1,720,965 research outputs found
Action research for contexts of change and inequality
No full textUndoubtedly, the past half-century has witnessed an escalation of changes in the social, political, economic and educational structures in many societies around the world. Some have seen change as a challenge and hope while, for many others, it is a source of concern and worry. Some have adopted change with gusto, while for many it is something to be resisted. Some say we live in a world and times with an increasing awareness that “times are changing”, while for some “the more things change, the more they stay the same”
Towards a Model of Mentoring in South African Higher Education
Get PDFThe imperative to replenish the South African higher education professoriate has inspired varied responses, ranging from aggressive recruitment of post graduate students to the induction of academics from outside the academy. One such response is the Staffing South Africa’s Universities Framework (SSAUF), which recognises the challenges facing early career academics (ECAs), especially as they relate to higher education pedagogies, curriculum develop-ment, supervising students, and developing scholarship in teaching. Notable in this framework is the absence of any substantive discussion around mentorship, and its potential to socialise emerging academics into the distinctive culture of the academy in all its manifestations, especially what it means to be an effective university teacher. This article surveys some of the literature on mentoring in higher education, as a precursor to introducing a proposed mentoring model, developed for a South African university. Acknowledging the complexity inherent in the practice of mentoring and the attendant power relations, the proposed model is a departure from the individualistic performance management approach typically associated with the dominant master-apprenticeship model. Instead, the authors offer a non-hierarchical, co-constructed menu of possibilities based on negotiated reflection, arising out of the specific, situated contexts of mentor and mentee
Beyond empty signifiers: Reclaiming social justice as an academic pursuit in higher education
Get PDFThis paper critically examines the proliferation of terms such as “social justice” within higher education discourse, arguing that they often function as “empty signifiers”, concepts stripped of their theoretical depth and transformative potential. The paper uses a narrative approach to explore how these buzzwords can obscure, rather than illuminate, the path to genuine educational transformation. The analysis is grounded in a tripartite theoretical framework, combining Ernesto Laclau’s theory of empty signifiers, Nancy Fraser’s model of social justice, and the capabilities approach advanced by Amartya Sen. I invoke Joan Tronto\u27s political ethic of care as essential to operationalising transformation, as a democratic practice involving attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness. I argue that a more robust and transformative decolonial praxis requires moving beyond superficial signifiers to a deeper engagement with epistemic justice informed by Southern epistemologies. The paper concludes that genuine transformation requires addressing the intersecting dimensions of maldistribution, misrecognition, and misrepresentation while centering the capabilities approach and an ethic of care in pedagogical practice
The Illuminative Potential of Organizational Ethnographies
No full textEvaluation studies, especially of South African educational institutions and non-governmental organisations offering educational programmes have been criticised for focussing inadequately on the ethnographic and anthropological dimensions of organisations. The dominant approaches to evaluation have been structuralist and empirical-rational in orientation, serving narrow bureaucratic functions for funders and donors, based on self reports by programme participants. One way of resolving the dilemma of unreliable evaluation reports is producing richly contextualised organisational ethnographies which illuminate organisational contexts beyond superficial analyses. What are the potential benefits of an organisational ethnography, and what are the epistemological and ethical implications of such an endeavour? I shall attempt to answer these questions by drawing on an organisational ethnography of a South African non-governmental organisation offering language teacher development programmes, as I trace its mutating identity over three decades. I use insights derived from the traditions of empowerment evaluation (Fetterman, 1999) and illuminative evaluation (Parlett & Hamilton, 1976) as theoretical lenses to appraise the value of narratives in understanding organisational behaviour. Further, I appropriate Discourse Analysis to interrogate selected narrative data as a methodological lens in organisational analysis, and reflect on my experience of engaging in such a project. In the latter part of the chapter, I revisit the methodological wisdom of engaging in an institutional ethnography, highlighting some of the ethical, representational and epistemological dilemmas in negotiating a non-conventional approach. I conclude the paper with brief allusion to the potential value of organisational ethnographies in mediating an emerging performativity driven higher education culture
Student experiences of the PhD cohort model: working within or outside communities of practice?
No full textThe Collaborative Cohort Model (CCM) of higher degrees supervision is gaining increasing popularity internationally and, in some contexts, replacing the conventional Apprentice Master Model (AMM). Among the motivations advanced for this shift is that the CCM improves completion rates and enhances the quality of research supervision. This exploratory paper interrogates these claims through the eyes of students, by documenting and analysing their experiences of the CCM currently used by the Faculty of Education, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), South Africa. This form of supervision integrates the traditional master-apprentice supervision with cohort seminar sessions. The traditional supervision involves students working one-to-one with what is referred to, in this instance, as the appointed supervisor/s while the cohort seminars draw on the expertise of a team of experienced and novice supervisors referred to, in this instance, as the cohort supervisors. In addition, students benefit from contributions offered by peers within the cohort as they are guided through the various phases in the research process. This paper engages with the experiences of a small sample of students, appraising the key principles of collaboration and collegiality which are integral to the success of the cohort model. The study reveals abundant evidence of successful collaboration and collegiality among students and between the cohort and appointed supervisors. However, there are also instances of students in the cohort working in isolation and supervisors working counter to each other. Through engaging with student experiences of the cohort model, this study offers critical new insights into the strengths, limitations and challenges of using the model to address the unsatisfactory PhD productivity rate in South Africa.Publisher's versio
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Editorial: Can Policy Learn from Practice?
Get PDFAt the best of times, higher education is known to be in a state of unbridled turbulence. That it should be any less so, remains (thankfully) a point of unresolved contention. What we do know from the South African experience, is that during times of discomfort, institutions take refuge in policy formulation, policy reform, and less frequently, policy dialogue. This was evident in the decades preceding what has been typecast as the ‘pre-democratic era’, when education policy units were the heartbeats of universities, some boldly located in the portals of campuses – supported by their university communities, others hovelled in more perilous enclaves, often at the mercy of the state security apparatus. Singularly and collectively, these units exposed the brutality of a divided and divisive education system, characterized by governmentality, geared for social engineering. Policy units envisioned a new future of possibility in which universities nurtured human talent for the greater good.In the years following ‘liberation’, policy units redirected their energies from activism and advocacy to an evidence-based approach to systemic reform, providing the signposts for reform and identifying benchmarks to measure the success of transformation agendas. During this period, many of the policy units quietly faded into the landscape, being either absorbed into mainstream academia or into government departments. The ensuing period was one of vigorous policy development by government, accompanied by an emerging evaluation culture, often associated with performativity
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
- …
