Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning

Editorial

Hanelie Adendorff — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Structured doctoral programmes for developing the scholar and the scholarship: Lessons from practice

Kirstin Wilmot — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There are growing international calls for doctoral education to embrace more collaborative, structured supervision models. While the uptake of such models has been slow in South Africa, interesting forms of structured models are emerging. This study critically reflects on one such example, highlighting the successes and challenges to provide the field with practical insights of how such a model can be conceptualised. Focusing on a curriculated PhD project in the field of higher education studies, the paper explores the extent to which the project enhanced the development of the scholarship and scholarly dispositions in candidates. Inductive thematic analysis of interviews with 12 doctoral candidates was used in the first phase of analysis to reveal the salient issues in the data. The second phase of analysis drew on Legitimation Code Theory’s dimension of Specialization to understand the different kinds of learning afforded by the programme. The findings show how the curriculated programme provided an important bridge into disciplinary knowledge, and it reveals how the collaborative community played a critical role in strengthening students’ theoretical and disciplinary knowledge as well as cultivating key scholarly dispositions such as criticality, voice, and collaboration.

Exploring an alternative access route to higher education in South Africa: A human development and social justice analysis

Faith Mkwananzi, Carmen Martinez Vargas — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Widening access to higher education is one of the key policy priorities for many countries and institutions globally. While the concern has been to increase the number of young people entering university, there has also been interest in the diversity of people entering university, such as women, working students, and those from rural communities. This paper builds on that body of knowledge by combining ideas from the capability approach and social justice to understand what widening access may mean through a human development lens in contexts of historical injustice and inequality. It draws on the University Preparation Programme (UPP) and the Extended Programme (EP) provided by one of the universities in South Africa as a route to expand access and participation for students who might otherwise not access university. In doing so, it presents empirical and theoretical contributions to the multidimensionality of inequalities and how these influence higher education opportunities.

South African new academics’ experiences of precarity: Becoming and unbecoming the condition of coloniality through collective reflexivity

Nicole Daniels, Taahira Goolam Hoosen, Jaisubash Jayakumar, Kasturi Behari-Leak — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The transition into Higher Education can be complex with South African new academics expected to drive institutional change and social transformation. We examine precarity from our situated geopolitical positioning, as a condition of coloniality and neoliberal forces. Our focus on racially marginalised new academics straddling multiple pedagogical roles addresses the challenges of needing to become collective reflexive agents, yet also unbecome conditions of coloniality. Through autoethnography, lived experiences of precarity as affective states are shown to co-produce displaced estrangement, undermine a coherent sense of self, and reinscribe colonial modes of doing and being. We argue that knowledge rooted in African-centred epistemologies offers new academics’ ways to collectively rally together to disrupt the status quo. This approach enriches the minimally understood concept of collective reflexivity. Our findings underscore the value of bringing decolonisation perspectives into conversation with reflexivity theories. We propose collective reflexivity can help new academics navigate their situational challenges.

Mathematical meaning construction in language, tables, and images: The potential utility of language proficiency development in numeracy teaching

Jumani Clarke — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Numeracy entails a facility for communicating mathematical knowledge in diverse contexts. Indeed, large scale standardised assessments have demonstrated that numeracy is associated with both mathematics and language proficiency. And yet, while research in mathematics education in schools has demonstrated the utility of taking a discursive view of mathematics, similar developments in higher education studies are scarce. Moreover, as teaching interventions in numeracy may lead to tensions between mathematical and disciplinary knowledge, the prospect of including language proficiency development is challenging. Taking a discursive multimodal view, this study reports on a pilot teaching intervention that introduced explicit language proficiency development into numeracy teaching activities at a prominent South African university. The study found that the participants produced coherent descriptions of statistics when mathematical concepts were related to vocabulary and grammar. These observations suggest that language proficiency development has the potential to realise the goal of teaching mathematical knowledge within disciplinary curricula.

Internationalisation – dispelling the myth of African inferiority

Ncamisile P. Mthiyane, Janet Jarvis — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Decoloniality is a framework addressing global power imbalances, particularly between the global north and south, rooted in the process of othering. This article suggests that internationalisation can promote decolonisation, particularly in South Africa, by challenging the notion of inferiority in the global south. Crossing disciplinary and geographical boundaries plays a crucial role in evolving classroom practice into reflective and reflexive classroom praxis. The use of empathetic-reflective-dialogical restorying as a teaching strategy aligns with a decolonial agenda. This approach allows pre-service teachers from diverse geographical contexts, like South Africa and Norway, to engage in empathetic and reflective dialogue within a safe space, potentially reshaping their prior conceptions of best teaching practices. This transformative process holds promise for the classroom environment.

Phenomenological engagement as pedagogical impetus in career counselling education

Karlien Conradie — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article aims to present the author’s understanding of how a phenomenologically concerned pedagogy can offer an antidote to the influence that a post-industrial consumerist culture has on career counselling education. In the age of mediatisation, surges of endless commercialisation and consumption has evolved in a crisis of relationality, characterised by ecological fragmentation and disconnectedness. The present article explains how an overly utilitarian mindset reinforces an instrumentalist approach to career counselling, inhibiting student educational psychologists’ capacity for being conscious of the embodied lifeworld situation of a person engaging in career counselling. The embodied lifeworld situation refers to an ecologically integrated person reality, intricately anchored in time, space, and historicity. A pedagogical approach is needed that forefronts phenomenological engagement – relational being and knowing - as a way of conserving students’ ability for embodied consciousness.

The Decolonization of Knowledge: Radical Ideas and the Shaping of Institutions in South Africa and Beyond.

Mags Blackie — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Jansen, J.D. and Walters, C.A. 2022. The Decolonization of Knowledge: Radical Ideas and the Shaping of Institutions in South Africa and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blackness at the Intersection

Asiphe Mxalisa, Abongile Sonkosi — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Crenshaw, K., Andrews, K. and Wilson, K. (Eds.) 2024. Blackness at the Intersection. London: Bloomsbury Press.

Assessment for Inclusion in Higher Education: Promoting Equity and Social Justice in Assessment.

Laura Dison — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ajjawi, R., Tai, J., Boud, D. and Jorre de St Jorre, T. (Eds.). 2023. Assessment for Inclusion in Higher Education: Promoting Equity and Social Justice in Assessment. London: Routledge.