 Skelton model of excellence in teaching. Questions of this study centred around whether teaching excellence should be measured in terms of effectiveness of teaching methods in delivering content; good communication skills; or a research-led approach to teaching. Technology-enhanced teaching could, these days, be included in considering elements of teaching excellence. Skelton considered six constructs as essential in attempting to understand different versions of teaching excellence and identified four approaches to teaching. The four teaching styles of discourse we have already identified as traditional liberal; performative; psychologised; and critical. The six constructs – target, location, dominant knowledge form, dominant teaching method, teacher’s role, and purpose of teaching – provided meanings of excellence in each conception of teaching (Table 2.4). For instance, the target and location of performative teaching is commerce and industry: in this framework, excellent teaching is one that produces employable graduates who have acquired graduate attributes essential in that environment. The role of the teacher is thus to transfer these predetermined graduate attributes and ensure that students meet commerce and industry standards. It is clear that teaching practices under this approach develop out of necessity to vocationalise learning in ways that would ensure the efficiency of the capitalist system. Matters of social justice would matter little under these conditions and the only wellbeing that would matter would be that of commerce and industry, as well as that of the few students lucky enough to secure employment. Classroom level activities focus on the uncritical acquisition of knowledge and replication of industrial process, as well as the lifelong learning that encourages students to upskill and reskill to ensure the competitiveness of commerce and industry. It is my view that such an approach to teaching excellence focuses a lot on effective teaching methods rather than on students’ interests as earlier stated. In adopting a critical approach along the lines of Paulo Freire, Skelton shifted focus away from notions of teaching excellence that highlight effective teaching, towards consideration of serving students’ interests, understood as their material conditions. In this, he not only highlights the importance of students’ contribution and their emancipation through the efforts of excellent teaching, but in effect focuses on the stark reality that teaching and education are political constructs designed to serve the interests of those in the dominant elite of society. When teaching seeks to engage and serve the “ordinary” and the most vulnerable, its measures of excellence shift from the narrow focus on the elite to ensuring a broad-based societal flourishing and prosperity (eudemonia). This to me is my sense of what it means to be an excellent teacher, the idea that teaching becomes a radical construct in the service of the oppressed and weak.

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Evaluating concepts of teaching excellence in higher education

Table 2.4 Understanding teaching excellence in higher education Traditional

Performativity

Psychologised

Critical

Target

Elite

Meritocracy

Individuals

Informed citizenry

Location

Disciplines

Rules and regulations

Teacher–learner relationships

Material conditions

Epistemic beliefs

The pursuit of truth

Knowledge that works

Subjective interpretation

Social change

Teacher role

Subject expert

Standard enforcer

Psycho-diagnostic

Critical intellectualism

Purpose

Cultural reproduction

System efficiency

Effective learning

Emancipation

Source: Skelton (2005).

Swedish pedagogical competence Another perspective that influenced my thinking around teaching excellence and how to measure it comes from practitioners in Swedish higher education , who conceptualise excellence in the term “pedagogical competence,” which is regarded as a crucial part of professionalising teaching in their tertiary context. Based on their conception of pedagogical competence, Swedish higher education academics are expected to focus their teaching on supporting student learning, on developing their teaching practices via credible theory, researching aspects of their teaching and making the findings public (which is essentially the SoTL approach), as well as on making transparent the stage of development of their individual pedagogical competence (Table 2.5). A portfolio of evidence is used as the basis of measuring pedagogical competence, and thus teaching excellence, within the Swedish higher education landscape. One of the leading contributors to the conceptualisation of Swedish pedagogical competence is Thomas Olsson, whose visit to our university in 2015 was facilitated through his work with Teboho Pitso on the South African– Swedish Link Project on SoTL. That project resulted in 2015 in a book called The scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education: On its constitution and transformative potential (Booth & Woollacott, 2015), whose relevance, for me, is the emphasis on student learning and SoTL. Table 2.5 Swedish concepts of teaching excellence Criteria

Elements

A clear focus on student learning

- Practice based on a learning perspective - Integrated relation between theory and practice - Practice based on a sound relation to students

A clear development over time

- Effort over time to consciously and systematically develop students’ learning - Proposals for continued development

Source: Olsson Thomas, information from presentation at the Pedagogical Competence Workshop, Durban (2015); hosted by the Council on Higher Education

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

Table 2.5 Swedish concepts of teaching excellence - Reflection on practice based in educational theory relevant to the applicant’s discipline - Search for and creation of knowledge about student learning in the applicant’s discipline - Effort to make findings public, with the purpose of collaboration and interaction

A scholarly approach to teaching and learning

Source: Olsson Thomas, information from presentation at the Pedagogical Competence Workshop, Durban (2015); hosted by the Council on Higher Education

The South African perspective on teaching excellence advocated by my colleagues (Pitso et al., 2014) in an article focusing on how undergraduates perceive “scholarly teaching.” In this article, my colleagues assume a critical pragmatic stance in which improvement of students’ material conditions becomes key. In line with critical theory, they agree that sources of oppression and marginalisation should be illuminated, and eliminated, in classroom encounters. They argue that this is only possible when students are invited into critical conversations as active agents capable of engaging knowledge in a critical way, and disposed to test its efficacy in real situations and add to it, leading to generation of innovative ideas. This approach is considered as enabling students to become their own liberators and is understood as teaching excellence within the framework of entrepreneurialism. Table 2.6 Modes of teaching excellence Target

Location

Epistemic beliefs

Teacher role

Purpose

Method

As Entrepreneurialism Traditional

Elite

Disciplines

Pursuit of truth

Subject expert

Cultural reproduction

Lecture

Rules and regulations

Knowledge that works

Standard enforcer

System efficiency

Work-based learning

Teacher learner relationships

Subjective interpretation

Psychodiagnostic

Effective learning

Teamwork

Material conditions

Social change

Critical intellectualism

Emancipation

Participatory

Performativity

Meritocracy Psychologised

Individuals Critical

Informed citizenry

Source of sections under Entrepreneurialism: Pitso et al. (2014).

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Evaluating concepts of teaching excellence in higher education

Table 2.6 Modes of teaching excellence Invitational

Enterprising individuals

Material conditions

Pragmatic solutions

Enabler and participant

Freedom and independence

Inquiry-driven

Just and equitable society

Team-based inquiry and collective problemsolving

As Radical Social Justice Critical Pragmatic

Pragmatic activists

Material conditions

Pragmatic activist

Social change

Source of sections under Entrepreneurialism: Pitso et al. (2014).

Radical social justice My version of teaching excellence focuses on improving material conditions of students as espoused in critical theory and resonates with my colleagues’ invitational pedagogy framework but with some important additions. I also embrace the critical pragmatism philosophical stance but with particular focus on teaching that explicitly seeks to achieve the following: • A holistic development of the student that restores their dignity, drives diversity, and supports their self-determination without conditions of limitations. • An environment in which students’ active agency within the framework of a rebalanced classroom agency is central. • A team-based approach to teaching. • A reflective practice in which the shortcomings of the teaching are continually identified and improved. Teaching excellence, in my own version, refers mostly to teaching quality that leads to the wellbeing of the students, defined within the framework of eudemonia which can only be judged beyond higher education settings. This means tracking students as participants in the wider community and society. When students play an active role as critical citizens, who engage in practical activities that improve their own material conditions and those of others, then excellence in teaching can be said to have been achieved. The success of this version of higher education can be measured by educators in terms of the degree to which students are actively engaged in debates that relate to great injustices and in practical projects designed to resolve real problems in their communities and the society in general. One such great injustice is the underlying neo-liberalism that drives politics and the economy, and that reorganises societies in terms of class, all of which lead to great inequalities and poverty. Another great injustice is the limitation of access to the means of production, removal of which would increase the wellness and happiness of all members of society.

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

Implications for VUT of critical pragmatic concepts In this section, I first focus my attention on current conceptions of teaching excellence within VUT, and I juxtapose and contrast these views of teaching excellence with my own understandings of teaching excellence, framed as critical pragmatic teaching excellence. I then attempt to identify future directions for research in the area of teaching excellence in higher education.

VUT criteria of teaching excellence At VUT, teaching excellence is evaluated by assessing a teacher’s teaching portfolio, which must demonstrate evidence of exceptional contribution to: • Quality teaching • Quality student learning • Professional development • Curriculum development • Impact on others and contribution to VUT as a whole (Vaal University of Technology, 2016, p.16). These five terms are not clearly defined and explained in the policy, with the result that assessing evidence of exceptional contribution in each of these criteria is quite arbitrary and open to divergent interpretations. Quality teaching is not linked to any of the key concepts I outlined earlier such as reflective teaching or contribution to the scholarship of teaching and learning. It is however rewarded through the Rectorate’s Annual Teaching Excellence (RATE) award, which means it is used in higher stakes decisions despite vagueness in meanings of the set criteria. It is my view that, given that VUT generally attracts students from low socio-economic status, meanings of excellence in teaching should move closer to my teaching excellence perspective. Teaching quality must thus be judged in terms of: • The extent to which it addresses most of the students’ needs, relating to the intellectual, psycho-social, emotional and socio-economic aspects of the students’ lives. (My colleagues offer a student support model in chapter 7 of this book that attempts this holistic approach to student development.) • The degree to which classroom agency is rebalanced and allows for greater active agency and teamwork among students. • Its ability to produce pragmatic activists who can discern and critically confront sources of their oppression and marginalisation as well as engage in projects designed to resolve real practical problems. These students’ activists need to embrace the vision of a socially just and equitable society in which poverty and marginalisation of any kind are things of the past. It is my view that excellent teaching needs to be linked to students’ well-being (eudemonia). The historical context of our country calls for no less an effort towards change, and teaching, and establishing measures for its improvement, has a huge responsibility towards the entire society for achieving that, with the classroom presenting a good starting point. Higher education teachers ought to engage in SoTL as conceptualised within the framework of improving students’ material conditions. This means that teachers, as much as students, need to be sufficiently

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Evaluating concepts of teaching excellence in higher education

rallied to embrace an activism that is practical, and geared towards classroom conditions that encourage healthy debates and engagement, and that gives rise to practical projects that resolve real societal problems. VUT meanings of teaching excellence share commonality with the views of the Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa (HELTASA), and also with the Swedish perspective on the measurement of excellence, with its focus on quality teaching, quality student learning, professional development, curriculum development, and contribution to the community of practice (see Table 2.7 below). However, VUT insights and concepts require critical elaboration. While the Swedish perspective on excellent teaching is clear about the community of practice (which is SoTL community), HELTASA and VUT are not very clear on who exactly belongs to the community of practice, although we at VUT have already started to strongly identify with the SoTL community. VUT, however, needs to commit unreservedly to this community, as it will benefit not only our teaching output, but also significantly enhance our research output. My main concern with the Swedish perspective on quality teaching is that it does not explicitly refer to improving students’ material conditions, which is understandable given that Sweden is a First-World country. The VUT context makes a strong case for teaching to focus on this aspect and institutional incentives should encourage this focus on material conditions of the students. Table 2.7 Comparison of VUT, HELTASA and the Swedish perspective on teaching quality VUT criteria

HELTASAa

Swedish pedagogical competencies

- Quality teaching - Quality student learning - Professional development - Curriculum development - Impact on others and contribution to VUT as a whole

- Students - Context - Knowledge - Growth

- Focus on student learning - Development over time - Scholarly approach to teaching and learning

Note: a   Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa. The VUT and Swedish profiles share commonalities with the criteria of the HELTASA National Excellence in Teaching and Learning Awards, established in 2010. These are prestigious awards that most academics in higher education aspire to attain.

Teaching excellence research: Going forward I have identified the following key areas as necessary in pursuing research on teaching excellence within South African higher education. We need to: • Establish a strong correlation between teaching quality and improvement of students’ material conditions. The scholarly teaching model developed by Pitso (2014) serves as a good basis for inspiring academic staff to reflect critically on their teaching practices, to research salient aspects of their practices, and then to make them public. • Develop our understandings of teaching excellence within the framework of common wellbeing and flourishing in society (eudemonia). In some of the critical conversations we had with Teboho Pitso as our writing retreats facilitator, he suggested that this link between excellence in teaching and student wellbeing and capacity for future contributions to the development of a socially just society represents a very important aspect of SoTL, in that it attempts to measure the impact

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of teaching, after the fact. It moves SoTL beyond its current fixation with teaching within the institutional borders of higher education. We need, thus, to recommend some form of longitudinal tracking of these students for further research purposes once they have left the student world to rejoin their society after graduation. • Assess student learning in terms of practical ends, so that showcasing of students’ innovations becomes a central theme of higher education learning. • Develop a curriculum that embraces and engages all forms of knowledge. • Evaluate the effects and impact of engaging students in healthy debate about societal problems such as inequality, poverty and unemployment, as well as interrogate implications of access to digital platforms in creating a socially just society.

Concluding remarks In this chapter, I have attempted to sketch my journey through a myriad of meanings relating to excellence in higher education teaching. I have come to understand that meanings of teaching excellence in higher education depend largely on the ideal that is being pursued. Teaching ideals incorporate the purpose of teaching and strategies used to achieve it. These two factors – teaching purpose and methods – in turn position knowledge and the teacher’s role in a particular way. For instance, when the ideal of teaching is to produce an individual who is independent, rational, autonomous, and free from societal constraints, then the purpose of teaching is cultural reproduction and the preferred method of teaching is lecture. Knowledge, in this type of teaching, is considered “pure” and universal, so that the responsibility of the teacher is to transmit it without contamination to students. The very different ideal that I have argued for in this chapter is the same as that of critical theory (Freire, 1970; Kincheloe, 2011) and invitational conceptions of teaching excellence (Pitso et al., 2014), in that its focus is on improving students’ material conditions; that is, excellence in teaching can only be measured by the degree to which teaching improves the socio-economic conditions of students. Our teaching ideal is to develop economically independent individuals, who deliberately and consciously emancipate themselves from the bondages of ignorance and mass deception, through collective effort in critical engagement with issues that marginalise and oppress them. Furthermore, such individuals participate actively in self- and collectively-initiated projects that are designed to improve their socio-economic conditions; and they operate within the framework of building a just and equitable society. My version of teaching excellence, however, differs from these two other meanings of teaching excellence in terms of how the ideal of improving students’ material conditions should pan out in the classroom. My view is that, similar to critical theory, classroom environments should be organised (in terms of power relations) in ways that encourage students to identify sources of their oppression and marginalisation, and to engage them critically. Classrooms should be organised in ways that push students to engage in practical projects, which lead to resolution of real societal problems, and in the process create conditions and opportunities that ameliorate their socio-economic status.

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The quest for humanised and socially just teaching excellence is thus a journey consisting of a myriad of teaching steps, which need to be relevant and contextualised to the needs of the 21st century. In this chapter, I have attempted to illustrate the need to pursue more progressive and transformative conceptions of teaching excellence as opposed to traditional ones. I have further argued that the transformative conception of teaching excellence has impressive credentials, and the potential to promote more substantial, holistic and inclusive student learning, relevant to their socio-economic conditions, enabling them to avoid imprisonment in debilitating societal conditions. Such concepts of teaching excellence also have potential to contribute towards building an equitable and just society, which in the South African context implies rerouting underprivileged and other vulnerable people into the mainstream economy. It also involves making a case for indigenous knowledge to form an integral part of established knowledge. It is self-evident that such meanings of excellence in higher education would require a high dose of activism from both teachers and students in the classroom, which means that a rebalanced classroom agency and reasonably high degrees of autonomy would be required to drive this kind of narrative. It would also require certain levels of challenging the dominant forms of teaching and learning knowledge, in terms of its production and dissemination.

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References Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C. & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Bernstein, B. (1990). Class, codes and control: Vol. 4, The structuring of pedagogic discourse. Abingdon: Routledge. Booth, S. & Woollacott, L. (2015). The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: On its Constitution and Transformative Potential. Stellenbosch, South Africa: African Sun Media. Boshier, R. (1998). Sage on stage is not sustainable: Participatory pedagogy for change. Natural Resources and Environmental Issues, 7(article 4):14-27. Brookfield, S. D. (2006). The skillful teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. [An additional “Workshop packet” is available at https://bit.ly/3qy1in4]. Chickering, A. & Gamson, Z. (1987). Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39(7):3-7. Chisholm, L. (2000). South African curriculum for the twenty first century: Report of the Review Committee on Curriculum 2005, presented to the Minister of Education, Professor Kader Asmal, Pretoria, 31 May 2000. Pretoria, South Africa: Government Printer. [Retrieved from https://bit.ly/3u90WFr]. Council on Higher Education in South Africa (CHE). (2014). Framework for institutional quality enhancement in the second period of quality assurance. Brummeria, South Africa: CHE. [Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2ZrMg6l]. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (Translator, M. B. Ramos). New York, NY: Continuum. Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa (HELTASA). (2013). Teaching Excellence Award rubric, Pretoria, South Africa: HELTASA. Kincheloe J. L. (2011). Critical pedagogy and the knowledge wars of the twenty-first century. In K. Hayes, S. R. Steinberg & K. Tobin (Eds.), Key works in critical pedagogy (vol. 32, Bold Visions in Educational Research series, pp.385-405). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Matee, B. (2009). The design of continuous professional development in technikons, with special reference to the teaching function. (Master’s dissertation, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa.) [Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10500/2974]. Olsson, T. (2015). Information from presentation at the Pedagogical Competence Workshop, Durban, hosted by the Council on Higher Education in South Africa (CHE). Osterman, K. F. & Kottkamp, R. B. (1993). Reflective practice for educators: Improving schooling through professional development. Newbury Park, CA: Corwin Press. Parry, Richard. (2014). Ancient ethical theory. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy archive (Fall 2014 ed.). [Retrieved from http://stanford.io/3auq4yI]. Pitso, T. (2014). Improving students’ learning through scholarly teaching: A model. The International Journal of Learning in Higher Education, 20(4):97-109. [https://doi.org/10.18848/2327-7955/CGP/v20i04/48712]. Pitso, T., Lebusa, M. & Kok, L. (2014). Accounting for undergraduates’ teaching perspectives in a scholarly teaching encounter. South African Journal of Higher Education, 28(4):1358-1375.

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Quinn, L. (2012). Re-imagining academic staff development: Spaces for disruption. Stellenbosch, South Africa: African Sun Media. Ramsden, P. (2003). Learning to teach in higher education. (2nd ed.) Abingdon: Routledge. Skelton, A. (2005). Understanding teaching excellence in higher education: Towards a critical approach. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Strydom, J. & Mentz, M. (2010). Focusing the student experience on success through student engagement. (South African Survey of Student Engagement series). Brummeria, South Africa: Council on Higher Education in South Africa. Tjabane, M. (2010). Education policy and social justice in higher education: A South African case study. (Doctoral thesis, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa). [Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2263/24121] Vaal University of Technology (VUT). (2016). Rectorate’s Award for Teaching Excellence (RATE) Policy. Vanderbijlpark, South Africa: VUT.

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3. Student evaluation of teaching (SET) as a means of improving teaching: A critique Bruce Matee

Introduction This chapter sketches key stages in my journey to using student evaluation of teaching (SET) as an instrument to evaluate the quality of teaching, first within the technikon sector of higher education, and then also in a university of technology setting. I particularly focus on the contestations around SET, my own experiences in implementing SET in both contexts, the challenges I faced, and the insights I gained during implementation of SET. The implementation of SET at the Vaal University of Technology (VUT) has gone through different stages, starting with paper-based evaluations, through use of clicker technology, and then to online evaluation. I trace the historical trajectory of SET as described in the literature; draw from international best practice (especially from Curtin University and the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, which I recently visited); and sketch the challenges I faced in my role of implementing and managing SET. I started work as a teaching facilitator in the then Centre for Institutional Development (CID) at the VUT in 1996. This period marked a societal transition from an unjust society towards one envisaged as an equal-opportunity society where race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation would have no influence on people’s ability to access opportunities. The effect of this transition towards an egalitarian society was marked by the need to widen access to higher education institutions for the previously excluded groupings in society; in addition, these tertiary institutions were expected to increase the success rates of the new cohorts of students. With the widening of access to higher education came debates around standards and quality of teaching, and around institutional readiness to accommodate and deal with these new dynamics. An added

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challenge for VUT, as an affected higher education institution, was that its original mission as a technikon had been focused on developing graduates for the intermediate level of the economy using mainly staff recruited from the industry (Matee, 2009). Transformation of VUT meant a change in both the student demographic and the curriculum: in effect, it meant accommodating underprepared students. Moreover, while accommodating students across the board, VUT had to put a new curriculum into operation, and upgrade the skills of industry-recruited staff, who had not been specifically trained as teachers. These challenges compelled VUT to set up a Teaching Development Unit. Owing to my strong background and training in teaching, it thus became my function to focus on ensuring and measuring teaching quality, while my colleague, Masebala Tjabane, focused on developing the teaching skills of staff (as she elaborates in chapter 2). Since my appointment as a teaching facilitator in 1996, I have been grappling with teaching quality, mainly focusing on measurement of teaching quality and how this links to student achievement. My aim in this chapter is to share my own experiences, challenges and insights on how meanings of quality teaching evolved over time as student demographics and numbers changed, as well as my own struggles with student evaluation of teaching (SET) as a preferred measurement of teaching quality in most higher education institutions globally. SET is considered mainly as a research instrument designed to scientifically survey or elicit the views and perspectives of students on teaching, in which students give their perspectives of how they have experienced teaching and how it has facilitated or hindered their learning (Cohen 1981; Harvey et. al, 2003; Moore & Kuol, 2007). Peter Cohen’s study (Cohen, 1981) of student ratings of instruction and student achievement was my basis for grappling with teaching quality in my VUT context. His study was a meta-analysis of all multi-section SET studies available at the time and revealed that there is no significant correlation between SET and expected student learning outcomes. SET as a means of evaluating teaching quality, at the time assumed to relate to better or worse student achievement, was not only scientifically challenged by this study, but the validity of the relationship between SET and student achievement was also found to be limited, leading me to a profound uneasiness. My uneasiness was on whether to continue using SET as a measure of teaching effectiveness in the faculties despite its generally discredited status. Conventional wisdom about staff development weighed heavily in our institution on the side of continuing to use SET as a measure of teaching quality and, as a corollary, a means of improving student achievement. My recent appointment as the Manager of the Evaluation Unit means that I am now responsible for implementing SET across VUT. My mandate is to ensure the institution-wide efficiency of SET systems. I am expected to perform this role despite my misgivings and scientifically tested evidence of its limited validity and reliability as a measure of teaching quality, and thus as a significant factor in student success. The following brief sketch of the history of the technikon sector in South Africa will locate my journey into staff development with particular focus on SET and its presumed value in improving teaching quality and student achievement.

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The technikon sector in South Africa With an eye to deepening the general understanding and scientific basis of my own work in teaching quality, I registered and completed a master’s degree focused on the evolving meanings of quality teaching within this sector. I have successfully linked, in my master’s study (Matee, 2009), the relationship between the technikon mission in different historical epochs and expectations of quality in its teaching. Technikons in South Africa evolved from the Technical Colleges and Advanced Technical Colleges, which had been in existence since 1923. The technikons were intended to answer to the need of the South African economy in the 1960s and 1970s for high-level skilled personnel, which higher education had not been providing. A rapid expansion of commerce and industry within the intermediate level of the economy required highly specialised but practical skills, and this created a skills gap and warranted the growth of technikon education. The rapid growth of this economic sector resulted in technikons aspiring to improve their status and autonomy, and a great milestone was achieved when they were afforded the power to award degrees in 1993. Upon the advent of a democratic society in 1994, technikons pushed for equal status with universities although with emphasis on practical skills and applied research. The key driver of its curriculum was skills training with a strong practical component. With the advent of The South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) in 1995, a new National Qualifications Framework (NQF) was established with implications for technikon education. The purposes of the NQF, amongst other mandates, were to create an integrated national framework for learning achievements; to provide for mobility and progression within the education system; and to accelerate the redressing of past unfair discrimination laws in the system (RSA, 1995). This culminated in the restructuring of the National Educational Framework which in turn resulted in the mergining of several higher education institutions, as well as the emergence of a new type of higher education institution, the comprehensive university, which offered both university degrees and vocational courses traditionally offered by technikons. As a result of these mergers, the number of technikons in the country was reduced from 21 to 6. In 2004, the technikons were reclassified as Universities of Technology, which was in effect the realisation of the technikons’ dream: to receive the same status and recognition as the traditional universities. The former technikon system had established a Certification Council for Technikon Education, known as SERTEC, a body that had developed systems to monitor performance of technikons in order to ensure stringent compliance of technikon programmes with nationallyset standards, and to improve the quality of technikon education and curriculum standards – this was in the quest to improve their autonomy and status (RSA, 1997). Teaching and its quality became an integral focus of these SERTEC initiatives, and it was this body that compelled the adoption of SET as a measure to determine quality of teaching. However, SET was mired in controversies and its efficacy remains a matter of scientific scrutiny.

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Key challenges for quality teaching in technikons Upgrading and professionalising teaching skills Most lecturers who taught at the technikons were drawn initially from practitioners in the related industries, and later from within the technikons’ own graduates: most were without formal teaching qualifications. Furthermore, from 1994 onwards, more Black lecturers were appointed for their speciality in their disciplinary areas, but again, without formal teaching qualifications. This constrained the establishment of the Teaching Development Units (responsible for developing the teaching skills of the lecturers); and and the Evaluation Units (responsible for ensuring quality in the lecturers’ teaching. The weapon of choice to facilitate teaching skills was the skills paradigm as described by Light and Cox (2001), which was already entrenched in South African universities. This was motivated by the need to prepare lecturers to cope with unprepared and underprepared students coming from the previously disadvantaged groups in South Africa.

Measurement of quality in teaching Quality measurements in teaching involved SET (despite its validity and reliability issues). The relationship between development of teaching skills and quality of teaching was not clearly described and interrogated. As a result, the training programmes inadvertently adopted a “silo” approach (where necessarily interrelated activities or initiatives are carried out as separate programmes, without mutual feedback, correlation and integration). As a result, lecturers acquired generic teaching skills through workshops, irrespective of their disciplines, and in fact focus on skills training, as well as data collected via SET, played little or no role in influencing these workshops.

Lack of theoretical underpinning Another challenge was that this kind of provision of teaching skills and related quality measurements were in effect proceeding mainly atheoretically because they were not framed as scholarly activities, part of whose function was to interrogate and critique the role and practice of teaching in higher education. This approach also contributed to the perpetuation of the “silo approach” between training of lecturers and measurements of quality teaching.

Student numbers and preparedness Another factor that impacted the Teaching Development Unit and the Evaluation Unit was the substantial increase in both student numbers and their reasonably high levels of unpreparedness or under-preparedness. VUT was built and designed to accommodate about six thousand students who were predominantly from the more affluent white minorities whose prior educational opportunities had established them as “previously advantaged,” with the result that VUT was not ready with the physical and intellectual infrastructure to deal with this new dynamic. Class sizes doubled after 1994; and most academic staff members were not prepared for the changes in terms of the impact on their teaching approach of a different racial mix, the more diverse cultures represented in the student body, and swollen class numbers.

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An undesirable reinforcement of disadvantage More recently, the student population has become predominantly black (almost 98%), which creates a perception of an entire cohort as disadvantaged (unprepared or underprepared). This perceived lack of university readiness has influenced our approach to academic support. The Teaching Development and Evaluation Units had to be conceptualised within the framework of “disadvantage,” an approach that unfortunately has the potential to reinforce past ills and could iron-cage our activities in ways that may prove detrimental going forward. There were thus grounds to reflect critically on these issues.

Language(s) of instruction Another challenge was that of language. Universities were created on the basis of empires of English and Afrikaans, which excluded indigenous languages, so that black students would carry the extra disadvantage of being taught in either English or Afrikaans. Indigenous languages are only now being developed into academic languages although the pace is rather gradual and slow. Most higher education institutions then adopted English as a medium of instruction with the assumption that it would diffuse disadvantage by creating a new disadvantage for Afrikaansspeaking students and lecturers. Lecturers who were used to teaching in Afrikaans as a language of instruction were now expected to teach content in English. Students whose preferred language of instruction was not English had to face the dynamic of coping with teaching from academic staff members who were also struggling with English as a language of instruction. This in effect was yet another layer of disadvantage that impacted quality issues in teaching. Most academic staff members would concur that this language barrier, for both students and staff, was responsible for causing tensions between students and staff members, and impacted on the quality of their teaching. Most of the staff members would ascribe the problem to students’ lack of preparedness for tertiary education as the main reason why students were not performing well academically. Drawing from these tensions, I observed that, from the student side, they perceived SET as a tool to indicate how lecturers were not teaching well, and ascribed their own failure to perform well academically as being caused by the inability of lecturers to teach well added to the lecturers’ poor English proficiency. In fact, the situation demonstrates the problem of SET, which fails to account for biases towards a particular lecturer, which could potentially be based on race, gender or attitude. For instance, there is growing evidence that student evaluations of female lecturers are biased, and adjusting these evaluations for such a bias is almost impossible (Kogan et al., 2010). These challenges around SET created a complexity where students used SET as a tool to allege a lecturer’s incompetence, or even as vengeance in cases where there was a disagreement between a particular lecturer and the student(s). As a result, lecturers also began to resist SET as a means to measure the quality of their teaching, because of the inherent bias, which could not be scientifically adjusted in order to generate objective accounts of what took place in the classroom. Lecturers also began to consider SET as unfair, especially in cases where students are unprepared or underprepared to cope with university studies.

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In very important ways, these new dynamics called for a more integrated approach to training and measuring teaching quality. The complexities around SET have compelled me to reflect critically on how best SET could be implemented in our context; my point of departure was a more critical engagement with SET from a historical perspective as described in the following section.

Historic contentions in the use of SET The contradictions and tensions in the uses of SET are identified in the research literature. These embrace differences in personality traits between lecturers and students (Patrick, 2011); similarity biases, especially those emanating from small-sample-size studies (Bokek-Cohen & Davidovitch, 2011; Clayson & Haley, 2011); and critical methodological flaws that often result in overstating of findings, and their presentation in ways that create a false statistical correlation between SET and student achievement. In addition, the literature demonstrates that studies on SET have also largely failed to consider factors such as the prior learning of students, their intelligence, ability, motivation and interest in the subject. Stark and Freishtat (2014) show that student responses to questions of effectiveness do not accurately measure teaching effectiveness, because the response rates and response variables that are significant in statistical analysis are generally ignored in SET studies. They further argue that SET measurements are used more because they are easy to administer, take little class and faculty time, and have an aura of objectivity, given that they use numerical scores. Palmer (2012) asserts that, although most research into SET has focused more on the statistical validity and reliability of the SET instrument used, even the best SET instrument may be inappropriately used in ways that render measuring quality of teaching problematic. These issues, around the legitimacy and effectiveness of SET as a means of measuring the quality and character of methods of teaching leading to student achievement, weighed heavily on me in my task of aligning SET with institutional goals (which push for improvement of teaching quality). My research made me fully aware that SET on its own, given the criticisms and misuse of, and resistance towards it, was never going to help me achieve the institutional goals of linking quality teaching to student achievement. I was beginning to warm to ideas such as those of Radloff (2010), who suggested that SET be used to facilitate dialogue within the institution rather than being used in high-stakes decisions of tenure and promotions. Yaoming et al. (2009) also highlight the need to rigorously engage SET and hook it up with implementation of pedagogic practices that have been demonstrated to improve and enhance teaching practices. SET can be used as a diagnostic tool to promote dialogue and discussions on how to improve teaching practices and quality. This approach may even prove more effective in novice, inexperienced lecturers who can be engaged via SET data to improve the quality of their teaching practices (Yang & Carless, 2013; Wen et al., 2011). I also concur with recent studies that advise the use of rigorous research methodologies to develop valid SET instruments to improve quality of teaching in higher education (Lemos et al., 2011). This shift towards evidence-based research that seeks to improve SET and strengthen its relationship with student achievement is welcomed. I fully agree that there is a need to balance SET use with a variety of other sources and methods of evaluating teaching. Such an integrated

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approach to quality teaching could address myths that exist amongst lecturers and students around the use of SET, as alluded to in Adcroft 2011. In quite important ways, this integrated approach could rescue the troubled legitimacy of SET and could render it more effective in measuring quality teaching.

My own experiences in implementing SET When I started with SET about two decades ago within a technikon context, a pen-and-paper approach was used to administer SET. At the time, SET was only conducted when the lecturer so requested, thus it was voluntary. While it was stated in the technikon policy on teaching and learning (Department of Education, 1997) that SET was meant to monitor the quality of teaching and learning, the voluntary nature of its execution meant that teaching quality and its measurement were not a key strategic focus of the institution at the time. The process of SET was also quite laborious, as I had to literally go to the class of the individual lecturer who requested SET and have students complete an anonymous questionnaire, one which was standard across the institution. The SET results, in terms of policy, were confidential and private, such that not even the line manager of the lecturer could have access to those results without the written permission of the lecturer. Policy did however make provision for the line manager to institute his/her own SET on a specific lecturer but even such results were never used for high-stakes decisions.

Paper-based evaluations: Origins and use The paper-based questionnaire had 65 questions that the students had to complete via written submissions. The questionnaire had biographic information on the students, as well as 17 questions related to the subject under investigation; 14 questions about study material used for the subject; 20 questions on the behaviour of lecturers as people; and 12 questions about the perceived abilities of the lecturer as an academic leader. The questionnaire took about thirty minutes to complete, thus taking that time out of the class lecture period. Some of the lecturers would advance the argument that SET took away valuable teaching time and therefore used it as an excuse to avoid student evaluation of their teaching. On the other hand, SET was becoming onerous to students who, over time, developed ways of skipping these evaluations. The questionnaires were processed using an optical mark reader, and the data collected would then be transferred to an Excel spreadsheet. Thereafter, I analysed individual reports and created a narrative report which I shared privately with the individual lecturer. In principle, the report was private, but lecturers were encouraged to share the report with their Heads of Department (HODs). Very few HODs would request that the evaluator create an anonymous departmental report for all evaluations within the department. The manual compilation process of departmental reports was time consuming and the report would serve mainly to provide the departmental heads with an idea of staff members’ teaching skills and provide information on departmental skills requirements in respect of teaching.

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Data processing and report generation was also time consuming and thus the university management could not be provided with data within a time frame that would influence timeous interventions in efforts to improve the quality of teaching and learning, even when lecturers opted for public disclosure of SET scores. As a result, a more efficient system of student evaluation of teaching had to be explored, one that would result in faster methods of producing reports, and as a result make immediate interventions possible in the teaching and learning environment, in order to facilitate the more efficient and effective professional development of academics. An efficient SET system would ideally have been preceded by institutional policy that directed that SET results be made public, and be directed towards improving teaching and learning. The new institutional policy on SET was formulated in later years and expressly stated that the purpose of SET was mainly to identify areas of professional development and create opportunities for improvement of teaching practices for the lecturers. However, although rare, in some cases certain department heads would still use SET results to demonstrate the incompetence of some of their staff members. This behaviour of middle managers created dissonance within the university and led to some lecturers questioning the real purpose of SET, especially when used punitively or pejoratively to undermine rather than empower lecturers. On the other hand, there has also been a strong tendency towards regular use of SET, by generally good lecturers, who have used its feedback to effect improvements in their teaching, and with the view to increasing student achievements. Policy on SET had not reached a level where SET results could be used to review the performance of lecturers or in high-stake decisions, such as tenure or promotion. There were a few instances where an individual lecturer would refuse to share the results with department heads, particularly where relationships of trust between the lecturer and the department head had become compromised. I recall an incident where one department used the results of SET in disciplinary processes to get rid of so-called “bad lecturers.” Despite my efforts as a teaching facilitator to intervene, some lecturers did lose their jobs and I considered this decision to be a gross abuse of SET results, as well as being against policy stipulations. It is obvious that the relationship of trust between the department heads and the affected lecturers was irrevocably broken for reasons unbeknown to me; but SET results should not have been used to settle this labour issue. It laid a bad precedent and gave SET a bad press within the institution at a time when it had been only benignly resisted. Its use to settle labour disputes intensified the resistance, and the real purpose of SET, to support teaching development of individual lecturers, suffered a major setback. While SET policy was amended after this undesirable outcome, changes focused more on procedural and operational issues rather than the substance of SET in relation to new demands of the post-apartheid higher education. As noted above, the teaching and learning situation had changed dramatically as a result of the advent of democracy in the country, with new cohorts of “disadvantaged” students struggling with the shift to English as the language of instruction. The new dynamic presented lecturers with new challenges, as well as placing new demands on SET. The new curriculum and teaching demands were overwhelming and called for new ways of doing things as well as new meanings of quality teaching. Many good lecturers responded to the challenge to learn new ways of teaching that would assist the students to learn; but others were overwhelmed by the extent of the demand placed on them under the new circumstances.

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The quest for compliance with the Certification Council, SERTEC – once achieved as a matter of course – meant that authority was still followed without question. However, the new demands on the curriculum and on teaching skills called for critical engagements and reflections, and these were not standard practice at the former technikons. It meant that difficult conversations had to be facilitated by academic developers within a highly authoritarian culture. Institutional management, although aware of these changes, found it difficult to abandon the authoritarian managerial style, and this stifled the debates, creativity and innovation that were required to take the institution forward. Traditionally, institutional performance was driven by absolute compliance with the SERTEC standards, which set the tone for measuring quality teaching. By way of an example of the almost ridiculous levels of “edufog” generated by authoritarianism in the face of the challenges of transformation, one can cite the matter of taking a class register. The established practice in the former days, when classes were small, was for the lecturer to mark the register. In the new dispensation, lecturers continued the same practice despite the fact that they were now dealing with large classes. My suggestion was that lecturers circulate the register while teaching, so that valuable teaching time would not be wasted on such a triviality. The lecturers demurred, explaining that until the department head gave such an instruction they were obliged to uphold the status quo. This was a factor we had to deal with as academic developers because the authority of the department head superseded even policy stipulations, so that efforts on changing policy would have little impact on classroom practice. Under the circumstances, it was difficult to effect change at the classroom level, including attempts to shift from paper-based evaluations towards technology-based evaluations that could save time, given the realities of large classes.

Clicker technology: Uses, advantages and limitations The advent of large classes in our institution as a result of massification in higher education, which started in 1994, resulted eventually in the formulation of a new policy on student evaluation of teaching, approved by the university’s senate in 2012, which it was my managerial responsibility to implement. These new policy guidelines made provision for the use of technology-based evaluations. In terms of this 2012 SET policy, lecturers and/or departments were to select a set of questions from a pool of question banks to which their students were expected to respond. A maximum of 25 questions could be set from the teaching evaluation questionnaire consisting of a pool of 96 questions. Another set of questions of up to 25 questions out of a pool of 97 questions could be selected for each module evaluation. Given the strong possibility of student survey fatigue, I negotiated that each department limit the number of both sets of questions to 20, so that a lesser total of 40 questions (instead of 50) would be answered by the students. This was an arbitrary practical solution to survey fatigue, but it received general consensus. I had not at that time considered the relationship of a small sample size to statistical significance. I had also not made a determination of the extent to which the use of a clicker technology system to collect SET data could mitigate survey fatigue. The clicker technology system allows students to use devices similar to mobile phones to respond to SET questions that are displayed on PowerPoint presentations in class. This system of SET data collection resolves the administration and processing problems for SET data collected from large classes, and provides immediate

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feedback on the results, as well as indicating possible remedies. Even so, administration of the clicker technology system was still time consuming and efficiency far from ideal. Firstly, lecturers and/or departments still had to go through a long list of questions to select the questions that they would want their students to respond to during SET data collection. Often lecturers had neither the experience nor the time to select the kind of questions that would provide the meaningful feedback they required on their teaching. Secondly, the evaluation unit would have to take time with each request from individual lecturers, as well as from departments, to set up PowerPoint presentations; and depending on the schedule of evaluators, the processing of questionnaires would prolong the time needed for collation of data from students. Thirdly, data collection from students in class using clicker technology would still take up the lecturers’ class time, even if the processing of the data was faster than the processing of paper-based evaluations. An added burden, as stipulated in the 2012 SET policy, was that lecturers were also expected to create their own questionnaires in addition to what was available from the bank of stock questions; and this was quite a laborious exercise. Additional questions provided by lecturers and/or departments were difficult to compare across departments because of their particularisation. This policy provision thus also added an unnecessary burden on lecturers, who would therefore often wait until the end of their modules to request a SET evaluation. This had a knock-on effect on the workload of the Evaluation Unit, as the substantial increase placed excessive pressure on data collation, analysis, report writing and remediation. This situation also affected timeous reporting and remediation suggestions at the level of the lecturer (micro-level), department/faculty (meso-level), and institutionally (macro-level). Eventually, these reporting and remediation challenges resulted in the review of the 2012 SET policy, so that we could achieve greater alignment with institutional needs to improve the quality of teaching. The revised SET policy had an added compulsory provision that all lecturers had to provide evidence of at least one conducted SET evaluation per semester in each of their modules. VUT has over six hundred lecturers and the capacity of the Evaluation Unit was just not sufficient to cope with this new policy imperative, as no additional staff were allocated to the unit. Given this untenable situation, I decided in 2015 to visit two international universities in order to look into best practices for possible adoption at our institution – Curtin University in Perth, and University of Southern Queensland (USQ) in Toowoomba, which were selected because they had not only been using SET for many years but had developed a substantial body of published literature on SET.

International SET practices and trends On returning from my visits to the two Australian universities, I shared my experiences with colleagues in the Centre for Academic Development, and it was observed that the Curtin University evaluation model, called “eVALUate,” offered good prospects of being successfully implemented at our institution, given its scholarly grounding. Good lessons taken from USQ could also strengthen our implementation and adaptation of the Curtin evaluation model. The key advantage with Curtin University, though, was its historic positioning as a former university of technology, whose huge strides in research had informed their evaluation model. The Curtin evaluation model, based on online administration, is evidently well researched and its questionnaire has been tested for validity and reliability. While this model would resolve most of

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the problems described earlier, our challenge at that time was that our information technology (IT) infrastructure at VUT was not sufficiently developed to carry this added load on the system. More recently, our IT infrastructure has become sufficiently developed to accommodate the online evaluation system. During our implementation of this upgraded SET system, we invited the director responsible for the online evaluation system of the Curtin University Learning Institute to visit VUT so as to ensure proper implementation, but also to secure faculty buy-in and review our revised SET policy, resulting in a further revision that was approved in 2016. VUT was also licensed to use the “eVALUate” questionnaire developed by Curtin University as an institution-wide tool.

Implementing the online evaluation system We piloted the online evaluation system in the second semester of 2017. Developed by Explorance, the Blue Text Analytics’ SET system we implemented was renamed “VQuilt,” which is an acronym for “VUT Quality in Learning and Teaching.” This also distinguished it from VUT’s already existing learning management system (LMS), Blackboard, called VUTela at our institution, which serves different purposes. During the piloting of the system, 1 232 responses were received from a total of 16 000 registered VUT students in the 2017 academic year. The pilot provided information on trends in the teaching and learning practices of VUT, as well as providing guidelines on what would facilitate the improvement of teaching and learning quality. Such low response rates are not an uncommon phenomenon in higher education; nevertheless we identified the following possible reasons for them within VUT: • Access to basic computer equipment is still a challenge for students. Computer facilities are available on campus for student use, but most of the venues for this purpose are always full during the day. When students finally get access, they would rather focus on academic work than on surveys. • Student email addresses used in the pilot were the institutional addresses that are individually allocated to each registered student at VUT. We were able to establish that a number of the students did not make use of their email access, leading to conjectures that they had either forgotten that they had such emails, or had forgotten their login credentials to their university email accounts. As a result, such students could not participate in the surveys via institutional email accounts. • Student access to internet connection is still a big challenge. Most of our students are from poor backgrounds and cannot afford to buy data, as it is expensive. VUT does provide free Wi-Fi access to students on campus; however, Wi-Fi is not consistently accessible throughout the campus, and students often struggle to access it. These challenges have created delays in rolling out the online evaluation system. There are ongoing engagements within the institution to resolve online access limitations.

Findings of the online evaluation system pilot study The pilot results revealed a number of issues relating to teaching and learning. The survey results can thus be grouped into three categories, namely: teaching practice competencies, module

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evaluation, and assessment practices. A 4-point Likert scale was used, where 1) represented “strongly disagree,” 2) represented “disagree,” 3) represented “agree,” and 4) represented “strongly agree.” The students were also provided with a “not applicable” option for each question. The charts below show the aggregate percentages of agreement and disagreement to the questions on the survey. The outcomes of each category in the pilot survey are discussed below.

Teaching practice competence Figure 3.1 below indicates the percentage agreement scores on the competencies of lecturers related to teaching practices. The average agreement score for lecturers’ teaching competencies was 80,25%. Considering the history of VUT as a teaching-intensive institution as compared to being a research-intensive institution, this may be an indication that lecturers within the institution consider themselves as teachers and do make efforts to excel in the practice of their teaching. The academic emphasis of the faculty Deans is also predominantly on teaching, which may also contribute to these results. Interacting on a regular basis with lecturers as a teaching facilitator, I consistently hear of lecturers’ struggles with research management logistics within the faculties. Agree

Disagree

The Lecturer prepares well for the learning activities – Mean: 3.33 The Lecturer explains concepts clearly – Mean: 3.18 The Lecturer shows knowledge of his/her subject – Mean: 3.40 The Lecturer is enthusiastic in teaching this subject – Mean: 3.15 The Lecturer uses varied teaching methods to accommodate student’ diversity – Mean: 2.99 The Lecturer uses examples to clarify theory – Mean: 3.23 The Lecturer assisted students by demonstrating how work should be approached – Mean: 3.14 The Lecturer explained how learning tasks would be assessed – Mean: 3.23

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Figure 3.1 Student evaluation of lecturer teaching competence

Module Evaluation Figure 3.2 indicates the percentage agreement scores on the module evaluation. The questions refer to classroom activities related to learning in the module.

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The average percentage score for agreement on the quality of modules offered was 78.5%. The questions in this section of the questionnaire will be expanded on to more comprehensively research this component in the future. Agree

Disagree

The learning outcomes of this module were clearly communicated – Mean: 3.21 The module acivities were well organised – Mean: 3.13 The module integrated theory and practice – Mean: 3.14 The learning materials in this module facilitated my learning – Mean: 3.10

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Figure 3.2 Student evaluation of module quality

Assessment practices Figure 3.3 indicates the percentage agreement scores on the competencies of lecturers related to the lecturers’ assessment practices. The average percentage agreement related to the quality of assessment practices within the university was 77,5%. Agree

Disagree

The Lecturer explained how learning tasks would be assessed – Mean: 3.19 Feedback on assessments indicated what was expected of students – Mean: 3.10 Assessment tasks helped students to understand content – Mean: 3.10 Different methods of assessment were used – Mean: 3.00

0%

20%

40%

60%

Figure 3.3 Student evaluation of lecturer assessment competence

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Student evaluation (SET) as a means of improving teaching: A critique

Interestingly, all four faculties (Applied and Computer Sciences; Engineering and Technology; Human Sciences; Management Sciences) had indicated to the Centre for Academic Development their need for assistance in improving on their assessment practices; plans were already in place in 2018 to remedy this through professional development initiatives. Data from the pilot project therefore serves to confirm that students have also identified the need for development of lecturers in terms of assessment practices. Data in the pilot therefore confirms the need identified by faculties related to assessment. Furthermore, from the data collected in the survey, scores on each question were ranked and the lowest-rated questions (which indicate areas needing improvement in terms of the teaching practices of lecturers) are listed in Table 3.1 below.

Table 3.1 Areas identified for improvement in teaching and assessment Area requiring improvement

Questionnaire

Mean

The lecturer used varied teaching methods to accommodate student diversity.

Lecturers’ standards of teaching

2.99

Different methods of assessment were used.

Standards of assessments used

3.00

Assessment tasks helped students to understand content.

Standards of assessments used

3.10

Source: Student questionnaires giving feedback on teaching and assessment.

The lowest ranking questions indicate the students’ opinions that teaching methods that lecturers employ in class need attention in order to facilitate the improvement of learning for students. Teaching in a multicultural and multi-tribal environment, where students have diverse cultures, languages, and academic backgrounds, is a challenge for academics. Purposeful attention to these diversities in the classroom are necessary to meet the needs of students to actualise their academic potential in the teaching and learning environment. Our aim is to provide professional development activities focused on furnishing lecturers with relevant skills and an understanding of why it is important to vary teaching methods, with the goal of facilitating an improved quality of instruction that will promote better student learning and success.

Insights arising from implementation of SET Tensions amongst the stakeholders in the implementation of SET are inevitable. Educational realities do not exist in isolation from the external political, cultural or social variables obtaining in any society. However, such variables create a role for academic development to manoeuvre within that space and become catalysts for change and improvement in the quality of teaching and learning. Academic development units must more rigorously and vigorously tackle the research challenges around SET reliability and validity, especially with regard to determining statistical significance of correlations between measured quality of teaching and student achievement. A more integrated approach to measuring the quality of teaching, one that is linked to student achievement, needs to be investigated and implemented within academic development units. Moreover, it is not advisable to use SET in high-stakes decision-making prior to developing a more integrated approach to measuring quality teaching. It is also important to

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ensure that the necessary supporting infrastructure is available within the institution prior to implementing new initiatives – something we learned the hard way when we introduced the online evaluation system. My experience of this process has been that effective facilitation of the culture change towards improving the quality of teaching and learning should intentionally be driven at an institutional level. The institution should also commit sufficient resources to support of the implementation of new initiatives. The Centre for Academic Development should lead and give direction, especially on unprecedented and innovative initiatives. However, it is equally important that consultation and internal partnerships are forged to drive new initiatives. For instance, closer relations with our IT department would have alerted us to current challenges relating to implementing the online evaluation system. We could have planned our implementation model within the framework of advances in the IT section, so that necessary preliminary work was done to determine the institutional state of readiness to implement the system in advance of committing to a resource-heavy initiative. I believe that the successful implementation of the SET questionnaire within the framework of an integrated approach to measuring quality teaching would greatly benefit VUT, and would eventually positively impact student achievement. VUT and the Centre for Academic Development in particular would have to commit to contributing towards making SET, and other relevant instruments of evaluating quality teaching, empirically valid and reliable. However, for future improvements and more effective use of integrated models of teaching evaluation which include SET, higher education institutions need to invest in research into, and building scholarship around, integrated measurements of teaching quality. This would help to generate evidence-based measurement of quality teaching, which, in turn, is linked to determining statistical significance of the relationship between quality teaching and student achievement. I believe the investigation of the integrated approach to measuring quality teaching should consider effects on quality of teaching and student achievement of massification, decolonisation of the curriculum, and the socio-economic status of students. Such research should also transcend the small-sample-size investigations that have bedevilled SET data outcomes. Studies should also focus on creating an effective integrated model of measuring quality teaching and establishing correlations. Another aspect that needs consideration is policy enactment. Policy is a good instrument to drive change. However, resistance to policy changes should be properly managed and effort should be taken to get the participation of all stakeholders in the process. Tucker (2015) indicates that successful implementation of the online evaluation system is preceded by “ownership” of the process by educational developers, academic staff members, students, and university management. The roll-out of the VQuilt system within VUT was conducted in a hasty manner, in order to achieve mandates that were set by senior management, without first rigorously mapping out processes that could have maximised its effectiveness and efficiency. The consequent delays and complications in the implementation of the system could have been avoided had planning systems been properly aligned beforehand. Moreover, the culture of quality assurance

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through unquestioning compliance with outmoded provisions was a hindrance towards implementation of new, innovative initiatives, a factor that cannot be underestimated in the search for a better integrated model of measuring quality, one that can be unequivocally linked to student achievement.

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References Adcroft, A. (2011). The Mythology of Feedback. Higher Education Research and Development, 30(4):405-419. [https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2010.526096]. Bokek-Cohen, Y. & Davidovitch, N. (2011). The challenge of improving teaching in a globalizing world. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 36(7):817-230. [https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2010.488796]. Clayson, D. E. & Haley, D. A. (2011). Are students telling us the truth? A critical look at the student evaluation of teaching. Marketing Education Review, 21(2):101-112. [https://doi.org/10.2753/MER1052-8008210201]. Cohen, P. (1981). Student ratings of instruction and student achievement: A meta-analysis of multisection validity studies. Review of Educational Research, 51(3):281-309. [https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543051003281]. Department of Education (1997). General policy for technikon instructional programmes. Report 150 (97/01). [https://bit.ly/3qeJ2ym]. Harvey, S., Royal, M. & Stout, D. (2003). Instructor’s transformational leadership: University student attitudes and ratings. Psychological Reports, 92(2):395-402. [https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.2003.92.2.395]. Kogan, L., Schoenfeld-Tacher, R. & Hellyer, P. W. (2010). Student evaluations of teaching: Perceptions of faculty based on gender, position, and rank. Teaching in Higher Education, 15(6):623-636. [https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2010.491911]. Lemos, M. S., Queirós, C., Teixeira, P. M. & Menezes, I. (2011). Development and validation of a theoretically based, multidimensional questionnaire of student evaluation of university teaching. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 36(7):843-864. [https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2010.493969]. Light, G. & Cox, R. (2001). Learning and teaching in higher education: The reflective professional. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Matee, B. (2009). The design of continuous professional development in technikons, with special reference to the teaching function (Master’s dissertation, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa). [http://bit.ly/35CGG4w]. Moore, S. & Kuol, N. (2007). Matters of the heart: Exploring the emotional dimensions of educational experience in recollected accounts of excellent teaching. International Journal for Academic Development, 12(2):87-98. [https://doi.org/10.1080/13601440701604872]. Palmer, S. (2012). Student evaluation of teaching: Keeping in touch with reality. Quality in Higher Education, 18(3):297-311. [https://doi.org/10.1080/13538322.2012.730336]. Patrick, C. L. (2011). Student evaluation of teaching: Effects of the big five personality traits, grades and the validity hypothesis. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 36(2):239-249. [https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930903308258]. Radloff, A. (2010). Doing more for learning: Enhancing engagement and outcomes. Australasian Student Engagement Report. Camberwell, Victoria, Australia: Australian Council for Educational Research. Republic of South Africa. (1995). The South African Qualifications Authority Act 58 of 1995. (Repealed by National Qualifications Framework Act 67 of 2008). [https://bit.ly/3nJaBOL]. Republic of South Africa. (1997). Higher Education Act 101 of 1997. [https://bit.ly/3oJvdYB].

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Stark, P. & Freishtat, R. 2014. An evaluation of course evaluations. ScienceOpen Research. [https://doi.org/10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-EDU.AOFRQA.v1]. Tucker, B. M. (2015). The student voice: Using feedback to inform quality in higher education (Doctoral thesis, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia). [https://bit.ly/3qlusVX]. Wen, S. H., Xu, J. S., Carline, J. D., Zhong, F., Zhong, Y. J. & Shen, S. J. (2011). Effects of a teaching evaluation system: A case study. International Journal of Medical Education, 2:18-23. [https://doi.org/10.5116/ijme.4d66.910e]. Yang, M. & Carless, D. (2013). The feedback triangle and the enhancement of dialogic feedback process. Teaching in Higher Education, 18(3):285-297. [https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2012.719154]. Yaoming, G., Ping, Z., Hui, C., Lili, L. & Guanghui, Z. (2009). The impact of the evaluation of the standards of undergraduate teaching work on teaching at higher education institutions: An investigative study. Chinese Education and Society, 42(2):86-99. [https://doi.org/10.2753/CED1061-1932420211].

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4. Implementing an LMS in a low maturity context: Towards an effective model Pauline Machika

Introduction and background The Vaal University of Technology (VUT), with its main campus in the south of Gauteng province, has attracted students from historically disadvantaged schools since the early 1990s, with numbers steadily rising and increasingly conforming to the national demographic distribution. By 2011, when I was appointed as the Executive Director of the Centre for Academic Development (CAD), the university was registering over 21 000 students per year . An important characteristic of most of those registering for the first time is that they are underprepared for tertiary education, owing to the historic conditions arising from the South African apartheid past, the effects of which include poor schooling, poverty, and inadequate exposure to technological media for educational purposes . To meet the needs of the growing intake of underprepared students, CAD was established in 2002 to provide student support. It was subsequently elevated to become a centre that provides academic and technological support for both students and staff. Within VUT, blended learning activities (discussed more fully in chapter 5) are supported by CADCAD. CAD’s primary goal is to contribute to the enhancement of the quality of learning, teaching and assessment across academic programmes. Improving throughput is an important issue for VUT and one that needs to be supported through enhancing the learning environment, including e-learning for both academic staff and students. In this chapter, my focus will be on technological support with reference to VUT’s online learning management system (LMS) launched in 2013, known as VUTela, which supports classroom teaching and learning activities and collaboration, as well as management, communication, and online assessment . LMS can be understood as a virtual learning space designed to drive student

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collaborative learning activities outside the limits of physical space, and also serves as a portal to deliver educational courses using mainly the internet (Wang, 2003). I describe our university context in terms of its level of technological maturity, as well as describing my own journey in implementing LMS in this context, the challenges I faced, and the insights I gained from my experiences and observations, and from the literature. The circumstances at VUT are consistent with the general status of higher education obtaining in South Africa, as shown in the literature. Jones et al. (2008) show that South African students from disadvantaged backgrounds are underprepared for higher education owing to circumstances that include financial, academic and socio-cultural factors. At the same time, Subotsky and Prinsloo (2011) document that higher education institutions are themselves underprepared to meet the needs of these underprepared students. At VUT, in light of the underpreparedness of both the students and the institution it was recognised as imperative to implement an LMS at VUT that would promote the academic success of our students and facilitate preparedness of the institution for these students. I had a fairly good grasp of LMS at the level of end-user, from my previous position at a comprehensive university in Gauteng where the Blackboard LMS was already established. However, in order to hit the ground running from the administrative and managerial perspective at VUT, I had to launch myself into the LMS literature, scan best practices, and bring my own experiences to bear on this important issue. My first observation of the information technology (IT) system showed that our university fell into the “low maturity” category for institutions operating online management systems. “Low maturity” refers mainly to the degree of readiness and availability of a technological infrastructure upon which an LMS programme would operate unhindered and consistently. This was evidenced by the fact that the university’s IT system often did not run consistently for various reasons, so any new implementation model had to take this factor into account.

LMS literature and insights in similar contexts It was important for me as an implementer to make meaning of the research data at universities both nationally and internationally, of what an LMS is within a university context. I believed this would enable me to map out the best possible strategic direction for the implementation of the LMS within VUT’s particular university of technology (UoT) context. My review of the literature was based on what I had noted: namely that VUT had implemented multiple LMS components (such as from the Sakai and Moodle systems), which are not readily adopted at the user interface at the macro (institutional), meso (faculty/ departmental), or micro (individual) levels. This was seen to be a hindrance to the advancement of an initiative seeking to embed LMS within the institution. The implementation of LMS was barely operational at the macro level at VUT, with the consequence that infrastructure and support issues posed real obstacles at the micro (individual) level. In the past, the adoption of the LMS across the institution had been voluntary, with a limited amount of training given at the individual level. Given the challenges – in terms of access, infrastructure and support – the result was a low adoption rate of the system amongst users at both the meso and micro levels.

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Studies on South African higher education, such as those of Linckels et al. (2009), highlight that within higher education in South Africa many unknowns exist about information and communication technologies (ICTs), and there is a particular lack of certainty regarding the effective implementation of LMSes. This is especially noted in relation to UoTs at the meso and macro levels. Similarly, Brown and Czerniewicz (2008) report a paucity of research in relation to how e-learning, and in particular how an LMS, should be implemented at the meso or macro level within the UoT context, where the maturity of the information technology system is very low, as earlier stated. Gremu (2012) highlights that an LMS does not require students to be in the same location as their lecturers, which offers the potential of flexible learning. Flexible learning refers to the use of face-to-face and online learning in an integrated way, which significantly enhances teaching and learning in universities. The literature demonstrates that research into LMSes and their implementation in South Africa predominantly focuses on case studies at the micro level, and hence not much is known about implementation at the faculty/departmental (meso) and institutional (macro) levels; or about the connections between them. The integrated implementation of LMS at VUT, particularly at the institutional level (since the macro level incorporates the meso and micro levels), and the low maturity level of the university’s IT system, were to become my main challenge. This required deep reflection on my scholarly research into understanding LMS implementation at the macro level, consideration of known best practices, and formulation of an implementation model appropriate to the low maturity level of IT systems in the university. In sharing my experience of implementating LMS in this chapter, my journey is further documented with data from our LMS strategic planning minutes, interviews with end-users in faculties, and a students’ survey with a return rate of 400 respondents. I also share my anticipations of how the LMS should unfold at VUT over the next five years as we embark on full implementation and evaluation. When scanning the literature, I noted studies highlighting the meaningful role the implementation of a LMS could play when addressing poor success rates and academic performance. The work of Jo, Kim and Yoon (2014) provides a strong indicator for improving student performance for courses offered online via the LMS. Additionally, it complements many of the initiatives being advanced to achieve the above-mentioned strategic goals of a UoT, namely, “facilitating greater student access”, “improving student support”, “improving the students’ overall experience”, “improving the UoTs infrastructure”, and “improving institutional processes and procedures” (JISC, 2004). Other institutional benefits are highlighted by research conducted by Roca and Gagné (2008), who show that the strategic deployment of an LMS facilitates developments and benefits – which should include a major review and streamlining of the processes, to ensure effective deployment in terms of the maturity level of the institution’s IT systems. This can add considerable value to an institution in terms of its operational efficiency and the quality of service it provides to all stakeholders at the meso and macro levels. In attempting to develop insights into an integrated LMS implementation, I was strongly influenced by the work of Hannan and Silver (2000), who outline certain factors that contribute to the successful implementation of an LMS within a university context at a macro level. These factors included planning, technological skills development in relation to operational factors, and implementation strategy – whether at the university-wide, faculty, departmental, or service level. I started to see that the development of the LMS is centrally linked to proper planning and

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that the plan should be integrated within the operations at the institution-wide level and then be cascaded down to the faculty and departmental level. The word “stakeholders” became very important to me as I realised that consultation with stakeholders was central to the development of a plan; it was important for all stakeholders to work together, as well as that all the players should have a clear understanding of what needs to be done, and in particular what their role should be. This approach is supported by the work of Spencer (2011) who argues that when stakeholders are working together to ensure that there is a co-ordinated plan towards the development of an LMS then the UoT has the potential to move forward strongly at the meso and macro level. Central to the success of the plan, as I noted in the literature, was the appointment of a champion or sponsor within the university’s senior management. This could have a profound impact on the successful implementation of the LMS. Unwin (2007) succinctly outlines the role of a champion or senior sponsor, demonstrating that the role of the sponsor is to ensure and engage innovation and institutional stakeholders so that the potential barriers, obstacles and issues in the institution are taken into consideration during the implementation stage. Without a champion assuming clear responsibility for this function, barriers, obstacles and issues are frequently left unaddressed, significantly reducing the potential for the LMS to be adopted by all stakeholders. He highlights the importance of stakeholder input but also more importantly that stakeholder input is channelled through a champion or senior sponsor so that carefully detailed planning can be implemented. The importance of stakeholder input and its relationship to a sponsor and/ or champion made me look into literature documenting the implementation of LMS in sub-Saharan African universities for further insight into an LMS implementation appropriate to VUT’s circumstances. This is primarily because most sub-Saharan African universities exist in a Third World context where the systems of information technology are typified by low maturity. In general, the LMS literature in this region indicated a wide and still expanding adoption of LMSes in sub-Saharan Africa. It was disturbing to note from the literature that despite expanding adoption of LMS in sub-Saharan Africa, this did not necessarily materialise into consistent usage of the system within the institutions described. Dube and Scott (2014) record that of the 10 000 users trained to use the LMS at the University of Science and Technology of Zimbabwe, only 20% actually utilised the system. This is further supported by studies in Kenya, Mozambique (Unwin et al., 2010), Uganda (Mayoka & Kyeyune, 2012), Sudan (Elmahadi & Osman, 2013), and Zimbabwe (Chitanana et al., 2008), all of which show increased institutional adoption of LMS but with reported low levels of actual usage. These insights, and those gleaned from the work of Heeks (2002), demonstrated that information systems implemented in developing countries are often limited to partial implementation or even total failure, as well as that failures of implementation result from the disconnect between LMS implementation on one hand, and improving the quality of teaching and learning on the other. This disconnect indicates the necessity of a parallel development of a teaching and learning model relevant to the purpose of the institution. Other pertinent issues related to the appropriate uptake of LMS within the tertiary setting relate to connecting LMS implementation with the widening access to education in ways that reduce the cost of delivery. Insights gleaned from the literature helped me to realise that three important issues are pertinent to successful implementation of LMS in a UoT context where the IT system has low maturity.

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They are proper detailed planning; the identification of a champion or sponsor who could channel stakeholder input into detailed planning; and the linking of the implementation of LMS to the teaching and learning model of the institution. My review of the literature involved a process of reflective critique, which led me into further forages into the literature to identify additional factors that typify successful implementation within a low maturity context. This exercise helped me recognise another emerging and equally valid factor in the successful implementation of LMS: the necessity of conducting feasibility studies before implementation, to ensure that the selected LMS is in line with the needs of the institution, and to give specific direction to the process of implementation. Research conducted by Ssekakubo et al. (2012) provides further evidence of the value of conducting feasibility studies prior to LMS implementation, showing that they provide clarity on whether an LMS is usable by students in African universities. Further evidence I took from this study came from Makerere University in Uganda, where over 84% of students and 79% of faculty members indicated that the LMS was not easy to use (Mayoka & Kyeyune, 2012). The value of conducting a feasibility study is thus to determine any userinterface problems that could hinder use of the system within a low maturity context such as at VUT. Mtebe (2015) demonstrates that by conducting a feasibility study before implementation of LMS, many such problems can be fixed so as to increase usage by making the systems user friendly, easy to learn and use.

Towards integrated, institution-wide implementation Macro level The pre-implementation phase of an LMS can be a lonely place for an executive director if there is no informed support from the institution – that is, at the macro level. Research focused at the macro level considers the development of e-learning policies and strategies as well as identification of champions and sponsors who can drive the implementation of the LMS from an institution-wide perspective (macro), through faculty/ departmental level (meso), to the micro level, which is the interface with individual lecturers. A lot of thought was given to developing an “e-learning strategy” embracing a comprehensive set of goals and directives, to be elaborated and endorsed by university management, for the sustainable implementation of ICT support for learning and teaching (cf. Kerres, 2005; Arnold, Mayrberger & Merkt, 2006; Stratmann & Kerres, 2008). In the case of VUT the aim was and is still to move slowly and implement methodically. This helps at the macro level when every part of the implementation process is considered periodically, leaving room for troubleshooting. The macro implementation of LMS demands a special focus within the organisation of this as a change management process (Behrendt, 2004; Reinmann-Rothmeier, 2003). Implementing ICT support for learning and teaching can take a variety of forms and can use many different technologies. For a coherent strategy on how a university wants to incorporate the new possibilities brought about by ICT, decisions have to be taken on various levels. Key decisions to take are about the general role ICT should play in the academic setting (role of ICT); which tools and technologies should be used (tools and technologies); and how open the design of the e-learning system should be (grade of openness) (Arnold, 2010 ). At this level, any LMS decisions relate to the degree to which LMS forms part of the strategic direction and vision of the institution. Should an LMS fail to make its presence felt at this level, it would be near-impossible that resources would be deployed to ensure its effective

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implementation. This is the crucial stage where a champion or sponsor plays a meaningful role towards highlighting the value of LMS as part of both the students’ total experience of learning, and the university’s efforts to use ICT to direct its key strategies and mission.

Meso level Research at the meso level focuses on the faculty, departments and their lecturers. Arnold (2010) argues that the concerns of the lecturers at the faculty and departmental level are central to successful implementation. Lecturer concerns that were identified focused on the use of an appropriate LMS, which is easily accessible, reliable, and works within a 24/7 environment. Thus it became important that primary specifications for the LMS chosen would be reliability and performance. Staff were adamant that when implemented the LMS should be accompanied by appropriate and reliable support and training capacities, to facilitate user-interface in handling the LMS, and to maintain related applications, as well as to provide advice and services for production of multimedia presentations and design of educational media using ICT. During the discussions towards implementation I noted considerable resistance from lecturers to the implementation of an LMS. Most resistance to the implementation of the LMS takes place at the meso level. The literature review identified four different types of academic teachers with regard to their perspectives on LMS implementation: • pioneering lecturers: intrinsically motivated, eager to experiment • careful lecturers: intrinsically motivated, prefering to use tested tools and designs • incentive-oriented lecturers: extrinsically motivated by incentives • resistant lecturers: resisting any change, due either to conviction or to lack of knowledge (cf. Pfeffer, Sindler & Kopp, 2005, pp.47) In order to ensure smooth flow of an LMS implementation, it was important that the concerns of lecturers were taken into account so that the buy-in of intrinsically motivated and incentivedriven lecturers would be secured and resistance minimised.

Micro level I observed that the multiple elements of learning management systems already in existence in the university (namely Moodle and Sakai) had been implemented in a stand-alone manner. They were small programs not used widely across the institution, and in fact used only by one or two departments or individuals. This observation highlighted that the implementation of the existing LMSes were in the hands of individual lecturers and had not been an institutional development. However, it is the institution that is the actual site of LMS implementation: care should be taken to communicate that the LMS forms part of the strategic goals of the university, and that this should also be made clear at policy level. Necessary resources also had to be committed at the institutional level in order to secure the buy-in of most lecturers, which would smooth the way for effective implementation of LMS. The conditions for an integrated and effective implementation of LMS include that the LMS is recognised as forming part of the strategic goals and policy imperatives of the university; that the buy-in of lecturers is secured; and that sufficient resources are committed towards its implementation.

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Configurations and challenges in LMS implementation Based on the analysis above on how to ensure an institution-wide implementation of LMS by linking the macro, meso and micro activities of a university, I provide a reflective critique of our university. I have already stated that VUT had been partially implementing two LMSes, Sakai and Moodle. Sakai was more broadly implemented across the university by the IT department, with limited support as an open source application accessed from the IT department. However, with Moodle, the implementation was limited to a single faculty-based department, within a limited context, off a server used by only a few lecturers.

Dissatisfaction with Sakai Essentially, Sakai was downloaded as a basic shell without complementary applications such as chat groups, wikis and so on; thus many challenges were faced when lecturers worked with the tool. Conversations with different stakeholders using the Sakai LMS brought several challenges and obstacles to light. Firstly, the Sakai tool was not regarded as stable, hence it not only added to lecturers’ workloads but also affected their motivation levels, as demonstrated in excerpts from the conversations given below. Conversations also highlighted the notion that Sakai, as an LMS, was a burden that required more work from the lecturers. It was also noted in conversations with stakeholders that there was a severe shortage of hardware available on site at VUT. The following remarks were made by various stakeholders: I started asking [IT staff] for help and they also tried but nothing worked and I was left with no server – can’t cope. I’ve heard of this Sakai but I don’t want to get involved because it is more work for me. We have approximately 90 (P 301) and 100 (Gym Hall) computers available for 18 000+ students on campus. We never expose our lecturers to a blended approach, so how do we expect our students to adapt to a blended approach of learning? How else can we use the learning management system? We have not been trained. We have not been trained on how we get to upload our tests or . . . We do not know how effective that tool can be. We are not using it as it should be, yet the UoT invested in it. So that is training we need, as well on using the e-learning management system effectively. How else can we use the learning management system? We loaded our learning guides on Sakai, but when I try to access the information under my name and password I can’t see my learning guide. Nothing works – at the moment I am using my LMS as a glorified file server.

This last remark also indicates the barrier experienced by staff who do not have regular access to the LMS as it becomes a repository of information. From the above responses from stakeholders, I was able to deduce that as a result of the actual and latent barriers in the system, lecturers had developed a negative attitude towards the LMS. From these and other conversations I had with staff, and observations I made, it appeared that the overall depth and quality of LMS provision across VUT was limited, with uptake being patchy, and indicating a diverse range of faculty/

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departmental approaches. Several departments had encouraged and supported staff with an interest, for example, in Engineering, while others have left adoption very much to individual staff members. Consequent on this, the university was not at a level where the LMS playing field was smooth, so that only small groups of early adopters and enthusiasts in some areas made use of it. I also discovered the occasional champion and expert user in other areas. My observations indicated that some staff were convinced and energised by the opportunities that LMS offers – even in such haphazard ways – whilst others wished to retain more traditional approaches. The reasons were quite varied but broadly speaking were due to a lack of time, infrastructure issues, limited support, inertia, not being fully aware of the concepts and practices, limited direction and institutional commitment, and in some circumstances a genuine belief that the LMS was unable to add value to teaching, learning and assessment. In short, in 2012 and 2013 the LMS was not widely used across VUT, with infrastructure and support issues appearing to be real obstacles. Discussions with faculty and departmental staff suggest that across the entire institution, some 10% to 15% of academic staff deployed the LMS, with about 5% actively engaged. However, some faculties were more active; for example, it was estimated that about 30% of staff in Engineering and Technology used an LMS or related application. Additionally, numerous staff commented that if the infrastructure challenges could be removed, many staff would engage with LMS as there was some enthusiasm and a wish to remain current. The following list briefly highlights the key points raised during the conversations with stakeholders: • Academic staff were comfortable with traditional approaches to classroom teaching and, in general, had no motivation to change; • Whilst the faculty deans were generally supportive, there was a lack of detailed knowledge and associated planning about how to advance things at faculty and department level; • Many academic staff were not comfortable using technology in a classroom setting and lacked the necessary skills; • There were ongoing difficulties with the network and systems infrastructure which deterred staff from relying on or using the LMS; • There was a lack of clarity about who was responsible for delivering the LMS, and who should drive it across the institution – it fell between many institutional silos; • The support infrastructure (for staff) was inadequate and needed to be enhanced if academic staff were to engage; • The lack of a clear vision and goals, with executive backing, and which were well articulated and understood across the university, deterred staff from engaging; • Many students lacked the knowledge to engage with technology and did not have technical support or sufficient access to computers to acquire knowledge and skills to use the LMS; • Academic staff struggled with existing workloads and were reluctant to take on additional LMS developments – incentives, space and support needed to be provided; • Technical limitations and complexity of use, perceived or actual, could and did deter staff from engaging enthusiastically.

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Independent feasibility study For the above reasons, the university initiated a feasibility study conducted by an outside consultant to understand how best to implement the LMS. Feasibility studies conducted in 2012 and 2013 recorded that outside the faculties, understanding and knowledge of an LMS was extremely limited. LMS was not being used to its full potential to provide a seamless learning environment that engaged students, although there was clear enthusiasm in some areas for doing so – for example, from a library perspective, using it to help deliver information literacy, or to integrate the library system (Millennium); and using Turnitin in conjunction with the LMS. Many questions were raised as part of the discussions with the consultants who were conducting the feasibility studies. Some of those questions included: • Which learning management system would be best suited for implementation within VUT? • How should the training be implemented at an institution-wide level? • Who would be the champion(s) of the implementation and drive it, institutionally?

Recommendations Within VUT the feasibility study noted the opportunity to provide information or IT literacy skills via blended provision. There was thus a need to explore such an option. The feasibility study further recommended the following at the macro level with regard to LMS development: • VUT should establish and implement a development initiative with appropriate governance and management to systematically advance the development of LMS over the next three years. A clear vision and plan should be established and suitable resources provided to support it. This process should commence with the implementation of pathfinder projects that aim to build capability and capacity, along with the migration of all existing systems and applications to a unified LMS environment, and in parallel, VUT should systematically promote the broader strategic issues. • The university should converge all existing systems into a single LMS, “Blackboard Learn,” which is the most widely adopted and supported LMS in South Africa, and prepare for a migration process from Sakai and Moodle. • VUT should establish a teaching and learning policy, building on the goals of the “Strategic Plan 2013” and “Teaching and Learning Model.” This policy should bridge these goals in the short to intermediate term, and provide institutional direction for the development of an LMS, and in particular for blended learning. • The Learning Support Committee must own the learning and teaching plan, and work to deliver it across the university through the faculties and central service teams. • Learning is owned and driven forward by the executive leadership of Professor Kuzvinetsa Dzvimbo, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (DVC): Academic and Research, who provides for its growth and development. • In the short term VUT should appoint a project manager to lead the initiative, an experienced instructional designer to lead in the area of educational design, and a Blackboard administrator to manage the “Learn” application. Each role would be critical in shaping the provision of the LMS. • To help scale blended learning and the LMS, VUT should take a programmecentric approach to its development, as well as establishing a consistent presence

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in terms of course administration and management, and content provision. This would facilitate a managed and sustainable growth process that can be targeted at particular cohorts and incrementally rolled out to ensure a consistency of experience and quality. • The academic, administrative and information processes and procedures necessary to support blended learning and the LMS should be reviewed, streamlined and automated, to ensure that the LMS can be scaled in an efficient and effective way across the university. This should involve appropriate systems integrations, particularly between Blackboard and Integrator Tertiary Software (ITS), and Blackboard and the domain network manager, Active Directory (AD). Blackboard should be populated and driven by students, staff and course data from ITS. The study also identified things that should happen at a meso or faculty/departmental level, such as: • Faculties and departments should commit to an institution-wide blended learning development plan and process that will enable VUT to embed and secure the benefits of the LMS. This should involve faculties/ departments developing action plans to realise the institution’s objectives for the LMS at a local level. • The faculties/ departments should identify a manager responsible and accountable for delivering and coordinating LMS growth and development; and who would work with the central service teams to develop and deliver local plans, enabling growth and adoption of blended learning. My own insights gleaned from conversations with staff – and as mostly corroborated by the feasibility study – showed a generally fragmented, disintegrated approach to LMS implementation at our university with a lack of clear articulation from the macro, meso and micro levels.

Progress in LMS implementation at VUT The research results on potential barriers and obstacles aligned with the results of the feasibility study, in showing that certain strategic decisions should be taken by the university. It was important for the university to implement an LMS that would be reliable, accessible and userfriendly. This would ensure, for instance, that lecturers would not become frustrated due to system failure when loading assessments. Based on the evidence, I tabled a proposal before Senate and Council that would see VUT moving to proprietary-based enterprise solutions such as Blackboard. Implementing this kind of proposal has been found to be a challenging process for most universities, requiring significant change management and the development of new skills and working practices. Within this context, as the LMS matures and grows, it typically becomes a mission critical system providing a key frontline service. For this reason, systems support for the LMS was increasingly outsourced in order to: • enhance support (24/7) • increase reliability and up time • secure overall cost savings • allow institutional staff to focus on the core network infrastructure

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• draw on the expertise of specialist systems staff, and • allow for easy growth in systems capacity, as demand dictates. From a student and staff perspective, it was critical to ensure the system was reliable and available, otherwise adoption would suffer. Concerns were also expressed about the lack of systems integration and single sign-on, poor mobile access, and non-streamlined business processes, which all impacted uptake. It became evident that the transition to a single managed environment through the adoption of a proprietary-based hosted system such as Blackboard would address many reliability issues and allow the IT team to focus on local issues that would improve overall network and service provision. By adopting Blackboard as an LMS it was hoped it would provide VUT with an opportunity to ensure integrated systems and streamlined business processes, particularly between the LMS and ITS. Streamlining systems and processes requires commitment to a single institutional LMS environment that can be integrated with other systems and optimised to meet the needs of the user community. Through this strategic decision the university was ensuring that the system was fully operational and functioning so as to ensure adoption by all its users. It shold be noted, however, that this decision does not preclude the possibility of implementing an open source system at a later stage, when the information technology system within the UoT is more mature.

Progress indicators at the macro level Notable progress indicators in implementing LMS since 2015 at our university include the following.

Identification of a champion Identification of a champion, in the person of the Deputy Vice Chancellor (DVC): Academic and Research, appointed in October 2014, who could drive the implementation at a strategic level. The DVC is supported by a co-champion, the Chief Financial Officer of the university. This is aligned with the research findings of Unwin (2007), who states that the role of senior sponsor should not be underestimated at a macro level as a key aspect of an integrated approach to LMS implementation.

Teaching and Learning Policy The design and development of the new Teaching and Learning policy (2016) aligned with the implementation of blended learning as a strategic initiative has been established, and this is a key aspect of a macro level activity that supports the role of a champion. (Relevant aspects of the policy are detailed in chapter 5).

Stakeholder participation The growth of stakeholder participation. Stakeholder participation is vital in numerous respects: it enhances effectiveness and efficiency of VUT’s teaching and learning approaches; increases student engagement with technology; creates extra learning opportunities for students;

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increases access to learning for students; improves student success; introduces greater peer support options for students; provides students and academics with additional resources; harnesses the potential of open educational resources (OER); increases student responsibility for learning; reduces staff workload (academic and administrative) and streamlines business processes; develops students’ practical skills through use of technology, thereby developing work-ready graduates; builds staff technical literacy; monitors at-risk students and enables proactive interventions where needed to improve throughput and success rates; and promotes reliable and accessible e-learning (Butcher, 2015).

Policy and Strategy document The Policy and Strategy document, developed at VUT through a consultative process based on the needs of the institution, faculties, departments and individual academics. An important principle recorded in the Policy and Strategy document is that faculties and departments are committed to an institution-wide blended learning development policy and process that will enable VUT to embed and secure the benefits of the LMS. At the macro level the LMS was integrated in 2015 with the information technology system of the university so that every academic module registered on the Higher Education Qualification Framework by the UoT could be adopted into the proprietary-based system, and would be registered immediately when a user accessed it. A unified LMS environment could help strengthen the UoT community and identity, and establish greater consistency across the university and its various campuses (Sun et al., 2008).

Wi-Fi provision It should be noted that because of the weak maturity level of the IT system of the institution, the provision of Wi-Fi has become more central and important to the implementation of the learning management system at a macro level. It is through Wi-Fi that students can access the reliable proprietary-based system with their own devices that they bring to the institution. This is essential when the institution is unable to provide consistent ongoing technological support in its computer labs because of the weak maturity system of the IT system. As McLeod, Mason and Pippin (2009) point out, Wi-Fi allows the university to expand its presence through a virtual infrastructure without increasing the physical estate, while acting as a vehicle for pedagogic and broader change.

e-Learning Unit A new e-Learning Unit was established in the institution which could drive the implementation and development of the learning management system. The unit reports to the DVC: Academic and Research through the Centre for Academic Development. Through this process several new professional staff members have been employed since 2014 to implement the LMS as part of a blended learning strategy. Currently a new structure for an Educational Technology and Multimedia Unit is awaiting approval and implementation. At a practical level the UoT will need to ensure that appropriate skills are available to promote activities deploying in-house staff, potentially recruiting new blood (instructional design and administrator skills), and drawing on external specialists to help fast-track activities and support the development process as appropriate.

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Progress indicators at the meso level At the meso level, principally two initiatives show progress.

Performance management There has been a faculty-level adoption of academic modules that are linked to performance management on an annual basis. In turn, this has ensured that academic staff are kept accountable for the uptake of their modules. Such performance management also highlights the developmental needs of lecturers, for skills required in terms of the LMS, which can be fed back to the e-learning unit to be addressed when developing training capacity. Further, faculties require a resource plan or development plan that outlines which modules should be uploaded to the system, how they would utilise educational technology in a blended learning environment, and how they would support the lecturer at a micro level to implement the LMS. This measure ensures that the faculties determine how many modules should be adopted into the proprietarybased system per year. Each faculty is required to develop its own LMS operational plan outlining how e-learning (including the LMS and the amount of modules to be adopted yearly), and in particular how a strategy for blended learning should be implemented at a faculty level.

Staff skills training Central to the implementation of the learning management system is the training of academics. Trends emerging from the research results highlight that without proper training, which is needs based and consistent with the purpose of the institution, the implementation of the LMS will fail. Another important finding indicates that if the lecturers have not received the necessary support in the form of proper training, students whom they teach will not feel comfortable in adopting the system. Training at a faculty (meso) level is a complex matter as it can never be taken for granted that faculty members have fully integrated the skills training offered. Thus identification of training needs is continuously evolving and needs to be adjusted in respect of who requires what particular training. This is supported by a study conducted by Unwin et al. (2010) based on a survey of 358 respondents from 25 African countries who found that 75% of respondents indicate a lack of training and appropriate technical support as a reason for low adoption. For this reason, the different needs of academics should be clearly identified and utilised to customise training. It is important that the model of training be matched with the different needs of the academics within different departments, and may vary from department to department. Academics in some departments might still require the support of old paperbased methods such as a manual, while other departments may feel confident and would rather play with the system to achieve mastery during the post-training period.

Progress indicators at the micro level Some notable issues at a micro level include student training in the use of the LMS, done in two ways: through video technology; and through upbeat, confident trainers who are themselves students, and have a high profile on campus through the student representative council or other student structures. These are typically students who have a significant following of other students on campus and thus have a communication role within the faculty structure. Thus they

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are able to operationalise face-to-face training and video technology. Video technology outlines the use of the LMS in a step-by-step approach that is readily available to the student user either through smart phone technology or through theLMS, during lectures and on the student portal.

Future prospects for effective LMS implementation Looking forward, the university now needs to establish its LMS platform as part of a blended learning approach to enhancing teaching and learning. It is very important that consistent review processes be conducted to ensure that the LMS has been firmly implemented in the VUT system. Further, a strategy for blended learning should be fully implemented as encapsulated in the Teaching and Learning policy of the institution (this policy was approved in November 2016 by the university Senate). It is important to understand which educational technologies lecturers are comfortable to use; how classroom settings can be upgraded with the necessary technology; and importantly, how the facilitating IT soft- and hardware can be kept safe at the teaching/ learning venues. We need to clarify how upgrades of educational technology can be rolled out for the benefit of staff and students. Supporting this initiative would be the development of operational plans or resource plans of faculties. These plans would identify which educational technologies to use in the classroom setting, how many modules would be uploaded to the system, and how blended learning would be integrated as a teaching and learning strategy per faculty. Other factors the university will consider is how technology will be made available to students either through Wi-Fi connected open spaces or computers in structured labs. In conclusion, implementation of the LMS and supporting educational technology must still occur at the macro and meso level so as to ensure a systematic approach that impacts the university in all its facets – this would involve the resolution of numerous cross-institutional issues, which must be coordinated and driven forward. As the university promotes its broader plans for learning and teaching, the LMS and in particular e-learning will become increasingly important as a tool to help realise VUT’s mission to ensure the throughput of its students. With a structured and incremental approach, VUT should be able to secure strong growth over the coming years if the core infrastructure is in place, and the agenda is shaped by the academic community and embedded in their working practices and culture, and with appropriate academic leadership and ownership from the outset.

LMS implementation model: Outline for a low maturity context Gleaned from the current literature and my own developing insights on an LMS implementation within the context of a low maturity university setting, I suggest the following factors as central to developing an LMS implementation model that would be successful in the university context with low maturity IT structures: • Detailed and meticulous planning. • The identification of a champion or sponsor who could drive the LMS implementation and serve as a conduit for stakeholder participation and buy-in. • Identifying and sustaining both internal and external stakeholders.

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• Conducting numerous feasibility studies the evidence of which must be built into the model of LMS implementation. • External hosting of LMS while internal technological infrastructure is being developed or inner dynamics (buy-in) are being sorted.

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5. Implementing blended learning: A faculty-based approach Moegammat Dolley

Background to blended learning at VUT The advent of the 21st century has brought with it technological capabilities that have developed new opportunities for learning, notably the development of virtual platforms that enable blended learning in universities. Blended learning describes a combination of several different technologies for content delivery and methods of educational interaction, and includes resources such as learning management software and data-driven learning practices, which can be delivered in a mix of various event-based activities, including face-to-face classrooms, live e learning, and self-paced learning (Valiathan, 2002). In this chapter, I outline my journey in heading up the technical team responsible for implementing programs for blended learning at the Vaal University of Technology (VUT). I share how I came to develop a love of technology as enabling human convenience, and my experiences, insights in relation to my professional work in the area of technology in education at VUT. I also describe the models of blended learning already available at VUT prior to my appointment, and share how the future of blended learning is envisaged at VUT. The VUT Teaching and Learning policy that was approved in 2016 defines blended learning as: Learning which involves a combination of traditional face-to-face instruction and e-learning, including gaming, virtual reality, text messaging, and social networking sites. Online technology is not used to just supplement, but to transform and improve the learning process. It usually includes some element of student control over time, place, path, or pace. (VUT internal policy document, 2016)

Institutionally, VUT has explored and developed blended learning opportunities since about 2012. Before that, the virtual learning environments provided by Moodle and Sakai (which globally came into being in the early 2000s), had been deployed by various users in the university to support specific operations. Whilst both these virtual environments are still supported, VUT’s

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goal since 2012 has been to enhance and embed the use of blended learning across the entire institution in a streamlined and effective way that would encourage uptake and use amongst students and staff. The program deployed to achieve this was Blackboard Learn 9.x, installed as an enterprise-wide learning management system (LMS), thus providing a single integrated learning environment to support staff and students across the university. Historically, in addition to Sakai and Moodle, some faculties and departments have also drawn on function- or subject-specific software, for example within the administration of information and communications technology (ICT), or in academic departments, whilst others have used generally available web-based resources such as Facebook, Google, file transfer protocol (FTP), and YouTube; or authoring and screen capture tools such as Camtasia and Storyline; and also Turnitin, for plagiarism detection. (Turnitin, being a widely used essential scholarly tool, has now been integrated into Blackboard.) Since about 2012, there has also been a steady overall increase in IT awareness and use, alongside increased infrastructure provision, in terms of which VUT mounted a focused effort in 2019 to enhance the broadband and network infrastructure. Ongoing plans include establishing wireless provision across the university. These are seen as prerequisites to the broad adoption of blended learning, which VUT recognises as vital, and is prioritising. A feasibility study for implementing an LMS, and benchmarking to determine the LMS most suited to VUT, had been concluded in 2014, and the Centre for Academic Development (CAD) had then secured the Blackboard LMS for the university. It was at that point that I was appointed at CAD, primarily to implement the use of Blackboard across the institution. A brainstorming session produced a customised VUT identity for the Blackboard LMS: we arrived at the name VUTela, being an acronym for “Vaal University of Technology e-learning alive”. The slogan that accompanies this name is: “Blow new life into learning along the banks of the Vaal River,” in keeping with the isiZulu word vutela, meaning to blow, or inspire. In this chapter, my main focus will be on the implementation of VUTela as the institutional LMS.

Technology in higher education: Professional aspects Harnessing ICT for educational purposes, to create blended learning opportunities, includes exploiting the kinds of applications utilised in gaming, virtual reality, text messaging, social media and networking sites, and so on. I first became engaged in using this technology for teaching and learning as a result of conversations with colleagues who were instructional designers at a technical and vocational education and training (TVET) college in Johannesburg, and who encouraged me to apply my ICT background creatively to contribute to the tertiary teaching and learning experience. Thus, in my former position at the TVET college, we had implemented an LMS for mobilephone-based (or “pocket”) teaching and learning, at that college’s School of Information and Communications Technology and e-Learning, in collaboration with a South African “green cluster” university – that is, a university whose mission includes both academic research and education of a more technical/ vocational nature (MacGregor, 2010) – which had implemented an in-house custom-built LMS. We designed online courses in basic information literacy for

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all students at the TVET college, which we implemented in a blended learning environment. The instructional designers functioned in the role of online facilitators in a lab where students completed the online module on an e-learning-facilitated computer. I was concerned about whether these students were really coming to grips with the coursework in this mixed mode situation. This experience triggered my interest in learning and teaching. I enrolled for postgraduate studies in andragogy (adult education), which opened the doors for me to the broader higher education field. Working at an institution of higher education, I learned about the inside mechanics of the e-learning unit, that is, how and why the learning unit was structured and focused in particular ways. I was inspired when it dawned upon me that the learning should always be foregrounded, not the technology. Further studies in ICTs for education introduced me to the world of research and underlying theoretical foundations of this field of education. I was drawn to activity theory and the role of the tool in mediating what this socio-constructivist paradigm regards as “real learning” (Hardman, 2008). On reflection, I realised that in the TVET college we had been implementing blended, facilitated lab experience, while integrating it into the core curriculum. These insights prepared me for my work at VUT.

Foundations for successful implementation Single-faculty piloting: A blueprint for accelerated adoption In piloting the roll out of our initiative at VUT to implement blended learning through a comprehensive LMS, we began in one faculty. The roll out of VUTela started with the development of training material for the lecturers, and we appointed an administrator to assist with organising the training on VUTela, which was done over three days. Before looking in further detail at the steps and processes that we followed, I think it is helpful to summarise the factors that I perceive to have been most salient for our overall success, and which form the basis of a “blueprint” for implementation: • Buy-in from the Dean and all heads of department in committing to a 95% adoption of modules in the targeted faculty is essential. • Content development and multimedia design may be outsourced to a company that can commit to stringent deliverables, during simultaneous transfer of skills to an inhouse learning design team – instructional designers/ technologists. (We engaged a multimedia design agency to assist in designing animation, gamification, and gamebased learning elements to foster learning). • Instructional designers and instructional technologists must collaborate with faculty to facilitate deep-seated learning and knowledge generation to happen through the LMS. The Instructional designers/ technologists, alongside their design work, will engage with faculty to support good online facilitation practices. • Content development must include the design of departmental templates in line with a faculty template and population of the modules.

Facilitation through cross-influencing In general, the relatively lower level of computer literacy amongst mature lecturers creates a challenge. This, however, is offset by the social influence of younger colleagues, who tend to

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make a positive contribution in assisting the mature lecturers to gain the requisite computer literacy. The beneficial cross-influencing that takes place in this way should be encouraged and supported, especially in a technologically “low maturity” context such as that of VUT. It was also evident that the introduction of new technologies could result in backlash, since it requires people to change the way they work; hence the need for cross-influencing, to minimise resistance, which can prove to be a major challenge in implementing a radically new program such as VUTela. The emergence of learning management systems and related technological innovations has considerable potential to accentuate the digital divide among people in the education system, conferring benefits on those with access to ICT and further marginalising those without such access. Cross-influencing as a strategy becomes crucial in bridging the gap and generating interest and engagement in this area. In my own experiences in implementing VUTela, I recognised that most learners became empowered with a general sense of self-efficacy about functioning at a university level; yet such empowerment of students is dependent on the degree to which lecturers are gaining interest in the use of technological gadgets and platforms. Cross-influence between lecturers thus has a positive effect on increasing students’ levels of empowerment and self-efficacy.

Key factors in the VUT environment Besides cross-influencing, we discovered that other key factors in implementing VUTela included training of lecturers, building a community of practice (CoP) for learning designers, and identifying a faculty champion and a faculty representative. Circumstances that required consideration in implementing VUTela and encouraging cross-influencing included: • The extent of access to hardware and internet connections that were both affordable and reliable; • The relative levels of information literacy amongst learners; • The extent to which ICT was integrated into the social fabric in the everyday experience of members of the university community; • The level of provision of technical and training support, and access to applications and content that were compelling; • The pedagogical foundation, as a criterion for the successful implementation of an LMS (Govindasamy, 2001), was recognised as a factor that requires careful consideration; • Most importantly, unless there was a concerted effort to ensure that steps were taken to integrate marginalised higher education students into an ICT-enriched environment, the digital divide would certainly be widened, and social inequities would be deepened, in ways that would affect graduates and researchers both locally and globally. The idea of cross-influencing, although still new, could function at multiple levels to reduce the digital divide and resistance to it. The feasibility study that was conducted at VUT, other studies, and my own observations showed that these circumstances were present in varying degrees at VUT. I will succinctly summarise how they were addressed within the scope of our unit.

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First, we conducted one-on-one consultations with lecturers, as a strategy for buy-in and to ensure understanding of the contextual factors that could impact implementation of VUTela In these one-on-one consultations, sound learning design principles were shared that could help with the implementation of blended learning modules. We subsequently conducted training in instructional design, based on information gained in those consultations. We then held a threeday workshop, where an outside provider came in to train certain lecturers to become certified Blackboard trainers. These lecturers had been identified to champion the use of VUTela within each of the four faculties. Together with these faculty e learning champions we started to attend meetings of the CoP of learning designers who are using Blackboard (this CoP is known as UP2U), in order to share common knowledge and experience. The identified lecturers were later assigned an informal role of being a VUTela faculty representative with responsibilities as outlined below.

Roles of a CAD faculty representative Faculty representatives: • Liaise between CAD units and departments within the faculty; • Work with CAD to organise training and professional development of faculty members; • Advocate the services of CAD to all departments in the faculty; and • Assist in developing intervention plans to address at-risk modules in the faculty.

Roles of a certified Blackboard trainer in the faculty Certified blackboard trainers: • Support and assist lecturers in the department where they work, and if need be other departments within the same faculty, to provide best-practice VUTela-based interventions in a context-sensitive way; • Work with CAD e learning personnel and their faculty peers to design and implement the most appropriate teaching and learning interventions within a VUTela module; • Refer lecturers to the correct VUTela support person and resources; Two provisos were applied to the above to protect the academic performance expectations of our trainers: that any support or other work performed by a certified Blackboard trainer should not impact negatively on their contracted workload; and that certified Blackboard trainers would not provide formal training in the use of VUTela.

Support challenges and solutions Implementing an LMS in a technologically low-maturity tertiary context has significant financial implications for the institution. In addition to this, the technological churn brings other new kinds of support challenges. Each new technology introduced brings its own requirements for support, while the support needs of established technologies remain.

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Systems administration and student support In view of this, a contract vacancy was created for a VUTela systems administrator. The integration of the Blackboard system with the Student Information System (called ITS), was launched. At first we only integrated the protocols from ITS to VUTela, but not backwards from VUTela to ITS. This forward integration from ITS to VUTela lightened the administrative workload of user-ID and course creation. In due course, a permanent vacancy was created to combine the systems administration and student support functions, which helped resolve those aspects of implementation that required the IT Services Department to fulfil integration tasks. The appointee has helped with training of “virtual campus” staff in LMS system administration roles, and serves as a consultant to the Student Services coordinators in their assistance to students. Necessity, as the mother of invention, led us to establish this role, and to extend its functions, seeing that the different types of systems administration functions that a hosted implementation of VUTela necessitated, required us to provide in-person, online, and telephone technical support to faculty teaching online; hybrid and face-to-face courses supported by the virtual campus; and providing a VUTela help desk support function. This walk-in VUTela help desk for students is a key driving factor in promoting a bottom-up thrust for student-driven uptake of VUTela by lecturers. Many students who had found joy in using VUTela in one module would cross-influence lecturers of all their other modules to follow suit. Blackboard Mobile Learn is the technology that affords students an engaging and flexible experience to maximise learning. Students are overwhelmed when they first experience the excitement of using their preferred device not only for social networking but for learning. It is a breath of fresh air in the stifled corridors to see how the faces of endless droves of disappointed students, queueing at the helpdesk with registration problems, become joyful, smiling down on their mobile phones as they leave the walk-in centre. The masses have been empowered!

VUTela graphic design services As a service to the VUT academic community, CAD employs a graphic designer to develop VUTela materials to professional standards and in line with VUT corporate branding guidelines. This provides lecturers with meaningful multi-media and graphic design elements that enhance teaching and learning material and add aesthetic value to the blended learning experience.

Faculty training and design support Two instructional designers (IDs) were appointed in contract positions to enable us to broaden our training and support. Faculty training and instructional design support services were divided between the two IDs, each one providing dedicated services to two specific faculties. In addition, two student trainers were trained to orientate students in the use of the VUTela system using varied modes of training delivery such as classroom-based orientation sessions, the design of an online orientation module and VUTela orientation videos. The training programme for VUTela consisted of the following workshops in 2015 and 2016:

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VUTela New User Training 3-day course. This was a general introduction, and demonstrated functional application of the many tools offered in VUTela to support teaching and learning. The course presented the strategic vision and objectives of using VUTela, as well as the potential uses and best practices of each tool. Time was allocated for practising with the major tools in VUTela.

Needs-based VUTela Training (per department) 1-day departmental training workshop. VUTela staff representatives used their learning design expertise to collaborate with faculty members to practically implement modules on VUTela. This needs-based training was customised to departmental needs and the suitability of specific VUTela tools in relation to the content and context of the module. Lecturers who had already attended the 3-day workshops, or who were proficient in the use of Blackboard, developed practical skills in how to build their modules.

VUTela Refresher Training 1-day training workshop. Aimed at lecturers who had previously attended VUTela training or who were proficient in the use of LMS but wished to revise the use of specific tools in VUTela for teaching and learning purposes.

One-on-one VUTela Build your Module Consultation sessions that catered for staff members who needed individual attention to master instructional design and practical building of their modules.

Instructional Design workshops 2-day workshop. Participants had to have already completed Blackboard New User Training, or be proficient users of Blackboard Learn, as they needed to be aware of both navigation and content building, and also acquainted with the functionality of the many tools available to design and develop a course that maximises student engagement. It was required that lecturers bring all their course material, such as study guides, presentations, and assessments, to the workshop. In the workshop we delved into those affordances of the VUTela tools that foster deeper learner engagement, and we explored the innovative use of these tools.

VUTela Student Orientation 1-hour training, conducted by our student trainers. In this training, students were introduced to VUTela, shown how to log in to VUTela, how to download the VUTela mobile application, and how to update their access details. They were also provided with the contact details of VUTela first-line support staff.

VUTela Student Training 2-hour training workshop. This workshop orientated students in the use of an online VUTela student training module. Training covered the use of VUTela from a student perspective. After the workshop, students could complete this online module in their own time, and learned about various learning activities, such as: access to VUTela content/ information; engaging in online collaborative activities; completing online assessments; and submitting assignments online.

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Measures of training quality A key implementation strategy is to evaluate “return on investment,” and one of the ways of making such an assessment includes soliciting the views of those who attended training. The data is then used to improve the training that is a key pillar of implementing VUTela. VUTela training feedback data from three open-ended questions and one closed question were analysed to produce the data visuals that follow. The qualitative data (see Figures 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3) were analysed using qualitative data software (NVivo11). The quantitative data (see Figure 5.4) were analysed using statistical data software (SPSS.V22).

Creating forums, blogs, wikis, etc., on Blackboard

Using Turnitin Various platforms available for student interaction

The hands-on approach to using Blackboard

Creating and using rubrics

Creating surveys on Blackboard

Online communication with students

The retention centre

State up to two aspects of today’s workshop that were most valuable Setting and managing assignments on Blackboard

The practical exercises

Uploading content or video links on Blackboard

Informative

Collaborating with co-workers

Teaching and learning theory linked to Blackboard

Tracking of at-risk students

Setting and managing assessments or tests on Blackboard The grading centre

Good overview of Blackboard application

Figure 5.1 Attendee feedback on most valuable aspects of the workshop

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The venue

Lack of learner guides/user manuals

Information about importing pre-existing Word documents to Blackboard

The food

Lack of handouts recording the PowerPoint slides presented

Slow internet State any aspects of the workshop that were disappointing, or could be improved

Slow computers

Faulty air conditioning

Limited time allocated for training

Insufficient trainers or instructors

Faulty Wi-Fi

The mode of teaching or instruction

The pace of facilitation was too fast

Information overload

Figure 5.2 Attendee feedback on disappointing/improvable aspects of the workshop

Insightful Competent

Too fast

Insufficient desktop helpers

Opened or answered all questions

Clear Good

Please give feedback about the instructor, re: knowledge, clarity, ability to make you understand topics covered, as well as willingness to answer questions and assist participants

Helpful

Responsive

Informative Well-informed

Engaging Patient

Excellent Lacks teaching skills

Knowledgeable

Skilled Willing to help

Figure 5.3 Attendee feedback on instructor communication skills

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80% 125

100

75

50

15%

25

5% 0 Just right

Too fast

Too slow

Figure 5.4 Attendee feedback on the pace of the workshop

Analysis of the VUTela training feedback The data from the first question, “State up to two aspects of the workshop which were most valuable” (Figure 5.1), points to the fact that lecturers derived great benefit from their exposure to the various tools available in VUTela for teaching and learning. The mention of “practical exercises” and “hands-on approach to using Blackboard” shows that lecturers appreciated the opportunity to use the tools practically during the workshops. The comprehensive overview that the lecturers got is reflected in the responses indicating various platforms, information, good overview of Blackboard application. Tools of assessment are widely mentioned in categories such as Turnitin, tests, assignments, and rubrics. Management tools such as retention centre, grading centre, and tracking are mentioned. Communication and collaboration tools are mentioned as a valuable aspect of the workshop. The fact that tools from all categories of activities in the LMS were mentioned shows that lecturers appreciated the exposure to a wide range of tools within their first formal training on VUTela. Indications of areas that required attention, in feedback for the second question, State any aspects of the workshop which were disappointing or could be improved (Figure 5.2), included infrastructural ICT facilities at the venue. One contentious issue related to the absence of printed material. We had decided that we would not print any handouts of the training material, but would empower lecturers to use the online help facility in VUTela right from the outset; but it became clear that we had to change that view to accommodate lecturers who still showed some discomfort in using only online resources.

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The feedback for the third question, Please give feedback about the instructor (Figure 5.3), relating to the knowledge and skills of course presenters and classroom teaching practice, was positive on the whole. In regard to the closed question, How did you find the pace of the workshop? (Figure 5.4), an overwhelming perception of an appropriately paced workshop that caters for 80% of the participants showed that, broadly, the participants could cope with the time allocations of the workshop activities and the speed of the presentation. Generally, the feedback indicated that the lecturers found that the presenters had the necessary positive qualities, except in respect of assistance with IT-related problems within the venue, and for some, in repsect of the pace of the lecture and a concern over the perceived lack of teaching skills of the presenter. During the planning sessions that I had had with faculties and departments, the lecturers reported that the three-day workshops were too long and not suited to their tight work schedule. They also said that the training should be more individually based. They reported that the growing popularity of using VUTela to support teaching and learning is evident in the growing numbers that attend the training. Most trainees who completed the workshops were well placed to drive the adoption of e learning in their departments, as they demonstrated a natural acuity for working in an online environment.

Implications of the evaluations on training quality After all the training feedback from 2015 and 2016 had been analysed it was decided that our training programmes should consist of shorter workshops, focusing on a limited number of tools as per departmental needs. We should make training handouts available in electronic format and continue to encourage the use of online help facilities in VUTela. This assessment resulted in the following VUTela training being created:

VUTela Step-by-step Build your own Module 2 half days. A workshop aimed at new users.

Tool-based VUTela Training 1-day departmental training workshop. Focused on practically implementing the specific department’s modules on VUTela.

Manage your module 1-on-1 sessions. Training sessions designed to address the management of individual lecturers’ modules. It covers the following topics: creating groups; adaptive release; course copy; the Grade Centre; teaching styles.

VUTela Student Orientation 30-minute presentation, which introduces students to VUTela.

VUTela Student Training 1-hour training workshop. In this workshop the students are orientated in the use of an online VUTela student training module.

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Feedback from the instructional design workshops Out of our assessments on the instructional design workshop, the following directions were clarified: • Build a course with content and activities using instructional design principles; • Review what course structure to use and build it; and • Create the content and activities with assistance as required. The instructional design workshop had been offered after completion of the training on Blackboard Learn for new users. The creation of course templates was designed on principles that the lecturers had discussed and deemed essential for their courses. The templates are also built in consideration of Gagné’s nine-step “taxonomy of learning” (Culatta, 2020), or framework for course building, which gives each template a strong pedagogical base and as such makes the templates scalable for use by other teachers. A survey was done after completion of the workshop to determine the responses of the trainees. Question 1 in the survey asked trainees to identify two valuable aspects of the course from the list below: 1. Overview of instructional design principles; 2. Basic principles of education as upheld within the university; 3. Discussion on minimum requirements as established for unit templates; 4. Building a template for a unit; 5. Building a unit of work on computer; and 6. Awareness and attention to learning styles, location of resources, instructions and student access. Most responses included the items from 1 to 5. Question 2 requested lecturers to identify aspects of the course that had been least valuable. All responses indicated that the trainees viewed all items as being valuable, and that trainees had been happy with the knowledge and presentation skills of the trainer. The trainer was aware of the levels of engagement of the trainees (lecturers), and reported that almost everyone had been engaged in the development of either a personal site or a shared course site. There was a tangible feeling of excitement within the trainees as they began to see how their courses could look, and they were enthusiastic about adopting Blackboard Learn options for e learning. Feedback included requests that the systems administrator and e learning team should guide lecturers regarding the nature of course sites, templates and cross-listed courses, so that courses could be built in the most efficient way. One person suggested that the course be offered to each academic department in order to customise courses for particular subjects. (In fact, this had been the original intent; but attendance by all departmental lecturers was difficult to achieve.)

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The online course began with a kick-off session through “Collaborate.” The trainer outlined the course and set the parameters within which to work. Of the nine participants who had enrolled to do the course, only eight participated in the first module – “ISD Basics Start Here”. It soon became clear that not all the participants were fully engaged. The trainer emailed all participants individually in order to raise awareness of the need to move forward in the course. One reply emailed to the trainer indicated that the participant could not continue with the course owing to work constraints, which was felt to be regrettable as the participant had initially shown a lot of enthusiasm. Only three participants finished the assignment within the duration of the course; in addition, the trainer was aware that some participants had tried to do the final assignment without having first worked through the first two modules. To prevent this happening in future the trainer suggested that all materials and activities should in future be set with adaptive release, to ensure that participants pass sequentially through each module. Under the circumstances, the completion rate for fully online instructional design courses is approximately 25%. Nevertheless, confident of our approach and the value of the course, we continue to advocate the use of this online instructional design course as a means to nurturing the blended learning paradigm within our VUTela training.

Consolidating the use of VUTela within the faculties Engagement with academic stakeholders I initiated the process of engaging with the designated faculty, regarding their planning for implementing of blended learning, by reporting at faculty board meetings to gain insight and give input on the use of VUTela and the VUTela lecturer training. In addition my attendance at departmental meetings facilitated joint planning of VUTela training needs and deployment of blended learning modules, through a sound and engaging use of VUTela. Collaboration with the Engineering Development Support Unit (EDSU) resulted in our being able to produce high quality videos for teaching and learning. These videos are licensed according to Creative Commons open source licensing and made available only to enrolled VUT students through links to a CAD YouTube channel in VUTela modules.

Benchmarking and capacitation An ongoing project for remodelling the ICT infrastructure with regard to teaching and learning with technology was initiated. Benchmarking was undertaken with Australian universities that have implemented state-of-the-art smart technology-enabled classrooms for teaching and learning with technology. We met with vendors to look at how we could deploy and manage the provisioning for multimedia, video-recording, video-conferencing and technology-integrated teaching and learning within teaching venues and learning spaces. Important portability considerations of the technology that would address security, maintenance, and support for the use of such technologies emerged as the crucial factors to foreground in such a project.

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Clicker technology support A “clicker” technology classroom response system is currently being used to offer training in how to use VUTela, as a way of whetting the appetite of lecturers to use this technology. A set of 25 clicker devices are available for lecturers to book out from the Educational Technology and Media Unit. Support is provided in the technical and pedagogically sound use of the clickers.

Continuous alert and referral system (CARES) The backward migration of marks (grades) in VUTela to ITS indicates the beginning of the project to launch predictive learning analytics that will serve as the basis for a continuous alert and referral system (CARES) of at-risk students. As per Blackboard (Learn Administrator), Blackboard Predict can assist in this way in student retention through identifying students at risk of falling behind or failing in their studies.

The grades journey The student grades journey, as described in Blackboard (Learn Administrator), is an automated process with the purpose of capturing students’ marks (grades) in the VUTela Grade Centre through a phased implementation process. In the first phase we will set deadlines for the capturing of semester marks in ITS. These marks will then be imported to VUTela. It is at this point that the software for Blackboard Predict will have to be in place. Once the first semester marks capturing cycle has been completed, Blackboard Predict will factor in all other data that impact on a student’s performance, producing a 360-degree view of each student. This profile, combined with the predictive analytics capabilities of this Blackboard engine, will allow us to implement the continuous alert and referral system (CARES) in order to give early warning of students who may be at risk of failing. This provides for timely interventions and the management of the risks identified by early alerts, in order to ensure that student chances of success are maximised. In the second phase, the semester marks will be entered directly into Blackboard. This will require a change management process, as well as both top-down and bottom-up buy-in from all role players.

Mentoring and tutoring programmes Other units in CAD that provide support services to lecturers and students are supported by the Educational Technology and Media Unit in the use of VUTela and other instructional technologies. Of particular interest is the use of VUTela to support and supplement its mentoring and tutoring programmes through the use of technology. We are hoping to address the 21st-century student, who is typically a technology enthusiast. In this specific context we are embarking upon a case study into establishing a framework for, and furthering the cause of establishing best practices in e mentoring and e tutoring. This e intervention emanates from feedback during tutor and mentor training, which demonstrated that the limited time allotted to face-to-face tutoring/ mentoring can limit effective interaction and thus impact on the learning development of the student.

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Teaching evaluation Another project worth mentioning, for which the Educational Technology and Media Unit is providing support, is the implementation of an online teaching evaluation system initiated in March 2017 and named VQuilt, an acronym for VUT Quality in Teaching and Learning. The objective of VQuilt is to solicit constructive feedback for lecturers and thus to provide them with appropriate, circumstantial insights as a basis for improvement of their teaching materials.

Wi-Fi roll out IT Services have rolled out Wi-Fi at strategic positions on campus, and this has significantly contributed to the increased uptake of VUTela amongst both lecturers and students.

Marketing campaign A roadshow was held to formally advocate the use of VUTela to students on campus in a fun, learning-centered marketing campaign. Rave reviews were received from students about the exciting technology-driven VUTela Roadshow.

e-Learning community of practice Since 2017, the Educational Technology and Media Unit has actively embarked upon the establishment of a CoP for e-learning, which aims to: • Connect people who might not otherwise have the opportunity to interact, either as frequently or at all. • Provide a shared context for people to communicate and share information, stories, and personal experiences in a way that builds understanding and insight. • Enable dialogue between people who come together to explore new possibilities, solve challenging problems, and create new, mutually beneficial opportunities. • Stimulate learning by serving as a vehicle for authentic communication, mentoring, coaching, and self-reflection. • Capture and diffuse existing knowledge to help people improve their practice, by providing a forum to identify solutions to common problems, and a process to collect and evaluate best practices. • Introduce collaborative processes to groups and organisations, as well as between organisations, to encourage the free flow of ideas and exchange of information. • Help people organise around purposeful actions that deliver tangible results. • Generate new knowledge to help people transform their practice to accommodate changes in needs and technologies. To date, meetings of this nascent CoP have established projects in the faculties to further the scholarship of teaching and learning with technology.

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Implementing blended learning: A faculty-based approach

Teaching and Learning policy The pedagogical basis for successful implementation of LMS is entrenched in the Teaching and Learning policy of VUT, approved in 2016, which represents a milestone in the teaching and learning arena at VUT in that it entrenches blended learning as a strategic initiative of the university, thereby serving as a critical enabler of a faculty-based implementation approach, as follows: 1. All Departments are encouraged to make greater use of blended learning in their programmes, both to diversify the range of teaching and learning methods available to students and to reduce pressure on physical facilities by replacing some aspects of face-to-face sessions with students (particularly those sessions that focus primarily on simple transmission of content from lecturer to student) with judicious use of resource-based learning and independent study. 2. Learning Analytics will be used to drive teaching and learning processes to ensure that VUT adopts a data-driven approach, based on empirical evidence, when developing strategies related to student access, throughput, and success. 3. Student training on the use of the university’s e-learning systems will be provided on all campuses by the Educational Technology and Media Unit within the CAD. 4. The University will harness learning analytics within its LMS and student recordkeeping system to create an early warning system for struggling students. 5. To give practical expression to the above policy commitments, each Faculty will be required to prepare an annual Faculty Academic and Strategic Enrolment Plan, which sets out its key teaching and learning targets, priorities, and approaches. This academic plan will map out: i)

High-level overview of proposed teaching and learning approaches (encapsulating the plans of the Faculty to respond to the above policy imperatives), broken down by Department as needed;

ii) Identification of key strategic priorities for the coming academic year; 6. The institutional LMS will be kept live and fully operational at all times (with planned outages being scheduled well in advance and outside of key teaching and learning times and with effective communication in place to alert staff and students to any unplanned outages and the corresponding progress in resolving these). The showcasing of the innovative practices in teaching and learning with technology, as indicated above, took place during the CAD Staff Development in-house conference in August 2017, displaying exemplary practices in digital teaching and learning spaces in the form of “minute papers”.

VUT experience of implementing blended learning: An appraisal In our experience, the following key factors were crucial in implementing technology-driven facilitation in the area of teaching and learning, especially at the meso-level of the faculty, within the context of a technologically “low maturity” university of technology (UoT): • Fostering of faculty-integrated teaching and learning support practices, processes, and procedures, in the form of hub-and-spoke models and interventions such as:

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– Faculty engagement/ action plans that contain an annual blue-print of the project plan of how the faculty will engage with all support services; – CAD faculty support office/r(s), based in each faculty, who fulfil advisory roles for educational development, educational consultancy, and student learning. • Linking of the institution-wide technology intervention (the LMS), at the faculty level, to the relevant predetermined objective of the institution – its strategic objective – Teaching and Learning. This is a critical success factor for uptake: – Student access, throughput and success initiatives should make use of the learning analytics capabilities of the LMS, integrated into the legacy data repositories of the institution, to foster data-driven decision-making and intervention processes. – Performance contract outcomes, for all levels of academic staff, translated into actionable deliverables through involvement in key teaching and learning projects and initiatives, on an institution-wide basis. • Implementation of advocacy for the scholarship of teaching and learning in the field of technology-driven education through a CoP for e learning. This should offset the bias in academia towards research output as the most important criterion for career advancement. • Integration of blended learning features in the curriculum, encapsulated in the software down to the level of specific learning activities. • A phased implementation/ pilot implementation that capitalises on quick tangible gains in small pockets of application, as a means of effectively showcasing the beneficial outcomes and potential of the LMS. • Careful thought as to how to grow and incentivise the informal role of a faculty champion or representative • Appreciation of the value of a bottom-up approach as equal to a top-down approach in increasing adoption rates through: – Creating expectation, interest and engagement in the LMS amongst students through student-centred, learning-orientated campus-wide promotional campaigns; – Using preferred platforms for student learning such as mobile technologies, and thus adding to the vibrancy of accessible student learning. • Good instructional design practices, based in a sound pedagogical foundation in the faculty combined with access to content development support from a technologically professional unit within the university. • Piloting the process through a champion faculty, to promote accelerated adoption throughout the institution, and characterised by: – Top-down faculty commitment and departmental performance targets for adoption of e learning; – Outsourced development of templates and content population; – Outsourced multi-media development and skills transfer; and – Innovative teaching and learning practices with emerging technologies.

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Faculty – Deep-seated learning in VUTela

Instructional technology – emerging technologies for learning

Learning design – design for knowledge generation

Muti-media design for flexible platforms

Content development

Figure 5.5 Cycle process for implementation of blended learning

In conclusion: The nexus of cross-influence Among the key elements that emerged as most salient for me during implementation of the technological platform for teaching and learning was the need to bridge the technological divide. In building this bridge, cross-influencing proved to be invaluable in our context. Moreover, it emerged as a potentially important theoretical construct that requires further analysis and experimentation, and may offer theoretical underpinning at multiple levels of implementing a technological platform. This would be especially relevant in a similar context (that of an institution with a low technological maturity level and compromised technological infrastructure), and it could manifest as pertinent when buy-in is sought. Further, a champion was significant in pointing management towards the benefits of a technological platform, and could thus dispose management to serve as a cross-influencing vehicle for the entire institution. This could be understood as cross-influencing at macro and meso levels. Another level of cross-influencing occurs in training where experienced and confident participants, through their interactions and performance, positively assist technological “novices” in using the technology and realising its benefits. It is important to note that these novices often are experts in their own disciplines, who have become novices in the technological space, which can be a daunting experience and could lead to resistance to novelty and change. The successful integration of cross-influencing in the learning space thus surfaces as a cushion against such resistance, and was found to be especially influetial at the micro or end-user level.

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References Blackboard Learn Administrator. (n.d.). Blackboard predict. [Retrieved from http://bit.ly/3kXZbqB]. Blackboard Learn Administrator. (n.d.). The grades journey. [Retrieved from https://bit.ly/3l0Cthm]. Culatta, R. (2020). Conditions of learning (Robert Gagné). [Retrieved from http://bit.ly/3kXwlqe]. Govindasamy, T. (2001). Successful implementation of e-learning: Pedagogical considerations. The Internet and Higher Education, 4(3/4):287-299, ISSN 1096-7516. [https://doi.org/10.1016/S1096-7516(01)00071-9]. Hardman, J. (2008). Researching pedagogy: An activity theory approach. Journal of Education, 45(1):65-95. [Retrieved from https://bit.ly/3bvzQRL]. MacGregor, K. (2010). South Africa: New university clusters emerge, University World News, 23 May. [Retrieved from http://bit.ly/2OC1seO]. Valiathan, P. (2002). Blended learning models. Learning Circuits, 3(8):50-59. [Retrieved from https://bit.ly/3qyZiKm].

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6. Institutional mapping and scaffolding of entrepreneurship education Teboho Pitso

Introduction In the context of education, the philosophical and socio-political framework of a discipline or institution will affect its “geography”: its identity, its thinking and creativity, and its scope of agency, research and operations. “Mapping” an institution or its disciplines is a way of identifying important features in its socio-political “landscape”: its rules and social relationships, its philosophical framework, its functional boundaries, and its identity and relationship to other centres of agency in its context (Aligica, 2006). In the paths of higher education, entrepreneurship education has a fairly nascent psychological footprint. Although education in entrepreneurship has experienced a surge in curricular and non-formal programmes since about the early 1980s, it has mostly been offered in business schools and centres for entrepreneurship (Kuratko, 2005; Morris & Liguori, 2017; Pitso & Lebusa, 2015; Pitso, 2019). In a comparative study of the tendency to locate entrepreneurship education in such units, away from close association with related academic faculties, Pitso (2019) found that in Scandinavian universities there is a concerted effort to integrate formal entrepreneurship programmes into mainstream tertiary curricula, but they remain located in centres for entrepreneurship. However, there is also a tendency in these Scandinavian universities to jettison courses and programmes in Entrepreneurship when there is pressure on curricular space from the mainstream subjects. In the South African context, entrepreneurship programmes tend to be mostly located in business schools. In some cases, they are offered in the mainstream curriculum to students from all faculties of a university, positioned as credit bearing, semester long, elective service modules, provided by a faculty representing the management sciences. Entrepreneurship programmes are also offered as full programmes, tendering

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qualifications from certificates through to doctorates, as well as in short learning programmes (bearing 119 credits or fewer) within business schools and centres for entrepreneurship. While these developments in entrepreneurship education have prompted temerarious comments (such as those of Morris and Liguori, (2017), who seem convinced that entrepreneurship education has gone beyond its emergent status), evidence on a global scale suggests otherwise. Yet there are indeed positive pointers towards the institutionalisation of entrepreneurship education in higher education on a global scale, as Morris and Liguori outline, such as: • More than 3 000 institutions worldwide now offer some kind of entrepreneurship programme including, in some cases, formal degree programmes up to doctoral level. • More than twenty entrepreneurship programmes are now offered in some university curricula, which may even include co curricular programming on entrepreneurship. In some cases, even community based non formal entrepreneurship programmes are offered. • The creation in some tertiary settings of departments, co departments and even schools of entrepreneurship, in addition to existing institutes and centres that drive entrepreneurship education. • The set up of tenure track Entrepreneurship academic positions, which ensure that staff focus exclusively on entrepreneurship teaching and research. This, in some cases, includes appointments to chairs in Entrepreneurship. (Morris and Liguori, 2017, pp.xiv–xv) This phenomenal growth of Entrepreneurship as a subject in higher education is increasingly turning entrepreneurship education into a distinct discipline and, with intensive effort, entrepreneurship education could be institutionalised on a global scale within a few decades. However, the metrics of determining whether entrepreneurship education is becoming institutionalised include its becoming a major, mainstream discipline, achieving the structural feat of being a faculty on its own, becoming resource independent, and offering combined curricular and outreach programmes. Furthermore, it still needs to establish associations for quality assurance; to pursue interdisciplinary research; to build a distinctive scholarship based mainly on an entrepreneurial mindset; and to be at the forefront of transformation and societal growth. Another promising area of entrepreneurship that holds positive prospects for its growth in higher education is its paradigm shift, from typifying an avaricious and unfettered use of natural resources, to one seeking to optimise profit margins in a context of caring for the environment and advocating for responsible use of depleting natural resources. This emerging entrepreneurship paradigm is a sure way of ensuring that entrepreneurship education gains increased traction within higher education, especially in terms of its focus on the circular economy that fosters recycling used products, increased interest in the renewable energies, and climate change. Given that this entrepreneurship paradigm also assumes a more socio cultural perspective, it makes relevant the issues of historical disadvantage and social justice in researching and offering Entrepreneurship. It is my sense that this emerging entrepreneurship paradigm will also substantially contribute towards making entrepreneurship education recognised as a legitimate academic discipline. The current major challenge of entrepreneurship education is its unfortunate conflation with business education, which is designed mostly to develop managers

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and top executives; moreover, there is a historical turn to it. Entrepreneurship education started off in the business schools of universities around the 1970s, although traceable further back to 1908, with Harvard Business School’s introduction of an MBA course which included an Entrepreneurship programme. Entrepreneurship itself, as an educational subject, developed from an economic development perspective and for a while was understood within the framework of the disciplines of Economics, Agriculture and Psychology. In their critique of this grounding of Entrepreneurship on “borrowed” theoretical infrastructure, Pitso and Lebusa (2015) argued for a different theoretical grounding that could free entrepreneurship, and by extension, entrepreneurship education, from their current restrictive theoretical underpinning. Kuratko (2005), who made a similar finding that entrepreneurship education suffers a weak theoretical grounding, offered a perspective on entrepreneurial theory that went beyond its narrow definition within the business and profit making mould to include non business and non profit aspects of entrepreneurship. This conception of entrepreneurship allowed him the opportunity to define entrepreneurship more broadly as “a dynamic process of vision, change and creation” (Kuratko, 2005, p.2). Kuratko’s perspective on entrepreneurship also argued that this way, entrepreneurship can be developed individually or collectively, and within and outside an organisation. These were important considerations and represented important soundings towards building an alternative paradigm to entrepreneurship education that are taken forward in this chapter. In this chapter, these critical issues of entrepreneurship education are reflected on critically within one higher education institution (the Vaal University of Technology, or VUT) as a case study. This case study approach is adopted in light of the argument of Pitso and Lebusa (2015), that entrepreneurship – and by extension, entrepreneurship education – ought to start the process of developing its own theoretical base, drawing from its own practices; and in the light that case studies provide detailed examinations of a practice within its contextual environment, and allow for critical reflection on specific practices. Once a substantial number of case studies have been generated, scoping reviews could help develop a baseline theory of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education. While this approach was adopted in the critical reflection exercise we undertook in the writing retreats, this chapter first traces the historical perspectives of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education (particularly their strong framing around economic development and business education respectively), which is then problematised and critiqued in order to contribute towards an emergent alternative paradigm of entrepreneurship education. The chapter is thus focused mainly on the institutionalised entrepreneurship education paradigm as against the emerging entrepreneurship education paradigm, and also considers supportive means that can take it forward. Second, entrepreneurship education, as it maps out in our South African institutions, is analysed in terms of availability of programmes for entrepreneurship education, where these are located institutionally, and their affordances, such as: content selection, pitching and pacing; accreditation; delivery mode; assessment methods; and enabling behaviours (including strengthened inner strategic core, physical space, staff, available skillsets, institutional and regulatory framework, improved partnerships and collaborations).

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Towards a fresh paradigm of entrepreneurship In scrutinising conceptions of entrepreneurship education in their historical context and their future prospects, it is useful to consider the entrepreneurial perspective developed by Donald Kuratko (2005). He attempted to break with traditional conceptions of entrepreneurship and its history of dependence “on borrowing theoretical concepts” (Pitso & Lebusa, 2015, p.28). It is also useful to mention that entrepreneurship education as an academic discipline started in earnest in the 1970s and covered a lot of academic ground in the 1980s; and its gestalt was heavily influenced by the dominant theoretical perspectives that undergirded entrepreneurship at the time. In other words, dominant discourses that drive entrepreneurship education in a particular epoch have tended to influence the offering of entrepreneurship education. For instance, when influenced by business education, entrepreneurship education has tended to teach business basics and compliance with legislation; when entrepreneurial basics were accentuated then entrepreneurship process, characteristics, opportunity discovery, business plans, crafting, and exit strategies tended to dominate entrepreneurship education. Making transparent the successive dominant theoretical perspectives that have underpinned entrepreneurship at different times gives insight into the entrepreneurship programmes offered, and into choices on their affordances. It is in this sense that I attempted to uncover the core concepts and ideas that walked entrepreneurship education in the 1970s and 1980s so I could better understand the shifts in the middle of the year 2000 towards broader meanings of entrepreneurship education. Each theoretical epoch of entrepreneurship education represents an important pivot around which entrepreneurship programmes oscillate and help us venture a fresh way forward. They could also help in the development of an alternative entrepreneurship paradigm upon which entrepreneurship education can be based, moving into the future. The alternative entrepreneurship paradigm could assist in sketching contours of the pedagogy that could better drive entrepreneurship education into the digital age and thus influence the kinds of skill sets that could help entrepreneurs function optimally in “society 5.0.” Society 5.0 is marked by rapid, accelerated technological innovation developing under the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), with key features of digitisation, interconnectivity, virtualisation, automation, and increased concerns with sustainability and climate change. This is becoming the key competitive equation that takes the global society into the future. Furthermore, this alternative entrepreneurship paradigm could shape academic development supportive postures for entrepreneurship programmes. Kuratko (2005) succinctly captures the dominant entrepreneurship paradigm of the 1970s and 1980s, although in non-specific terms; however, he narrows it down to a perspective on entrepreneurship rather than sketching a paradigm. It is important to note that a paradigm is much more specific than a perspective and my concerns related more to developing an alternative entrepreneurship paradigm that could undergird entrepreneurship education moving into the future, than to the offer of an alternative entrepreneurship perspective.

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Process In his article, Kuratko (2005) argued for entrepreneurship as a process, thus by implication locating entrepreneurship education within the theoretical infrastructure of entrepreneurship basics. Entrepreneurship basics emphasises meanings of entrepreneurship, traits and types of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship context, innovative business models, entrepreneurial cognition (intention, orientation, self efficacy), opportunity discovery, lean startup, exit strategies, and ethics (Morris & Liguori, 2017). This perspective on entrepreneurship had shaped programme offerings of entrepreneurship education from the middle of 2000, and represented a crucial break between entrepreneurship education and its business education origins. There are still remnants of the business basics focus in most entrepreneurship programmes to this day. Business basics concentrate a lot on business management with emphasis on financials, legislative compliance, cash flows and cost analysis, strategy and operations, market analysis, business plans, marketing, franchising (Morris & Liguori, 2017). The hinging of entrepreneurship on process by Kuratko, while significant, comes up for critical consideration in the digital era, marked by co creation and capturing of value under complex, ever changing, uncertain, ambiguous, seamless and unpredictable conditions. Co creation of value in the knowledge based society meant including customer input in product and business development; but it assumes a completely different take in the digital age. It fundamentally includes human–machine collaborations where human ingenuity and the capabilities of intelligent technologies join forces to develop high quality products and services in a fast paced manner that leads to high levels of product and service differentiation in the market (Pitso, 2019). Process as a concept is our heritage from the scientific management of commerce and industry during the “20th-century industrial age.” Indeed, our civilisation owes its successes to the use of process across the whole spectrum of society, and especially in engineering, logistics, and computer programming. However, process is based mainly on strict, standardised, step by step procedures that mostly lead to predictable and often similar outcomes. It also requires high levels of certainty and stability; such that it is better suited for structured, stable and routine based activities. It thus tends to become vitiated under conditions of spontaneity, unpredictability and extreme uncertainty. Even stochastic processes require that the initial conditions be known before one may deal successfully with indeterminacy as marked by uncertainty and unpredictability. While process as a concept will continue into the future, since certain degrees of stability and structure are vital for the normal running of things, the demands of the future compel an entirely different approach to entrepreneurship education, well beyond business basics and entrepreneurship basics, though their remnants may survive into the future. Entrepreneurship education, like most other disciplines in formal learning, has had a strong learning paradox: that is, it uses what is known today to try and prepare entrepreneurs for the unknown, uncertain future that is imposible to outline in advance (Bowden & Marton, 1998). Entrpreneurship education has an added complexity in that some of the future markets must be imagined by these budding entrepreneurs in the present, compelling a strong element of explicit training on the kind of skill sets that transcend process, time and space. In this sense, focus on developing a particular mindset becomes crucial. An entrepreneurial mindset has a growth focus and requires high levels of independence, freedom, persistence and coping with anxiety, since outcomes of the intellectual effort cannot be known in advance, and thus have something of the

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quality of an epiphany. There is also a strong possibility that efforts of crafting an opportunity could end up in products and services never imagined at the point when the intellectual project of exploring possibilities first started off. It is a highly fluid and uncertain space, which requires a mindest with the subsets of purpose, responsibility and collaboration (Daugherty & Wilson, 2018).

Responsibility I further believe that these “subsets of a mindset” have to be understood within the philosophical bricolage that comprehends social justice and sustainability in its framework. This way, the primary purpose that needs to be inculcated in a new entrepreneurial mindset is that of creatively and collectively finding solutions to complex societal problems in ways that are underpinned by fairer resource accumulation, and distribution principles that consider the sustainability of our environments and responsble use of natural resources with a reduced carbon imprint. Profits should serve a secondary purpose in this kind of entrepreneurial mindset. Responsibilities that must be cultivated in this entrepreneurial mindset thus include: caring for the environment by reducing our carbon imprint; being activists against avaricious and unfettered chasing of profits with no regard for sustainability; and pushing for a circular economy where recycling and renewable energies are at the heart of market competitiveness. In other words, business rubrics must include the social and sustainable elements so that market competitiveness assumes a new meaning, one which is socially and environmentally constructed. The other responsbility of this kind of entrepreneurial mindset involves ethical conduct in running the business and in leadership. Co creation of value, in this kind of entrepreneurial mindset, becomes socially constructed and thrives on collaborations but goes beyond current understandings, which involve embracing customer input in product and business development. Co creation of value as a key element of collaborative effort, in this entrepreneurial mindset, subsumes leveraging the joint capabilities of human ingenuity and those of intelligent technologies made possible by advances in artificial intelligence (Pitso, 2019). It also involves mobilisation of idle resources (material, human, skillsets considered moribund, regulatory frameworks that lie dormant) in the co creation of value. One of the theories that changed the world of entrepreneurship is effectuation, developed by Saras Sarasvathy (Sarasvathy, 2008). The notion of effectuation shifted entrepreneurship rationality from reliance on causation – with its concern for predictive underpinning and opportunity discovery – towards effectual logics, which, similar to the notion of bricolage, sets available resource as its starting point in order to create new markets. However, even effectuation remains framed within the process mantra and was developed within big-brand, resource rich organisations. In the case of developing countries, which tend to rely on small businesses for economic growth, and deal with challenges of a large portion of society that is economically inactive, effectuation would accordingly have to be adapted to these resource constrained countries. A combination of the bricolage approach and effectuation principles could prove invaluable in developing an entrepreneurial mindset that can function effectively in resource constrained contexts. In her doctoral thesis on “bricolage behaviour” in small, resourceconstrained businesses, Rebecca Namatovu (2018) takes bricolage from its traditional base of richer contexts and seeks to adapt it as a mechanism in creation of new ventures in resource poor

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countries. Of particular importance in this study is the shift from the process mantra towards adaptive persistence as the main complex problem solving tool that can be adopted in these resource constrained environments. The kind of entrepreneurial mindset that is advocated here hinges on this kind of bricolage, perhaps better described as adaptive persistence. Thus, adaptive persistence refers mainly to active, patient and dynamic trying out of different things using resources at hand, individually owned or combined collectively, in order to find solutions to complex societal problems within the framework of environmental sustainability and the quest for a socially just society. Adaptive persistence is not always systematic, procedural or structured, and does not even ensure quality outcomes; but it represents an important developmental phase in tackling and overcoming resource constraints. Studies on bricolage are context dependent: hence the case study approach in their systematic and reasoned inquiry is a preferred methodology; in addition, their focus is more on social and community development rather than purely on economic development. Another important feature of these studies is that they focus a lot on the bottom-of-the-pyramid target market, and thus weave a new and rich tapastry of entrepreneurial behaviour which, Devine and Kiggundu (2016) argue, brings a new theortical angle into entrepreneurship, a point also accentuated by Pitso and Lebusa (2015) when they argue that practices of entrepreneurship should be the main sources of building entrepreneurship theorisation. Critically, this approach to entrepreneurial behaviour, based on entrepreneurial mindsets cultivated within these emerging sets of beliefs and models of reasoning, re-engineers product and service development from the bottom up. This approach thus offsets the traditional trajectory of innovation, where innovative products and services have often moved from developed countries to developing countries, with a consequence that the end products themselves have now changed course, moving from the developing countries to the developed countries – for instance, the Tata cars are shipped from India to developed countries such as Italy, which is now no longer known as one of the more significant players in the automotive manufacturing industry. These new developments in entrepreneurship compel consideration of an alternative paradigm in entrepreneurship, one that could serve as a hinge mechanism for entrepreneurship education moving forward. India, like other developing countries, is a resource constrained country with a substantial informal sector that contributes positively to economic growth and development of the country using the community development model. In the South African context, the informal sector has locked almost R44 billion in “stockvels,” a type of small-scale, private investment and savings society to which members contribute agreed amounts of money on a regular basis. With a bit of creative ingenuity, the stokvel model could shift from the consumptive to the productive side: stokvels could become the engine behind large business ventures with potential to develop and move products into developed countries’ markets, as does India. As already suggested, these circumstances and philosophical perspectives point to contours of an emerging entrepreneurship paradigm that could have a strong influence on entrepreneurship education, especially in developing countries. In the next section, an attempt is made to elaborate on this emerging entrepreneurship paradigm.

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The emerging entrepreneurship paradigm Perhaps we should first explain what it is not. It is not a perspective of entrepreneurship, although it is capable of shaping and subsuming such perspectives. It is not social entrepreneurship, as social entrepreneurship tends to shun business metrics of measuring profits, stable revenues, stock prices and assets, and uses only social metrics that calibrate impact and return to society, and often has a strong non profit logics. The key features that are likely to shape this emerging entrepreneurship paradigm include: • Cultivation of an entrepreneurial growth mindset as described earlier. • Making use of a bottom up innovation model that involves those living in resource constrained environments, as this would serve as an intrinsic motivation to want to succeed against all odds. • Making use of both business and social metrics in measuring the success of developed innovative products and services. The acme of that success will be when the product or service developed in resource constrained markets is adopted in richer, developed markets, a kind of reverse innovation as elucidated earlier in this chapter, and representing adoption of a more socially just distribution model. Social metrics would include ensuring that environmental sensistivity is part of product or service development. • Balancing technical novelty with artistic vibrancy, with a strong local cultural flavour and “good enough” utility base. • Leveraging available resources, as marshalled collectively to co create value, in ways that are open to wherever the initiative might lead but using principles of affordable loss when investing in these initiatives. • Placing adaptive persistence and resilience at the heart of each innovative endeavour, using multiple iterations in product or service development, until a good enough minimum viable product phase is achieved.

Future prospects for entrepreneurship education It is highly likely that the emerging entrepreneurship paradigm whose contours are described above would have a great influence on entrepreneurship education, once it takes shape. The paradigm would also impact innovation models, and their role in driving entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurship in general. It is nigh impossible in this century to talk entrepreneurship without ideation and creativity as phases in an innovation model. The model demonstrated in Figure 6.1 could serve as the specimen for other innovation models that could be developed in the future; such innovation models could lead to the successful training of entrepreneurs using mostly reverse innovation and key aspects of the suggested alternative paradigm of entrepreneurship. The model demonstrated in Figure 6.1 suggests that the primary purpose of entrepreneurship education is to create conditions where students and staff engage in efforts to generate novel ideas, develop these ideas into prototypes, test the prototypes for efficacy, and commercialise them. This is a challenging mindset project as it makes clear the purpose of engaging in activities of entrepreneurship education, the responsibiities of classroom

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actors in each phase of the model, and the need to work collaboratively. The model further clarifies tools and techniques required for each phase of development. For instance, creativity is a tool that plays a major role during the ideation phase and is an indicator of their fluency, in terms of the number of ideas students can generate per given time. The key responsibility of facilitators in entrepreneurship education is to unlock the potential of students to generate as many ideas as possible within the limits of available resources. Various tools and techniques of creative problem-solving such as TRIZ (the engineering inventive problem solving technique illustrated in chapter 1, Figure 1.4), brainstorming, and any of multiple other available tools and techniques can be used during idea generation. Once ideas have been generated then facilitators help students put them into categories to measure degrees of flexibility of generated ideas. Students can then be placed in teams to research and test the uniqueness of the generated and categorised ideas. A range of tools and techniques are available to test the technical novelty of ideas, including their artistry and utilisation potential. It is clear that this ideation phase subsists on data collected from students, facilitators and search engines, and mainly focused on tools and techniques that help ideational bricolage, that is, generation of diverse novel ideas within resource constrained conditions. The white path in the model suggests that a student or student team are able to generate as many ideas as possible with little support from facilitators. The light grey path indicates generation of fewer ideas thus requiring sustained support from entrepreneurship education facilitators who could use any of the variety of creativity tools and techniques that unlock such potential. When the light grey path becomes more intense (darkest grey) then it means students’ potential to generate as many ideas as possible is unlocking, and the potential to generate unique ideas increases. Once a unique idea or ideas have been identified then product or service design begins, leading to the development of a prototype that can be tested. This is the crucial stage of the product or service development, which also includes attempting to achieve the minimum viable product (MVP) level. It also involves patenting of the invented or improved product or service, and public disclosures. MVP suggests that the product or service is ready to be scaled and one of the effective techniques of scaling MVP is the lean startup model, which can also be used to provide further support to scaling businesses beyond the incubation phase. Entrepreneurship education is thus essentially about incubating potential entrepreneurs rather than training or teaching them. When the entrepreneurship education efforts reach the midgrey part of the innovation path, then potential entrepreneurs have reached a state of clarity, since MVP has been achieved and the idea concept is ready to scale out and claim its market share. For some students, the path can be relatively easy, that is, from the white path and straight into mental clarity (the mid-grey path) then scaling out. Other students, most likely many of them, would begin from vagueness and limited idea generation (white path) then to increasing levels of ideas generation (darkest grey path) then the real struggle to achieve the MVP ( darkest grey to mid-grey). The real work of entrepreneurship education is to create conditions where students can close the gap between a promising idea (darkest grey path) to MVP (mid-grey path).

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Ideation – Design

Testing

Scaling – Post-incubation

Each phase = Data + Tools + Techniques Figure 6.1 The innovation model

Profile of entrepreneurship education at VUT In this section, I briefly outline how entrepreneurship education maps out at VUT, as a case study of how entrepreneurship education plays out in a particular context and suggesting how that could be improved or transformed in light of the emerging paradigm of entrepreneurship education. First, the different ways entrepreneurship education is offered are highlighted; then findings from this particular institution are shared. Second, the different units in which entrepreneurship education is offered are noted, mainly to make a case for whether entrepreneurship education in this context is sidelined or forms part of mainstream offerings. Third, the key assumptions being made are also illuminated in order to determine whether they signal a way forward in a context such as this.

Types of academic offerings in entrepreneurship Entrepreneurship in higher education is offered in at least four different ways. These different ways of offering entrepreneurship education vary in terms of purpose or focus as embedded in each offering. Besides the key focus of each Entrepreneurship education programme, typical variations relate to accreditation status, programme structure, duration, content profile, style of assessment, and delivery mode.

Formal programmes Formal programmes in Entrepreneurship are accredited, credit bearing programmes that form part of the programme qualifications mix (PQM) of a higher education institution. They range from a certificate (requiring 120 credits), a diploma (requiring 360 credits), through to postgraduate programmes up to the doctoral level. These programmes can be offered for one to three years, and content ranges across Business Basics, Entrepreneurship Basics and Entrepreneurial Mindset. At VUT, there are no formal programmes in Entrepreneurship at undergraduate level, but discussions are under way to offer these programmes by 2022. At the moment, the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, working with the faculty of Management Sciences, offers doctoral studies, with three candidates currently studying various aspects of entrepreneurship.

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Modularised programmes An Entrepreneurship module is a formal, accredited programme designed to introduce students across faculties to Entrepreneurship. These programmes often offer Business Basics and/or Entrepreneurship Basics through a semester format. It is often offered either by the Business School or faculty of Management Sciences of a university. The faculty of Management Sciences at our institution offers such a service programme to other faculties within the university.

Short learning programmes A short learning programme in Entrepreneurship is often a formal and accredited programme with credit units of up to 119 but not 120 credits and above. It is often offered to external clients and is a strong source of income. It can be offered in a three- to six-month basic course cycle, with content including Business Basics, Compliance, Entrepreneurship Basics and, in some cases, even Entrepreneurial Mindset. The Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at our institution offers a one year “New Venture Creation” (NQF Level 2) learnership development programme, designed for the previously working but now unemployed target group (who constitute 70% of the beneficiaries, with the balance of 30% of places dedicated to VUT students). There are other similar programmes within other departments at our institution. The Science and Technology Park has a dedicated unit that is working on better coordination and provision of these programmes.

Non-formal entrepreneurship programmes A non formal programme in Entrepreneurship is often offered in centres/institutes/hubs of entrepreneurship and entails basic training on entrepreneurship knowledge and principles, as well as business basics, financial theory, strategy, and compliance. In most cases, a premium is placed on business plan development. Non-formal programmes usually occur as part of business incubation activities. The Science and Technology Park and the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at VUT, offer a number of such programmes, with varying levels of academic accreditation and content. This type of programme has not received sufficient scholarly attention in the South African context, and deeper analysis and proper theoretical positioning is required in order to adequately respond to the demands of the emerging market dispensation.

Sketching a scaffolding model for entrepreneurship education The nature of entrepreneurship education is such that support for its academic facilitators takes a materially different approach to the support of other academic staff. Entrepreneurship, by its nature, demands that students become proactive, show initiative and take calculated risks as they display entrepreneurial self efficacy; that is, the confidence to successfully perform tasks of an entrepreneurial nature. Students need to quickly take full charge of classroom activities so that active agency and increasing autonomy are at the heart of entrepreneurship education. It is a practical subject whose knowledge draws on both epistemic and doxastic logics: it is as much

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about facts as it is about beliefs. Students need to believe that they can succeed and commit to a particular course of action based on a certain belief. A better model of support is suggested by the concept of scaffolding, as developed by Lev Vygotsky, who referred to typical levels of support that can be accorded a person in the process of acquiring new knowledge and skills, and includes what he called the “Zone of Proximal Development” (ZPD). Given that Vygotsky’s model was designed essentially with the education and training of children in mind, the most appropriate model of support for our purposes, also gleaned from ZPD, is the one developed for teachers by Warford (2011), called the Zone of Proximal Teacher Development (ZPTD). The key advantage of ZPTD is that it seeks, first, a self initiated support system where students and academic facilitators, amongst themselves, negotiate and decide on: the type of support they require; the period of intervention and the nature of support needed (which, most of the time, is based more on collaboration and partnership than on an approach seeking to remediate a “deficit” in the student’s grasp of the subject). Second, support can also be sourced from other academic and vocational units dedicated to innovation and entrepreneurship, such as business incubators, centres/institutes/hubs dealing with innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as academic development units. Third, ZPTD can include support of a technological nature such as chatbots and other AI tools that can aid in the ideation stage of entrepreneurship development (such as Bixby, Siri or Google Assistant). When novel ideas are being developed into a tangible entity then virtual prototyping could play a vital role. Students and facilitators of entrepreneurship education thus decide on self scaffolding and mediated scaffolding support, and identify where to access them. Under these circumstances, an academic development unit becomes one of many institutional resources where support for entrepreneurship education should be accessed. In general, this area of academic development would greatly benefit from more intensive scrutiny, resourcing, and research, and to be recognised for the value it offers in the more creative aspects of knowledge and learning. It is important that institutional academic development support gives due consideration to entrepreneurship education as Entrepreneurship continues to develop into a distinct area of academic scholarship.

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References Aligica, P. D. (2006). Institutional and stakeholder mapping: Frameworks for policy analysis and institutional change. Public Organization Review, 6:79-90. [https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-006-6833-0]. Bowden, J. & Marton, F. (1998). The university of learning: Beyond quality and competence. London: Kogan Page. Daugherty, P. & Wilson, H. (2018). Human + Machine: Reimagining work in the age of AI. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review. Devine, R. A. & Kiggundu, M. N. (2016). Entrepreneurship in Africa: Identifying the frontier of impactful research. Africa Journal of Management, 2(3):349-380. [https://doi.org/10.1080/23322373.2016.1206802]. Kuratko, D. F. (2005). The emergence of entrepreneurship education: Development, trends, and challenges. Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, 29(5):577-598. [https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6520.2005.00099.x]. Morris, M. & Liguori, E. (Eds.) (2017). Annals of entrepreneurship education and pedagogy – 2016. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Namatovu, R. (2018). Bricolage behaviour in small established firms operating in resource constrained environments. (Doctoral dissertation, Gordon Institute of Business Science, University of Pretoria). [Retrieved from https://bit.ly/3v84311]. Pitso, T. (2019). Invigorating innovation and entrepreneurship: Insights from selected South African and Scandinavian universities. The Southern African Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management, 11(1):1-9. [https://doi.org/10.4102/sajesbm.v11i1.187]. Pitso, T. & Lebusa, M. (2015). Entrepreneurship: Practice based theorizing. In H. Kaufmann & S. M. R. Shams (Eds.), Entrepreneurial challenges in the 21st century: Creating stakeholder value co creation (pp.24-46). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Sarasvathy, S. D. (2008). Effectuation: Elements of entrepreneurial expertise. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Warford, M. K. (2011). The zone of proximal teacher development. Teaching and Teacher Education, 27(2):252-258. [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2010.08.008].

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Theme 2. 2. Student Support

7. SI-based tutorial and mentoring programme: An integrated model Linda Mandewo Sibongile Hlubi Tebogo Kekana

Introduction Improving the success and throughput rates in higher education has been a long-standing concern of institutions across the globe, and many strategies have been formulated to overcome the challenges, with varying degrees of success. These intervention strategies are broadly comprehended in the term “student academic support.” Although student academic support has many different definitions, there is consensus among researchers that it encapsulates a broad array of educational strategies intended to assist learners to become effective in their studies. Strategies include tutorial sessions, mentoring sessions, and supplemental instruction (SI) courses, as well as alternative ways of grouping, counselling, and instructing students. Depending on the context, academic support may be offered in terms of separate, semi-integrated, or integrated models (Crosling, Heagney & Thomas, 2009). At the strategic level, the integrated model means that students receive academic support as an essential element of the curriculum and coursework in each subject, instead of as a separate programme of assistance. In this chapter, we argue for transitioning to the integrated SI based tutorial and mentoring model that we have been developing at Vaal University of Technology (VUT) since 2016. Our model is consistent with broader trends in academic development, where integration has been happening at the philosophical and theoretical level as well as at the strategic level (Quinn, 2012). The rationale behind transitioning to such student support programmes at VUT is that providing academic support in an integrated approach, at both theoretical and strategic levels, provides for the needs of the students in a gestalt way with high degrees of efficacy (as recorded in a considerable body of research).

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At the practical level, it is near impossible to separate the academic and psycho-social aspects of students’ engagement in their studies. As Balfanz, McPartland and Shaw (2002) demonstrate, an emotionally and socially mature student is more likely to do well academically. The integrated approach has proved valuable in helping to develop students’ learning capacity in the following ways: • instilling strong cognitive and practical skills; • inculcating reasoning and thinking capabilities, as well as developing habits of critical thinking; • significantly developing language and communication skills; and • enhancing life skills and study skills. (Kloot, Case & Marshall, 2008) Generally the term “academic support” may refer to a wide variety of instructional methods, academic support strategies, general educational services, and/or resources provided to students, in an effort to help them overcome their learning barriers, learn effectively, meet learning standards, or generally succeed in their quest to become graduates (see Balfanz et al., 2002; Kloot et al., 2008; Tinto, 1993; Tinto, 2012). Key criticisms of student academic support practices include a myopic focus on “unprepared and underprepared” students, which, in the South African context, inevitably assumes racial connotations. Furthermore, student academic support has been locked, over time, on the deficit model. These two unsavoury factors have mired what was intended as a positive intervention mainly because of the implied underlying pejorative stigmatisation of students. In this chapter, we demonstrate how we dealt with such vitiating aspects of student academic support when we began to rebuild the tutorial and mentoring programmes at our institution, which included not only their integration into the curricula and coursework of the faculties, but also the theoretical integration into our support practices of the principles of supplemental instruction (SI). The SI model of academic support was first developed at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, around 1973. The objective of the model is to identify and provide support in terms of those courses that are most challenging for students. SI refers to a student academic support programme that is tailor-made to promote engagement and effective study skills among students in “high-risk” tertiary subjects or courses (Hurley, Jacobs & Gilbert, 2006). Its key advantage is that it eliminates stigmatisation of underperforming students with its focus on underperforming subjects. We also record here something of our personal journeys in the process of implementing the tutoring and mentoring programmes: how we got to hinge the programmes on SI, and the theoretical variations that emerged in our understandings of tutoring and mentoring as a result of the realities and dynamics of our institution. We share our experiences and challenges as we implemented these two programmes, mainly through a decentralised implementation model. In terms of the tutorial system, continuous development of tutors through training and support is done at our Centre for Academic Development (CAD), whilst the recruitment, screening and selection, as well as payment of tutors, are conducted at the faculty level. In the mentoring programme, a more centralised model

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is used, in that most of the undertakings concerning mentors – such as recruitment, screening, selection, training, continuous development, and payment – are done at CAD.

Broad overview of tertiary student support Globally, universities utilise student support programmes to lessen the quagmire of low success and throughput rates. Most will typically use forms of student support that include mentoring and tutoring. Mentoring seeks to facilitate the transition of first-year students into university and to contribute towards their personal, academic and social development. It does not operate only in the psychosocial space but also ventures into the academic space, with particular focus on developing students’ study and time management skills. Typically, the mentor works with mentees in small groups, to enhance effective facilitation of these academic skills and promote students’ move towards greater emotional and social maturity. Mentees attend mentoring sessions in addition to their normal academic classes. Tutoring usually involves selected senior students giving assistance to mostly first- and secondyear students, to improve their academic performance, and is thus subject-based (Lorenza, Casado-Muñoz & Collado-Fernández, 2013). Ngengebule, Molatlhegi, Tshaka and Mamadisa (2007) describe tutoring and the role of the tutor as a well-recognised form of student support, and its operation is predominantly in the academic rather than the psycho-social space. Both tutoring and mentoring are are widely utilised to help enhance throughput and retention especially of undergraduate students, although they are largely treated as separate programmes. Our view is that tutorial and mentoring programmes must be integrated in order to cater more effectively and efficiently for all aspects of student life.

Historical trajectory of student support at VUT Our institution, founded as a college of advanced technical education in 1966, became the Vaal Triangle Technikon in 1979, and was elevated to a University of Technology in 2004. It is a multisite institution with the main campus in Vanderbijlpark and other sites of delivery in Secunda, Daveyton, Sebokeng and Upington, and it comprises four faculties: Applied and Computer Sciences; Engineering and Technology; Human Sciences; and Management Sciences. It offers approximately 80 programmes and its Engineering programmes are well known for their quality and practical relevance. VUT’s Teaching and Learning policy (2016) requires that a system of mentors and/or tutors supporting first-year students should be implemented across all campuses, demonstrating that VUT values and recognises the importance of effective student academic support. In 2002, amidst low throughput and success rates, the institution had established a tutorial programme based on SI principles and provided in all faculties. Its implementation model was highly centralised and the programme served as a stand-alone. The mentoring programme was located within the Counselling Unit of the university and there was no relationship between the two programmes. This meant that the academic and psycho-social needs of students were met in different units

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with no form of collaboration and different theoretical underpinnings. This created problems for students as they had to access these services at different physical locations. When Linda Mandewo was appointed to train tutors in 2012, she realised that there was a need to include the mentoring programme as part of her brief so that both academic and psycho-social needs of students could be met in one place, and thus she was enabled to reignite the moribund mentoring programme in 2013. When Sibongile Hlubi joined CAD in 2015, and we decided to work together in developing both programmes, we received SI training, but found we were unable to integrate it into our programmes apart from embracing its facilitation mode. Tebogo Kekana was roped in to help us integrate the theoretical foundations of SI into both programmes. It was also important to align these programmes with the Teaching and Learning policy (2016) of VUT: we had to ensure that academic support would be a well-planned, effectively coordinated programme; available to all students; and form an integral part of the overall academic experience. The policy further states all support departments, coordinated by CAD, should be involved in the provision of support of different kinds to students, working closely with faculties and departments to ensure a coherent, coordinated support programme, available to all students, on all campuses, and integrated into the delivery of modules and programmes. The policy also states that the work of mentoring should be carried out within a support framework of “learning communities,” which we established in 2015, although it was not properly conceptualised at that time. Efforts are under way to develop a deeper understanding of learning communities in the context of our students. Unlike the mentoring programme, the tutorial programme is compulsory for all students. The tutorial programme at VUT is guided by the Tutor policy (2016), which defines tutors as senior students who have completed a minimum qualification of a bachelors or honours degree, have performed well academically, and are competent and equipped with knowledge, skills and values that enable them to assist and guide undergraduate students in their studies. Under the policy, CAD takes responsibility for the generic training of tutors while subject-specific training devolves on faculties, who also make tutor appointments and payments. Tutors are mainly allocated to first-year modules but are also used for at-risk second-year modules. At the third year and postgraduate level tutoring is arranged at the discretion of the department.

Journeys towards our integration model When the familiar becomes unfamiliar by Linda Mandewo I was appointed as Learning Development Coordinator (LDC) at CAD in September 2012. My main role in this position was to re-establish the tutorial system and the mentoring programme, which had become moribund. My responsibilities in the tutorial system involve training and continuous development of tutors. My responsibilities in the mentoring programme, on the other hand, focus on recruitment, screening, selection, training, continuous development, and payment of mentors. My interest in tutoring and mentoring students in a university setting started in the late 1990s in my position at another university, where my main roles involved training of both

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mentors and tutors, course development, and community outreach, as well as collaboration with lecturers regarding tutoring and mentoring. Although the student demographic and university context there differed materially, the experience gained has been invaluable in developing my role at VUT, although it has required considerable adaptation of my previous experience and expertise. .

VUT tends to attract students with average matriculation results and low socio-economic status, both of which demand a more sustained and integrated approach to the needs of students and the profile of education offered in the institution. In addition, such circumstances require a collaborative model rather than a “silo” approach to student support. Thus the model we seek to establish, which is cognisant of “the whole student,” recognises that the success of students is closely linked with support that considers all aspects of the student as a human being: that is, the academic, psycho-social and affective dimensions. These factors featured strongly in developing the model we share in this chapter, and points to the need we perceived, to move from offering “student support” to establishing a “learning community.” We have begun a collaborative research exercise that is intended to develop a learning community paradigm as a way forward for student support in higher education. It is my hope that, as we continually push into this still new, unexplored territory, our research and experience will result in insights relevant for tertiary contexts similar to ours.

Redrawing student support spaces by Sibongile Hlubi I was appointed as Tutor Development Coordinator (TDC) in CAD in March 2015. My main responsibilities within the VUT tutorial system involve training and continuous development of tutors, and in the mentoring programme my focus is on training only. My interest in student tutoring and mentoring at university level began during my previous work, over two decades, as a learner support educator within the basic education sector (which caters for primary and secondary education). In that context, my main role was to support learners with learning barriers, including differently-abled learners. The experience gained in providing support to these “disadvantaged” learners helped me realise the need to breach barriers between learning and emotional support. I came to the realisation that learning and emotional support require equal attention if students are to really benefit from any form of intervention. It was within this understanding that I saw value in the integration of the tutorial and mentoring programmes at VUT. Further key reasons for my insight were my experience of the situation at VUT coupled with my own similar experiences as a university student. Universities can be quite alienating for students who struggle to cope emotionally and socially because of their socio-economic background and various other kinds of disabilities, which inevitably affect their academic performance. In this respect, a crucial element of student support at university level relates to the transition from school to university, which can be quite disempowering; yet can also open opportunities for growth when handled prudently. The first level of disempowerment that students experience in the transition from school to university lies in the fact that, a few weeks prior to university study, they had status as senior students at school but are suddenly relegated to lower status as first-year students in a much larger, more populous

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institution with intimidating buildings and many unknown factors. Without proper orientation and support, even the brightest student may struggle academically if the psycho-social and affective adjustments are not handled satisfactorily. The second level of disempowerment in the transition to tertiary education relates to the imperative that accompanies first-year study: to exercise independence, and having to take decisions in which, previously, students would often have deferred to parents or teachers. The third level of disempowerment in the transition lies in the intimidating level and nature of the discourse of a university, which is substantially different from the home and school discourses that were familiar to the students (Kapp & Bangeni, 2011). Another reason we advocate our integrated model is to promote inclusivity by catering for students with disabilities who would greatly benefit from an integrated approach to academic and psycho-social support. A holistic support mechanism helps all kinds of students to benefit socially and educationally, and serves as motivation to learn (Miller et al., 1995). We think the integrated student support model that is based on SI principles will bear fruit. These factors shaped our understanding of the challenges that face first-year students, and led us to investigate the integrated model of student support we record in this chapter. They also made us focus on an extended orientation approach that goes beyond the first-year period. We found it more effective to decentralise the administration of this extended orientation programme into the faculties (as described more fully in chapter 9). In these initiatives, my colleagues and I have been renegotiating the boundaries of VUT’s student support programmes and are now moving towards the “learning communities” spaces.

Grounding the integrated support programme by Tebogo Kekana I was appointed in VUT’s CAD, as Manager for African Languages Development, in March 2017. My main contribution, in the formulation and recording of our experience as a CAD student support team, was to be a critical reader and to play the role of theoretically undergirding our research and writing process, a responsibility that devolved on me thanks to my experience in writing and research during my doctoral studies and various research publications. My contribution was further enriched by my previous involvement in the Centre for Academic Excellence at the University of Limpopo, where I had been a tutor and a research assistant. It was in the light of these experiences and the similarity of the socio-economic contexts of the two universities that I found the integrated approach to student support quite attractive. I had also developed a certain level of understanding of the academic support principles of supplemental instruction (SI), which we agreed should form the theoretical foundation for our integrated model.

Understanding SI Research studies in education across the globe reveal that students in institutions of higher learning are struggling with their studies due to an array of interrelated and intertwined factors. This challenge has led to a proliferation of intervention measures within the higher education landscape across the world. Supplemental instruction (SI) is one of these measures. SI-based

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training is a student academic support programme conceptualised with the idea of helping students in modules or courses generally regarded as having a high risk in terms of failure rates, and thus of helping them to graduate. As shown in the research of Hurley, Jacobs and Gilbert (2006); Congos (2001); Blanc, DeBuhr and Martin (1983); and Latino and Unite (2012), the SI training model is most effective in tertiary institutions when integrated with tutoring and mentoring programmes. Students themselves report positive perceptions of the learning environment and reduced feelings of intimidation (Longfellow et al., 2008), embarrassment or inadequacy (Martin & Arendale,1992). Student support in this model also demonstrates a positive effect on learning competencies and academic performance (Blanc et al., 1983; Ning & Downing, 2010). The premise behind SI is that when students are given adequate, relevant, coherent, structured and efficient programmes that support their studies, the higher their chances of success, and as a consequence the better the throughput rates in the institutions of higher learning. The principles of SI draw from cognitive development theory, which emphasises the role of the student in constructing knowledge. Thus, the central idea espoused by the SI-based training programme is student engagement. In an SI-based training programme, senior students who have already passed a particular “high-risk” module are used to facilitate training sessions with junior students just embarking on the module. The senior students are screened and selected based on certain desirable attributes that are both social and academic. In other words, they are students who are doing well academically and are socially stable. SI sessions are not a replacement of academic lectures but support them. Therefore, students attend both academic lectures and SI-based sessions. The SI-based training sessions are participatory and collaborative, as the senior students/ facilitators in the SI-based training programme do not teach or lecture, but only facilitate. Furthermore, they do not provide answers during facilitation. Working with small groups of students, they encourage engagement: they strive to promote full participation of the students during the sessions. SI facilitators go through a training process before being appointed to lead groups of students – this process is illustrated in Figure 7.1. Successful facilitators (senior students) can be promoted after a rigorous screening process to become SI leaders, one of the conditions of which is evidence of acceptable pass rates amongst the students who have been facilitated by them in the SI-based training programme. Each SI leader is responsible for training a group of selected facilitators from the overall group of facilitators, to assist them to become better facilitators. SI leaders also assist with student facilitation. The SI leaders themselves are from time to time trained by leader trainers, who also give training to the SI facilitators as and when needed. The leader trainers are staff employed by the institution, whereas the facilitators and the SI leaders are still students, working part-time.

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Leader Trainers: They train groups of SI leaders and facilitators

SI Leaders/Senior Students: They train and assist groups of facilitators

Facilitators/Senior Students: They work directly with smaller groups of students

Figure 7.1 The SI-based training model

Having shed some light on the features encapsulated in the SI model that are critical for improving academic student support initiatives in the context of tertiary institutions, we go on to delineate the similarities and variations between VUT’s two student support programmes (tutoring and mentoring). It should be noted that these are juxtaposed and contrasted with the conditions required by an SI model, in the process of proposing a new integrated tutoring and mentoring model for VUT that will be more efficient and sustainable. The integrated approach to tutoring and mentoring combines both the academic and psycho-social aspects of student support thus (cognitively) instilling practical reasoning and thinking, and (conceptually) critical thinking, alongside language, communication, life skills and study skills, through the medium of the subject content (Kloot et al., 2008).

Incorporating SI theory into tutoring and mentoring It should be noted that, in most universities, tutoring and mentoring units represent discrete programmes with no clear linkages. At VUT the two programmes were initially treated as separate entities; but, as coordinators, we have brought about an integration of these programmes through our strongly collaborative approach, our common experiences and our insights. Here, we provide an overview of the similarities and differences between the SI model and the tutorial and mentoring programmes that are currently in existence at VUT. One major difference between the SI training model and our tutorial and mentoring programmes is that SI emphasises that student groups should be relatively small, while at VUT the groups tend to be larger, especially in the tutoring programme. While at first this difference in group size appeared to hinder realisation of the SI-based approach in our system, we found a way through this challenge

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by training our tutors to break the large groups into smaller ones and to facilitate small group discussions that can continue beyond the tutorial session. The mentoring programme generally consists of smaller groups, which helps to promote a more academic level of engagement once the mentoring programme ends. This interrelationship between the mentoring and tutorial sessions requires careful training, and sustained monitoring and support, so that the facilitation roles are not conflated. Table 7.1 adumbrates similarities and differences between formal SI and our VUT programmes. Table 7.1 SIa principles in VUTb tutoring and mentoring programmes Core aspects of SI training

- Facilitation is required - Senior students are facilitators - Student groups are small - Focus is on high-risk aspects of subject/ course

Incorporated aspects of SI in VUT practice Tutoring

Mentoring

- Facilitation takes place - Senior students are facilitators - Student groups are large - Focus is on all subjects/ courses

- Facilitation takes place - Senior students are facilitators - Student groups are small - Focus is on all subjects/ courses

The vision for adapting current SI practice at VUT Tutoring

Mentoring

- Provision of space for academic support - The tutor is empowered to give academic support - Lecturers are engaged in the process

- Provision of psycho-social space - The mentor is empowered to give psycho-social support - Lecturers are engaged in the process

Notes: a   Supplemental instruction. b   Vaal University of Technology.

The VUT Teaching and Learning policy (2016) requires that academic support must “be made available to all students as an integral part of the overall academic experience,” and thus the two student support programmes must cater for all students across all the subjects at VUT. The policy in fact refers to “the underprepared and unprepared” students; however, our model seeks to support all students irrespective of their relative academic performance. Furthermore, the new student support training model that we have come up with, and which integrates the tutorial and mentoring programmes, is underpinned by SI principles, and aims to cater for both academic and psycho-social needs of each student. Our underlying premise, drawn from SI, is that all students require these kinds of support. It is our intention to expand our model to cover all students – including postgraduates. According to our observations and experiences, SI principles can be efficiently and sustainably applied in the context of conditions such as at VUT, where not only institutional resources but also the socio-economic conditions of our students are a serious challenge. Moreover, we see it as absolutely crucial that VUT establish an improved coherent, adequate, effective, holistic and

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sustainable student support programme that integrates tutoring and mentoring, as we suggest in our integrated model.

Outline of our developing tutorial and mentoring model At VUT, tutoring and mentoring became integrated through force of necessity, first, because only one academic development practitioner had been appointed in 2012 to revive and strengthen the two programmes. Secondly, when our second academic development practitioner was appointed in 2015 to take charge of tutoring, the two practitioners continued to work together and to develop these programmes in collaboration. Thirdly, both programmes are underpinned by SI principles. In the next section, we explore different aspects of our tutorial and mentoring programmes as they mapped out over time and we demonstrate the appropriateness of how they have been implemented in our context as an integrated whole. In our experience, the value of this integrated approach, and catering for both academic and psycho-social needs of students, is clear.

Conceptualising an integrated student support model When she took over the tutorial and mentoring programmes, Linda Mandewo conducted research and benchmarked both programmes, which led her to establish the kind of programmes that were likely to address the specific contextual concerns at VUT. Part of preparing to implement these tailor-made programnes included soliciting buy-in from the faculties. It also meant holding meetings with the Counselling Unit, to ensure that the form of mentoring envisaged (to be administered from CAD) would not encroach on the Counselling Unit’s activities. This point is crucial to consider prior to implementation of any new initiatives. Furthermore, building support and securing buy-in for new initiatives without a track record of effectiveness can be a daunting task. However, with persistence, and thus over time, evidence of the effectiveness of the programmes increased support and buy-in, especially from the faculties, confirming the findings of research showing that students who experienced fewer psycho-social challenges had a higher chance of academic improvement (Sugai & Horner, 2009). The mentoring programme started off in 2013 with 70 mentors who participated on a voluntary basis. Each of these mentors was responsible for 30 mentees, who together formed what we preferred to call a “learning community” (although poorly conceptualised at the time and still undergoing some analysis and development at the time of writing this chapter). This first group of mentors was appointed without prior screening but were supervised by Linda. That she was also responsible for tutor training meant that the workload was heavy to the point of compromising the quality of both programmes. The driving necessity, at the time, was to ensure that both programmes ran, and in such a way as to build evidence of effectiveness in increasing pass and throughput rates: in this way more resources could be committed to the programmes. Table 7.2 provides an overview of the activities of the mentoring programme.

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Table 7.2 Activities of the mentoring programme during the academic year Psycho-educational

- Motivation for success - Goal setting - Time management - Learning styles - Facilitation skills - Study skills and summarising strategies - Exam/ Test preparation - Diversity - Memory & independent learning skills - Retrieval strategies - Stress management

Psycho-social/ emotional

Career exposure

Community engagement

- Raising awareness of other outside classroom support services - Feeling safe around the campus - Referral to relevant student support services & structures

- Mentors identify relevant career & educational organisations - Mentors plan trips to such places for mentees - Mentors invite relevant career motivational speakers

- Mentors inculcate appreciation of community & value of “ploughing back” - Mentors plan trips to various community organisations where graduates can render their services for a day - Trips to communities offer graduates opportunities to develop ongoing relationships with them

In our opinion, the mentoring programme continues to the present to be generally undervalued as compared to the tutorial programme, which tends to receive bigger resource allocations. The disparity persists despite evidence that attention to the psycho-social needs of students are as vital to improving students’ performance as accommodating their academic needs. A number of studies confirm that there is a connection between behavioural problems and academic failure, and this must be given close attention in student support initiatives (Barriga et al., 2002). It began to be demonstrated in our own experience that a well-managed and integrated approach to both academic and psycho-social aspects of students’ challenges would yield positive results in terms of their achievements. While the mentoring programme had resources to reach an average of 2 500 first year students per annum, it was felt that the number of students reached could substantially increase once the mentoring and tutorial programmes were merged. We also noted that aspects of the mentoring programme required attention, and this strongly indicated the need for an integrated model for the programmes, which would also be beneficial in securing joint funding and sharing of resources. The following issues gave impetus to our view that an integrated model stood a better chance of success than two separate programmes: • Poor visibility of the mentors across the campus as the programme was not well promoted during orientation. • No pamphlets/ posters during orientation to alert first year students to the availability of the mentoring programme. • Poor accessibility of the programme owing to time-table clashes with mentees’ classes. • Poor attendance at those mentoring classes that ended late (especially after 17:00), as limited transport options are an issue for mentees. • Communication barriers, especially for mentees who do not have smartphones. There is a strong case to be made for our integrated model in respect of addressing the issues above. Our integrated model could ensure the following:

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• Allocation of a slot in the timetable for both programmes. • Equivalent roles for mentors and tutors. • Equal access to lecturers for advice and guidance, by both tutors and mentees. • A holistic benefit ratio for students. • A more even allocation of resources. The challenge facing us when we mooted an integrated model involved integration at the level of materials development for training, and continuous development of both tutors and mentors. While integration was fairly manageable at a theoretical level (as SI became the underlying theory), at a materials development level the challenges were quite complex. The following key issues became central in simplifying things for us: • Definition of the tutor and mentor roles and responsibilities. • The differing use of facilitation and questioning techniques in the two programmes; in each, these techniques are used in vastly different ways because the expected outcomes are different, thus lending different weights to each programme. • Understanding diversity and inclusivity, and how to deal with them, in both programmes. • Dealing with difficult situations in both programmes. • Giving constructive feedback to mentees. The guidelines for the two programmes had been developed separately: our integrated model demanded that we combine them. This has proved to be extremely difficult as there are no comparable models across the globe that we could trace in the literature. You could say we were trailblazing in this area. There were also practical problems relating to our integrated model, as the tutorials involved facilitating large groups while mentoring catered for small groups: our design of the training guidelines had to take this issue into account. While VUT Tutorial policy declares that a tutorial group session should not exceed 30 students, the reality is that tutors operate with much larger groups. If the policy guidelines could be followed, both programmes would thrive on the small group facilitation. Part of training in the integrated model would include preparing facilitators (tutors and mentors) on how to establish ground rules in sessions, how learning works, addressing and responding to cultural and language diversity, challenges of inclusivity, the cultivation of writing skills, and also the effective use of visual and other aids to improve attention and understanding. The duration of training for tutors and mentors – customarily two to three days – would not be long enough for our integrated model: we recommend three to five days to allow for training on aspects common to both kinds of facilitation, as well as time for training on unique aspects of each mode of facilitation. Training of tutors and mentors had always included mock facilitation classes, which were evaluated by other colleagues within the Centre for Academic Development together with the existing tutors and mentors. This aspect of training would remain part of our integrated model. One of the ways of dealing with large classes, as with tutorials, is to encourage tutors to break the large groups into smaller ones and to allocate tasks to each smaller group,

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with each smaller group then reporting back to the large group to wrap up. Under our integrated model, this would mean that tutors target specific areas of difficulty in the subject instead of trying to facilitate all aspects of the subject. This way, tutors would work closely with lecturers and monitor students’ performance for areas of difficulty. Observation of live sessions, which have always formed part of the tutorial system, would be extended in our integrated model to cover the mentoring programme. A summary of the challenges in our facilitation programmes is presented in table 7.3 below. Table 7.3 Summary of challenges experienced in the tutoring and mentoring programmes Tutoring

Mentoring

- Academic departments do not cooperate in terms of appointing tutors in time to train them - Tutor training groups are small, and this taxes the Coordinator, who must repeatedly do the same training over a long period in order to accommodate all the tutors - Tutorial groups include too large a number of students - It is difficult to find appropriate venues for tutorials - Tutors experience lack of supervisory support in performing tutoring activities - Perceived salary inequities result in tutors preferring to become mentors

- Academic departments do not cooperate in the process of recruitment of senior students to be appointed as mentors - Mentors found that attendance at mentoring sessions, which are voluntary, was erratic - Mentoring sessions dealing with popular or “at risk” topics had to cope with a larger number of attendees than usual - It is difficult to find appropriate venues for mentoring sessions - Mentors’ working hours often interfere with their own academic commitments - Mentors are expected to give support to mentees even during periods of unrest on campus

Our proposed integrated model A diagrammatic representation of our integrated SI-based Tutoring and Mentoring model is demonstrated in Figure 7.2:

Lecturers

Tutors

Mentors

Figure 7.2 Our model for integrated student support

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The emphasis of our model in Figure 7.2 is the idea of collaboration: in order for an academic student support programme to work effectively and in a sustainable manner, the three groups of facilitation stakeholders (lecturers, tutors and mentors) should work together in a coordinated manner. A summary of the aspects that are involved in such a model are presented in Table 7.1. In our mentoring and tutoring model, underpinned by SI, the roles of each group of stakeholders are very critical. A principal role of the tutor is referral. Should tutors discover or observe that one of their students has a problem that is psycho-social in nature, the student must be referred to the mentor, whose role is to address that challenge; in the same way, the mentor refers a student with academic challenges back to the tutor. Another role of tutors is to identify the barriers to learning experienced by students with physical or learning disabilities, and refer them to the lecturer, who will in turn refers them to the relevant support service. Once a student’s support needs have been assessed, feedback is provided to the lecturer, who then consults with the tutor on how to continue supporting the student, based on the need. In our model, with respect to inclusivity, we do not want to view disability as an abnormality, but to make efforts to establish inclusive support strategies for our students’ success (Moriña, 2017). Thus the referral role of each facilitation group is very crucial in this integrated model.

Concluding remarks A bold attempt to revive and re-establish student support at VUT was made by the appointment of Linda Mandewo at CAD in 2012; and the subsequent appointment of Sibongile Hlubi in 2015 initiated the collaborative process in which the two colleagues began to merge their expertise and experiences to build up the VUT student support system, leading to an informal integration of the tutoring and mentoring programmes. However, it was not until a writing retreat, out of which this book was born, that the two colleagues reflected critically on their practices and had a moment of epiphany, a realisation of a greater reality that they had been immersed in. That greater reality was the fact that they had already developed a framework of integration for the two support programmes. As a result of further writing retreats and the inclusion of Tebogo Kekana in our team, the integrated model became more apparent and we sought to ground it more formally in the internationally recognised model of academic support called supplemental instruction (SI). It was clear at this point that our integrated approach to these programmes was not only a promising way forward, but also represented a significant departure from the exisitng implementation of academic support programmes in “silos.” As the VUT student population continues to grow, and embraces larger numbers of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, an integrated system of academic and psycho-social student support will become an increasingly important tool to improve VUT’s throughput and pass rates. We hope that the insights we have shared in this chapter will be a helpful tool to colleagues in other institutions of higher learning experiencing similar challenges in providing student academic support. The insights that we have gained in working together led us to develop an SI-based model in which not only our practices, but all other facilitation stakeholders, initially participating only on the periphery, can now be integrated meaningfully into the support programme and contribute towards its success at VUT. Our model represents an upgrading of the student academic support model that was initially in place at VUT.

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Ultimately, this chapter underscores the importance of research into student academic support programmes in institutions of higher learning, and has thus attempted to contribute to the existing body of knowledge on student support in educational discourse, particularly in the context of typical local constraints, and the need to improve throughput rates. We hope that the insights we have shared in this chapter will ignite further research projects on SI-based student academic support programmes in similar contexts.

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References Balfanz, R., McPartland, J. & Shaw, A. (2002). Re-conceptualizing extra help for high school students in a high standards era. [Retrieved from https://bit.ly/3qCX78L]. Barriga, A., Doran, J., Newell, S., Morrison, E., Barbetti, V. & Robbins, B. (2002). Relationships between problem behaviors and academic achievement in adolescents: The unique role of attention problems. Journal of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders, 10:233-240. [https://doi.org/10.1177/10634266020100040501]. Blanc, R. A., DeBuhr, L. E. & Martin, D. C. (1983). Breaking the attrition cycle: The effects of supplemental instruction on undergraduate performance and attrition. Journal of Higher Education, 54(1):80-90. Congos, D. (2001). How supplemental instruction (SI) generates revenue for colleges and universities. Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice, 3(3):301-309. [https://doi.org/10.2190/KUTE-ERFN-XTG4-TE7W]. Crosling, G., Heagney, M. & Thomas, L. (2009). Improving student retention in higher education: Improving teaching and learning. Australian Universities’ Review, 51(2):9-18. Hurley, M., Jacobs, G. & Gilbert, M. (2006). The basic SI model. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 106:11-22. [https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.229]. Kapp, R. & Bangeni, B. (2011). A longitudinal study of students’ negotiation of language, literacy and identity. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 29(2):197-208. [https://doi.org/10.2989/16073614.2011.633366]. Kloot, B., Case, J. M. & Marshall, D. (2008). A critical review of the educational philosophies underpinning Science and Engineering foundation programmes. South African Journal of Higher Education, 22(4):799‑816. Latino, J. A. & Unite, C. M. (2012). Providing academic support through peer education. New Directions for Higher Education, 1(157):31-43. [https://doi.org/10.1002/he.20004]. Longfellow, E., May, S., Burke, L. & Marks-Maran, D. (2008). They had a way of helping that actually helped: A case study of a peer-assisted learning scheme. Teaching in Higher Education, 13(1):93-105. [https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510701794118]. Lorenza, D. R., Casado-Muñoz, R. & Collado-Fernández, M. (2013). Tutoring and mentoring at the university level: Experiences in Padua and Burgos. International Journal for Cross-Disciplinary Subjects in Education (special issue), 3(1):1406-1415. Martin, D. C. & Arendale, D. (1992). Understanding the SI model. In D. C. Martin, & D. Arendale (Eds.), Supplemental instruction: Improving first-year student success in high-risk courses (2nd ed., pp.3-10). Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, National Resource Center for the Freshman Year Experience and Students in Transition. Miller, S. R., Miller, P. F., Armentrout, J. A. & Flannagan, J. W. (1995). Cross-age peer tutoring: A strategy for promoting self-determination in students with severe emotional disabilities/behavior disorders. Preventing School Failure, 39(4):32-37. [https://doi.org/10.1080/1045988X.1995.9944640]. Moriña, A. (2017). Inclusive education in higher education: Challenges and opportunities. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 32(1):3-17. [https://doi.org/10.1080/08856257.2016.1254964]. Ngengebule, N. T, Molatlhegi, M. M., Tshaka, N. N. & Mamadisa, S. (2007). Tutorial Support Services: Discussion classes and work integrated learning (Unisa tutor handbook). Pretoria, South Africa: University of South Africa.

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Ning, H. K. & Downing, K. (2001). The interrelationship between student learning experience and study behaviour. Higher Education Research & Development, 30(6):765-778. [https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2010.539598]. Ning, H. K. & Downing, K. (2010). Connections between learning experience, study behaviour and academic performance: A longitudinal study. Educational Research, 52(4):457-468. [https://doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2010.524754]. Quinn, L. (Ed.) (2012). Reimagining academic staff development: Spaces for disruption. Stellenbosch, South Africa: African Sun Media. Saunders, D. (1992). Peer tutoring in higher education. Studies in higher education, 17(2):211-218. [https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079212331382677]. Sugai, G. & Horner, R. (2009). Defining and describing school-wide positive behavior support. In W. Sailor, G. Dunlap, G. Sugai, & R. Horner (Eds.), Handbook of positive behavior support, pp.307-326. New York, NY: Springer Tinto, V. (1993). Leaving college: Rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Tinto, V. (2012). Completing college: Rethinking institutional action. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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8. Fostering undergraduate mathematical proficiency: My liminal space Jeremiah Madzimure

Introduction In 2012, I was appointed as the first Coordinator of the Maths Centre at the Vaal University of Technology (VUT). Part of the university’s student support system, the Maths Centre is managed by the Centre for Academic Development (CAD). Its purpose is to improve the proficiency of students (mostly undergraduates) enrolled in Mathematics or Statistics as part of their courses in Engineering, Applied Sciences, or Management Sciences. In this chapter, I share something of my personal journey in mathematics education: first, how my own passion for Mathematics developed, and my fascination with its intricacies and problemsolving capabilities; then my experiences as a Mathematics lecturer at a comprehensive university; and finally my setting up of the Maths Centre at VUT, where I am currently employed. In the first five years of setting up and developing the VUT Maths Centre, I gained substantial new insights from the process, specifically in the context of a university of technology (UoT) that mainly attracts students from previously disadvantaged schools. Among other challenges, we had to deal with the stigma attached to attendance at the Maths Centre and overcome pejorative labelling of students participating in our programmes. It was also a journey in developing my own skills in integrating the activities of the Maths Centre with those of the faculties we serve. It is satisfying to see the return on my efforts and experiences over the period, demonstrated in the increased levels of student proficiency in Mathematics and Statistics skills resulting from Maths Centre interventions.

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Rites of passage (the pre-liminal space) My love for mathematics started off at primary school when I was about 10 years old. My father was a teacher at the same primary school and a role model to me as he tried to explain the significance of mathematics in the real world. He used to take me to chess clubs, mathematics remedial centres and some recreational activities that involved mathematics. These activities, over time, developed my passion for the field. By the time I reached secondary school, I was already dreaming of becoming a mathematics teacher of some note. My role model now was my secondary school teacher, who helped me master mathematics in extraordinary ways. I remain indebted to him for his role in taking me through Advanced Level Mathematics, which prepared me for my studies in Mathematics at a Zimbabwean university. Thus, it was tough to discover the considerable gap in my mathematics knowledge, skills and proficiency between secondary school and university. This was no mean challenge for me: nevertheless, my passion for the subject carried me through. One of the major differences between secondary education and university learning is that at university, lecturers barely teach in the sense famliar at school – they are mostly emotionally detached and present just the cold facts of mathematics. Thus, one is left very much to one’s own devices in terms of support. The lack of support from lecturers was exacerbated by the fact that no student support mechanisms – such as tutorial and mentoring programmes, a writing lab, or a mathematics centre – were available at the time. I then devised my own support mechanisms, such as spending extensive time in the library and arranging additional private lessons, which helped me cope with universitylevel mathematics. My personal experience of lack of support as an undergraduate made me seriously consider my future role in this area and was instrumental in my seeking employment as an academic developer in the Maths Centre. It has been a perennial source of pain to see so many students dropping out of university, withdrawing from university-level mathematics, and failing in great numbers. In a way, this pain is assuaged in my current role, in that it allows me to offset these trends of dropping out, withdrawal and failure. I firmly believe that if student support mechanisms had been available at my Zimbabwean alma mater at that time, more students could have completed their degrees – in all courses, not only in Mathematics – and could thus have improved the throughput rate of the university. After completing my bachelor’s degree, I started work at a comprehensive university in South Africa as a Mathematics lecturer to first-year students. My students’ struggles to master the subject led to our introduction of a tutorial system under which senior students, identified to act as tutors, attended after-hours training for an hour each week, to equip them to assist students with a weak mathematics background. They were selected from a pool of students who had already completed the same module but with high marks and demonstrating a passion for mathematics. Before going to facilitate their tutorial classes, they met with the lecturer to learn how and what to teach these students. The system worked well, and results improved significantly. This confirms trends from other tertiary contexts: as demonstrated by Carter and Wetzel (2010), tutorial programmes in higher education not only help to raise students’ confidence but help them understand the concepts learned in class. Nilsson and Luchinskaya (2012) demonstrate that such support centres can also provide additional help with mathsrelated problems by running drop-in sessions, workshops and/ or tutorials.

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In the experiences of this phase of my personal development in becoming a maths educator, I paid my dues and separated from the preoccupations of my schooling, undergraduate studies, and lecturing work. Through these experiences, I was ready to assume the new status of academic developer.

The liminal space It now became my focus to set up the VUT Maths Centre, with the goals of improving the success rate of Mathematics students, and of ensuring that the Centre developed as a fully-fledged unit that could more broadly offer undergraduate students further opportunities to develop their mathematics competencies. It was a challenge. I first had to understand the context in which I was to establish the Maths Centre, as it differed significantly from my experiences and challenges at the more traditional “green cluster” university (MacGregor, 2010) where I had studied and worked before joining VUT. When VUT was originally established in 1966, it was a technical college, catering for mainly white students who were to serve the intermediate level of the economy as junior engineers, artisans, or middle managers. (See chapter 3 for additional historical background.) Since then, it has grown in stature, not only becoming a UoT, but also drawing a diversity of students from all over the country and abroad. It is one of the largest residential UoTs in South Africa. Coming from the more “traditional” university background where I had worked as a Maths lecturer, I had to hit the ground running at VUT. There were no guidelines or policies on how to implement the new Maths Centre at this institution. When I arrived, the physical space designated for the Maths Centre was a dusty office with no computers, from which I ousted a miscellany of old vacuum cleaners and dustbins. Yet taking charge of this initially unsavoury physical space presented me with immense opportunities for growth and professional development, and it was a triumph to launch the Maths Centre in September 2012, in the same year I was appointed at VUT. I benchmarked desirable practices and frameworks with other South African universities, including the University of the Witwatersrand, and brought my own experiences to bear on what was needed to set up VUT’s Maths Centre. I did a lot of reading about other mathematics centres across the globe, especially those in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia.

Local and global views on student support Studies show that mathematics tutoring centres can be viewed as an example of emerging programmes and services to improve students’ chances of success in colleges and universities (Jaafar, Toce & Polnariev, 2016). Mathematics support generally takes the form of mathematics support centres (MSCs), whose main aims are: to address issues surrounding the transition to university mathematics and to support students’ learning of mathematics and statistics across the wide variety of undergraduate courses that require an understanding of mathematical concepts and techniques (Matthews, Croft, Lawson & Waller, 2013).

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Our aims at the Centre were also supported by the research of Lawson (2012) which proposes that “the key purpose of mathematics support centres is to assist students to achieve full potential”. In general, the literature supports the notion that Mathematics at tertiary level is an at-risk subject. Greene and Forster (2003) document how most undergraduates struggle to cope with university Mathematics and thus with the transition from school to university. Hourigan and O’Donoghue (2007) further point to the widespread concern about students entering higher education who have basic problems with Mathematics as a subject. As a consequence, they point out, Mathematics gets bad publicity, students develop negative attitudes towards it and its allied subjects; and a tendency towards rote learning of Mathematics – instead of intellectual engagement with its principles – becomes hard to change. Students entering university studies, both from disadvantaged educational backgrounds and from privileged backgrounds, generally enter higher education with insufficient knowledge and skills required for studying key concepts in mathematics (Paras, 2001; Howie & Pietersen, 2001). This includes the necessary language proficiencies required for the higher intellectual demands, and in addition students often reflect the gaps left by the schooling system in the foundational knowledge of the discipline. As a result, typical university tasks present major challenges for most students irrespective of background (Hardman & Ng’ambi, 2003). The lack of sufficient mathematical knowledge not only affects students’ achievement on their courses but also leads to disengagement and higher dropout rates during the first two years of study (Gallimore & Stewart, 2014). Similarly, Sayed et al. (2009) record that 40 percent of South African students drop out of university studies during the first year, which is why many universities now offer Mathematics support services in an attempt to overcome the challenges, and which, as Sayed et al. believe, will ultimately improve students’ achievements and engagement, as well as improving institutional retention rates. Most community colleges in the United States, Ireland, Australia, and the United Kingdom have learning support centres to help students address their remedial needs and to increase academic preparedness. One of the central goals of these centres is to help students develop efficient learning processes (Carter & Wetzel, 2010). Mathematics learning centres can help students develop greater self-efficacy (Jaafar et al., 2016), defined as an individual’s own judgement of their capabilities to complete certain tasks (Schunk, 1991). In order to address such challenges in higher education, many European universities have created support centres to address the mathematics challenges that students experience when transitioning from high school to tertiary education (Carroll, 2011; Hourigan & O’Donoghue, 2007; Pell & Croft, 2008).

Further steps into my liminal space Based on the benchmarking I conducted, and my readings, I began to put together a proposal for structuring the Maths Centre. The critical issue for the model I proposed was to address the challenges faced by the institution. I held several meetings with the head of the Department of Mathematics and other relevant academic and administrative stakeholders at VUT, as well as making presentations in faculty board meetings. In this consultative process, I came to recognise that another subject related to Mathematics and deserving of attention in the Maths Centre was Statistics. It was decided, at that stage, that only undergraduate students would benefit from the Maths Centre. Another aspect of the model I recommended for the Maths Centre was that attendance should be voluntary or referral based.

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The Maths Centre operated as a standalone for some months before we could formalise collaboration with the university’s Mathematics Department, and from September to December 2012, very few students – only 300 out of some 2 500 students doing Mathematics and Statistics courses – attended the Centre. Given the voluntary and referral basis of the model, there was a need for extensive marketing of the Maths Centre. The marketing plan we implemented included advertising through posters placed around the campus, flyers, and broadcasts on the university’s radio frequency, VUT FM. Attendance at the Centre increased substantially in 2013, principally representing its use as a facility offering additional support to complement students’ normal lecture classes. The main purposes of the Centre are to support at-risk students and those seeking to excel in mathematics. The other specific aims of the Centre include building the confidence of students, providing nonjudgemental support, especially to those who are struggling with Mathematics or Statistics, and bridging the gap between high school mathematics and “first year student readiness.” We also aim to provide to students outside their normal teaching times. The services the Maths Centre currently provides include: • One-on-one consultations • Small-group consultations (2-5 students per session) • Tutorial classes (one hour per week per group) • Diagnostic testing (only first-year Maths students) • Extra classes/ exam revision sessions (in preparation for tests or exams).

Early challenges Initially, I faced major challenges in launching the Centre. Just after my appointment, I noted that some lecturers in the Department of Mathematics were not in full support of the new Centre. A small minority of Mathematics lecturers had not been open to the idea of the Centre and actively refrained from recommending the service to the students. Convincing lecturers that this was an activity worthy of their full support and involvement was at first a seemingly insurmountable challenge and made my task of convincing students to make use of the Centre extremely difficult. Lecturers have the greatest influence on their students and are therefore at liberty to advise them to attend our programmes during their normal class times. The challenge was addressed by circulating a Maths Support Proposal soliciting the support of the lecturers by describing the aims and goals of the Maths Centre. Through various further meetings and presentations, we ended up engaging in successful collaboration with the Mathematics lecturers. For the purposes of buy-in and referrals of students who need assistance, this collaboration was a huge step forward. The lesson learned from this was that for the Maths Centre to be successful, it had to have full support from both top management and all staff in the Mathematics Department. Having meetings and collaborations with other departments, or with units such as e-Learning, helped us all to rethink and reposition the Maths Centre as a 21st-century learning space. For the Centre, it meant demonstrating the importance of Mathematics support on a face-to-face basis. The process of using blended learning support had begun in earnest.

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Information about the Maths Centre was disseminated to students through noticeboards. However, it was difficult to get the message across to them: one could deduce from poor turnout at the Centre that the majority rarely read noticeboards. Slender resources have been another challenge. The resources challenges include the small space available to accommodate the large number of students, and a lack of computers and other specialised equipment necessary to deliver top-class Maths support. A cursory look at the literature points to several issues relating to such challenges. Jaafar et al. (2016) suggest that, at a minimum, running a successful maths support centre requires adequate resources, which include space and location, computers and other specialised equipment, management personnel, tutoring personnel, and faculty support. I had to consider such advice carefully and work a strategy around it. Furthermore, supporting these ideas, Fraser and Killen (2003) advocate that it is vital for maths support centres to be established on a permanent basis with a full-time coordinator and a substantial base of trained and qualified tutors, who are sympathetic and friendly to all students making use of their services. One of the insights I gleaned from this advice was the importance of training tutors not only in facilitation and academic support but also in providing some level of psycho-social support. A close link with other colleagues who provide tutorial and mentoring support is vital in achieving this goal. (See chapter 7 for our proposed integrated model of facilitator training, which caters for both academic and psychosocial aspects of student needs, based on supplemental instruction (SI) principles.) Most of our attendees at the Centre were enrolled for various courses in Engineering, for which Mathematics is an essential subject. Like me, as an undergraduate, they had to make that transition of adjusting to university mathematics, which is different from the school mathematics familiar to them. Thus, most – if not all – students registering for an engineering course require some level of mathematics support, in a way that makes Mathematics an at-risk subject in terms of pass rates and throughput. As a result of this realisation, I am mooring our approach to the principles of SI as one of the strategies for supporting students in the Maths Centre. One of the challenges our university was facing was how to deal with the students coming from high school with good matriculation passes in Mathematics yet displaying alarming weaknesses in basic mathematical manipulations and understanding. At the Maths Centre I found out that some students can apply a method but generally do not exactly understand what they are doing. As a result of this, I found out, students lack the confidence or courage to tackle any new material. One step we take at the Maths Centre in addressing this challenge is to introduce diagnostic testing to bridge the gap. All first-year students taking Mathematics courses at the institution take this diagnostic test, without consideration of their Mathematics matriculation grades. This testing has also proved to be effective in other universities, including the universities of Limerick, Loughborough, and Coventry, to mention just a few. The literature records several major studies in the United Kingdom on undergraduate mathematical preparedness. Savage et al. (2000) recommend that “students embarking on Mathematics degree/ diploma courses should have a diagnostic test on entry,” and demonstrate that it is a means to an end in a two-stage process of testing followed by prompt and effective follow-up, which is essential to deal with both individual weaknesses and those of the whole cohort. Heck and van Gastel (2006) reported that the kinds of positive effects that can accrue from interventions are in the first instance informed

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by the results of diagnostic testing. In the case of VUT, we are giving diagnostic tests to our new students, yet we still face the following challenges: • The test is paper based (marking tends to take longer). • Registration administrative challenges: these result in some students not being able to write the test (which is written only at the beginning of the year before normal classes commence). The registration process tends to encroach on academic time so that by the time the academic year officially begins, some students are already under extreme time constraints trying to finalise their registration. My experience suggests that the matter can be resolved through: • Having online diagnostic testing; • Optimising the timing of the test; and • Good collaboration with academic departments. Diagnostic tests are common services offered by MSCs around the world, most notably in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia, where results are used as a baseline and for early detection of struggling students (Fry, Ketteridge & Marshal, 2009). To be useful, such tests have to be designed carefully, testing on most prerequisite and assumed knowledge. However, students performing below a set standard should not be tagged as at-risk, as this tends to add a layer of complexity in an already problematic situation. Rather, all students who enrol for Mathematics should be invited to use Maths Centre services regularly and be given special attention. However, such single-point estimates of students’ abilities, whether a diagnostic test or even a matriculation exam result, are not good predictors of success potential in universities studies (Fraser & Killen, 2003): thus, even good performers are urged to make use of the Maths Centre. At VUT, the Maths Centre offers the test only to those students enrolled for Maths I, but the plan is eventually to test all undergraduate students up to final year. Testing has not yet yielded its full potential: despite the identification and listing of students in difficulty, as indicated in the diagnostic test results, most targeted students do not regularly consult. Thus, a key step in improving the Centre’s impact is to identify and address reasons why such students choose not to seek help from the Centre, despite our deliberate position in focusing on Mathematics as an at-risk subject, so that it is not the students who are disparaged. As shown in Maths Centres across the globe, obtaining sufficient and permanent funding is essential for the success of any support centre (Matthews et al., 2013). The Maths Centre at VUT is hugely under-resourced and initially relied on a University Capacity Development Programme (UCDP). As a result of constrained finances, the rate of staff turnover in the Maths Centre is typically high and poses a threat to the momentum gained. Each year, some two or three experienced tutors have left the Centre for greener pastures because of uncertainty about their jobs and the insecurity faced by all staff in the Centre, including the Coordinator, because they work under temporary contracts. For many years, since inception, the Maths Centre survived because it was underpinned by the Centre for Academic Development Department and funded by UCDP. This state of affairs needs to change and, internal and permanent funding is found to service the Maths Centre. Having overcome many of the earlier day-to-day challenges of getting all Mathematics students to regularly make use of the Maths Centre, and securing buy-in from faculties and students, it would be disappointing to lose this leverage.

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In terms of optimising the true value of the Maths Centre, another really big challenge I faced during consultation sessions was to move students beyond just wanting to get an answer to a particular question towards gaining a broader understanding of the mathematical concepts or principles needed to solve the problem. At the Centre, we try to overcome this challenge by spending time with students, talking to them and explaining the value of understanding over merely getting an “answer.” Related to this challenge, students often come for help with coursework assignments and it is usually possible to determine how to help these students understand the work without doing it for them. However, sometimes lecturers deliberately do not inform students that the work for which they seek help is assessed coursework, and then things become trickier. We counteract this problem by having regular meetings with lecturers to discuss assessments they intend to give their students, so we can plan and act accordingly. Another challenge we experience in the Maths Centre is that VUT does not offer a Mathematics degree or diploma course: this poses a big challenge in recruiting well-qualified tutors in Mathematics from among our student body. The challenge is exacerbated by the small stipends offered to tutors. For the purposes of stability and retention, it would be advisable to create permanent posts at the Centre.

Progress in the Maths Centre since its inception Most learners at VUT are affected by the deficiencies of the secondary school system, resulting in Mathematics consistently featuring in the list of most problematic subjects, with a low success rate. Table 8.1 shows throughput trends for Maths I during the period 2006–2016. Student performance was declining prior to the establishment of the Maths Centre in September 2012; the impetus for its establishment was the need to recover and maintain a positive appreciation on success rates in Mathematics. The objective of the Maths Centre has therefore been to improve success rates in the mathematics-dependent subjects, working in close collaboration with the Mathematics Department, by providing the following services: • One-on-one drop-in consultations: students seek individualised attention from the Centre for their specific problems and at their convenience during the centre operating hours. • Small group consultations: two to five students would seek attention from the Centre to attend to their shared mathematical issues. • Class tutorials: prepared and scheduled tutorials in collaboration with the subject owners, (lecturers in the VUT Mathematics Department), offered to a full class group for the target Mathematics module of a given semester.

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Table 8.1 Pass rate and success rate for Mathematics I, 2006-2016 Student Numbers Column

1

2

3

Years

Enrolleda

Eligible to Write

Wrote

2006

Proportions 4

5

6

7

8

Examb

Exam

Passed Exam

Failed Exam

Total

c

% Examinees

% Overall Success

Failed

Passede

Ratef

1 952

1 354

1 347

1 126

221

826

83.6

57.7

2007

1 666

1 249

1 236

1 056

180

610

85.4

63.4

2008

2 022

1 291

1 284

1 065

219

957

82.9

52.7

2009

2 584

1 829

1 804

1 481

323

1 203

82.1

57.3

2010

2 498

1 795

1 773

1 329

444

1 169

75.0

53.2

2011

2 216

1 312

1 311

1 080

231

1 136

82.4

48.7

2012

2 011

1 248

1 248

957

291

1 054

76.7

47.6

2013

2 034

1 282

1 282

989

293

1 045

77.1

48.6

2014

1 389

976

976

934

42

455

95.7

67.2

2015

1 061

767

767

702

65

359

91.5

66.2

2016g

1 536

1 006

1 006

923

83

83

92.0

60.1

d

Notes: a   All registered first-year Mathematics students (as recorded on the invigilation list). b   All students with a year mark above 50%. c   All exam scripts received and marked. d   Including students who failed the exam and those who did not write the exam. e   Column 4 as a proportion of Column 2. f   Column 4 as a proportion of Column 1. g   Figures in this row represent only the first semester.

Student feedback As the Maths Centre Coordinator, I see it as vital to get feedback from students, and designed a “student feedback interview schedule” in order to elicit data that could indicate whether the Centre is improving its services to students. These feedback forms are filled in by students after their consultations with the tutors in the Centre. Below are some of the comments from selected students about their consultations at the Maths Centre. Most were appreciative. A student in

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the third-year programme (Maths III) commented thus on the Maths Centre: It encourage[s] me to practise more. And gives/builds confidence in problem solving.

These comments came from Maths II students: I appreciate a lot and I got what I was looking for. When I came I had no clue but now I clearly understand. Thank you!!!

As a matter of fact, some students have expressed their wish for the extension of the Maths Centre operating hours, as follows: I got everything clear but need to create time for consultation. A lot of us who are doing Engineering knock off late so please close a bit later.

Another student says: The Maths Centre is too small, larger space is required.

One of the senior students had the following to say: The Maths Centre is an excellent resource and escape center after classes. It happens that due to lack of time we might not get enough time to discuss or ask our lecturers to help us as they are not always available, but it is always easy to pop into the Maths Center to ask questions, do revision, get previous question papers, or even catch up on lessons in case you missed a lecture due to legitimate reasons. The Maths Centre helps us overcome our fear toward Maths and we sometimes go over the basics that help us solve the bigger problems.

Another senior student said the following: I really appreciate the creation of the Maths Centre because it helped me a lot. What is very interesting is that you are free to consult according to your right time, and you can bring all kinds of questions you have. The tutors are always available to help for the preparation of the tests or exams, and you can go through the past question papers to test yourself before going to the test or exam. I am proud of the tutors and I will ask them to carry on with that job because it helps us a lot. At the same time, I would invite all students to attend the Maths Centre in order to improve their understanding. Thank you.

These views, while not necessarily representative of all those who receive our services, point to the important role that the Maths Centre is playing, and its value in assisting the Mathematics Department in achieving its objectives; and, indeed, in contributing to the overall strategic goals of the university.

Assessing, regrouping, and developing To date, the VUT Maths Centre’s usage statistics and student feedback amply demonstrate that the Centre has been successful in answering its remit of providing support for mathematics learning at VUT. Furthermore, there is strong, if not conclusive, evidence that the Maths Centre has contributed positively to student retention, warranting further research into the evidence. Other areas in the Centre worthy of further research are the effectiveness of the different services we provide (one-on-one consultations, small group consultations, tutorials) and the influence they have on students’ learning styles.

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

In the future, I would like to expand the Maths Centre’s role in encouraging creative problemsolving and innovation by developing it as a Maths, Science, Engineering and Technology (MSET) centre. To implement such an expansion, the Centre needs to be developed at the institution’s macro level (the level of governance) so as ensure that all stakeholders (students and staff) are involved in achieving the university dream. The MSET Centre would help the institution to realise its strategic goals more broadly and effectively in terms of improved success rates and throughput of graduates. As noted by Gallimore and Stewart (2014) in concluding their study: engineering disciplines are underpinned significantly by Mathematics and a lack of knowledge in the basic mathematical skill areas has a profound impact on student access.

They demonstrated that students who lacked basic mathematical knowledge were much more likely to underachieve, not only in stand-alone Mathematics but also in other modules such as Technical Drawing, Statistics, Thermodynamics, Mechanics, Physics, Chemistry and even Biology. This therefore indicates a compelling need to have an MSET Centre, and mostly likely will improve achievement and retention overall. For students who regularly get help from the Maths Centre, the quality of the service should be assessed. The feedback forms submitted by students after their consultations give a qualitative rating based on the tutee’s satisfaction. Caution should however be exercised, not to equate a learner’s appreciation with a successful support session. Students who visit the Centre are biased towards giving positive feedback either due to the bonds that have been built with their tutors or just because they see that the tutors try their best to help them. A better appraisal would be to periodically propose a quick short test (taking about five minutes) to tutees. Ideally the Maths Centre should build a resource of such tests, arranged per topic and concept; the questions should be in multiple choice format and orientated towards conceptual understanding and problem-solving methods. In my capacity as Coordinator of the Centre, I have noted several issues in how we run the Maths Centre. We should: • focus more on at-risk subjects than on at-risk students; diagnostic tests and other relevant tests should be conducted with all Mathematics students to avoid stigmatisation of weaker candidates; • ensure that most students attend and benefit from the Centre at the right juncture in their course of studies; • identify mechanisms of self-support for students beyond what the Centre can offer; • ensure that tutors facilitate and encourage students to participate actively in tutor sessions; and • encourage students to value proficiency in Mathematics as a key to their broader success. The knowledge gap in Mathematics between school and university studies in South Africa is a reality that will persist for many years to come and hence the need to strengthen the capacity and role of a Maths Centre. Our university has already taken positive steps by establishing this Maths Centre but needs to invest more internal resources to stabilise it. Students are appreciative of the support: our analysis has shown that the Maths Centre significantly increases their chances of success and improves their level of performance in all Mathematics-related subjects, and

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Implementing blended learning: A faculty-based approach

certainly has positive repercussions for other Mathematics-intensive engineering and scientific subjects. I did, however, observe that there was considerable room for improvement in utilisation of the Centre by students, and recommend extending its operating hours to maximise our offering and show proactive concern towards students who experience the worst difficulties. Ultimately, the performance of the Maths Centre can only be based on a quantifiable, but objectively realistic throughput rate with a target set every semester. Alongside other contributions, a good support system should be able to change an A student to an A+, a B student to an A, a C student to a B and a D student to a C. That is the direction of our aims at the Maths Centre, hence our focus on at-risk subjects. The most common tool for identifying areas of Mathematics that require attention is written tests. For early detection, initial baseline tests such as diagnostic tests (based on subjectrequisite knowledge), could be implemented for all Mathematics-related subjects at the beginning of each semester. The progress of identified students could subsequently be tracked through regular quizzes designed by the Maths Centre and through normal class tests, and their success evaluated on performance in semester tests. If diagnostic tests are deemed impractical, a delayed detection of students (whose academic difficulties are often exacerbated by seasonal student strikes) could be done with the first class test results (either semester or occasional tests); it will be beneficial for the Maths Centre to work more closely with the Mathematics Department, requesting performance results as soon as they are available and acting promptly on them. More emphasis should be given to both remediation and enhancement, in order to cater for all students across the spectrum. The Maths Centre ethic is to help all students equally to reach their full potential in Mathematics. This can be achieved by identifying learners for whom it is priority, providing planned contact time with those learners, organising these planned sessions around commonly misunderstood topics and concepts, and servicing students in small groups of about five. Greater administrative support would enable the Maths Centre to persistently use available channels of communication (phone calls, emails, text messages, social networking, or VUTela), to discuss arrangements and to motivate all students to get the help they need. Some students do not consult the Centre as much as they would like because of their tight academic schedules, and many others have professional obligations that overlap with the normal opening hours of the Centre (from 08:00–16:30 on most days). To attract and support those learners requires flexibility in the service schedule of the Maths Centre. In future the Centre will open for longer hours, and on weekends, to cater for such learners, provided funding is available to employ more staff within the Centre. From my experience as a coordinator, a combination of efforts is required. Mathematics support is arguably one very effective part of the solution, in which the Maths Centre is helping all students struggling in various aspects of Maths to overcome their difficulties. The benefits of collaboration with the Mathematics and Statistics departments, as well as with the Unit for Preparatory Programmes (where foundation courses are offered) should not be underestimated.

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

What I also noted from my experience is that while universities are increasing student enrolment into higher education, few prepare students for a smooth transition into a university, which would allow more students to complete their studies within the optimal period. Thus, it is important to have support from the higher echelons of the university administration (that is, at macro level). These include the VC, DVC, Deans and HoDs, whose support will clearly make a huge difference. This idea is also supported by the works of Lawson (2012) who acknowledged that for longer-term continuation of the service the support and guidance of senior management is important to steer any provision of services in the direction that is institutionally desired. Moreover, as I have learned in my career so far, developing reciprocal relationships with key staff across the university is vital. A range of colleagues can help to support the success of the Maths Centre: particularly crucial are the head of the Mathematics Department, Mathematics course lecturers, and the staff in the Statistics Department and the Unit for Preparatory Programs.

Recommendations To summarise from my experience, the most important factors to be considered when setting up and implementing an academic support unit such as the Maths Centre in a higher education context are to: 1. Develop a clear and simple proposal that outlines aims and potential benefits of the support unit, including how the unit will be promoted to staff and students. 2. Align the support unit with institutional strategic goals and faculty objectives. 3. Ensure that the proposal integrates the support unit with the relevant faculty or faculties. A stand-alone unit lacks legitimacy and could struggle to gain buy-in. The aim is to ensure that the Centre becomes recognised as a necessary, typical and established part of the institution. 4. Do a literature review, and benchmark on a global scale to glean best practices. 5. Share the proposal with influential and relevant people to identify a champion(s) and other influential parties who can progress the goals. 6. Focus on at-risk subjects rather than at-risk students, to eliminate the stigmatisation. 7. Ensure that the Centre, as an academic support unit, is funded internally and on a permanent basis. 8. Make sure the core staff members of the Centre are permanently employed. 9. Determine the effectiveness of the support unit through evaluation and research and share the results with colleagues and associates who can add value from their perspectives.

Towards my post-liminal space Finally, based on the experience I have gained over the period of setting up the Maths Centre, my journey going forward involves running this Centre as a business entity: to this end, I have obtained an MBA degree; Post Graduate Diploma in Higher Education and Doctrate of Technology in Business degree. I also intend to study for a doctorate in Mathematics, with a view to finding ways of deepening the role of Mathematics in resolving real, practical, and complex

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Implementing blended learning: A faculty-based approach

problems of society in the 21st century. I also would like to ensure that the establishment of mathematics centres becomes a mainstream feature of all our universities, something dear to my research and scholarship activities in this area.

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Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

References Carroll, C. (2011). Evaluation of the University of Limerick Mathematics Learning Centre (Bachelor’s thesis, University of Limerick, Ireland). [Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2OcEVFT]. Carter, E. & Wetzel, K. (2010). The Mathematics Outreach Centre – Saving dreams. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 34(11):901-903. [https://doi.org/10.1080/10668926.2010.509252]. Fraser, W. J. & Killen, R. (2003). Factors influencing academic success or failure of first-year and senior university students: Do education students and lecturers perceive things differently? South African Journal of Education, 23(4):254-263. Fry, H., Ketteridge, S. & Marshall, S. (2009). A Handbook for teaching and learning in higher education: Enhancing academic practice (3rd ed.). London, UK: Routledge. Gallimore, M. & Stewart, J. (2014). Increasing the impact of mathematics support on aiding student transition in higher education. Teaching Mathematics and its Applications, 33(2):98-109. [https://doi.org/10.1093/teamat/hru008]. Gill, O. & O’Donoghue, J. (2007). Justifying the existence of mathematics learning support: Measuring the effectiveness of a mathematics learning centre. Fourteenth International Conference of Adults Learning Mathematics – A Research Forum. University of Limerick, Limerick, 26-29 June. [Retrieved from https://bit.ly/3eu2wfK]. Greene, J. & Forster, G. (2003). Public high school graduation and college readiness rates in the United States (Education Working Paper, No.3, September). New York, NY: Centre for Civic Information, Manhattan Institute. [Retrieved from https://bit.ly/3rDaZkE]. Hardman, J. C. & Ng’ambi, D. (2003). A questioning environment for scaffolding learners’ questioning engagement with academic text. South African Journal of Higher Education, 17(2):139-146. Heck, A. & Van Gastel, L. (2006). Mathematics on the threshold. International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science & Technology, 37(8):925-945. [https://doi.org/10.1080/00207390600819003]. Hourigan, M. & O’Donoghue, J. (2007). Mathematical under-preparedness: The influence of the pre‑tertiary mathematics experience on students’ ability to make a successful transition to tertiary level mathematics courses in Ireland. International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science & Technology, 38(4):461‑476. [https://doi.org/10.1080/00207390601129279]. Howie, S. J. & Pietersen, J. J. (2001). Mathematics literacy of final year students: South African realities. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 27(1):7-25. Jaafar, R., Toce, A. & Polnariev, B. A. (2016). A multidimensional approach to overcoming challenges in leading community college math tutoring success. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 40(6):534‑549. Lawson, D. (2012). Setting up a Maths support centre (National HE STEM programme). Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham. MacGregor, K. (2010). South Africa: New university clusters emerge. University World News, 23 May. [Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2OC1seO]. Matthews, J., Croft, T., Lawson, D. & Waller, D. (2013). Evaluation of mathematics support centres: A literature review. Teaching Mathematics and its Applications, 32(4):173-190. [https://doi.org/10.1093/teamat/hrt013].

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Nilsson, G. & Luchinskaya, E. (2012). Do we deliver effective maths support for students? Abstract from The European Conference on Educational Research (ECER 2012). Cadiz, Spain, 18-21 September. Paras, J. (2001). Crisis in mathematics education. Student failure: Challenges and possibilities. South African Journal of Higher Education, 15(3):66-73. [https://doi.org/10.4314/sajhe.v15i3.25327]. Pell, G. & Croft, T. (2008). Mathematics support – support for all? Teaching Mathematics and its Applications, 27(4):167-173. Savage, A., Kitchen, A., Sutherland, R. & Porkess, R. (2000). Measuring the mathematics problem. London, UK: Engineering Council. Sayed, Y., MacKenzie, I., Shall, A. & Ward, J. (2009). Mainstreaming higher education in national and regional development in Southern Africa: A regional profile (Study series 2008). Braamfontein, South Africa. Southern Africa Regional Universities Association (SARUA). Schunk, D. H. (1991). Self-efficacy and academic motivation. Educational Psychologist, 26(3/4):207-231. [https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.1991.9653133].

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9. Student orientation: Towards an extended faculty‑based model Corneli van der Walt

Formative encounters with student experience The notion of the “student experience” has, in recent times, come to be regarded as an intrinsic part of university learning. The experience of first-year students in particular is regarded as playing a critical role in student success and institutional throughput rates (Tinto, 2006), and is widely referred to in the literature as the first-year experience (FYE). The importance of FYE was more fully embraced within the Vaal University of Technology (VUT) in 2013, when a position for FYE Coordinator was created. At the time, I held the role of Senior Student Counsellor, tasked with providing psycho-social and academic support (including career advice and counselling) to students at all levels of study; thus I welcomed the opportunity to take up the position of FYE coordinator, supported by my experience of working with students from a wide range of backgrounds, and being acutely cognisant of the necessity of giving attention to “the whole student” in the design and implementation of university programmes. After working for more than a decade in higher education, I had come into a greater realisation of the growing scope and complexity of the task of South African universities as institutions that are in the process of repositioning themselves in order to better serve contemporary student populations. Moreover, institutions such as VUT had had to transform in 1994 from being technikons to becoming universities of technology, and thus were supporting a student population that was radically different from the student population prior to democracy (De Jager & Van Lingen, 2012; Du Pré, 2006; Scott, 2006; Scott, Yeld & Hendry, 2007). In this context, VUT turned its focus on student experience and the creation of “intentional spaces” that

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are conducive for learning. Inherently, the new tertiary context suggested that students could benefit from academic learning in a “therapeutic” milieu (Ross, 2007). As a psychologist, my interaction with students in the intricate spaces of their private lives brought an awareness of the severe challenges that they face in the higher education system, not only as individuals, but also as student groups. I started to note the factors that impact their success (such as the realities of their socio-economic status), which are linked to discourse and stereotypes that may affect their motivation and approach to their studies, as well as their academic and social preparedness for higher learning (Baron & Byrne, 1997; Condor, 1988). However, before I outline my experiences in attempting to frame empowering student experiences for first-year students through our first-year orientation programme at VUT, it is necessary to sketch the context of our work in this domain, and the impact on our work of attenuated public funding and student poverty.

The student milieu Social psychologist Claude Steele (2010) highlighted how, when entering university, students of colour carry an additional burden of having to process racial stereotyping, which has a negative effect on their motivation, self-concept and academic performance. Other factors, that can bear negatively on all students, include teaching strategies, attitudes and actions of educators; the nature of interactions – such as levels of engagement and disengagement – between students, and with the academic and social systems of the institution; their experience of the university administration in general; cultural and family expectations that may exert pressure on them; and various other psycho-social factors (see cf. Fraser & Killen, 2003; Mason, 2017; Scott et al., 2007). In addition, many first-year students may face other major challenges in relation to the transitions they have to make, such as moving to a new area or country, and – possibly for the first time – longer-term separation from their families and friends, which add further to the burden of managing the transition from high school to university life. Transition challenges include factors such as being immersed in a range of different cultures; communicating in a language they are not fluent in; and being subject to unfamiliar modes of learning, teaching and assessment. Some of them have to manage changed financial circumstances; to balance studies with employment; in some other cases, to manage the pressure of being a parent and/or caregiver while meeting the demands of their studies; and to make the transition from home to the university’s support services and local health providers (Aldiabat, Matini & Le Navenec, 2014; MWBHE, 2015). At the same time, first-generation students (those who are the first members of their families to attend a tertiary institution) may be facing social, psychological and educational challenges on top of the foregoing difficulties (De Jager & Van Lingen, 2012; Scott et al., 2007). Moreover, for all students, the broader South African socio-political reality of violence, crime and unemployment intensify the impacts on them of all the other circumstances. While some scholars may argue that the “therapeutic culture” that is emerging in higher education is counterproductive in terms of developing the academic and psycho-social abilities of university students, there are valid reasons for such a focus, especially in developing countries.

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Hence, for the purpose of this chapter, it is important to demonstrate the basic framework behind the intentions of the therapeutic milieu, that is, education that will produce socially welladjusted members of society – students who will be empowered to make their own decisions about their lives and to manage their own learning; who will be encouraged to reflect upon their own personal development, in processes of reflection that help them to develop as a whole person; who are enabled to take responsibility for their own learning; and who are developing self-confidence and self-esteem (Apperley, 2014).

Foundational undergirding is essential During my time as Senior Student Counsellor and in my concurrent general professional psychology practice, I came to understand that some first-year students might enter higher education with a predisposition towards developing higher levels of stress, which tends to escalate into psychological symptoms and adverse health conditions. There is thus a need for intentional assistance that can enable students to learn how to cope with the demands and contradictions in their new community of higher learning: to adjust, integrate and become familiar with their context (Aldiabat et al., 2014; Pillay & Ngcobo, 2010). First-year students’ developmental challenges are attested across the literature (Tinto, 1988, 1993, 2006; Van Schalkwyk, Leibowitz & Van der Merwe, 2009), and the fact that first-year students have a higher risk of dropping out of their studies is attributed to this array of challenges (Tinto, 1988, 1993, 2006). Consequently, the first-year period at university is regarded as pivotal since it is the critical period for the establishment of a solid base upon which the entire student experience can be built (Siegel, 2011). It is in this sense that successful transition to the higher education environment within the first year is key to overall student engagement with university education, as satisfaction of student needs – in terms of teaching and learning experiences, and overall relationship with the institution – in turn increases their likelihood of graduating (Barefoot, 2000; Edward, 2003; Tinto, 1993).

Demographic diversity At VUT the majority of students are black (96.5%), followed by white students at a distant 2%. Coloured students form 1.16% and Asian students 0.32% (VUT, 2014). The majority of students are South Africans (90%), with a 10% international or foreign student component. The foreign student group comprises students from the Democratic Republic of Congo (32.73%), Swaziland (23.27%), Lesotho (7.24%), Angola (7.03%), and others. In terms of gender, the student population comprises more male (54%) than female (46%) students. The majority of students (76.07%) are in the 18- to 25-year-old bracket, followed by the cohort of students in the 25- to 35-year-old group (19.34%). The average age of the student body overall is 25 years. The VUT student poverty profile indicates that 56% of first-year students occupy the high poverty segment and thus come from backgrounds of the “poorest of the poor” (VUT, 2014). Poverty in SA is widespread and its negative impact well documented. The harsh reality is that a

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Student orientation: Towards an extended faculty‑based model

significant number of South African students aspire to obtain a tertiary qualification to escape abject poverty (Letseka & Breier, 2008). These conditions of the student milieu, as they play out in the context of VUT, create stiff challenges for the university, imposing an imperative to properly undergird first-year students to cope with their vulnerabilities and ensure successful completion of their academic studies. A therapeutic milieu in higher education, while it may not be necessary in other tertiary settings, is absolutely necessary within our context.

Massification and higher education institutions Massification in South African higher education – the rapid and steep increase in the number of enrolments after 1994 – was driven by the need to widen access to those previously denied such access, and as a government strategy to reduce poverty and inequality (MacGregor, 2014). However, massification has serious implications for university funding models, as reflected in ongoing debates about the public good versus private good, and on how to finance higher education (Altbach, 2015). The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), which provides loans and bursaries to qualifying students, is not able cover the full costs of study, thus leaving poor students struggling to meet living and other expenses (MacGregor, 2007). Inadequate finances are known to be a determining factor in students’ decisions to drop out of their first year of study (Manik, 2015; Moeketsi & Mgutshini, 2014). This puts the shortfall of the NSFAS allocation of student bursaries and loans under the spotlight and suggests that universities may not be able to escape sustaining high student debts (VUT, 2014). Higher education is by nature an expensive enterprise, and added to the burdens of broadening access and a need to resolve students’ socio-economic issues after 1994, an acute and sustained underfunding followed massification, with serious consequences for both academic and support programmes. VUT was particularly affected by these dynamics, and the challenge of ensuring that students perform well academically was complicated by the added burden that VUT admission requirements are relatively low, certainly in comparison to the country’s more “traditional,” or “green cluster” universities (MacGregor, 2010). The major fields of study at VUT are in Science, Engineering and Technology (also known as SET – but not to be confused with “student evaluation of teaching”) (VUT, 2014). Of VUT’s four faculties, Engineering and Technology requires the highest “admission point score” (APS) for entrance, that is, 36.7 points, whereas the Faculty of Human Sciences requires the lowest APS, at 30.7 points. The average APS score for university applicants at VUT was 32.6 points in 2013 (VUT, 2014). An interpretation of the National Benchmark Tests (NBTs) performance profile for the 2018 first-year student intake, which mirrors the profiles of previous first-year student cohorts, indicates that a significant number of applicants have challenges in the domain areas of Academic Literacy (73.11%, n = 2012), Quantitative Literacy (56.91%, n = 2012), and Mathematics (79.55%, n = 1 237). Consequently, it was predicted that such students’ academic progress in cognate domains would be affected (VUT, 2018). In this typical scenario, there is a need to provide appropriate further support to students, such as placing them on an extended programme, with complementary support mechanisms such as additional tutorials, subject workshops, and language “intensive”

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workshops. This finding is in line with the notion that the changed and changing higher education environment has created a new reality where a significant percentage of students are not only socially but also academically under-prepared for the demands of higher education (De Jager & Van Lingen, 2012; Scott et al., 2007). Furthermore, current national patterns of student success and dropout rates continue to present a discouraging picture. VUT’s four campuses are widely separated, located in Vanderbijlpark, Daveyton, Secunda and Upington. The Vanderbijlpark campus is the main delivery site; the others are considered as satellite sites for programme delivery, and are in areas with a generally moderate-to-low socioeconomic status, thus placing more pressure on VUT. There is a heightened risk of dropout, which is particularly high in the first year of study. The dropout rates for first-time students entering VUT during the period 2012–2016 are indicated in Table 9.1. Table 9.1 Dropout rate per campus of first-time entering students, 2012–2016 Daveyton

Secunda

Upington

Vanderbijlpark

Year

%

(N)a

%

(N)

%

(N)

%

(N)

2012

17.44

(258)

32.80

(189)

34.34

(99)

15.20

(3 626)

2013

21.25

(240)

37.42

(163)

34.12

(85)

15.61

(3 299)

2014

21.92

(260)

28.29

(152)

36.67

(60)

20.11

(3 168)

2015

15.61

(173)

29.88

(164)

31.82

(22)

15.57

(2 793)

2016

39.60

(202)

67.65

(170)

36.11

(36)

40.36

(4 319)

Source: Data provided by the Institutional Planning Unit of the Vaal University of Technology. Notes: a   Baseline enrolment number.

From Table 9.1, it is clear that during the period 2012–2016 the Vanderbijlpark campus had on average the lowest first-year student dropout rate (21.37%), followed by the Daveyton campus (23.16%), and Upington campus (34.61%), with Secunda campus showing the highest average dropout rate (39.21%). Moreover, the sharp increase in the dropout rates from 2015 to 2016 across all four campuses is noted. The Secunda campus had the highest increase in dropouts (37.88 percentage points), followed by Vanderbijlpark (24.79 percentage points) and Daveyton (23.99 percentage points), whereas the Upington campus had the lowest increase in dropouts (4.29 percentage points). Student success and dropout rates are influenced by numerous complex factors. While it is outside the scope of this chapter to deal with these factors, it is a matter of great concern that tertiary institutions, and in particular VUT, are put under increased pressure under such challenges and without sufficient resources in terms of student funding, infrastructure and human resources.

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Understanding FYE: A systems perspective Prior to working in higher education and pursuing a career in professional psychology, I worked in the field of chemical engineering, which inclined me towards systems thinking and dynamics. The nature of the work in a research and development (R&D) environment gave me the opportunity to enhance my skills in the areas of design, implementation, process optimisation and research. Moreover, the experience of working at a private corporation during a time of major change and downsizing sparked my interest in the reality of organisations and work groups as complex human systems. It taught me practical lessons about the importance of context and/or setting and the value of considering the impact of context when designing, implementing and developing any type of system. The skills and experiences proved invaluable when setting up our FYE programme at VUT. FYE programmes have sub-systems such as the orientation programme that compel one to consider those contextual factors and modalities of operation that will function better and become more effective in the specific setting. Furthermore, my academic journey just got more interesting when, at the time of my appointment as FYE coordinator, the proposal for my doctoral study in the field of consulting psychology was approved. My interest in the field had been sparked by my lived experiences with contemporary students and the institutional system and its dynamics. I had been exposed to students who had notable psycho-social challenges that impacted their academic performance, and also the frequent challenges of encountering high levels of negativity, pessimism, and even resistance and hostility, when engaging with various academics in their respective disciplinary posts. Such encounters were repellant, and may be related to what Purkey and Siegel (2013) described in invitational education theory as unintentional disinvitation. As such, the main aim of the doctoral study was to first explore the meaning and/ or “meaning frustration” embedded in the academic employee experience, in order to develop and empirically evaluate a brief group-based meaningcentred intervention in a tertiary setting. The intervention was articulated from the logotherapy perspective of Viktor Frankl’s system of psychotherapy (Van der Walt, 2017). Purkey and Siegel (2013, p. 39) defined unintentional disinvitation as “forces in the environment that are functioning in negative and counterproductive ways even though [individuals] are unaware that this is taking place.” These scholars maintained that countless factors and variables such as interruptions from important work, pressures to attend meetings and complete tasks, demands of line functions, overdue projects, personnel conflicts, physical ailments, noise level, even the temperature, weather, or time of day, week, or month, may influence individuals’ daily activities. These factors may also play a key role in creating pockets of disinviting work spaces that may culminate in an unintentionally disinviting work environment or work experience. This experience may to a large extent be an effect of the changed and changing higher education environment with its escalated pressures and challenges for academics, and indeed all other stakeholders. My pursuit of a deeper understanding of these complex interactions and interrelated issues led me to compose a framework for creating conducive (or “safe”) spaces not only for learning but also teaching. I had come to realise that both types of classroom actor are under tremendous pressures, although materially different, and this required a more integrated approach to any form of intervention. Such an integrated approach had to take into account all the behaviours of the academic system in the context of institutional culture. Armed with this framework, I engaged with two of our identified local benchmark partners so that I could better

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understand these institutional complexities relating to FYE and one of its sub-systems, the orientation programme. The benchmarking exercise and my own insights led to a view similar to that of Van Zyl (2013; 2014), who argues that the purpose of FYE and its sub-systems is the provision of a central and coherent transition experience that should at all times be grounded in best practices. Through such a transition experience, the FYE aims to promote students’ adjustment to university; assist with development of their academic competencies; enhance their sense of ease and relationships with faculty and peers; promote and support their social, emotional and moral development; and facilitate development of a greater understanding of multiculturalism (Feldman & Zimbler, 2011; Thomas, 2012; Van Zyl, 2013 and 2014). On a practical level, my findings suggested that the FYE and its sub-systems do not operate from a centralised point but should rather strive for holistic and university-wide coordinated actions, realised through giving first-year students a sense of belonging; helping them to adapt to the university; and offering academic, social and emotional support and development opportunities (UCT, 2014; Kift, Nelson & Clarke, 2010). This clearly argued for broad engagement of all stakeholders: A systemic approach to first year experience and student success which required the support and engagement of the university faculties, support departments, students, high schools and external experts to design a system-wide process to improve the undergraduate (more specifically the first-year) experience. (Moodley & Singh, 2015, p.95).

Furthermore, it was apparent that FYE programmes may take many forms and that their designs are typically informed by several common but key components that are grounded in an established body of research. Moreover, I realised that whatever the scope and diversity in FYE programmes, institutions of higher education would always have to face a challenge in terms of developing and delivering evolving, institution-wide FYE programmes that reflect the multiple purposes they must serve. And, most importantly, providing for the needs of first-years is about the development and establishment of initiatives that would be responsive to and address the needs of a first-year student population unique to a particular setting. Thus, an initiative intended to effect certain changes would probably be programmatic with several contextspecific components that act independently or interdependently (Campbell, Murray, Darbyshire et al., 2007; Mbindyo, Gilson, Blaauw & English, 2009; Rychetnik, Frommer, Hawe & Shiell, 2002). To realise such a programme, I had to consider the students’ broader social, cultural, economic and political environments and our specific institutional environments. I embarked on a process of crafting carefully designed and delivered FYE programmes that could function as powerful tools to promote engagement in, and enhance the experience of, university life for first-year students, with the overall aim of increasing their rates of success. As part of the process, I also decided to conduct focus-group discussions with students, lecturers and faculty management, to factor in their perspectives on my programme design. Some of the insights gained through focus-group interactions were: • A relatively small proportion of students had participated in past FYE activities. • Some student support programmes had been administered only after students had underperformed academically.

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• Some university satellite delivery sites felt hostile towards support programmes. • A one-day orientation programme had proved inadequate.

Designing and implementing an extended orientation programme In 2014, drawing on my experiences and insights in working with students, data from focus group interactions, and consultations with other universities, I began the process of designing and developing our FYE programme, based on the following working definition (developed in collaboration with the FYE coordinator at UJ and various VUT stakeholders): FYE begins with new students’ first contact and interaction with the university. It involves intentional and holistic academic and non-academic programmes and/or initiatives that create a safe and supportive environment for first-year students. Moreover, the FYE strives to promote academic excellence and mutual respect through creating a sense of belonging and participatory learning experiences (VUT FYE working definition, 2014).

Systems theory predicates that the system is greater than the sum of its parts (McRae & Short, 2010). To carry this principle over to FYE, we could say the FYE environment (whole system) is greater than the sum of its sub-initiatives and sub-programmes (parts) (Cuseo, 2001). As such, the new student orientation programme could be regarded as an FYE sub-programme that provides an important sub-environment experience (Cuseo, 2001). In formalising and customising the new FYE, and because the orientation programme occurs in the initial stages of the first-year student cycle, it was important to consider the design, processes and delivery of the orientation programme still current in 2014. Orientation programmes are the institution’s best opportunity to welcome students and their families to the campus community and to convey the values and traditions of the institution to the newcomers. Also, by promoting student interactions with faculty and staff, they enhance potential for a strong learning environment and build the foundations for academic success (Mullendore & Banahan, 2005). In this sense, orientation offers a critical and non-repeatable opportunity for institutions of higher education to facilitate and support first-year students’ transition from secondary school to university life. The fundamental goal of orientation is to help first-year students to academically and socially get familiar with, connect and engage with their new communities of higher learning. Broadly speaking, this goal was realised through activities that familiarised students with their new community of higher learning and the academic environment, and introduced them to support services, offered encouragement, and shared information of both a general and an academic nature, in order to kick-start their academic careers. Previously, a fully centralised approach had been followed to realise this goal, which essentially meant that the Centre for Academic Development (CAD) delivered an orientation programme across the institution with other stakeholders, such as faculties, playing a limited role. When I started designing the new programme, I recognised that it was particularly important to factor in the engagement of faculties where possible.

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One issue that adds an important dimension to the process of designing and sustaining an FYE strategy, and especially of the orientation programme, is the positioning of VUT in relation to similar institutions in the province. VUT has a history of walk-in students and extended registration periods to accommodate those accepted into programmes at a late stage. Within the Gauteng region, direct competition for student enrolments comes from the universities of Johannesburg, the Witwatersrand, Pretoria, the North West, Tshwane University of Technology and University of South Africa (VUT, 2014). A research study demonstrated that VUT has the lowest demand for admission in the Gauteng region (VUT, 2014), which suggests that the institution is not the university of choice for a number of students, but is often seen as a last resort for those whose applications were declined at the other institutions. The timing of orientation in VUT’s academic calendar is determined by the Registrar’s Office, which has typically allocated the last week of January for orientation, allowing more or less a week’s break between registration for first-year students and the week allocated for orientation. Since the institution has a history of extending the registration period to accommodate latecomers, it has happened that first-year student registrations were still ongoing when student orientation took place. Moreover, occurrences started to happen where sub-sections of the orientation programme such as the welcoming event and administration of the national benchmark tests (NBT) were disrupted by senior students as a means of communicating their dissatisfaction with various institutional matters (Van der Walt, 2019). The risk of such adverse conditions also had to be factored into the design of the programme as they tended to affect the quality and duration of the orientation programme. In addition, since many students originated in Limpopo and surrounding areas, the time between registration in January and the beginning of the academic year in the first week of February would require many of them to travel home after registering . Given that most students fall into the segment of the poorest of the poor, it was to be expected that this arrangement would put further pressure on their already limited finances. As a result, a number of students could not afford to attend the new-student orientation programme. This demonstrated that the time gap between the registration period and the actual delivery of the orientation programme had a negative impact on first-year student attendance. In effect, it might have sent out an unintentional message that they were not really invited to attend the programme (Purkey & Siegel, 2013). This was an equally crucial factor that could not be ignored when redesigning the orientation programme. Against this background, the following key recommendations were made to enhance the 2015 orientation programme: 1. Student orientation should commence once registration is closed. 2. Integrate orientation with the academic programme that starts in February. 3. Develop and implement an extended orientation programme with a campus-wide involvement, and tailor the orientation programme and processes to the boosting of disciplinary knowledge and to students’ needs. 4. Utilise online resources to market and disseminate information about the orientation programme.

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Based on these recommendations, Senate gave permission for: 1. The recognition of “Orientation Week” as the official commencement to the academic year for first-year students. 2. The integration of the orientation programme with the academic programme. 3. An orientation programme with a stronger academic focus. 4. An initial orientation week (week one of the academic calendar) to facilitate transition to university life through: practical information; tours of campus with a focus on classrooms; activities to foster interaction between students and between students and staff; involvement of student leaders; addressing student expectations of VUT and of their course of study; assistance with timetables; addressing transition issues; induction meetings with library and all other student services; and diagnostic testing (for instance, in Mathematics) of students, to identify those requiring academic support and skills development. 5. The development and implementation of an extended orientation programme over a six-week period, with ongoing activities (such as literacies development, tutor development, library information, academic skills development, personal development, HIV/AIDS awareness, psycho-educational information, career development) aimed at providing continuous support and development opportunities to first-year students. 6. The development and implementation of an online resource that can be utilised to disseminate information before and during the orientation process, and also providing information about continuous orientation opportunities and activities. The 2015 orientation programme thus was scheduled for the first time to take place from Friday 30 January to Saturday 7 February, and coinciding with the official commencement of the academic year on 2 February and the opening ceremony on 6 February. Given that too much change over a given period had the potential to confuse the established system (of the university), a decision was taken to implement the approved recommendations in an incremental way. The decision was also informed by the limited capacity of the FYE office since it consisted of only one staff member. In order to ensure that the programme had a stronger academic focus, a consultative approach was followed with faculties to assist in designing faculty programmes tailored to their needs. Senior students (n = 110) from all four faculties were trained to welcome first-year students, assist with programme logistics and implementation and to facilitate various activities during the events. These students were trained on topics like adjustment to university, knowing yourself, self-respect, time management, motivational skills, leadership skills, goal setting and self-motivation. Table 9.2 gives an outline of the core programme components.

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Table 9.2 Core components of the VUT orientation programme (2015) Programme

Aim

Welcome of all first-year students 30-31 January

The programme is intended to create a welcoming atmosphere and to minimise first-year students’ anxiety through: - introducing them to the university leadership and environment; - screening an edu-drama performed by the student drama society about what it means to be a first-year student at VUT (what they can expect); - introducing all the student support services to them; - providing campus tours, and off-campus bus tours to indicate sites of interest; and - group activities facilitated by senior students.

Faculty (per faculty) 2-5 February

The faculty programmes are aimed at: - introducing students to the Dean and heads of departments; - disseminating programme-specific information; - promoting positive relationships between faculty and students, and - providing skills development opportunities aimed at promoting academic success. The faculty events were incorporated into the students’ timetables during the first week of the academic year. Other stakeholders (e.g. Health and Wellness, HIV/Aids Unit, Student Counselling and Support, etc.) had the opportunity to create awareness about their services and to interact with the students during the faculty orientation days.

Academic opening, 6 February

International students 3 & 7 February

International student orientation was aimed at providing a platform to address issues pertaining to international students They were also provided with an opportunity to familiarise themselves with South African political history and aspects of the Vaal community.

2015 First Year Passport

Students were provided with a printed information booklet, the 2015 First Year Passport, focusing on what they can expect to encounter in their first two weeks on campus, offering guidance on: - successful integration and feedback from previous positive student experiences; - information about the faculties; - student services; - International Relations and Advancement Department, - life-skill related matters including routes to success, money matters, healthy eating, tenant and landlord relationships; - general information, e.g. the academic calendar, student cards and a map of the main campus; - detachable orientation programmes for the welcoming events.

Marketing

The university SMS system, posters and flyers were utilised to inform students about the programme. Information about orientation was also disseminated through social media (e.g. Facebook and Twitter). The various programmes could be downloaded from the VUT website. The programmes for the welcoming event were also included in the 2015 First Year Passport booklet, as indicated above.

Evaluation

Students were encouraged to participate in giving pen-and-paper based feedback to strengthen the administration’s grasp of the student perspective.

Student integration models emphasised the importance of social integration as key to student persistence (Swail, 2004; Tinto, 1993). International research pointed to campus “climate” as a mediating factor in undergraduate students’ academic and social experiences (Swail, 2004).

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Likewise, international research indicated that students who are inadequately prepared for nonacademic challenges (such as the boycotts and violence as experienced during the #FeesMustFall student protests) may experience a culture shock which may culminate in the perception of a poor institutional–student fit and in turn lead to early departure (Swail, 2004). This also links to what Purkey and Siegel (2013) referred to as an intentionally disinviting programme environment that might have been characterised by moments of deliberate discouragement. In their most basic form, such disinviting conditions could be described as an unpleasant and unsafe experience for both students and staff. However, being cognisant of the historical reality and value of student protests in higher education, Purkey and Siegel (2013) held that – regardless of how inviting and encouraging the rest of the programme might have been – the boycott actions of the senior students had the potential to undermine much good and productive work. Even so, it would not have been helpful to frame it as a negative factor, as students would continually be exposed to such realities during their anticipated years in higher education. Therefore, I had to consider ways of presenting such experiences that could be considered as conducive to learning to be factored in when designing the programme. Thus, another important factor in the design of the orientation programme was to gain perspectives from students whose orientation had been disrupted, using an orientation evaluation questionnaire whose main aim was to elicit the views of first-year students who had been denied aspects of the 2015 orientation programme as a result of the protests. A brief questionnaire (pen-and-paper-based) was distributed via the faculties, and 402 completed questionnaires were received. The key findings from the questionnaires were: • A desire for orientation not to be ruined by senior students. • A desire for orientation to be conducted prior to the start of classes, and prior to the arrival of senior students. • It was suggested that faculty orientation could improve with respect to provision of: – more time for faculty orientation events; – opportunities for students to meet all their subject lecturers and have more interaction with them; – more information about the programmes/subjects; – programme specific campus tours; – more career information (to assist in planning a career); – activities that are more interactional and fun (such as competitions and prizes); and – activities designed to assist students to get to know each other. • A need to be provided with a detailed campus map. • A need for information sessions on: student etiquette, NFSAS, and bursaries, among others to be included in the programme. The views of the students showed that student protests might have contributed to creating an impression of an unwelcoming and “unsafe” place for them, owing to the heightened levels of stress and anxiety that they might have experienced. As such, the students’ perspective that “contained” spaces would promote a sense of safety for them and possibly every other stakeholder involved, was not without merit, more specifically in relation to creating conducive learning spaces. Although it was tempting to agree with the respondents’ views that the programme needs be carried out in a “contained” space (in other words without the presence

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of senior students), it was important to remember that student protests form an integral part of higher education life and have been for decades a reality in global higher education. The aforementioned posed pertinent challenges for programme design and delivery since it was necessary to keep in mind that the university and orientation programme have to be “effective containers” for students in such a way that threatening or anxiety-provoking events can be given back to them in aworkable format (Lanman, 1998; Miller-pietroni, 1999). Being able to process such adverse factors and events is key to effective cognitive processing so that learning can take place (Pattakos & Dundon, 2017). If the university and the orientation programme as a FYE subenvironment failed to contain first-year students’ anxieties in a way that allows for constructive cognitive processing and learning it might have resulted in numerous unintended consequences, of which one might have been first-year students’ premature departure. After collecting data, and integrating my experiences and insights from various consultations on FYE and specifically on the orientation programme, I developed the following framework of design for the orientation programme: • That orientation programmes are conducted at a faculty level and throughout the first year of student study. This would greatly enhance FYE. • That a more inclusive management structure for FYE and the orientation programme is established. This would include CAD, faculties and other relevant stakeholders such as Student Counselling, Student Support Services, and others who could positively contribute to the effectiveness of FYE. • That the timing of orientation is considered as key in the provision of a programme that could contribute towards a more exciting, satisfying and enriching experience for every stakeholder (first-year students, faculty, academics, support staff, and visitors); in other words, an intentional inviting orientation programme and FYE (Purkey, 1999). • That faculty programmes are reflective of the most common principles with respect to best orientation practices, and that faculty should be guided about these practices. • That faculty be encouraged to develop the roles and responsibilities of student mentors in their orientation programmes. • That faculty be requested to embed components of the orientation programme, such as motivational seminars, in their academic plans as a standing activity. • That faculty be educated about the key role that they have to play in the social and academic integration programmes, in order to foster positive relationships between students and themselves. • That the adoption of a reflective approach is necessary to evaluate and document the work once it has been done, in order to enhance the design, delivery and development of the orientation programme.

Orientation perspectives going forward In the period since we launched the new and more comprehesive FYE orientation programme in 2014, we have gained new insights and embraced new possibilities with each successive year. The programme was enhanced through including a parents/family meeting in 2017 for the first time. This was a needed aspect of the programme since

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research shows that about 70% of first-years are first-generation students, which means that both they and their families need more effective orientation approaches to help them understand higher education (Strydom & Mentz, 2009, p. 61).

The 2018 orientation programme followed the recommended framework for programme design and implementation. The welcoming event was moved to the sports stadium to accommodate the first-year students from all four faculties. The stadium is in walking distance from the main campus with regulated entrance, and thus provided a conducive (“safe”) space for the programme to come about. To get a perspective on our first-year students’ experiences of orientation in 2018, a brief questionnaire (pen-and-paper-based) was completed by 308 students after they had attended the welcoming and faculty orientation events. The key findings from the questionnaires were: • the majority of respondents agreed that the orientation programme met their expectations. • the orientation welcoming programme needed to be improved with respect to – better marketing of the programme – a shorter duration of events – improved time management – more breaks in the programme – provision of more and proper meals and beverages – more activities, and opportunities, for students to participate – increased mentor involvement and support • faculty orientation programmes had to be improved with respect to – providing more information about faculty – providing career information – providing more course and subject specific information – providing information about course and subject changes • general concerns were raised about student safety, residence life, student protests, application and registration processes, online systems and a lack of communication. The lengthiness of the welcoming event was ascribed to the inclusion of representatives from a range of interest groups in addition to representatives from VUT support services. Although the interest group representatives had been allocated time in the programme, the majority by far exceeded the time allotted to them. This suggests a review of the aims and structure of the welcoming event, as well as what key stakeholders to involve in order to prevent programme overload. However, this also requires the exploration of different modalities on how to give the representatives of interest groups an opportunity to participate in orientation and to disseminate crucial information to first-year students without burdening the programme.

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Some concluding remarks – however, never the end! This chapter presented a scenario in higher education which has come about due to radical changes in education both within the country and internationally; changes that have to be considered as necessary and inescapable. The reality remains that – for a significant number of students – external and internal factors, and other conditions that give rise to educational inequalities and disadvantage, will not be eradicated in the near future. These conditions include high levels of poverty and crime in South Africa, students’ socio-economic circumstances, poor schooling, students’ under preparedness for higher education, race stereotyping, and boycotts and violence. The impact and implications of these conditions for the FYE and for a sub-programme such as firstyear orientation at VUT is significant. Our challenge is to respond to the demands of the evolving higher education environment, within reasonable boundaries and to the best of our abilities. Our concern is to ensure that the design and delivery of the orientation programme, as a subenvironment of FYE, does effectively enhance first-year students’ transition to and integration with their new community of higher learning, and that it supports their learning needs. Barefoot (2000, p.18) held that we “need evidence – not assumptions and not tightly held beliefs based on our own experience.” She argued that the changed characteristics of contemporary students may also challenge the “timeless and irrefutable” nature of classic student development and retention theories. This suggests that the theories also need to be re-evaluated in relation to the way students in a specific setting conceptualise involvement; the degree to which they want or need to be assimilated into “the university way”; and their many options for learning environments. As such, I will be required to submit the orientation programme and its procedures to the bold, painstaking and ongoing process of objective scrutiny. However, this will always pose the risk that I may have to “alter the status quo in ways that are discomforting to faculty, staff, and students” (Barefoot, 2000, p.18).

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Development: Prospects and Possible Future Trajectories

10. Emerging paradigms for academic development: Concepts, context, content Teboho Pitso

Background and introduction At the heart of contemporary debates on higher education (and viewed as threats to academic freedom, professional identities, and as evidence of corporatisation of higher education), are four phenomena of contemporary university practice: academic workload planning (AWP), teaching excellence framework (TEF), research excellence framework (REF) and student experience (SE). Increasingly, higher education institutions globally rebrand themselves along variants of these four factors (AWP, TEF, REF, SE). These four factors have also been impacting the missions of higher education institutions, which continue to be modified, reconfigured, expanded, or even transformed, in ways that increasingly reflect these academic factors in various guises.

Academic workload planning AWP is a tool used to allocate staff hours and the distribution of those hours into teaching time, marking, and administrative duties, as well as time for scholarly activities (doing research, expediting publications, writing conference presentations, carrying out peer review, providing postgraduate supervision). It is used mainly in UK universities but its variants cut across the globe. Its greatest dangers (as perceived from the scholarly point of view) come from setting up scholarly activities and those of teaching as competing in the time-allocation ratio, with teaching tending to cut a bigger slice. AWP is also implicated in the general destruction of academic autonomy (Hayes, 2017), with its proletarianisation of academic work. Academic work gets chunked and controlled as in a factory production system, in the name of greater efficiency and organisational stability. In the past, academics decided on these things for themselves, and from the scholarly point of view, things had tended to function just fine: that is, prior to the fall of

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faculty and the rise of the all-administrative university (Ginsberg, 2011). The power shift in the making of key teaching and research decisions, from faculty to administration, has in the view of many in academia resulted in the blight of administrative dominance and has skewed academic incentive schemes toward administration, despite its unproven record.

Teaching excellence framework The TEF is, again, used mainly in UK universities but its variants are also present all over the world. It refers to state assessment of the quality of teaching received by undergraduates. TEF, while in its current conception not yet punitive, has the potential to be used as a tool to determine distribution of subsidies to higher education institutions in the future and may have already been used in some countries for that purpose. One of its sub-systems, student evaluation of teaching (SET), has a wider reach globally despite challenges on its validity. Aspects of TEF came under scrutiny in Chapters 2 and 3 of this book.

Research excellence framework The REF is the tool used to assess the quality and impact of research in UK institutions of higher education. REF outcomes are used to guide the UK government in allocating funding for research conducted in universities. REF is based on the system of review of research outputs provided by scholarly experts and research users. The inclusion of research users (defined as those who sit outside academia in the public, private, and third sectors), who utilise university research for professional or organisational purposes, remains one of the key controversies in higher education. Such research users include those who commission research, who collaborate with academic researchers on niche areas, and even those who just access research for practical purposes, to resolve protracted societal or business challenges. Among key problems identified with REF is first that it bifurcates generation of research, and secondly that it uses research in ways that subordinate research generation to the dictates of research use (Colley, 2013). This means that research utilisation sets the agenda for research generation, which reduces the production of knowledge to pragmatic considerations, and other disinterested or lofty ideals that research ideally pursues become subordinated to the demands of transitory pragmatic requirements. The second problem perceived in REF is that it threatens academic autonomy in terms of how it defines expert review and delimitation of reviewers (Smith et al., 2011), and related issues of how it affects the scope of disciplinary research in light of the manner in which interdisciplinary research approaches are advocated. Such advocacy is often geared myopically towards research utilisation. Variants of REF exist on a global scale, that is, there is some degree of external measurement of research quality and impact in higher education institutions globally. The main questions are whether such research measurability should be conducted outside normal peer-review mechanisms and whether it should indiscriminately include research users as proficients in assessing REF. While peer-review systems are not perfect, they have strong checks and balances that can potentially be compromised when non-researchers and other “laymen” become part of the review mechanims, as they are already prejudiced by practical

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interests. These non-academics seek research that drives their cause, that is, one that is focused on their niche concerns, and would thus most likely attempt to sway research agendas in the direction of utilisation at the expense of research for disinterested purposes.

Student experience SE, given its political origins, is one of the most controversial elements in higher education. Studies on SE trace its origins from the leftist politics which have typically seen the working class “as the subject of history and as an active agent in politics” (Hayes, 2017, p.10). With the general demise of the leftist political project, ordinary people were assigned the status of being potentially vulnerable or victims. Heartfield (2002) argued that the state had found a new way not only to contain the working class struggle but to offer this class some sort of therapy and counselling in various guises. In developing countries, governments use access to higher education as a social justice issue capable of resolving key outcomes of an economic neoliberal agenda that is inherently designed to benefit the elite few. Neo-liberalism as a resource mobilisation and distribution economic ideology breeds inequality and poverty in quite higher scales. Both inequality and poverty are thus direct results of a deeply flawed economic system that drives private interests. It is not that states are unaware of the underlying neo-liberal economic plinth that causes all these problems, they just develop other tactics to sell the poor and the vulnerable a new mirage when old ones lose their salience. Access to higher education learning has become a new mirage where counselling and therapy can be offered for free as fully funded by the state. This explains what Ecclestone and Hayes (2008) call a “therapeutic turn in higher education,” which is more beneficial to the professional and novice therapists, as it makes relevant their work in higher education. Yet it is undesirable that higher education is reduced to a dignified depository of failed or new state projects; or to a therapeutic support structure for victims of deliberately planned poverty and inequality. Added to this vitiation of human potential for resilience, being identified as a “victim” or “vulnerable” is not empowering, but rather evokes learned helplessness – a behaviour in which students do not develop resilience or craft fight-back strategies in the face of painful or adverse experiences; rather they become orientated towards a state of perpetual need for therapy. This need for therapy and care makes escaping from the “victimhood” condition quite daunting. I suspect this “victimhood” status serves governments well as it presumably serves to maintain the public order and stability necessary if the deeply flawed neo-liberal project is to survive unhindered. Chapter 9 in this book makes a case for regarding student experience in the current local context as a phenomenon still reeling under the ravages of the apartheid era. Given this historical reality in our country, challenges in the student experience tend to assume strong and almost pejorative racial connotations and could potentially perpetuate rather than help to eliminate the “victimhood” and stereotypical attitudes towards a particular grouping of students. Student experience in higher education thus requires further analysis and theorisation, and chapter 9 in this book offers some important pointers in that direction.

Problematising academic development practices These four academic factors (AWP, TEF, REF, SE) are at the heart of debates on how higher education ought to be positioned and how each positioning frames systems of meaning for

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academic workload, teaching excellence, research excellence and student experience. A deeper analysis and critical understanding of each of such positionings of higher education would go a long way towards deepening our understanding of these four academic factors. As each higher education positioning is better understood in relation to these academic factors so the role of academic development becomes clearer. Identifying higher education positionings thus helps us to better understand how academic development practices come to stake their claim within higher education institutions. This understanding of academic development also provides a basis for problematising and critiquing practices of academic development in relation to the way institutions position themselves and how these academic factors are influenced and shaped under their institutional conditions. We will return to these issues later in this chapter. In this book, issues of the positioning of higher education, as well as academic factors and their impact on academic development practices, have provided a basis for arguing that the history of academic development is very much intertwined with developments in higher education, a point also made by Quinn (2012). Quinn further attests to the fact that academic development in South Africa, over its more than thirty-year lifespan, has undergone various ideological and theoretical turns as shaped by prevailing higher education positionings. Given the competing versions of higher education at the moment, I contest that academic development is currently in some kind of a chiasmatic juncture where some new direction ought to be taken. It is my contention that such a direction ought to be preceded by a thorough understanding of various positionings of higher education beyond the traditional and corporatised positions as they are currently hotly debated. This framing of current versions of higher education is limiting in that other forms of higher education positioning are generally ignored. In the next section, I interrogate the currently prevailing positions on higher education in order to make a case that broader conceptions of these positions on higher education are necessary and will have an impact on how academic development practices could look in the future. Furthermore, these broadened conceptions of higher education positionings could have a bearing on the meaning systems of AWP, TEF, REF and SE. Given that these positions on higher education tend to model and shape higher education activities such as teaching, learning and research, they can better be described as higher education paradigms.

Corporatisation: A deeply entrenching position A number of scholars in higher education argue that the strong links between higher education and corporate mores are at the heart of institutional shifts in higher education positioning and are affecting their traditional positions, missions and purpose (Ritzer, 1996; Hayes, 2017; Kennedy, 2017). The traditional position in higher education mostly urges reclaiming knowledge-based teaching and learning, and research for its own sake (Hayes, 2017; Kennedy, 2017). It also seeks to develop a cultured, civilised “educated person” (Tennant et al., 2009) under materially different conditions. A vignette that serves to characterise this concept of the educated person is found in Charles Dickens’s 19th-century novel, Great Expectations, in which Pip, a working class orphan from rural England, receives sponsorship to go to metropolitan London, where he is to be trained as a “true gentleman,” which in the Victorian era usually meant one born into an elite lifestyle with all its wealth, social status and vanity. This reflects the origins of the traditional position of the university, which catered mostly for an elite social class and those lucky enough to secure money from philanthropists to study in such hallowed spaces. Its main purpose was to

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reproduce this elitist culture. It thus was unashamedly reproducing inequality in society and its reliance on eleemosynary funding meant that the wealth-owning elite had greater influence on such institutions than the ordinary people. When higher education funding shifted to the state then it was never going to be business as usual. However, the state was also under the strong influence of the agendas of economic liberalism, especially after the Cold War, which limited the role of the state in resource mobilisation and distribution, thus allowing a neo-liberal economic agenda, with its inherent inequality, to thrive and dictate the character and positioning of society and higher education in that society. This neo-liberal economic agenda remains the main source of inequality in societies across the globe. As higher education positioning shifted from the elite to the generally “corporate captured” state then inequality in society became entrenched and exacerbated. This shift of the higher education character from its traditional mould to corporatisation marked the ascendancy of measurability in higher education. The use of corporate principles in tertiary institutions such as efficiency, predictability, calculability and control (Ritzer, 2000) account for the heightened role of measurability in higher education, which resulted in AWP, TEF, REF and SE. The application of these corporate mores in higher education has also eroded the traditional strength of higher education as an elite fortress. In his reconceptualisation of higher education institutions as “McUniversities” (a description of the charcteristics resulting from the corporatisation of these institutions), George Ritzer sought to use the McDonald’s fast-food company as a metaphor for corporate culture and highlight the now ubiquitous market culture in higher education. Ritzer (1996) bemoaned the undue influences of that type of business thinking, as embodied in the operations of the McDonald’s fast-food company, on the administration of higher education, a form of corporatisation that has fundamentally changed the character of tertiary institutions. The McUniversities concept thus refers to the transformation of universities into rational service organisations capable of using a casualised academic workforce, offering relatively cheap degrees that can be itemised and identically packaged, as in the franchise mould, and sold online – on a global scale. The metaphor also refers to use of corporate quality assurance mechanisms to manage teaching and research – hence AWP, TEF and REF. Positioned as a rational service, higher education becomes open to organising its academic work, teaching, learning and research, including student life, in ways that reflect hyper-rationalisation. Hyper-rationalisation understood sociologically refers to the (in my view, excessive) breakdown of academic traditions and values that served to provide high-quality, curiosity-driven research, and produced great scientists, great thinkers and great writers. This systematic and systemic decimation of academic traditions and values in tertiary institutions is intended to entrench a techno-bureaucratic rationality – a market-driven rationality that essentially birthed variants of academic workload planning, teaching excellence framework, research excellence framework and student experience. While framed as progress, hyper-rationalisation generally has a negative and mostly dehumanising effect on such scholarly values as academic freedom, the exercise of flexibility, and the general authority framework of academics, which are pulverised by it. Principally, it moves academic practices away from the basic tenets of a university as originally conceptualised, as a space for sustained cultivation of critical and creative thought, unhindered production of mostly curiosity-driven research, and an ideal of what societies should aspire to.

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Universities still ensconce intellectual projects and lofty ideals. Universities sometimes take on the task of producing utilitarian research and training utilising highly technical skill sets; but that should not be their primary focus, since other educational sectors such as technical colleges can deal with those aspects of higher education, as some scholars argue (Hayes, 2017; Kennedy, 2017; Ritzer, 1996). The same scholars further argue that techno-bureaucratic rationality defeats the very ends of a university as higher education. However, this rejection of higher education corporatisation in no way suggests that universities should revert to the traditional elitist-driven positioning. This debate, to its credit, opens up exploration of new possibilities and development of broadened conceptualisations of higher education positionings. The rejection of corporatised higher education means that higher education cannot be reduced to technobureaucratic logics. Techno-bureaucratic rationality signifies technocratic knowledges, technical expertise, technical action, efficiency, control, calculability and predictability, as pivots around which bureaucratic structures function. It commits to strategic planning, rational management and the notion that all problems are of a technical nature and thus require technical solutions. While it may appear to be neutral and unproblematic in the higher education context, it is essentially and substantially hegemonic and ideological. Its institutionalisation of technicist mores and its legitimation processes through use of popular academic icons are carefully designed to take away the agentic power of academics in matters of setting up the academic and research agendas. This kind of rationality also: • reduces the autonomy of academics to a subjugation to bureaucratic and technocratic logic, with the ultimate price being the technocratic control of the entire university – programme and qualifications mix (PQM), curriculum, research lines, informed opinions of scholars and intellectuals, and so on; • creates a kind of sophisticated censorship mechanism operating through AWP, TEF, REF and SE; • ensures authoritarian control of independent thought and autonomous views of scholars and intellectuals; and • develops means and ways of counteracting critical voices of scholars and intellectuals. Another principle of industrialisation or corporatisation of higher education that has come up for strong criticism is calculability. Calculability refers to that which is capable of being calibrated, that is, those aspects of academic practices that can be subjected to measurability using a particular standard or set of descriptors. AWP, TEF and REF are the direct results of this obsession with calculability in higher education. Moments of intellectual epiphany or serendipitous discovery after years of mental toil, as the ultimate zenith of higher education, get lost in the general technical zombification of academics. Another problem related to the calibration of teaching workloads, teaching excellence and research excellence is the underlying pattern of “evolution.” Measurability by its very nature seeks to include certain things and discard others so that, at some point, the phenomena signified as important morph into takenfor-granted “truths”. These “truths,” once entrenched, are viewed as “unproblematic,” and thus as unworthy of further scrutiny or critique, leading to a constructed certainty and predictability in higher education spaces. Higher education by its very essence is supposed to carry conflicting objectives and overlapping constraints that make optimisation in higher education an enigma.

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The real meaning of optimisation in higher education, outside its corporate meaning, has not been sufficiently explored and optimisation thus represents an undertheorised concept in relation to higher education. Academic work needs to be represented in all of its complexities, and the quest for new frontiers of knowledge cannot be reduced to measurable research outputs, predictable outcomes, and optimisation of resources, to achieve predetermined goals. As Jonathan Fields (2011) argues, “Anything certain has already been done”. The academic project is essentially creative, unpredictable and uncertain, and will, over the course of the next ten years, use intelligent technologies to automate all repetitive, routine-based academic activities. Automated routine activities will leave ample time for academics to engage critically with new ideas, new areas of research and to savour the intellectual pleasures of venturing audaciously into the unknown territories of the real and imagined worlds deserving of academic scrutiny. These materially different academic spaces that encompass AI capabilities will also impact undergraduate teaching and challenge its current conceptions. Undergraduate teaching as one of the areas that come under the strong arm of measurability has historically marginalised explicit development of critical and creative thought, as well as altering conditions of learning under which both students and researchers may contribute to science and scholarship. Undergraduate teaching is framed mostly within the “graduate attributes” and competency models that are limiting to the real potential of students at this level of study. The logic of calculabity is that if it is measurable then it is controllable, predictable and certain, and thus leads to greater efficiency. Yet academic efficiency is more complex than the current technicist conceptions and not all of it can be boxed into managerialism, that is, become measurable, predictable and controllable. Academic efficiency subsumes critical and creative thought, and thus subsists on large doses of uncertainty and unpredictability. Undergraduate teaching and academic work that ignore this aspect of academic learning will not pass muster in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), which will be marked by increased complexity, uncertainty, unpredictability, ambiguity and rapid technological innovation, with its key features being digitisation, interconnectivity, virtualisation and automation (Daugherty & Wilson, 2018). This relationship between academic work and 4IR remains largely underexplored and under-theorised as the 4IR hegemonic and ideological character require rigorous engagement and adaptation in higher education. The Covid-19 pandemic has fast-tracked higher education into leveraging capabilities of remote, online teaching and learning, plus use of virtual platforms to facilitate meetings and conferences. However, this was a force majeure reactive response to the pandemic. This means that a retroactive theorisation of the relationship between higher education and 4IR will have to be conducted in order to develop a better understanding of how this relationship can take higher education forward, particularly in respect of curriculum and teaching. Academic efficiency is also not limited to the traditional and corporatised versions of higher education that include discourses around the 4IR. While debates on these two versions of higher education (traditional and corporatised) offer an important lens through which to analyse the currently competing higher education positions, they are limited and limiting. They do not cater

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for other manifestations and realities of higher education positioning. In the next sections, we attempt to develop a broader framework that caters for most of the debates on the positioning and repositioning of higher education, and to suggest a way forward.

Transformational possibilities: Broadening the scope In his 2004 book on postcoloniality, Conscripts of Modernity, David Scott argues that for deeper analysis, and critique of deeply-held beliefs about a phenomenon or aspects of reality, we need to have a fairly good grasp of a problem space. Given that, in this monograph, we are particularly focused on exploring possibilities of transformation in higher education, then this idea of a problem space becomes an enchanting prospect. Higher education transformation, in my view, relates to issues of modifying and even changing deeply-held beliefs and aetiological assumptions about the nature and purpose of higher education. This understanding could create spaces for renewal and re-imagination of higher education under new historical conditions. Thus, debates on the retention of the traditional model of a university represent a nostalgic romanticism that is unsustainable moving into the future. Getting a grasp on the problem space further suggests recognising that corporatised higher education represents a silent, insidious business capture of a very important societal tool with the potential for real freedom, emancipation and empowerment. There is thus reasonable justification for us to explore meanings of higher education within the context of the emerging digital era (4IR) as it maps out within the complex spaces of a globalised, neo-liberal economic activity with its inherent breeding of inequality. This means that our exploration of the transformative potential of higher education has to consider the historical disadvantage and innovative developments of the next ten years without becoming intellectually imprisoned in all of these efforts. This, in essence, delineates the problem space, defined essentially as a deliberate crafting of tentative goals for the creative process, as its outcomes cannot be exactly outlined in advance. Critical to such a creative process is that enduring beliefs and assumptions about any phenomenon receive sharp critique – as such, critique opens up new possibilities that are explored in an environment where the former conceptualisations of “conscripts of time” do not necessarily apply. It further points to the possible outcome of a transformational paradigm for not only higher education, but also to a paradigm for academic development, as both are essentially intertwined. Historical disadvantage in the global context has to be understood within the economic binary between developed and developing countries. It is, however, important to note that income inequality in the advanced economies of developed countries is noted to be at its highest so that the gap between the rich and poor has widened quite considerably in these contexts over the last decade (Dabla-Norris et al., 2015). This is an indication that the ravages of the neo-liberal economic agenda cut across all countries, irrespective of their economic status. Relevant to higher education, and for the purpose of our analysis, three issues relating to income inequality are worthy of attention. First, studies on income inequality in general show that an increase in income levels of the poor and middle class have a positive effect on the GDP growth of a country while an increase in income at the top-end of the rich leads to a decline. This finding supports the need to focus on economic empowerment at the lower end of the economic spectrum, as benefits not only accrue to the economy of the country, but also to the most vulnerable amongst us.

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Second, the other major contributor to income inequality relates to technological advances that place a premium on skill sets that subsume humans collaborating with intelligent technologies to co-create value (Pitso, 2019). These skill sets thus include supercreativity (human–machine value co-creation), complex problem-solving, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence. Those with such skill sets stand a better chance of being employed in an era where the traditional labour market is evaporating fast. Given that traditional jobs are being automated and rendered obsolete, there is a need to constantly monitor how this phenomenon is going to breed income and social inequality. Studies show that these premium skill sets substantially increase the economic growth and productivity of a country but also lead to increased inequality in both advanced and emerging markets (Dabla-Norris, 2015; Corak, 2013; Cingano, 2014; Acemoğlu et al., 2014). Third, the unbridled rise of neo-liberal economic activity on a global scale can be attributed to the political dead-end of the contemporary left, the reduction of social justice activism to equal opportunity discourses, the triumph of identity politics, and the general decline of class analysis as an intellectual project (Zamora & Behrent, 2016). These issues are crucial in attempts to better understand possibilities of higher education transformation; and pretending they are not directly related to higher education smacks of intellectual hypocrisy. They are central in the description of the problem space of higher education and in an exploration of different versions of higher education. Other sets of issues relevant to understanding the transformation possibilities of higher education relate to technological advances that will shape the next few decades. According to Dial and Storkey (2017), some of these technological advances include the web, smartphones, the cloud, the internet of things, AI, big data analytics, cryptocurrencies, 3D printing, and genomics. Those technologies that already have a direct impact on higher education and will shape its character over the next few decades are the web, smartphones, AI, big data analytics, and 3D printing. Typical higher education websites initially focused on public relations and sharing information about the university, using their sites essentially as a customer-centric tool, which is still largely the case, with some notable additions. Hites and Block (2013), suggest that the following have been added to higher education websites: admissions and all information related to admissions, the student support portal, staff portals with email accessibility, and educational portals that enhance and supplement teaching and learning. It is anticipated that university websites will increasingly take the role of human administrators and could fragment into applications available in smartphones. Smartphones will increasingly take higher education activities into these handsets away from intimidating physical spaces, as the Covid-19 pandemic so rudely demonstrated. The internet of things shapes the logistics and supply chains of higher education, as well as making smartphone platforms relevant to higher education. Artificial intelligence (AI) and big data analytics are at the heart of changing the character of bigger education activities, and both will shape teaching, learning, research, and administration in ways never imagined before. In teaching and learning, AI-enabled personalised learning is increasingly becoming a reality and chatbots will become valuable tools of learning, as will remote online learning and teaching.

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However, I firmly believe that rigorous research and critical engagement with these technology issues in academia are of paramount importance, not deserving of the silent acquiescence that techno-bureaucrats in academia seem to prefer. For instance, the digital era brings with it its own ideological baggage, and increased use of digital applications in academia have been carefully managed within the framework of centrism (Torgilsson, 2015), along the lines of the centaur, the Greek mythological half-horse, half-man creature. Technology assumes a specific position that entails a degree of acceptance of a balance between academic autonomy and institutional efficiency in ways that fundamentally oppose shifts to any of these perceived “extremes.” The basic problem of positioning technology in academia in this way is that, first, it is carefully designed within the narrative of progress and sound rationality. This narrative assumes that technology is a “good-to-have” in academia; yet its underlying ideological plinth, which drives economic efficiency in academic spaces, remains obfuscated and mostly outside the purview of critique and systematic inquiry. Second, technology has an inherent problem of “remoteness,” that is, its tendency to separate humans from nature and from other human physical contact in preference for efficiency, speed of delivery and measurability, which are key instruments of economic hegemony (Torgilsson, 2015). This is why technology in academia should be problematised and critiqued for improved theorisation and to support better academic practices. Third, the now ubiquitous technology in academia was mostly introduced without proper research and theorisation on the supposed value-add for academia and impact on its practices of teaching, learning and research. Introduced this way into academia, technology assumed a special kind of fetishism, an endowment of technology with magical power that is capable of resolving almost all of our academic problems in quite efficient and distinctive ways. Its magic wand is set to range across measuring teaching hours, delivering content, helping us do research, determining excellence, and so on. Therein lies its hegemonic power and possibly its guile. As with all forms of power, technology in academia seeks not only domination but consenting leadership that is to say, it seeks moral and intellectual sustenance. It thus does not have power of its own but depends on credible leadership and often uses academic icons for its institutionalisation and legitimation. As derived hegemonic power, technology craves active consent not only of academic leadership but also that of academics, such that it feeds on their subordinated status – not their rigour or critique. Technology thus becomes part of the concerns in our analysis of higher education positionings. Armed with all of these concerns about the direction and repositioning of higher education in ideological and hegemonic terms, we sought a more comprehensive theoretical lens. Our sense was that this theoretical lens could help us make sense of the challenges facing higher education transformation, and suggest possible futures. There is, however, strong resistance from some scholars towards the fundamental change in the character of traditional, liberal academia (Ritzer, 1996; Hayes, 2017, Kennedy 2017). Some leftist scholars, on the other hand, view this stance on academia as equally hegemonic and ideological. The traditional, liberal academics sought to serve the ancient elite and thus makes its relevance to contemporary societies quite suspect as the notion of widened access to higher education learning has become quite ingrained. Some scholars, however, argue that because widened access, or massification, of higher education is premised on differentiation then it perpetuates and invigorates elitism in higher education

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(Trow, 2003; Meek et al., 1996, Ecclestone, 2007). The class identity of students who fail to access higher education tends to be the working class. Working class students tend to access higher education institutions that are dominated by vocationalised curricula, and the myopic economic valuation of higher education that this represnts reduces the intellectual value of these working class students. In other words, while this category of students might have accessed higher education, focus on work-related skill sets without considering other aspects of intellectual offerings in higher education represents a special kind of inequality. In the South African context, this inequality tends to assume a racialised undertone. In order to help us analyse these issues in more detail and clearly, I integrated David Scott’s (2004) concept of a “problem space” with the thinking of Karl Maton (2005), conceptualised as epistemic positions on higher education. The purpose of developing this analytical framework is to broaden understandings of the issues that relate to higher education positionings.

An analytical framework A problem space, Scott (2004) suggests, demarcates a discursive context. A discursive context signifies and privileges a particular language or discourse that cognitively arranges ideas, concepts, images and ideas in ways that compel certain ways of communicating, reasoning, thinking and even doing. A discursive context, however, ought to be understood within its historical framework such that, as Michel Foucault argues in his 1970 lecture, “The order of discourse” (Young, 1981), it reveals knowledge systems that informed the thinking during certain periods of the historical trajectory of a discourse. Understood this way, a particular discursive context reveals specific epistemic temporal epochs or what is also termed “epistemological ages,” so that once a commitment is made on a demarcated discursive context at a particular point in time then continuities and discontinuities of particular “epistemes” become discernible. Once discernible and transparent, these epistemes make interpretation possible. A discursive context also reveals knowledges and practices that were/ are permissible or desirable given the epistemological age. Drawing from Foucault, whose main focus was on questions relating to how some discursive demarcations shaped and created meaning systems that have gained the currency and status of “truth,” my interest is in how these meaning systemsare generated within a particular discursive context. My basis is that these meaning systems compel higher education scholars and strategists to define and organise institutional structures in ways that privilege certain social interactions and particular academic practices, while they also displace and even inadvertently or advertently subjugate others. This way, higher education – seen as a discursive field distinguished into different epistemological ages – becomes the cynosure of power, discursive disputes and rival views. Power within higher education is about privileging certain discourses and undermining others. However, its real power ought to be in allowing multiple discourses to exist in a state of constant, creative tension that allows multiple possible discursive paths to develop. Each epistemological age thus should reveal the dominant meaning systems, or its own “truths,” with clear epistemic justifications but not in ways that are subjugating of others’ discourses.

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This means that each epistemological age provides its own warrant, grounds and rationality for its propositions, beliefs and saliences that map out social interactions and academic practices in particular ways as it allows dissenting alternatives. Some of the dominant ways, Foucault argues, result from a socially deterministic view in which individuals are completely socialised and positioned as powerless and without agency. However, higher education as a discursive field consists of a whole range of competing and contradictory discourses that contain varying degrees of power, and which give meaning to and help to organise social institutions and their processes (Weedon, 1987), so that no single way triumphs absolutely. Foucault argues (Young, 1981) that because each epistemological age has its own “truth,” which is a major source of exclusion and constraining of other discourses, it is equally a key source of discontent and discursive disputes. We believe these disputes and logical disputations between entrenched “truths” and marginalised ones stem from an epic struggle for epistemic supremacy within higher education but also represent a quest for higher and better models of higher education. These epistemological tussles also, in my view, compel a re-think of the real purpose and outcomes of higher education as a societal institution operating at a particular historical juncture. It in a sense defines and redefines the narratological relation between the dominant higher education epistemic position and its correlation with a particular historical juncture in a specific societal context. In other words, higher education institutions have to be mindful of a society’s history and to help such a society to negotiate and even navigate the complexities of its own historical juncture without being incarcerated by it. My argument is that certain historical epochs in the life of a particular societal context place particular demands on higher education. While higher education has to be responsive to some of these demands, it should not be coercively obliged to render itself the object of this historical juncture or even become its agent. Higher education should also not be imprisoned by its own traditional, liberal heritage: where we have seen this happen, as in the context of colonial conquest in Africa and under apartheid in South Africa, higher education becomes complicit in some of the greater injustices ever visited upon the human race. There is also no need for higher education to position itself as a plinth for societal salvation and redemption, that is, as an apparatus for overcoming societal ills of social inequality and poverty. It should also not vindicate current utopian narratives of a socially just world. It can only make a contribution to these protracted societal challenges. If it gets sucked too deeply into discourses of societal salvation and redemption then higher education will have fewer opportunities for imagining the future of the society in which it finds itself. My view is that higher education ought to position itself as a centre for generating new propositions, new questions, new demands; and as a space for creating the epistemological conditions that engage us in the search for answers and thereby compel our societies to reimagine their futures. This means that higher education ought to re-interpret and reconstitute relations of past and present in societies in ways that transcend current societal interests and problems, so that such societies could in turn also strive for clarity and influence as a means of getting a purchase on future saliences. This way, it also embraces both a historical disadvantage and technological advances. The greatest challenge facing higher education in this era is thus on how some higher education discourses continue to maintain their authority and “truth” despite clear evidence that they have lost their salience under new historical conditions and technological advances.

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David Scott fashions his response to this matter of a perpetuating discursive authority under new historical conditions thus: In new historical conditions, old questions may lose their salience, their bite and so the range of old answers that once attached to them to appear lifeless, quaint, not so much wrong as irrelevant (Scott, 2004, p.4).

Scott argues that under these circumstances, the old paths between hackneyed questions and answers perpetuate because their cognitive connections do not disappear, but rather remain visible and intelligible as essentially a norm, a taken-for-granted “truth.” These old paths persist under new historical conditions despite the fact that “the stakes that walked them have dissolved” (Scott, 2004, p.4) and new paths are emerging.

Fields as conceptualised by Maton I now give attention to Karl Maton’s thesis on the “fields” of higher education, and in particular to the different epistemic positions upon which higher education can be hinged. Each epistemic position privileges certain knowledge forms and meaning systems with strong claims of truth. This way, each epistemic position denotes a discursive context. This means that each epistemic position represents an ensemble of specific questions that have been posed in different epochs of its historical trajectory, and the answers that have been proffered produced knowledge that has been considered as “truths” and as authoritative. These “truths” become vital sources of perspectival energies that give life to a variety of interventions, that is, they make for “good arguments” upon which human interactions and practices hinge. Given that epistemic positions have a historical underpinning, it follows that each of these epistemic positions holds a salience which serves as its rallying point and as a source of authority at a particular point, or historical juncture. My view, similar to that of Foucault, is that epistemic salience drawing from a privileged knowledge system in each epistemic position reflects its dominant line of thinking and what informed it at a particular point in history, so that different forms of thinking dominate specific epistemological epochs in the lifespan of an epistemic position. I refer here mostly to scientific thinking that leads to production of a specific kind of knowledge at a particular time in history. I argue that all advances and progress in scientific thinking and understanding started with a speculative adventure, that is, with the imaginative preoccupation with what might be propositionally considered as a “truth” about certain aspects of reality. My sense is that each scientific search for “the truth” is an attempt to invent possible worlds in which humans and objects live in harmony, that is, each attempt is geared towards providing models of how a society should look (an imagined world) and its correspondence to the real one.

Internalism and externalism Two main views of social reality that have been guiding scientific quests for “truth” are internalism and externalism, which may be briefly described as basic sources for four different epistemic positions that have been influencing higher education throughout its history, and by extension and in varying degrees, societies. The understanding of these four different epistemic positions on higher education as derived from internalism and externalism (Maton, 2004) is crucial in developing an analytical framework that could broaden the scope for better understanding the

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current debates on higher education. We also believe that each of these epistemic positions on higher education assumes a discursive sub-field with its own “truths,” systems of meaning and a dominant perception in ways that make it possible to be defined as a problem space. Table 10.1 gives a summary of these positions. Table 10.1 The epistemic positions that model higher education paradigms Objectivist Internalism

Subjectivist Internalism

Epistemic stance:

scientific purist

Epistemic stance:

weak pragmatist

Higher education vision:

traditional academic values, elitist

Higher education vision:

modified traditional academic values that include low external influence (social, political, economic)

External influence:

zero to lowest

External influence:

low to moderate

Objectivist Externalism

Subjectivist Externalism

Epistemic stance:

strong pragmatist

Epistemic Stance

social idealist

Higher education vision:

market-related values

Higher education vision:

social justice values

External influence:

moderate to high

External influence:

extremely high

Internalism and externalism constitute two views of social reality that have been guiding scientific studies. These two conceptions of our social world are based on four sets of assumptions, as identified by Burrell and Morgan (1979). The first set of assumptions entails the nature and essence of social phenomena that warrant investigation by scientific means. The nature and essence of social phenomena are based on the question of whether social reality is external to people and thus imposes itself upon their consciousness from the outside or whether it is an aggregate of our individual consciousness. These questions seek to determine whether reality is of an objective nature (objects having an independent existence outside the knower), or represents the totality of our own cognition (subjective nature). The objectivist stance proceeds on the basis that knowledge production can occur in a decontextualized way, that is, outside geopolitical spaces and their influences, so that such knowledge can apply in a borderless way. Subjectivists argue that knowledge is contextual and situated, thus it is generated through direct experiences of people in specific contexts. The main difference between objectivism and subjectivism is that objectivism draws from positivism, with its concerns for control and its positioning of humans as passive agents who are acted upon by their surroundings. The positivists argue that social reality and its workings can be understood by means of a detached, objective observer, and it thus generally deprives humans of their unique ability to interpret their own experiences and represent these experiences to themselves. The emphasis in positivism (and in its variant, postpositivism) is on the knowing rather than the knower. Humans, in the positivist tradition, are disempowered to construct and act on their own theories about themselves and their world. Positivistic social science

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is portrayed as a “pruned, synthetic version of the whole, a constructed play of puppets in a restricted environment” (Layder, 1994). The anti-positivists challenge the basic thrust of social science based on stimulus–response theory, which raises debates on the tension between human agency and structure. The emphasis for them is on the knower. The main thesis of the anti-positivists is that humans exercise agency, that is, they make choices and have intentions not always under circumstances of their own choosing but nevertheless do not just simply behave deterministically as puppets. Anti-positivism is thus based on the principles that humans are deliberate and creative in their actions, such that they act intentionally and make meaning in and through their activities, as well as constructing their own social world under conditions that are fluid and changing. This means that there is a recognition, in the antipositivist lens, that behaviour and events evolve over time in a ways that are richly affected by contexts in which they actuate. The second set of assumptions put forward by Burrell and Morgan (1979) relates to whether knowledge can be understood as hard, clean, universal and capable of being transmitted in tangible forms (positivist perspective); or whether it is of a softer, more subjective, spiritual, and even transcendental type, which draws from experience and insights of a distinctly personal nature (anti-positivist stance). These assumptions about the nature of knowledge place scholars on the extremes of the acquisition–experiencing dichotomy. The manner in which these scholars position themselves in relation to any of these extremes determines how knowledge about social behaviour can be uncovered. Those scholars who embrace the “knowledge acquisition” mantra commit to assuming a zero-point observer status and pledging allegiance to natural science research methods as means of uncovering knowledge about social behaviour. Those who believe in knowledge as depending on the lived experiences of the subjects rely on deep involvement with the research participants and qualitative methods of data collection. The third set of assumptions relates to the relationship between humans and their environment. Whereas positivists assume that humans respond mechanically to their environment so that they and their experiences are considered as products of their environment, which conditions and controls them, the anti-positivists believe in the active agency, free will and initiative of humans as they shape and control their environment. These assumptions play out in the extremes of the determinism–voluntarism dichotomy. Given that these three sets of assumptions necessarily address issues of ontology, epistemology, and specific models of what it means to be human, it follows that they would require different methods of research. The positivists (or post-positivists) would rely on surveys, experiments and quasi-experimentation methods, while anti-positivists would feel at home in research methods such as ground theory, ethnography and many other emerging qualitative methods. Positivist research methods search for universal laws which attempt to explain and govern reality (nomothetic) while anti-positivists try to understand individuals and the ways in which they construct, create, modify and interpret their world with focus on unique features rather than on universal laws (idiographic). Internalism, ipso facto, reflects assumptions of positivism and post-positivism since it refers to claims that science is entirely distinct from social influences. The assertion of this perspective

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is that knowledge can exist in any society and at any time, given the availability of intellectual capacity that accentuates universalism and the generation of knowledge in a decontextualised way so that general laws can be uncovered. Externalism, on the other hand, is the view that science and the generation of knowledge draw from the social context, that is, on the sociopolitical climate and the underpinning economy. Thus, for externalism, the socio-political and economic influences determine scientific knowledge production and its progress. Two epistemic constructs are associated with internalism. Studies and scholarly writings based on internalism focus, first, on understanding phenomena in a decontextualised way, and depend on the reliability of well-established methodological protocols as well as rigorous validation mechanisms that serve as a funnel of objective knowledge (objectivist internalism). Given the rigour of the validation applied to this knowledge, the creation of hierarchies of knowledge was going to be inevitable; and other knowledge forms generated by alternative means were generally going to be devalued or placed at the lowest rung of the knowledge hierarchy. The ordering of knowledge relations in this way brings into sharp focus issues of power that privilege the one episteme and marginalise the other. The knowledge produced within the objectivist internalism framework is set to be superior and unproblematic. In order to illustrate this point on various epistemic positions regarding higher education, one may look closely into the curriculum, which is the heartbeat of every formal education enterprise. Within the objectivist internalism frame, the dominant approach to curriculum is the “philosophy of education.” Studies based on this approach tended to analyse academic subjects in terms of forms of knowledge embedded in the curriculum and their unfolding into indisputably logically cohesive disciplines (Maton, 2004). These studies, using mainly positivist research instruments, have tended to focus on core content and its variation across institutions;moreover such studies have been conducted in ways that ignored the context that gave each discipline and institution their defining properties. In this way, curriculum knowledge production was done in isolation and entirely divorced from the conditions where production occurs, which is a point Bourdieu (1988) makes throughout his critique of knowledge produced within this objectivist internalism frame. It also makes socially-empty trainability possible in higher education (Bernstein, 1990). The second aspect of the internalism epistemic frame is called subjectivist internalism. Here, it is important to consider that both objectivist and subjectivist internalism spheres lead to the abstraction of higher education from wider determinations. Another point to consider is that subjectivist internalism studies do not replace objectivist internalism: rather, they transfer the focus of inquiry from objective structures to active higher education actors. This means that these studies consider subjective encounters in the classroom as critical sources of inquiry. Subjectivist internalism studies consist mainly of empirical studies of classroom interaction using research instruments such as phenomenology and phenomenography. They thus illuminate active constructions of curricula, participants’ viewpoints and scientific endeavours that abstract classroom practices from wider structural relations (Maton, 2004). As the focus of study shifts from studies of philosophy of education, which accentuates the internal workings of knowledge, to sociological studies of scientific practices, the signification and place (or position) of knowledge in these studies is greatly ignored. Higher education studies, within this frame, include inquiries on organisational change,

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institutional leadership, policy implementation and innovation management. Such studies reject top-down approaches and frame power as a struggle, thus avoiding a purely functionalist and technicist view of institutional relations. The central thrust of such studies is that relations within institutional leadership and departments, as well as between government initiatives and their outcomes within institutions, are loosely coupled (Maton, 2004), emphasising the conception of power as a struggle. This allows even processes of curriculum design to be understood and studied as interactional processes. These wide-ranging studies on higher education consider outcomes of such exercises as contextually contingent although open to abstraction. The reductionist view of higher education institutions as reflected in objectivist internalism is replaced by a view that higher education institutions possess a unique and dynamic multiple cultural configuration, which makes pure reductionist depictions difficult. This view provides intellectual spaces that posit that values, attitudes, assumptions and recurrent practices in an institution may vary from department to department, and even within departments themselves. Some higher education studies are framed within externalist core assumptions. While internalism privileges studies that consider knowledge within higher education in terms of its production, validation and acquisition, as well as institutional interactions, externalism goes beyond higher education. It looks for factors outside higher education that seek to influence it. Two such framings of externalism emerge as objectivist externalism and subjectivist externalism, both of which deeply implicate the social context in their understanding and reading of higher education studies, and are thus mostly anti-positivistic. Objectivist externalism refers to studies and writings on higher education that focus on the structural relations between higher education and society. These studies pay attention particularly to state policies and legal frameworks relating to funding and management of higher education, especially with regard to the propensity of states to turn higher education into a lever that serves economic and social interests. Such studies also highlight the debate on the true purpose of higher education, with, for instance, neoliberal capitalist markets preferring higher education that produces employable graduates with those competencies, skills, attitudes and graduate attributes requisite in capitalist ventures. Debate on the purpose of higher education from a market economy perspective links higher education with economic growth, and identifies it as a crucial element of the knowledge and digital economy. The positioning of higher education in this way resulted in the prominent emergence of neoMarxist theories in the 1970s, in which higher education was analysed as nothing more than a piece of state apparatus that reproduces class divisions and social inequality by means of differentiated access to jobs based on qualifications (Poulantzas, 1975; Balibar, 1994; Wright, 2005; Althusser, 2006). Another perennial debate on higher education, based on objectivist externalism, is rooted in traditional liberal theories, which see these external influences on higher education as disruptive of the purpose of learning in higher education, which they describe as cultural reproduction, and which develops “an educated person.” (Traditional liberalism is based on objectivist internalism discourses.) Other studies based on objectivist externalism are premised on the tradition of “political arithmetic,” which allows for the investigation of social origins and occupational destinations

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of those who access higher education. All these studies are notable for their general neglect of knowledge and curriculum as well as their empirical descriptions of change in higher education as understood within the framework of higher education, the state and the economy. Subjectivist externalism focuses on studies that use ascriptive categorisation of gender, ethnicity and race to analyse and understand how power and knowledge within higher education are formed, distributed and transmitted, such that certain “voices” are privileged while others are silenced or kept on the margins. These studies can also be traced to the 1970s, which also saw an increased investigation of class relations and how they are reproduced via higher education. Studies within this epistemic position analyse the role of patriarchy and racism in the exercise of power and in patterns of social relations within higher education; especially the silenced “voices” of the women in higher education leadership, research, the professoriate, and in knowledge transfer. Through the use of small-scale, qualitative research instruments, feminist studies focus on how women’s identities form in relation to higher education social relations as dominated historically by men, and document their experiences as ways of resisting patriarchal power and gaining power. Some such studies document experiences of the ethnic minorities and how they are treated in higher education and in terms of knowledge production, validation and transfer. In recent times, such studies have also focused on the marginalised forms of sexuality and treatment of differently-abled people. Each of the four positions can be considered as a problem space given that it places limits on the discursive field, privileges certain meaning systems, compels use of a distinct nomenclature, and allows for particular visions of higher education. Each of these positions also delineates possible outcomes of academic endeavours, purposes of higher education, and delimits possible roadmap scenarios. Under such circumstances, academic development practices become directly implicated in ways that compel that academic developers to be at the heart of debates around the direction that a particular higher education institution takes. As these positions on higher education are capable of supporting models in higher education visions and roadmapping, it can reasonably be inferred that these positions can also be considered as paradigms or models of higher education.

Key positions and visions: An analysis The analytical framework developed above points to four distinct epistemic discourses that guide decisions and choices not only on how to study the higher education field but also on how higher education tends to position or model itself against these epistemic discourses. Each of these epistemic discourses also provides meaning and understandings of how these positionings should pan out – which has been the source of raging debates. These debates focused on variations in visions of higher education, and how they tended to affect knowledge generation and its outcomes, its teaching, and academic values. Each of these discourses thus reveals stances on knowledge, signifies academic values, degrees of external influence (that is, extent of emphasis on relations between higher education, state and economy, as defined within the framework of higher education autonomy), and its delimitations.

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The debates on higher education positioning and repositioning pivot around these three key factors: knowledge, values, external influence. In turn, these three factors determine how the respective missions articulated by higher education institutions are constituted and reconstituted as visions of higher education that describe its role, target and strategies. For example, the traditional vision of higher education harks back to the knowledge-centred model of higher education with its emphasis on a research-intensive character of the university, academic freedom, and the generation of research for its own sake. Higher education can thus be positioned in its traditional or current visionary struggles, that is, in terms of the degree to which it seeks to uphold purist traditional meanings of higher education or become implicated in real societal problems in ways that change its traditional purist character. These are the main understandings of higher education. On one hand, higher education can be described as being outside the influences of the proclaimed external forces for change (the economic, political or social), or as being subordinated to these external influences. The traditional, purist higher education position is based mostly on the objectivist internalism logics and thus firmly drives knowledge that is produced through positivist/ post-positivist research frameworks. Knowledge produced in this way is set to have the allure of being universal, timeless, objective and “clean” – hence its signification in traditional higher education paradigms. This knowledge is also set to be hard, real and capable of being transmitted in tangible form. It was this view of knowledge that developed a higher education vision that attempts to reproduce the educated, independent-minded person, and its essential purpose has thus been cultural reproduction as succinctly captured by John Henry Newman (1999, p.93): On this account the subject of pedagogy is the production of a singular ideal type: the “educated person,” towards which one progressively develops through disciplined study and engagement in rational argument.

This view of higher education institutions, has thus been traditionally conceived as autonomous, closed and generally in a separate realm from society at large, and with a marked level of insulation from outside influences. This principal position on higher education protected academic freedom, drove research for its own sake and pursued the ideal almost to the exclusion of the real. Curiosity, and not real world application, has been at the centre of research as also domination by the “scholarship of discovery.” Angus Kennedy (2017) argues that higher education represents the ideal society of those united to pursue, without hindrances, the truth through the means of reasoned inquiry “wherever it might lead” (Kennedy 2017, p.47). He further claims that our current higher education models reflect the nadir of this academic ideal as envisioned during the Enlightenment era, and through Plato as its advocate (who counselled against the politicisation of higher education). Similar to the argument of Michel Foucault, Kennedy argues that our current higher education model has been reduced to the production of docile people who can be used in the economy to extract maximum utility. He further argues that the traditional, purist model of higher education allows for the exercise of power through disciplinary means, which curtail and control students’ power by means of standards. Students become those things that must come into prescribed standards without question. We will come back to these issues in a moment, within Foucault’s framing of power as a struggle. The Enlightenment view of higher education sees it as the means through which societies were to be liberated from the iron cages of ignorance,

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materialism, greed and conflict. The universities of the time throve on rigorous research that searched for the ultimate “truth,” instruction centred on this knowledge, and vigorous debates. Teaching (instruction) thus formed an integral part of higher education. Its main intention was to develop future researchers as well as independent-minded intellectuals, as earlier stated, and travelling scholars who could pursue the truth anywhere without any obstruction. These educated individuals were expected to develop deeper understandings of scientific knowledge and the grand scale on which it could liberate those that coud access it from the bonds of darkness and ignorance (Newman, 1999; Skelton, 2005; Hayes 2017), and eventually lead to the creation of an ideal society. Teaching, in these Enlightenment-era, purist higher education institutions, focused mainly on the freedom for individuals to “study the business of being free, and this free pursuit of freedom was a self-conscious project” (Kennedy 2017, p.48). The Enlightenment-era higher education institutions were generally insulated from Plato’s “cave of the real” as they were set up to be autonomous and independent from any societal influences, and in them academic freedom was sacrosanct. Higher education was thus designed to be autopoietic: self-creating, self-organising, and self-correcting. Without this condition of autopoiesis, higher education risked being sucked into the cave of the mundane and losing its salience as a future model of society. In the early 19th century, the philosophical work of Immanuel Kant, based on radical humanism, began to challenge the views of Plato, which sought to find in nature rules that could show people how to live in peace and harmony. Kant sought such human harmony in the shared reason and commonsense that reside in all self-conscious humans (Kant, 1998). This Kantian influence in higher education compelled a recognition of the real world as a legitimate area of scholarly focus, and human experience as a critical aspect of searching for harmony and peace. Kantian influence also served as an integral part of the quest for an ideal society and thus shared strong similarities with the traditional, purist model of higher education. A new model of higher education was developed around the German concept of Wissenschaftideologie, which was the search for a knowledge that would bring the real and ideal together as bases of searching for an ideal society. This view of higher education is based on subjectivist internalism. The critical element of this new 19th-century conception of higher education was the view that everyone with potential could greatly benefit from education through self-development. There was also the accompanying admonition that everyone with potential should actually be allowed the freedom to develop individual creativity without hindrance or unnecessary obstruction. The condition of learning under this conception of higher education was maximum academic freedom that could allow students to become independent, autonomous, and global citizens. Embedded in this concept of higher education was the rejection of over-regulation and restrictive disciplines, and the need for students and faculty to craft and follow their own intellectual paths. It is important to note that this new higher education model, originating in Humboldtian ideals, accentuated the pursuit of independent research and study so that knowledge acquisition was no longer the sole purpose of higher education study for students. While the real was integrated into the Humboldtian higher education mores, higher education remained a space for searching for the moral ideal of society. The Humboldtian model of higher education embraced research that is driven by both curiosity (blue sky research) and real world applications (applied research). A healthy tension, under this model, was sustained where commitment to intellectual pursuits as ends in themselves throve alongside narrow specialisation.

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Students were encouraged to become accomplished critical thinkers who are capable of deep thinking, reason and discernment, thus cultivating the ability to make sound judgements, and live in non-conformist and non-traditional terms: these were the ultimate prize of higher education learning. The purpose of higher education in this model was thus to ensure that as society veered towards routines, conformity, bureaucracy and mechanical order then higher education would become a disruptive force of these patterns, so that the search for the ideal society would continue unabated. Higher education was thus that aspect of society that was worth preserving as it served as a lens through which society could measure itself against its own mediocrities and vices which, ipso facto, offered society the opportunity to be in a perpetual search for its higher design and constant reflection. Under these circumstances, the ideal had to trump the real and higher education had to be a model of how society should look, rather than serving as a tool for the marketplace where the material and mundane are pursued shamelessly. Given that the ideals are always in the distance and on the edges, higher education has to represent a place of safe distance and extreme tolerance so that it does not necessarily have to be entirely relevant to society and its immediate needs. The current higher education landscape has moved significantly away from the Humboldtian model (which embraced both the real and the ideal), towards becoming a tool for economic growth. This view of higher education is based on objectivist externalism. The ideal, Kennedy (2017) argues, has been subordinated to the imperatives of the real. The aetiological make-up of higher education now is functionalist and thus it serves the behests of the market and society (although strong vestiges of the Humboldtian era persist tenaciously). Research has been reduced mainly to real-world applications that bring economic prosperity and competitiveness as it develops the “trained minds that the industry demands” (Kennedy, 2017, p.52). These trained minds belong to well-adjusted model citizens who mostly do not question, or were not trained to question, the status quo or the underlying economic plinth, with its unequal redistribution of wealth, which was generated by most of society. Higher education has succumbed to the dictates of the material and mundane as a result of sustained assault from without (proclaimed forces of change such as states and neo-liberal economic agenda), and from within (captured intellectuals and researchers who unashamedly drive interests of capital). Peter Drucker (1999), well-known as an expert on change management, bravely declared at the onset of the 21st century that higher education as we know it has ended, as new modes of knowledge production shift from higher education to include governments, corporations, international development agencies and institutions, operating mostly in partnerships. Institutional partnerships or the endeavours of individual institutions have begun to deliver courses and offer degrees on a global scale (Castells, 2001) as enabled by instant global transactions and digital platforms. We have entered the era of higher education best typified by Levine (2000) as “brick and click” institutions that offer both contact and online learning. Higher education has become central to the socialisation of students towards working globally. At the strategic level of higher education, planning and operations have been deeply influenced by market mores: first, in becoming more competitive on a global scale – so as also to compete in the market for foreign students; and second, to identify core business, and to plan according to cost-centre accounting so that higher education itself becomes a kind of a market-type institution. Academics, researchers, staff and intellectuals have become trainable, retrainable

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and redeployable resources that operate under flexible labour rules which make them project manageable. Scott (2000) argues that higher education is also increasingly becoming involved in manufacturing desires and needs, satisfied by the business world through its products and services; which makes higher education complicit in developing a culture of consumerism. In this sense, the emergence of global markets and a non-traditional clientele that higher education institutions can exploit for profit, alongside the proliferation of multiple, networked, global knowledge production sites, have redefined the role of higher education. It is thus a repositioning of higher education on the real with the ideal occupying its margins. This position of higher education is also marked by massification (increased and broader access), which in itself has brought about further new challenges of unprepared and underprepared students whose learning experience requires support and scaffolding. Market mores, by shifting the focus to the production of trained minds for the economy, have thus eroded the authority of the liberal humanities along with their emphasis on developing critical thought: this has inevitably “cushioned” students against being overly sensitive to their becoming unquestioning economic functionaries. Another authority that has been terminated is that of the professor and other academic staff, who have been replaced by student-centric models of teaching and learning, as well as by the all-administrative motif that engulfs higher education. These models of teaching and learning have been enervated by the ascendancy of vocational training that masquerades as higher education learning, according to Kennedy (2017) who demonstrates that unfettered access to higher education, irrespective of academic ability, has destroyed the underlying raison d’être of higher education learning. The widening of participation rates in higher education, while serving a political agenda, has occurred mainly because a link has been made between access to higher education learning and the competitiveness of the economy. In other words, globalisation and the advent of the knowledge economy in the 21st century have created a need for non-material intellectual labour. A further link has been made between higher education and social justice in terms of massification and democratic citizenry, as premised on the false narrative that greater access to higher education by the majority of society would necessarily reduce inequality and persistent class divisions. The truth of the matter is that this narrative served only to hide the failure of society and its governments to challenge the underlying economic plinth that is driven by a neoliberal capitalist agenda serving narrow private interests. The impossibility of initiating a neoliberal model of wealth redistribution in society, to eliminate inequality and class divisions, has been shrewdly veiled under the higher education access agenda. Historically, higher education also did itself no favour in turning itself into ivory tower empires that, to an important degree, embraced racialised and gendered thinking that resulted in the emergence of critical and feminist theories as well as demands for its radical transformation. As a result of these faux pas, higher education has reduced itself to a reactive and reactionary force, so that instead of leading society and becoming the model of how society should look in the future, it has allowed itself to be implicated in the mediocrities of society. It has now so entangled itself into this mess that other scholars are already predicting the death of higher education and the phenomenon of a post-higher education era (Kennedy, 2017). The other issue that Angus Kennedy (2017) raises as central in the failing crepuscular glow of higher education as we know it is the ascendancy of relativist epistemology in higher

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education. He argues that relativism of knowledge will, in the end, lead to the view that nothing really matters; so that higher education learning loses its purpose in that it would have been deprived of its objective of elucidating the truths that undergird the way things appear to us, thus destroying shared journeys and shared understandings. Such a view of higher education, as strongly challenged by Angus Kennedy, is based on subjectivist externalism. In Kennedy’s view, relativist epistemology is inimical to the agenda of reasserting the Enlightenment universalism whose authority, he bemoans, has been eroded by the positioning of higher education in relation to the real, and to the exclusion of the ideal. He further argues that freedoms that once allowed academics to challenge students on everything have been clipped in preference for providing “safe spaces” for students, and in which any opinions that might be construed as offensive have beeneliminated. Kennedy (2017, p.53) captures this new higher education mood thus: instead of access to freedom and truth, it offers beanbags, puppies and whale song: a comforting relativized echo chamber of untutored ignorance and narcissistic, self-regarding prejudice.

Proceeding in a similar vein to Angus Kennedy, on the need to turn back the clock in higher education and pursue the goals and values of traditional liberal education, are Hornsby and Morello (2017), who argue for the signification of not only liberal arts in higher education curriculum and teaching, but the return to Christian education and the cultivation of intellectual virtues as formed around the celebrated minds of Western civilisation. For these authors, hierarchies of knowledge and their validation mechanisms ordered in Western terms are unproblematic and must be embraced without question. However, Enlightenment universalism has created knowledge hierarchies with a geopolitical propensity and has tended to build an epistemic empire that is entirely Eurocentric, and consisting of hierarchies of knowledge that tended to exclude other ways of knowing emanating from other areas of the world. This approach to what constitutes scientific knowledge has resulted in the emergence, from the 1950s, of what may be termed “epistemic disobedience,” which is directed at meanings of knowledge that are hegemonic and exclusionary, and especially at its protocols of validation. Its purpose is thus to expand the scope and scale of knowledge validation so that it does not itself become exclusionary. Epistemic disobedience is thus focused on broadening rather than replacing entrenched hegemonic knowledge forms and their validation mechanisms; such that the process of delinking from Eurocentric knowledge forms and their validation mechanisms cannot be seen as an end in itself. It rather has to be seen as a means to create conditions in which the status of alternative knowledge forms, which have generally been marginalised, can be reclaimed, and generation of such alternative knowledge be encouraged as philosophical, theoretical and methodological frames are broadened. Such knowledge production and validation need not happen within the framework of bringing alternative knowledge into standards of entrenched knowledge forms; but should rather be seen as ways of opening up new possibilities of validation and knowledge production. The recent intensified call for decolonisation of the curriculum, especially in South Africa after the 2015– 2016 student protests, while conceptualised politically, represents efforts to expand signified ways of knowing in higher education and their validation mechanisms. It is important to note that such a call is not new – it can be traced to the 1950s during Frantz Fanon’s era, with the demand for recognition of the epistemology and ontological outlook of the “wretched of the earth” in mainstream knowledge production, dissemination and acquisition. Epistemic disobedience is

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thus essentially an expansion project. This expansion project can also be associated with feminist struggle agendas, intended not only to challenge the epistemic hegemony of entrenched knowledge but also its patriarchal manifestations. Such agendas of disobedience seek to remove ascriptive categorisation of race, gender and geopolitics as bases of knowledge production and validation. They essentially represent a search for spaces of rigorous engagement within higher education, which could lead to a new creative dynamic with the potential to invigorate a culture of productive complexity. Within these spaces, the terms of knowledge production and validation can be renegotiated and expanded within the framework of the real and the ideal, without compromising rigour and research excellence. Within the South African higher education landscape persists a particular epistemic hierarchy, which essentially undervalues the African knowledge at the heart of the call for decolonisation of the curriculum, an epistemic hierarchy that the call seeks to disrupt. It is a call to find better ways of producing and validating knowledge, which could drive course delivery that is not alienating and foreign to all students and staff. The call for decolonisation, or a post-colonial conception of higher education in South Africa, is not intended, I argue, as a rejection of established knowledge: rather it represents a rejection of the hegemony and hierarchical ordering that exclude other ways of knowing that led to the gradual ascendancy of epistemic disobedience and feminist discourses.

Paradigms, academic development and productive complexity To summarise the detailed discussion above, I have demonstrated how studies and philosophical debates on positioning in higher education can be placed into four broad categories, which are also understood as shaping higher education paradigms and visions: objectivist internalism; objectivist externalism; subjectivist internalism; and subjectivist externalism. The purpose of this analysis is to promote a critical understanding of how studies and writings on academic development practices have been proceeding and why I have tended to have a problem with such a framing. I suggest a different framing, which I also use to analyse chapters in this book as I glean out and adumbrate contours of an emerging theory of academic development that could inform our future studies and practices. I also believe that this framing points to and corresponds with an emerging higher education paradigm. I begin, as I must, from the view that all advances and progress in scientific understanding start with a “speculative adventure” which Medawar (1996, p.63) defines as “an imaginative preconception of what might be true” – or what I prefer to call informed conjectures about aspects of reality or the world (hypotheses, hunches). These scientific adventures or conjectures seek to search and invent a possible world where humans can live in harmony and peace with the material world, formulating attempts to offer models of how society should look. The means of uncovering the truth often involve experience, scientific reasoning and research, which facilitate critical discussions on the degree to which the imagined world corresponds to the real one. I argue that all these means are necessary in helping us to understand and find solutions to our complex modern problems and our search for deep knowledge that points to the ideals and values of societies. In this way, I embrace both attempts to make sense of our daily lives through our own experiences as acted upon by a dominant political, economic and ideological authority, and also our struggle to overcome these conditions and search for higher designs for our practices. In this sense, academic development becomes positioned in both the real and the ideal. The positioning of academic development on

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the real implies both the conditional acceptance of and struggle against the dominant internal (institutional) and external power (state, economy). In order to clarify my stance and make a case for the epistemic positioning I advocate for higher education – which also ought, as I argue, to inform studies and practices of academic development – I briefly explain the four epistemic positions in relation to higher education paradigms using the table format. These higher education positions/paradigms have tended to shape studies and theorisation around academic development. Table 10.2 provides an overview of these competing positions on higher education and their possible influence on academic development theorisation. Table 10.2 Summary of higher education paradigms and areas of potential academic development theorisation 1. Traditional, liberal (purism)

2. Neo-liberal (weak pragmatism)

3. Performativity (strong pragmatism)

4. Socio-democratic (social idealism)

Research

Generated for its own sake includes blue sky research

Mostly curiositydriven as in blue sky research but also has consequence for the real

Mostly applied & for economic growth

Problem-based to provide solutions to societal challenges of inequality, discrimination, leads to practical ends

Purpose

Pursue ideal of society, developing an “educated man”

Research and skills development

Increase the efficiency of an economic system

Contribute to attainment of socially just society

Teaching

Develop top scientists, top writers and top thinkers (the educated person, a true gentleman)

Develop critical and creative thinkers as well as novice researchers

Develop employable graduates with fixed graduate attributes, push business innovation

Develop pragmatic activists

Community

Rarely involved

Moderately involved

Mostly business and industry communities

Deeply and actively involved

Mission

Research-intensive

To become top ranking university (quality and quantity of research)

Efficiency of economy

Equal society

Objectivist internalism

Subjectivist internalism

Objectivist externalism

Subjectivist externalism

The purist, traditional liberal paradigm seeks to retain the traditional model of a university where research was conducted for its own sake and knowledge-based teaching sought to create a noble man. Under this paradigm, universities were largely insulated from society. The neo-liberal paradigm (Humboldtian), similar to purist traditions, accentuates research for its own sake, but includes elements of investigating the real. Teaching remains mostly knowledge-based with a strong student-centred rhetoric, and accounts for developing mainly critical thinkers and researchers – although increasingly the skills development agenda has been gaining traction, conceptualised as “graduate attributes.” External influence remains moderate as academic freedom remains the shield against its encroaching claws; but the pressure is on from the state and business as measurability of research (REF) and teaching (TEF, SET) becomes a reality.

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The performativity paradigm pushes universities to serve at the behest of commerce and industry. Research agendas have to link up with business interests and serve economic growth as teaching develops employable graduates who possess skills that lead to greater economic efficiency. Commerce and industry become primary consumers of research and teaching outcomes, with a strong influence via advisory boards and involvement of business people in university councils. The socio-democratic paradigm, which occupies the end of the higher education dichotomy opposite to the purist, traditional liberal paradigm, seeks research that resolves social and political problems as well as challenging the underlying neo-liberal nature of an economic activity, resulting in a socially just society. Teaching has to develop pragmatist activists who are critically minded and can challenge inequality in all its forms, across income inequality, patriarchyrelated inequality, access inequality, economic inequality in general, and knowledge generation inequality. Communities, especially those from lower economic strata, are deeply involved as active agents in seeking a socially just society and researchers have to focus on this knower. While these paradigms for higher education provide a useful analysis of current debates on the direction higher education institutions ought to take, they tend to lock us into their framework and limit our ability to explore possibilities of higher education beyond these paradigms. It remains for me to attempt to explore these issues of higher education transformation beyond the current paradigms of higher education. Along the lines of making the familiar strange (providing a window for problematisation), I hope to achieve what T. S. Eliot (“Little Gidding”, 1942) strove towards in saying that: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

Indeed, it is my contention that academic development has the potential to contribute meaningfully towards realising alternative paradigms of higher education as long as it does not “cease from exploration” of new possibilities. Rumblings in academic development studies are encouraging, and given that the history of academic development is intertwined with that of higher education, there is some merit in trying to understand where academic development studies are pointing, and hopefully to glean some contours of an emerging paradigm of higher education.

Towards a productive complexity paradigm In her 2014 article on academic development, Brenda Leibowitz makes the following observations on contemporary academic development: • A commonly understood meaning of academic development remains largely elusive, so that academic development mires in some definitional vortex. This is a good thing because in this organised chaos, possibilities of exploration and the quest for higher designs of academic development exist.

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• Academic development meanings have shifted over time and remain quite precarious, so that practices of academic development vary across institutional contexts and geographical locations. This might not be a problem as long as the search for better models of academic development are developed and shared within the global community. • There is, however, a common thread that binds the activities and practices of academic development across institutional contexts and geographical locations, which is that academic development attempts to create conditions that support learning of students and academics within the framework of productive complexity. • Most academic developers are drawn from a variety of disciplines and belong to one or more of the academic “tribes” within higher education institutions. Given that this century thrives on productive complexity, which leverages multiple perspectives because today’s problems have become multi-dimensional, the drawing of academic developers from various disciplines could prove to be a blessing. These precarious, fluid and dynamic spaces of academic development are ripe for imagination and innovation, as academic development situatedness is today within the space of productive complexity, as Brenda Leibowitz suggests. It is most unfortunate that Brenda Leibowitz (2014) passed on to the world beyond the azure dome before she could expatiate further on this important matter of productive complexity, and how it frames discourses of higher education and those of academic development. However, it can reasonably be inferred that it emanates from the economic paradigm that emerged just after the post-Fordist era called “productive diversity” (Kalantzis & Cope, 2008). Productive diversity increasingly defines workplaces that value the autonomy and innovative ideas of workers. It is thus noted for increased devolution of organisational power and heightened valorisation of workers’ input – as product development becomes more complex (as a result of big data analytics), there is co-creation of value, which now includes collaborations that harness human ingenuity and intelligent technologies (Pitso, 2019). Productive diversity is premised on new working relationships and rebalanced agentic power between management and operations workers as it flourishes on “the actual and possible”, “the emergent and ideal” (Kalantzis & Cope 2008, p.61). Productive diversity thus demands new skill sets that subsume critical thinking, creativity, complex problem-solving, emotional intelligence, and resilience, as well as collaboration and communication – including that of intelligent technologies. Its main challenge is that, similar to post-Fordist economic activity, it does away with stable career pathways, and compels us to accumumulate multiple and divergent technical skills in addition to the soft skills mentioned above. Varied and broadly focused skill sets become the new mantra of work designs. It is this complexity in productivity, with its demands for varied skill sets, I believe, that Brenda Leibowitz sought to convey in her conception of productive complexity. Table 10.3 provides a development from Table 10.2, and a summary of what I believe to be an emerging higher education paradigm that could hinge practices and studies of academic development, moving into the future.

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Table 10.3 The emerging higher education paradigm 5. Productive Complexity (muli-perspectival and strongly pragmatic) Research

Mostly research that matters conducted within the framework of the real–ideal complex

Purpose

To foster greater efficiency of resource accumulation and demand fairer redistribution models within the framework of social justice and epistemic justice

Teaching

AI-enabled personalised learning that includes online delivery modes and strong social justice discourses

Community Mission Epistemic position

States, commerce, industry and local communities: moderate to high involvement Highly innovative, differentiated and externally-focused workplaces with greater freedom and independence within the social and epistemic justice framework No commitment to a specific episteme, and could include techne and doxastic knowledge production thus signifying the creative arts in product development. Focus is on what works at a particular point in time and within a particular context

There are already a few emerging higher education models based on this emerging paradigm, such as those institutions referred to as digital leaders, innovators, corporate and entrepreneurial universities. Higher education institutions considered as digital leaders offer strictly online courses and AI-enabled delivery modes. Those considered as innovators focus on value cocreation generated through human–human and human–machine collaborations. The corporate higher education institutions drive specific business niche areas through specialised research and training. The entrepreneurial university model creates conditions where students and staff can become capital value creators and independent critical and creative thinkers capable of complex problem-solving. Studies and theorisation around academic development can no longer ignore these important pointers into the future.

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11. Epilogue Teboho Pitso The scholarly exercise we engaged in and report on in this book is not intended as a once-off activity: rather, it represents our initial forays into critical reflection and engaging with the scholarship of academic development. It is our hope that our attempts to achieve our objectives as outlined in chapter 1 will receive wide interest, and inspire further development of our themes. Our goal is to constantly reflect on our practices and attempt their amelioration as well as their transformation until we become master practitioners of academic development. Our other goal is to steadily integrate critical scholarship into our academic development. Furthermore, we hope to make meaningful contributions towards the development of professional learning as a separate area of higher education learning. This scholarly exercise produced insights into four aspects of professional learning worthy of further research and greater scrutiny: • Professional learning involves “learning to learn” through scholarship and critical reflection. This means that it has a strong inclination towards allowing experts to begin to unlearn the status quo and craft more powerful pathways that could enrich learning in higher education and contribute meaningfully towards a fairer and more just global society. While data generated in this exercise were limited in terms of being drawn from a single context, the exercise was far from limiting us in terms of engaging broader agendas of justice and freedom on a global scale, and within academic development. Our learning offered opportunities for us to critically engage power relations in our practices, institutionally and globally, in respect of entrenched cultures, issues of social justice, economic equality, environmental sustainability, and epistemic justice. • Professional learning ought to make transparent embedded assumptions in our practices, and open up spaces for critical engagement with them. In laying bare some of the assumptions we have been making in our practices, we have discovered that professional learning urges problematisation, critique and substantial improvement of our practices, in some cases even transformation. We uncovered in some practices a great deal of theoretical frameworks residing in a strong Global North bias and very little substantive resonance from the Global South, a point that the peer review exercise also highlighted. We also idenfied some “didactic” motifs in some of the chapters – understandably so, as some of our practices have a strong service positionality, a point also picked up in the peer review process.

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Epilogue

• Professional learning derives from the critical reflection model, and both professional learning and the critical reflection model can form crucial tools for professional staff development. We plan to encourage the use of professional learning and the critical reflection model in ongoing staff development initiatives so that further publications arising from this founding exercise may boast a good sampling of colleagues who have undergone this process. • Professional learning also compels a measure of focus and reflection on curriculum and teaching at undergraduate level, as well as the future direction of these in higher education. In many ways, it has created conditions where we could explore and modify the “Five Cs” of curriculum. Currere and Curiosity could allow for a flexible structure and some degree of organised chaos. Somerville and Green (2011), as cited in chapter 2, have come up with the term “pedagogy of organised chaos” within the framework of ecological sustainability. This approach to pedagogy brings forth issues of fostering Creativity and deep appreciation of sustainability discourses within higher education curriculum, with implications for teaching. Complexity and Collaboration bring forth diverse, multidisciplinary student teams, and learning through real-life projects. The last “C” of curriculum refers to Community, which opens up opportunities to forge stronger links between undergraduate curriculum and local communities in the form of municipalities, local residential communities, rural communities, private sector concerns and public agencies. In Scandinavia, in particular at Copenhagen University, advanced undergraduates tackle real problems that have been submitted by such local communities to faculties, under the responsible facilitation of the university’s academic development unit. Multidisciplinary teams of students have been involved in providing effective solutions to real, practical problems besetting local communities, thus signifying a move by academic development at this university towards productive complexity. There are grounds enough, in my view, to develop professional learning into a distinct area of teaching and learning scholarship as we broaden the scope of curriculum and teaching.

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Professor Vuyisile T. Msila Researcher at the Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs, University of South Africa.

Teboho Pitso holds a PhD in creativity and innovation read at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). His research interests involve higher education curriculum as well as teaching and learning transformation within the framework of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship, areas he has published widely on and gained international repute. He serves in multiple international committees that drive, amongst other thing, technological innovation, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and higher education transformation in the age of deep learning. His recent research interest involves examining the collaborative potential of human Ingenuity and intelligent technologies in ideational bricolage, that is, in generation of unique ideas under resource-constrained conditions. He is currently leading the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Vaal University of Technology (VUT).

Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices

This book offers insightful reflections on academic development practices. The contributors engage the reader painstakingly in the dynamics of professional learning and effective teaching. This volume facilitates the examination of the need for reflection that leads to professional maturity. All educational institutions seek teachers who continuously search for effective strategies in improving student success. The contributors uncover a variety of approaches as they evince proven suggestions. The chapters are refreshing and edifying. This book is essential for all teachers, lecturers and trainers who want to improve their teaching practice immensely.

Contextualised Critical Reflections on Academic Development Practices Towards professional learning

Ed. | Teboho Pitso

ISBN 978-1-991201-20-1

EDITOR 9 781991 201201

Teboho Pitso