The significance of structure, culture and agency in supporting and developing student learning at South African universities

Chrissie BougheyRhodes University

IntroductionThe support and development of student learning in order to promote access and success in higher education has long been the focus of those involved in the South African Academic Development (AD) movement. In recent years, a number of researchers (see, for example, Luckett (2010a, 2001b, 2009, 2007a, 2007b), Quinn (2007), Wright (2008), Vorster (2010), Quinn & Boughey (2008) have turned to Roy Bhaskar’s (1978, 1979) critical realism and Margaret Archer’s (1995, 1996, 1998) social realism as a means of better understanding events and experiences related to higher education in South Africa and of identifying the underlying structures and mechanisms from which those events and experiences emerge. This chapter contributes to this vein of work by using Bhaskar’s and Archer’s work to explore the potential of the AD movement to contribute to the need to support and develop student learning as we move into the second decade of the twenty first century.

The chapter begins by providing a brief outline of the theoretical positions adopted by Bhaskar and Archer. It then moves on to reanalyze shifts within the AD movement using Bhaskar’s and Archer’s work.

Bhaskar’s Critical RealismKey to critical realism (Bhaskar, 1978, 1979) is the acknowledgment of an objective reality external to humankind. However, unlike empiricists and relativists, critical realists insist that this reality must not be conflated with our experience of it. Conflation of an ultimate reality with our experiences of it, that is, the conflation of what is with what can be known, is termed by Bhaskar (1978:16) the ‘epistemic fallacy’. This separation of ontology (what is) from epistemology (what can be known) leads Bhaskar (1978, 1979) to posit a world consisting of three ontological strata: the empirical, the actual and the real.

The empirical stratum is that of experience and observation and is the layer from which all our explorations of reality must begin. Since human beings experience and observe the world in different ways, this layer is acknowledged to be ever changing, constructed and relative. The second stratum in Bhaskar’s ontology, the actual, consists of events which take place in the world. The actual and the empirical co-exist since we experience events as they happen. The final stratum, the real, consists of structures and mechanisms, both natural and social and which have an objective existence, and from which events at the level of the actual and observations and experiences at the level of the empirical emerge. This stratum co-exists with the other two strata – in other words, the strata surround us continually.

1

Although Bhaskar (ibid) insists on the intransitive nature of structures and mechanisms at the level of the real, in a rejection of determinism, he argues that they are tendential rather than causal. At any one time, structures and mechanisms may be dormant or active and may come together to produce unexpected effects in myriad ways.

Research located in a critical realist ontology attempts to reach beyond the analysis of events and experiences in order to identify the structures and mechanisms from which these emerge. Like other critical research, critical realism is focused on a concern for social justice and equality. Although a critical realist view of the world as an ‘open’ system means that critical realists would argue that outcomes cannot be predicted, they would argue that the identification of structures and mechanisms at the level of the real can help us to understand and explain tendencies and, importantly, through that understanding, work to bring about change and social justice.

In the context of this chapter, social justice would involve improved learning for the black students, long disadvantaged in gaining access to higher education because of historically inequities and shown by Scott et al. (2007) to bear the brunt of poor completion and graduation rates in a recent cohort study.

Archer’s social realism

For Archer (1995, 1996, 1998), the study of structure, culture and agency is key to understanding the social world. Archer defines structure as relating to material resources, to recurring patterns of social behaviour and the interrelationship between different elements of society around the distribution of these material resources. Structure would thus relate to concepts such as social class, gender, race, marriage, education and so on. Culture, on the other hand, is understood to concern ideas, beliefs, values and ideologies. Both structure and culture are important aspects of social life. Agency refers to the personal and psychological make up of individuals in relation to their social roles and relates to the capacity people have to act in a voluntary way.

In sociology, there has long been a tendency to conflate the ‘parts’ (systems) and the ‘people’ (agency). Archer critiques the conflation of structure and agency and culture and agency and argues instead for structure, culture and agency to be viewed as separate domains of reality, each with distinct properties and powers. Importantly, she also argues that each should be analysed separately although, in this analysis, the interplay of each with the other should be explored.

A framework for analysis

In this chapter, Bhaskar’s and Archer’s concepts are used as tools to analyse work in teaching and learning by bringing them together in a common framework.

Empirical(Experience

2

s & Observations)

Actual(Events)

Real(Unchanging Structures & Mechanisms)

Structure Culture Agency

Figure 1: A Framework of Analysis following Bhaskar (1978; 1979) & Archer (1995; 1996)

In the framework, the experiences of students, academics and other stakeholders as they engage with teaching and learning in higher education would be placed at the level of the empirical. Since each individual would experience higher education in different ways, these experiences would be understood to be relative and constructed as a result of personal and social histories. The level of the empirical would thus account for the difference in, for example, an academic saying ‘My teaching is good and students fail because they lack skills, cannot speak English and are not motivated’ and for AD practitioners arguing ‘The problem is not with the students but rather with the curriculum and the pedagogical approach used’. A set of course marks would also be seen as an empirical observation and would be located at the level of the empirical as would observations made of those course marks.

The myriad events taking place on a daily basis would then be placed at the level of the actual and would include an AD tutorial, a class in an Extended Programme, a Teaching and Learning Committee meeting or a debate in a Faculty Board or Senate about funding for student support/development activities. The variety and specificity of events is explained as the effects of different combinations of structural, cultural and agentic properties.

Both events and experiences/observations emerge as a result of structures and mechanisms at the level of the real coming together to exert tendential properties. Importantly, these structures and mechanisms, following Archer (ibid) are seen to be located in the three domains of culture, structure and agency and are analysed separately. This might mean, for example, that the observation, on the part of a lecturer, that her/his students have failed because they lack skills and cannot speak English could be analysed as emerging as a result of a set of cultural conditions related to the lecturer’s own experience at university, to structures such as social class and to students’ exercising agency in ways that the lecturer cannot recognize. As already noted, the fact that structures and mechanisms are tendential rather than causal is important given Bhaskar’s view of the world as an open system rather than one characterized by

3

determinism i.e. in which structural mechanisms are activated only when certain agents act in such as way as to trigger them.

This chapter now moves on to an attempt to use the framework to analyse the attempts of the AD movement over the years to support and develop student learning in order to promote access and success.

Reanalysing the development and support of student learning

Volbrecht & Boughey (2005) identify three ‘phases’ in the history of the AD movement: ‘Academic Support’, ‘Academic Development’ and ‘Higher Education Development’. In identifying these phases, Volbrecht & Boughey (ibid) note that this division is for convenience only, that the three phases should not be understood as being distinct from each other or having any marked transitions from one to the other. Significantly, they add that they ‘are aware that practices associated with the three phases have in some cases co-existed, and sometimes continue to do so’ (p.59).

In other work (Boughey, 2005:1) I once again stress that the phases should not be understood as distinct from each and argue that the phases ‘are indicative more of dominant discursive formulations than actual periods of time’. Following Chouliariki & Fairclough (1999), I then go on to note (ibid) that:

. . . these formulations are understood to give rise to ‘conjunctures’ or relatively stable sets of social practices around specific projects (in this case student support). This is an important point as, in many respects, the student support practices which have characterized each phase (or each discursive formulation) have co-existed in many cases and, in some, continue to do so alongside dominating practices.

In critical realist terms, what Volbrecht & Boughey (2005:58) identify as the ‘open sets of practices’ characterizing AD work can be seen to emerge from different sets of conditions which, using the framework proposed in this chapter, exist at the level of the real. In terms of the framework, therefore, the ‘phases’ are best understood as relatively stable sets of conditions from which practices and experiences of practice emerge. Some conditions are more or less dominant at any one time. This means that dominant sets of conditions can be related to time and that changes in practice over time can be related to shifts in conditions. It is in this context that the term ‘phase’ needs to be understood as it is used in this chapter.

I now turn to using the framework to analyse each of these sets of conditions within the three ‘phases’ identified by Volbrecht & Boughey (ibid).

The Academic Support phase

The domain of culture

4

The earliest programmes intended to support and develop students’ learning began in the early 1980s as a small number of black students gained entrance to the historically white liberal institutions as a result of ‘relaxed state apartheid policies’ (Pavlich & Orkin, 1993).

Given this context, it is hardly surprising that a concern for equity dominated the cultural conditions from which practices associated with the early initiatives emerged. As will be seen, however, the extent to which these initiatives sometimes marginalized and ‘marked’ students as different raises questions about the realization of this concern.

Torr (1991:624), gives an indication of the cultural assumptions dominating this phase of the movement’s work when she notes that early Academic Support Programmes (ASPs) were ‘developed to assist students without the necessary background to be able to benefit immediately from lectures and tutorials’. Alongside a concern for equity, then, was a deficit assumption about students in the context of an assurance about the ‘rightness’ of the practices which characterized the institutions to which they had been admitted. The cultural conditions from which practices characterizing the Academic Support phase can be seen to emerge can thus be seen to fall within the ambit of what Knoblauch & Brannon (1984) term a ‘cultural literacy’ model focused on the inculcation of western norms and values.

The practices arising from this set of conditions were therefore inherently liberal in intent in that they focused on attempting to give black students ‘equal opportunity’ by filling the gap between their poor socio-economic and educational backgrounds and university. Students’ ‘underpreparedness’ for tertiary study was seen to derive from apartheid which had structurally denied them access to quality education. Academic support work was then conceptualized as filling the gaps left by students’ impoverished educational experiences. Significant here was the lack of acknowledgement of tertiary learning as a socially constructed phenomenon underpinned by values about what can count as knowledge and how that knowledge can be known. Rather, learning, and achievement in learning, was viewed as dependent on factors inherent to the individual such as intelligence and ‘skills’.

Many of the theories informing practice in the early Academic Support phase can be seen to be consonant with the ideas above in that they view learning as socially and culturally disembedded. The idea of learning as disembedded needs to be contrasted with understandings of learning and teaching as social practices – as practices which are specific to times and places (see, for example, Gee, 1990). In the South African AD movement, it was only over time, however, that understandings of learning and teaching as social practices become more dominant.

A lot of early work focused on language and on students’ status as speakers of English as an additional language. This early language work tended to be based on what Christie (1985) terms a ‘model of language as an instrument of communication’ or on a model which understands language as a vehicle for

5

transmitting pre-formed ideas and concepts. This contrasts with a ‘model of language as a resource’ for making meanings (ibid) and which draws on social context in order to make the choices necessary to make those meanings (see also, Halliday, 1973; 1978; 1985). The early work thus tended to view language, like learning, as disembedded from social context and as consisting as a set of neutral ‘skills’. As a result, language development practices tended to focus on the form of the language and on the ‘skills’ necessary to encode and decode meanings into speech and writing.

An important step in this early language work (Starfield, 1990a; 1990b) involved drawing on Cummins’ (1979) work on Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). Cummins defines BICS as involving language use which is rich in paralinguistic support derived from the context in which it is used and which is also not cognitively demanding. In contrast, CALP is understood as language use which is cognitively demanding and which does not benefit from support from context. Although the BICS/CALP distinction was important in that it allowed practitioners to understand that students’ experiences with using language at tertiary level were not necessarily language ‘problems’ per se (in that many students had ample BICS but lacked CALP) in both their home and additional languages, the early work still lacked the sophisticated understandings of how social history and social context impacted on language use.

Other significant early work focused on access and admissions and on the development and on the identification of ‘potential’ to succeed in higher education in spite of poor scores on school leaving examinations. Many of these initiatives involved the identification of elements of cognition and affect impacting on academic success ( Potter & van der Merwe, 1993; van Dyk & van Dyk, 1993) although there was also a major focus on correlating scores on the Senior Certificate examination with performance at first year level (see, for example, Badenhorst et al. 1990).

Although the findings of studies conducted in the earliest years of the AD movement, along with the use of specific test batteries, might not have stood the test of time particularly in terms of theoretical challenges to, for example, the use of psychometric tests (with Wallace & Adams (1989), for example, making one of the earliest challenges), they were important in initiating areas of endeavour which remain significant in AD even today and which can be seen, for example, in the work of Yeld & Haeck, 1997; Yeld, 2003). The difference, however, lies in the availability of alternative understandings of what it means to succeed in higher education.

The domain of structureAs will be seen from the brief analysis of the domain of culture offered above, in the Academic Support phase, social group was clearly an important structure affecting who would be present at any of the events intended to provide student support and how those events might be experienced by students themselves. In 1984, for example, Scott (1984) was noting the resentment felt by many students

6

at having to complete ASP courses and linking this to black students’ sense of being singled out from the ‘mainstream’.

It is interesting that social class was not directly identified as a social structure in relation to the phenomenon of ‘disadvantage’ in the early Academic Support phase in spite of the fact that the majority of black students were working class because of the way apartheid had structured society. Arguably, this failure to identify social class in relation to disadvantage can be attributed to the cultural conditions of the struggle against apartheid which sought to elide difference. As will be seen below in relation to the Academic Development phase, this was to change arguably because of the theoretical positions which became available to practitioners because of shifts in the domain of culture.

At an organizational level, another way structure impacted on events and students’ experiences of those events involved the way early ASPs were located in institutions. Early work tended to be ‘adjunct’ to mainstream programmes in that support/development was programmed in addition to mainstream programmes and was offered by specially appointed staff members who were often housed in units or centres. These centres then serviced the perceived needs of students across the entire gamut of programmes offered by an institution. It is not difficult to see how the interplay with ideas dominant in the domain of culture led to the structure of the early programmes. If learning is viewed as disembedded from disciplinary and other contexts, then student development can also occur in isolation from those contexts. In practice, however, early practitioners found themselves working with content even though there is at least one report (Tisani, 1991) of practitioners being limited to work with ‘skills’ and being expressly forbidden to work with content.

Although many ASPs were located outside mainstream teaching and learning, in a few institutions, most notably the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Cape Town and the University of Natal, faculty-based foundation programmes providing access to specific mainstream programmes were established. The ‘embedding’ of development/support work in faculties was a feature which was going to become increasingly dominant as time moved on. It is important to note, however, that, even though this work was located in faculties, it was not part of the mainstream programmes which had been extended to incorporate it. This foundation work tended to be located in ‘Colleges’ or ‘Programmes’ which were the responsibility of the Faculty concerned but which still sat apart from the mainstream and continued to be taught by educational specialists rather than academics.

The location of many early programmes as ‘adjunct’ to the mainstream, also impacted on the way practitioners were appointed as ‘support’ rather than as ‘academic’ staff. This added to the fact that many early practitioners were appointed on the basis of their expertise as school teachers – a phenomenon related to the construction of the difficulties black students faced as due to their inadequate schooling in the apartheid system. Such practitioners were often minimally qualified and this, in addition to their location in ‘support’ services, limited the way they were able to engage with academic organizational

7

structures such as faculty boards and senates and also on the way they were able to engage with academics themselves. In many cases, this contributed to the marginalized position of many of the early programmes and practitioners.

Access to funding mechanisms located in material structures are obviously crucial to development work. In the academic support phase, funding tended to be donor based with institutions contributing in fairly minimal ways in the form of established posts. Hunter’s (1985) survey of ASPs at the four historically white liberal universities (Cape Town, the Witwatersrand, Rhodes & Natal) showed that the majority of posts in the ASPs were donor funded. Over the years, the South African Academic Development movement has consistently failed to develop a strong cadre of practitioners and, to a large extent, this can be attributed to the lack of permanent positions in the field or to a structural failure.

The domain of agencyKey to the set of conditions related to the Academic Support phase was the assigning of agency to students who were deemed have the ‘potential’ to succeed in higher education provided gaps in skills and conceptual development were filled as a result of support/development work. The assigning of agency to students and to the practitioners expected to work with them in a remedial fashion in this way takes no account of the alien nature of the system in which students were expected to succeed and which was picked up in later work in the Academic Development movement. Dominant assumptions in the domain of culture tended to focus on the ‘neutrality’ of learning and teaching without questioning how, for example, ways of reading and writing (and, at tertiary level, thus learning) worked to favour some and exclude others or how understandings of knowledge itself might work to include some at the expense of others.

In assigning agency, some early development/support programmes did acknowledge problems other than those related to cognition. Practitioners, for example, recognized the enormous challenges students living in poor conditions and with little money faced and acknowledged the way these challenges then impacted on learning. Significantly, a common response to the acknowledgement of these problems was for some programmes to appoint psychologists or social workers (Donald & Rutherford, 1994). Potter & van der Merwe (1993) give another indication of the role of counseling for ‘disadvantaged’ students when they refer to ‘poor study habits’ as a cause of failure and the need for students with such habits to be referred to counselors. Referral to counselors and psychologists suggests that once the difficulties experienced by students had been addressed in individual or group sessions, students would be able to exercise agency to learn in environments which were very different to those most had previously experienced. As will be seen later, this sort of assumption was challenged as years wore on.

It is also possible to discern agency in the work of many early AD practitioners who, in many respects, functioned as activists fighting for equity and for the rights of black students to a quality education. Practitioners wrote funding proposals, made arguments within institutional structures and undoubtedly did a great deal to improve the chances of the black students who had gained

8

entrance to the historically white liberal universities. As will be seen in the analysis of the next phase, however, the cultural system on which much of this early work was based was to be challenged.

A critical realist note As already noted, critical realists reject determinist views of the world favouring instead an understanding which perceives structures and mechanisms at the level of the real as tendential. This means that although the structures and mechanisms are enduring, the way they combine to produce events at the level of the actual and experiences and observations at the level of the empirical, where social interaction occurs, cannot always be predicted.

Earlier in this chapter, and following Volbrecht & Boughey (2005:58), AD was defined as an ‘open set of practices’ and it was pointed out that the practices which have characterized each phase of the movement have co-existed and, in some places, continue to co-exist, with other practices in different ways at different institutions. Critical realism would explain this by noting that in any institution the structures and mechanisms identified as part of the analysis are available to come together so that events and experiences at the levels of the actual and the empirical can emerge. This could mean that many of the observations made in relation to what, in this chapter, is termed the Academic Support phase can also be made alongside observations related to other, later, ‘phases’ of the movement. In offering this analysis, critical realism offers the opportunity for those working in the AD movement to become more conscious of the conditions from which the different practices they see and engage with emerge and to begin to understand how they can make choices and try to make the best of the conditions in which they work.

This chapter now moves to an analysis of the next phase of the movement, Academic Development.

Academic Development As already noted, the earliest development/support initiatives emerged in the early 1980s. By the middle of the decade, the first challenges to the cultural and structural conditions which had characterized what has been termed the Academic Support phase began to emerge. It was not until the end of the decade that these began to become more dominant, however, a phenomenon which coincided with the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC. Given the changes that occurred as apartheid was dismantled in the early to mid- 1990s, it is appropriate first to look at the domain of structure.

The domain of structureAccording to Kraak (2001:87), the early 1990s can be identified as a ‘pre-taking of power era’ involving the ‘mobilisation of the entire anti-apartheid movement behind the task of forging new policy propositions across the entire gamut of human existence’. Given this background, equity, defined in National Education Policy Investigation’s Report on Post-secondary Education as ‘the improved distribution of educational resources to disadvantaged communities’ (NEPI, 1992:11), was obviously a major issue. In the context of higher education, policy

9

documents therefore had the potential to work as mechanisms to promote equity. The extent to which the potential of polices to work as mechanisms was actualized, however, was dependent on the extent to which policies were implemented and, thus, on resources available for implementation.

In the face of this overwhelming demand for equity, the relatively small and focused efforts which characterized earlier Academic Support work were clearly going to be challenged and the realization slowly grew that future initiatives would need to address ‘disadvantage’ or ‘underpreparedness’ as a majority rather than a minority phenomenon, a point which was made in the literature by Mehl as early as 1988 and Moulder in 1991. This realization represented a shift in the domain of culture since it involved a reconceptualisation of the phenomena of ‘disadvantage’ and ‘underpreparedness’ themselves.

The idea that ‘underpreparedness’ would eventually be a majority phenomenon was supported by the experiences of those working in ASPs which had been set up on historically black campuses (such as the University of Bophuthatswana) as the 1980s wore on. Partly as a result of the nature of South African society at that time but also because of important theoretical differences, by 1986 those working on historically black campuses had established a professional organization named the South African Association of Academic Development (SAAAD). SAAAD existed alongside a group of practitioners from the historically white liberal campuses who ran an annual conference and who had published proceedings from that conference as ASPects. Other practitioners had become members of the South African Association for Research and Development in Higher Education (SAARDHE) and had published in the Association’s journal the South African Journal of Higher Education (SAJHE). SAAAD became a rallying point for what, at that time, emerged as a vociferous and apparently radical opposition to dominant student support practices. Over time, a growing number of practitioners working at the historically white institutions came to adopt positions advocated by SAAAD and, eventually, to join the organization which later became an overarching professional body for those working in the field of Academic Development.

Over the years, and as will be shown later in this chapter, the existence of a professional organization as a structure providing support and development for practitioners as well as a space for the sharing of beliefs, values and theories about the practices they engaged with was to be an ongoing issue. In the Academic Development phase, the emergence of SAAAD was critical in serving this function and bringing about shifts in events at the level of the actual and experiences at the level of the empirical.

The shift to democracy also brought about changes in funding. In the early 1990s, approximately R70 million worth of public funding was made available for Academic Development work via the Independent Development Trust (IDT). This funding was grant based and required proposals for projects to be developed and submitted. The availability of this funding led to a growth in AD work but, as it was grant based, it did not necessarily lead to an increase in the number of established posts in the institutions which used it. This then impacted

10

on the development of a cadre of highly qualified and experienced professionals who could interact with academics as equals and who could find a way to argue their case through institutional structures.

In the realm of practice different kinds of organizational structures were also developed. The existence of AD units and centres servicing a range of programmes and initiatives across entire institutions has already been noted as a characteristic of the Academic Support phase. In the Academic Development phase, although central units and centres continued to exist, they were accompanied by attempts to ‘embed’ AD in faculties and departments in an attempt to bring about change in mainstream practices related to teaching and learning.

Projects typical of what became known as the ‘infusion model’ (Walker & Badsha, 1993) included attempts to ‘embed’ tutorials in mainstream teaching so that they became the responsibility of the department, a process which then allowed AD practitioners to focus on tutor development rather than tutoring themselves (see, for example, Davies & Tisani, 1993). Other projects centred on introducing new forms of pedagogy and curriculum structure (see, for example, Cornell, 1992; Cornell & Witz, 1993), on the development of language across the curriculum (see, for example, Boughey & Van Rensburg, 1994; Coetzee & Boughey, 1994; Motha & May, 1996).

Critical to the success of these projects was the willingness of mainstream academic staff members to engage with the need for change as there was no structural need for them to do so. The success of the projects, in other words, was dependent on mainstream staff and institutional managers/leaders subscribing to the values and beliefs which dominated the AD cultural system, which were not the same as the dominant cultural systems of the institutions in which they were based. As a result, work completed during this second phase was patchy and had no guarantee that it would be sustained once individuals engaged in the projects moved on or when soft funding was exhausted.

The domain of cultureKey to the domain of culture in the Academic Development phase were challenges to the understandings of ‘disadvantage’ which had sustained the earlier academic support conjuncture. Mehl (1988:17) summarises these understandings thus:

The questions which are being addressed have changed from how the “underdeveloped” are “developed”, to examining the basic underpinning of the institutions themselves. In the process it is becoming clearer that in relation to the realities of present-day South Africa it is not simply a case of students carrying various educational deficits onto the campus with them because of the socio-economic and political dispensation, but rather a case of the universities themselves, as represented by academic and administrative staff, being deficient, if the vision of a non-racial, democratic South Africa is to be realized.

11

This shift to locating ‘disadvantage’ in the institution, and, later in the practices which sustained it, led to developments at a theoretical level in the sense that practitioners began to draw on a wider range of theories and more social theory than before. Importantly, the shift also involved a questioning of the extent to which students could exercise the agency needed for success. As Mehl (ibid:18) himself points out, the idea that change should take place at institutional rather than individual level is linked to People’s Education, a radical reform movement which aimed to use curricula1 to bring about change in South African education. For Mehl (ibid:18) this process had to be linked to that of Africanisation or of ‘bringing the university more into contact with the stark reality which the colonized student represents’.

The conceptual underpinnings of what might be termed the ‘social turn’ in the AD movement can be discerned in the work of a number of theorists including James Paul Gee (1990) whose Social Linguistics and Literacies proved to be a seminal text informing ideas related to learning and teaching. Gee uses the term ‘Discourse’ (intentionally capitalized) to refer to the notion of a ‘way of being’ in the world. The term ‘literacy’ is then used to denote the ability to demonstrate that way of being. Literacy is thus understood to be much wider than reading and writing and to be more than a matter of acultural, asocial, apolitical ‘skill’ since the practices in which it is manifest result from the values and attitudes which inform them. In Gee’s terms, academic Discourses can be seen to be underpinned by values and attitudes relating to what can count as knowledge and how that knowledge can be known. Thus, demonstrating literacy as a scientist (by for example, speaking and writing in ways common to scientists, wearing a white coat in a laboratory and so on) can be seen to relate to a valuing of objectivity and, thus, to an ontological position which is inherently empiricist.

Key to gaining membership of a Discourse is access to the values and attitudes which underpin it. Gee explicates this point by making a distinction between ‘acquisition’ and ‘learning’. Acquisition takes place over time through exposure to a Discourse and through contact with those who are literate in it. Through this exposure and contact, novices not only acquire the forms or literacy practices which characterize, sustain and reproduce the Discourse but also the values which underpin those practices. Learning, which occurs as a result of being taught, is unlikely to enliterate novices in a Discourse. Learning is however important as it is only through learning that critique of the Discourse and its practices becomes possible as learning offers a meta-frame through which the Discourse and its literacy can be analysed. By introducing the idea of critique, Gee thus offers an alternative to the idea of assimilation into a community of practice which is not always present in work which understands the university from a socio-cultural perspective (see, for example, Bartholomae, 1985).

Underpinning the work of Gee (1990) and Taylor et al. (1988) is the idea of literacy (in the sense of reading and writing related behaviours) as a social practice. Although Gee’s construct of literacy is wider in that it encompasses

1 The term ‘curriculum’ is used in its widest sense here and is intended to embrace the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’ of teaching. Curriculum would therefore include teaching methodology and assessment practices as well as a negotiated understanding of what should be taught.

12

behaviours other than those related to printed text, Street’s (1984, 1995, 1996) ‘ideological’ model of literacy can be viewed as related to Gee’s position. In contrast to the ‘autonomous’ model which constructs literacy as a neutral technical skill involving the decoding and encoding of print, Street’s ‘ideological’ model acknowledges that reading and writing involve values and attitudes to printed text which then give rise to reading practices. The ability to read ‘critically’, for example, is thus not only a matter of identifying arguments and evaluating their validity but also involves a predisposition to challenge, rather than revere, the ‘word’ of the text. The idea of reading as a value-driven practice, rather than a skill, also allows us to account for the ‘setting aside’ of printed text in favour of oral communication even when, technically, people have the ability to read those texts (see Heath, 1983 on this point).

These sorts of understandings presented profound challenges to the practices which had characterized the Academic Support phase. If literacy is acquired, rather than learned, then the development of learning appropriate to academic Discourses needs to be conceived as a process which takes place over time through exposure to mainstream teaching, which attempts to make overt both the practices and the values and attitudes which underpin them, rather than in adjunct classes and tutorials. In critical realist terms, these sorts of theories in the domain of culture at the level of the real thus give rise to attempts to infuse development work into mainstream teaching at the level of the actual.

Other theory commonly cited during the Academic Development phase was Bourdieu’s (2002) notion of ‘cultural capital’ which offered an alternative construction to the notion of ‘disadvantage’ which had sustained the Academic Support phase. Mandew (1993:622) summarises Bourdieu from his position within AD thus:

‘[Bourdieu] asserts that it is through control of the education system and by controlling the actual criteria of cultural selection that the dominant class ensures the reproduction of its own culture. According to this view, unlike working class parents, middle class parents pass on to their children skills and knowledge with which to make the most of what school has to offer. These skills and knowledge are what constitute cultural capital.’

The relevance of the notion of ‘cultural capital’ to the position of black students entering universities which were informed by western, masculine and essentially middle class traditions is obvious. The use of Bourdieu’s work can thus be seen to represent an attempt to understand the structural conditions on which university entrance was dependent within the domain of culture.

The Academic Development phase also drew heavily on the work of theorists such as Feuerstein (Feuerstein et al., 1980) and Vygotsky (1978, 1986) which took account of society in explaining learning rather than merely locating it as an individual phenomenon. Feuerstein’s (ibid) construct of the ‘mediated learning experience’ (MLE) defined as ‘a special kind of interaction, involving a human being who interposes himself between the learner and the world of stimuli in

13

order to mediate or give meaning to the stimuli’ (Mentis & Frelick, 1993:104) was attractive to AD practitioners as it constructed a role for them and for academic staff in the interposing position. The lack of mediated learning experiences in students’ own learning histories also provided an explanation for the problems they experienced upon entering tertiary education. Similarly, Vygotsky’s (1978:86) notion of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) defined as ‘the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or more capable peers’ was also attractive to those working with the development of student learning as it not only identified a ‘teaching space’ which could be cognitively substantiated but also a role for them and mainstream lecturers within that space.

Also significant in the Academic Development phase was Geisler’s (1994) work entitled Academic Literacy and the Nature of Expertise. In a wide review of research, Geisler showed how i) school based reading and writing practices are qualitatively different to practices within the university and ii) how school does not necessarily prepare students for university study. An example of this phenomenon is the reading comprehension which requires school students to answer questions using only information contained in the text. Students thus come to understand that the text is a source of knowledge. Higher education, on the other hand, requires students to use information in the context (i.e. in other texts) and information stored as prior knowledge to interrogate the text before coming to any conclusions. This practice is widely referred to as ‘reading critically’ and is something prized in higher education circles yet school does not prepare students to do this.

Common to all the theories outlined above was their ability to sustain an ‘infused’ approach to student support because of i) their acknowledgement of academic ways of knowing and of the behaviours related to those ways of knowing as social practices and ii) their shared understanding that these practices are only developed over time and through contact with those who are already ‘literate’ in Gee’s (1990) terms. This meant that they were available to challenge understandings of academic behaviours as asocial, acultural ‘skills’ which could be taught in special ‘adjunct’ classes which had dominated the Academic Support phase. The shifts in the domain of culture between the Academic Support phase and the Academic Development phase were therefore quite profound.

Agency

Given the strong focus on equity in the domain of culture and the argument for institutions to be transformed to meet the needs of individual students in the Academic Development phase, it is not surprising that much of the work related to agency was ‘activist’ in nature. Commonly, individuals who were heads of Academic Development units or centres argued the case for the need for the transformation of curricula and pedagogy as they engaged with institutional structures such as faculty boards and senates. The potential of these arguments

14

to bring about change was, of course, compromised by status of the people making them and their construction as ‘other’ to the mainstream academy thanks to dominant ideas in the domain of culture. The interplay of culture, structure and agency can thus be seen to be critical to the emergence of change in events at the level of the actual (an example of which might be the decision on the part of a member of the academic staff to engage with curriculum review in order to enhance student learning) and experiences at the level of the empirical on the part of both students and staff.

One significant way in which agency was exercised during the Academic Development phase, however, related to attempts to develop academic capacity within the AD movement itself. Practitioners began to realize that, if they were to be able to engage with mainstream academic staff members as equals, they needed to upgrade their qualifications and begin to produce research. Capacity building within the movement around research became key and SAAAD, the professional organization described above, played an important role structurally in doing this. Annual conferences provided spaces for practitioners to ‘practise’ being academics and regional workshops and meetings provided important opportunities for members to learn about research. These observations regarding the exercise of agency in relation to capacity building speak to Sewell’s (1992) point that structures empower agents differentially and that agency can be collective or individual. In this case, SAAAD appears to have acted as a structure which empowered both individuals and the AD community as a collective.

A critical/social realist overview of the first two phases of work with student learning

As will be evident from the analysis so far, shifts in the domain of culture gave rise to differences in the way attempts to develop and support student learning were conceptualized in the Academic Support and Academic Development ‘phases’. Although alternative understandings of the constructs of ‘disadvantage’ and ‘underpreparedness’ became available to those involved in student support and development work, other elements of the cultural system remained unchanged. Discourses constructing students’ learning ‘problems’ as a result of the poor schooling system and their social and cultural histories remained dominant in most universities. As a result, the practice of ‘infusion’, which emerged from the alternative understandings, was challenged by dominant ideas at the level of the real and this prevented the sustained emergence of events related the transformation of curricula and pedagogy identified as critical by those subscribing to these alternative understandings.

Although alternative understandings in the domain of culture did become available to those involved in student support and development work, shifts in the domain of structure lagged behind cultural change. The potential of change in the domain of structure to work with understandings in the domain of culture will be discussed as this chapter proceeds.

15

Higher Education Development

As already noted, the final phase in the history of the Academic Development movement identified by Volbrecht & Boughey (2005) is ‘Higher Education Development’. Critical to this phase is the construction of the work of the Academic Development movement as a resource for institutional efficiency in relation to teaching and learning. The final section of this chapter examines the conditions from which practice aimed at higher education development emerge.

The domain of culture

As I have pointed out elsewhere (Boughey, 2007), shifts in the policy field have been instrumental in the positioning of Academic Development work within discourses related to efficiency rather than equity. Several writers (Kraak, 2001; Oldfield, 2001) have pointed out that the negotiated settlement which led to the first democratic election had profound implications for policy. The liberation movement had been ideologically positioned in what Kraak (ibid:88) terms ‘left socialist formulations’. As the ANC came to power, however, a shift from social democratic to neo-liberal positions occurred and was manifest in the development of stringent macro economic frameworks as the 1990s wore on (Fataar, 2001). Shifts in the domain of culture were therefore accompanied by structural adjustments.

At the level of the actual, the effects of the ideological shifts in the domain of culture were experienced most painfully in the form of cuts for Academic Development work located within equity frameworks as the century came to a close. The reliance on soft funding in the Academic Development phase has been noted earlier in this chapter. As soft funding came to an end, changes in the way the public universities were funded meant that posts established to further ‘transformation’ and ‘infusion’ were lost as institutions were unable to cover their costs.

The interplay of culture with structure is also evident in other areas. As the prospect of democracy became more and more possible, the idea of South Africa needing to participate in a globalised economy began to influence thinking around education in the form of the ‘high skills’ discourse (Kraak, 2001). The effects of globalization as a macro economic structure thus came to be experienced in the way higher education came to be constructed as a provider of a skilled workforce for a global economy. This then came to involve a focus on the need for efficiency in the sector – a discursive shift from which new forms of student development/support practices, related to the need for universities to improve graduation and throughput rates and decrease attrition, were to emerge.

In the last section of this chapter, some of the theoretical positions in the domain of culture out of which practices related to ‘infusion’ and ‘transformation’ emerged were outlined. These positions continue to be available to the field and, indeed, have been developed and expanded as practitioners have increasingly drawn on social theory and on ‘social’ theories of learning and language even

16

within dominant constructions of student development work as related to efficiency. Key to this expansion has been thinking which draws on the work of British Sociologist Basil Bernstein (see, for example, Shay, 2008(a), 2008(b); Vorster, 2010) and work drawing on Activity Theory (see, for example, Garraway, 2006, 2007, 2009a, 2009b). Much of this work has focused on the curriculum and, as new forms of institutions have emerged in the universities of technology and comprehensives, has included the need to integrate the world of work in learning (see, for example, Garraway, 2006, 2007, 2009a, 2009b, 2010; Winberg, 2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b. 2009).

The significance of theoretically based research in the South African Academic Development movement needs to be appreciated. In a review of forty years worth of research into student learning in higher education based on a content analysis of three premier journals in the field, Haggis (2009:384) notes the predominance of approaches which privilege what she terms ‘individualised and static aspects of cognitive psychology’ throughout the 1990s at the expense of a ‘more nuanced and critical approach to the theorization of the individual and society’ (p.383). It will be apparent from the review of the literature related to what has been termed the ‘domain of culture’ in this chapter, that South African Academic Development practitioners were, in many respects ahead of thinkers elsewhere. The tradition of drawing on critical approaches has continued into the third phase of AD work. Haggis concludes her review by noting that ‘[i]f we can begin to stand even further outside the results of our own enculturationand start to see things differently, a further question is how it might be possible to find productive and generative ways of challenging aspects of what we see that we wish to change’ (p.288). I would argue that Haggis’ identification of the need to stand ‘outside the results of our own enculturation’ has long characterized South African Academic Development work. What has happened, however, is that contributions to the international literature are only now beginning to be made in any number with the result that much of the rich work which has characterized the movement is only available in the relatively ‘fragile’ forms of conference publications and in local journals.

However, it is also important to note that the sort of consolidation in the domain of culture identified above has not been uniform, largely because of the large turn over in practitioners thanks to the instability of funding and the resultant lack of permanent positions and career progression. As a result, newcomers need to build understandings and, in the meantime, often tend to draw on many of the ‘commonsense’ theories and approaches which sustained the Academic Support phase and which are dominant outside Academic Development communities.

The domain of structure

Although development did take place in the domain of culture, arguably developments in the domain of structure have led to change in the way student development/support work is practised.

17

One of the most important developments involved the establishment of a National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and the concomitant introduction of outcomes based education (OBE), as a result of the SAQA Act (Act 58 of 1995). The NQF distinguishes between a qualification and a programme of study leading to that qualification. Qualifications are described in terms of learning outcomes and programmes then need to be designed in a way which allow learners to attain those outcomes as efficiently as possible.

The need for programme design then leads to the possibility of ‘aligning’ entrance criteria, learning outcomes, associated assessment criteria, assessment tasks, pedagogical approaches, learning resources, credit values and more direct forms of student support in order to allow the programmeto fulfill its purpose and produce the kind of graduates/diplomates/certificated individuals described in its purpose statement and indicated by its location on the NQF.

Although OBE has been subject to strong critique because of its effect on what Muller (2008) terms the ‘conceptual coherence’ of some curricula, the construct of curriculum alignment provides institutions with a tool which can be used to ensure that students’ learning needs are met and standards are maintained. Although this tool is available, it tends not to be used in institutions i) lacking capacity in the management of teaching and learning and where structures to manage teaching and learning are not in place, ii) lacking capacity in the field of AD itself iii) where cultural conditions mean mainstream staff are not prepared to engage with issues related to teaching and learning or iv) where mainstream staff lack capacity to work with curricular and pedagogical issues. While the NQF and the introduction of OBE have been significant developments in the domain of structure, once again the interplay between culture and structure can be seen to impact on the extent to which structural change at the level of the real can bring about change at the levels of the actual and the empirical in the form of increased success rates for students and enhanced experiences of both learning and success.

A second major structural development occurred in the early 2000s as a result of the National Plan for Higher Education (NPHE) (DoE, 2001) which provided for the establishment of new institutions and new institutional types. The emergence of Universities of Technology and Comprehensive Universities2 then opened the way for i) a wider range of qualifications to be offered by single institutions and ii) specialization and focus according to institutional type (traditional university, comprehensive university, university of technology). Although the delay in the development of a new Higher Education Qualification Framework (HEQF) impacted on the way comprehensive universities and universities of technology in particular have been able to develop curricula which are relevant to their new roles, the availability of a range of qualifications from NQF Level 5 upwards in a single institution meant that students could be placed in aprogramme which closely matched their learning needs and abilities.

2 Comprehensive universities emerged as a result of the merger of former technikons with traditional universities. Comprehensive universities offer a mix of vocationally oriented programmes and more traditional programmes.

18

The ability to place students accurately is, of course, dependent on information about the students available on admission. If this information for placing were available and, if programmes were well aligned, this would have the potential to impact on success, throughput and graduation rates. Unfortunately, institutional procedures for placing students along with the lack of programme alignment mean that this potential is not always capitalized upon.

Specialisation and focus by institutional type has the potential to impact in similar ways in that, for example, UoTs could be expected to develop the expertise to identify the students who could benefit from the types of programmes they offered and also to develop high quality specialized programmes which would support students through to completion. As I have shown elsewhere (Boughey, 2010) however, the specialization in teaching and learning required by universities of technology has not always been developed.

Problems in finalizing a new Higher Education Qualifications Framework for the South African system have been noted above. The new HEQF was published in 2007 (DoE 2007) and, although indications are that this will need further refinement, many institutions have already begun to review qualifications and the programmes leading to those qualifications in order to ensure they are aligned with the framework.

Ideally reviewing qualifications and the programmes leading to those qualifications should involve more than a paper exercise and should take into consideration understandings of alignment outlined above. For this to happen a number of things need to be in place at institutional level including the will (on the part of management and mainstream staff) and capacity (on the part of AD practitioners and mainstream staff) to drive and implement the review process. Where will is concerned, once again the possibility of conditions in the domain of culture to block the potential of a structural development to bring about change can be discerned.

Yet another development relates to the establishment of the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC) and the introduction of quality assurance to South African higher education in 2001 (CHE, 2001). The HEQC is currently completing its first round of institutional audits. These audits have attempted to affirm an institution’s own evaluation of the extent to which it has met audit criteria in a number of areas including teaching and learning. As I have shown (Boughey, 2009, 2010), at an institutional level this has resulted in the development of quality assurance mechanisms including policies on teaching and learning and attempts to use feedback from students to enhance teaching and course design. Although quality assurance frameworks and mechanisms are in place to a greater or lesser extent at most institutions, the extent to which they are implemented in relation to teaching and learning varies enormously.

In addition to conducting institutional audits, the HEQC also works in the area of programme accreditation. Institutions wishing to offer new programmes need accreditation from the HEQC before students can be enrolled. Programme accreditation processes require alignment of the curriculum described earlier.

19

As well as accrediting new programmes, the HEQC has also conducted a number of national reviews of established programmes. Once again, the focus in the review is alignment of all elements of the programme in order to ensure that the programme is fit for the purpose it has identified for itself. A review of the work of the HEQC conducted in 2008 (HEQC, 2008) identified national reviews as one of the most successful mechanisms for enhancing quality in teaching and learning. Since that time, no new national reviews have been conducted although a review of LLB programmes now appears to be underway. National reviews, like programme accreditation and institutional audit, depend on peer review and on the capacity of mainstream academics to make judgments regarding the quality. Although the HEQC has put a great deal of effort into the development of this capacity, arguably it is still not in abundant supply.

Funding has been noted as an important mechanism throughout this chapter. The new funding framework related to three year rolling plans (DoE, 2004) allocates funding for teaching and learning on the basis of agreed enrolments and the extent and rate at which enrolled students then pass through an institution in order to graduate. Norms for success, throughput and graduation rates have been established and institutions with ‘graduate shortfalls’ (DoHET, 2009:11) became eligible for a Teaching Development Grant which replaces part of the output subsidy. Until now, although these grants have been earmarked and allocated to institutions for the development of teaching, but no accountability mechanisms have been in place to ensure that this development actually takes place. As a result, much of this funding has simply been used for institutional running costs. The recommendations of a review of teaching development grants in 2008 (DoE, 2008) have now been included in a recent Ministerial Statement on Funding (DoE, 2009) and, from 2011 a new system will be in place. This new system will make teaching development grants available to all institutions, not only those with performance falling ‘below national output norms’ (DoE, 2009:12).

The Grants will be allocated on the basis of plans submitted by institutions identifying i) programmes in which the graduation rates of disadvantaged students are significantly lower than those of advantaged students ii) what the DoE (ibid) terms ‘killer’ courses within those programmes (i.e. those courses in which large numbers of disadvantaged students fail) and iii) the interventions they would make to improve success rates in those courses. Annual progress reports would then be required on the way the grants have been used. This represents a significant improvement on the way teaching development grants have been allocated until now although the Ministerial Statement does not take into account the ongoing need for development in all courses if curricula are to remain relevant and if proactive measures are to be take to prevent students failing. Most significantly, the change offers an important opportunity for student development work linked to the motivator of funding provided i) the will and capacity to manage grants at an institutional level and ii) the capacity on the part of mainstream academic staff and AD practitioners is available to drive curriculum development and the enhancement of pedagogy. Once again the significance of conditions in the domain of culture needs to be considered.

20

Yet another funding mechanism impacting on Academic Development relates to the introduction of Foundation Programme Grants in 2000 as a form of non-recurrent funding. As noted in earlier in this chapter, bridging and foundation courses were among some of the earliest forms of student support. As also noted, one of the problems with the earliest forms of this intervention related to the fact that these courses did not necessarily articulate with mainstream programmes. The DoE’s Foundation Programme Grants now require students to be admitted to ‘Extended Programmes’ or fully accredited programmes which have been lengthened by up to a year of additional study in order to allow for the inclusion of activities intended to support and develop students enrolled on them. In principle, this is a significant advance as it i) requires institutions to identify those students who could benefit from an Extended Programme and ii) design and offer programmes which include an ‘integrated’ foundation phase.

In practice, however, the potential of Extended Programmes is not always capitalised upon because of i) poor placement procedures involving the identification of students who are weaker than students admitted to regular programmes when the success, throughput and graduation rates of the students admitted to regular programmes already fall far below DoE norms ii) foundation provision based on commonsense rather than theory and research generated in the field of Academic Development over the last twenty five years and iii) the failure of the foundation phase to articulate with mainstream provision with the result that students continue to ‘hit the wall’ and fail once they exit the foundation phase. Once again, these issues relate to management and capacity at institutional levels and, importantly, to conditions in the domain of culture.

Until now, the DoE has relied on the services of an expert group in order to award funding on the basis of a set of strictly applied criteria for funding. These criteria however only relate to the broad curriculum structure and not to course design. In addition, although the DoE analyse students’ performance on Extended Programmes, no mechanisms are in place to identify those programmes where students still continue to fail. The CHE is currently exploring the idea of the introduction of a four year ‘extended’ programme more generally in the form of a four year bachelor’s degree. Such an initiative would have enormous implications for funding and other policies. A critical question, however, relates to the extent the higher education system would have the capacity to implement four year programmes given some of the problems outlined above in relation to current extended programmes and especially given conditions in the domain of culture.

Yet another mechanism emerging from the level of the real involves the development of systems to track students’ performance. In recent years, terms such as ‘success rates’, ‘graduation rates’ and ‘throughput’ have increasingly become part of institutional discourse as institutional leadership and management teams have tried to manage performance in order to maximize subsidy income. One effect of the inclusion of these terms in institutional discourse in the domain of culture is very evident in AD related discourses where practitioners often construct their work within the need for improved efficiency measured by increased throughput and success and graduation rates. Linked to

21

this phenomenon, and also to the work of the HEQC which has stressed the use of institutional data in managing quality in its audit processes, is the idea of ‘tracking’ . This involves the use of a data base to i) track students’ performance against the criteria used to admit them to the university in order to validate those criteria and ii) to identify students ‘at risk’ on the basis of their performance on assessment tasks in the courses they take in order to offer appropriate interventions and iii) to identify courses with high failure rates in order to effect some sort of curricular or pedagogical intervention. Not all institutions have tracking mechanisms in place and, even where systems have developed, the structures which identify students as being ‘at risk’ are not always sufficient to provide the support and development required. Once again, development in this area requires agency to be exercised to manage tracking and to effect improvement at institutional levels.

The focus on admissions and placement testing in the earliest phase of student development /support work has been noted earlier in this chapter. The National Benchmark Tests (NBTs), developed under the auspices of Higher Education South Africa (HESA) are the latest generation of a long line of tests developed thanks to the expertise of the Alternative Admissions Research Project at the University of Cape Town. The NBTs, which test students in the domains of Academic Literacy, Quantitative Literacy and Cognitive Academic Mathematical Proficiency, aim to identify three kinds of students: i) students who can be admitted directly into a regular programme and be expected to succeed without any additional form of support ii) students who can be admitted into a regular programme and can be expected to succeed with support deemed appropriate by the institution iii) students whose learning challenges are so severe that they could not be expected to cope in regular programmes and would need to be admitted to some form of non-credit bearing preparatory programme. The NBTs have been piloted and are now offered at venues across the country in the year prior to that in which students seek admission to institutions of higher education.

Although the NBTs offer a powerful mechanism for placing students in appropriate programmes, their administration at institutional level means that the mechanism does not always live up to its promise. At many universities, students ‘walk in’ to campus in February having made no previous application. This means that, if the tests were to be used, then they would need to be administered in February as students were on the campus unless institutions were willing to refuse all ‘walk ins’. Alternatively existing structures to prepare students for university admission (career guidance, advice about applications, advice about programmes etc) would need to be enhanced so that they functioned effectively and students could be guided into taking the tests in the year prior to their admission and counseled on results. For the tests to be used optimally, there would also need to be a focus on the development of capacity in managing and developing teaching and learning at institutional levels and particularly on the ability to develop appropriate interventions at the level of curriculum. Once again the importance of conditions in the domain of institutional culture is apparent if admissions and placement testing is to be realized as a mechanism with the potential to impact on student learning.

22

Agency

The last phase of work in student learning has been described as having been characterized by a focus on efficiency and as being constructed within the need for higher education development. This construction in the domain of culture has resulted in the establishment of senior positions in institutional management structures with responsibility for managing teaching and learning. The potential of these individuals to act as social actors with the power to bring about enhanced student learning is, however, related to the ideas they can draw on in the cultural domain. All too often, however, the ‘theoretical capital’ lies not with these individuals but in individuals in teaching and learning centres or in the centres as collective/ corporate agents.

At other institutions, there is very little ‘theoretical capital’ on which to draw, a phenomenon which relates to the historical failure of the field of Academic Development to build a cadre of practitioners largely because of structural conditions. The need for this cadre to be built from now on cannot be overestimated.

The way forward?

This chapter has attempted to track shifts in structural, cultural and agential conditions at the level of the real in relation to work intended to develop and support student learning in the South African higher education system. In the analysis, the interplay of culture with structure has emerged as critical.

In the earliest phase of student development work, arguably both structural and cultural systems did not create the situational logics/ conditions conducive to AD work. In the second Academic Development phase, cultural systems developed to the extent that powerful theoretical understandings started to become available to explain what was experienced and observed at the levels of the empirical and the actual. The existence of dominant alternatives to these theoretical positions in the form of commonsense and deficit discursive constructions of students’ problems served to work against the potential of these theoretical positions to bring about change. At the same time, conditions in the domain of structure meant that gains which had been made in the domain of culture could not be maximized through the conjunction of structure and culture.

In relation to the most recent phase of student development and support work, I have attempted to show how the emergence of structural mechanisms have opened the way for new forms of practice to emerge. Critical to the success of these structural developments are, however, conditions in the domain of culture which continue to have the potential to block emergent practices. Once again, the domain of culture emerges as highly significant in the analysis.

In April 2010, the new Minister of Higher Education and Training, Dr Blade Nzimande, convened a Stakeholder Summit on Higher Education Transformation. The Declaration which emerged from the Summit (REF)

23

recommends the development of mechanisms to promote student-centredness and caring universities and the development of a charter on teaching and learning. Both of these recommendations emerged from an acknowledgement that it was the universities which needed to transform rather than students which needed to be ‘fixed’ in order to to enter unchanged institutions – an idea which, as this chapter has shown, has informed student development and support work since the mid 1980s. Critically, although the Summit Declaration recognizes a number of challenges for the South African higher education system, it does not overtly identify challenges in the domain of academic culture which have worked to resist change over the years. If the analysis in this chapter is correct, it is, however, in this area that most work remains to be done.

Works Cited

Archer, M. (1996). Culture and Agency: The place of culture in social theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Archer, M. (1995). Realist Social Theory: The morphogenetic approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Archer, M. (1998). Social theory and the analysis of society. In T. M. Williams, Knowing the Social World. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Badenhorst, F.D., Forster, D.H. & Lea, S.J. (1990). Factors affecting academic performance in first year psychology at the University of Cape Town. South African Journal of Higher Education , 4 (1), 39-45.

Bartholomae, D. (1985). Inventing the University. In M.Rose (Ed.), When a writer can't write: Studies in writer's block and other composing process problems (pp. 134-165). Guilford, New York.

Bhaskar, R. (1978). A Realist Theory of Science (2nd ed.). Sussex: The Harvester Press.

Bhaskar, R. (1979). The possibility of naturalism: a philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences. New York: Routledge .

Boughey, C. &. Van Rensburg, V. (1994). Writing to learn in Occupational Therapy. In M.Walker (Ed.), Curriculum Development: Issues and Cases. Bellville: University of the Western Cape Press.

Boughey, C. (2005). Lessons learned from the South African Academic Development Movement for the FET Sector. Commissioned Report for the HSRC. Cape Town: HSRC.

Boughey, C. (2007). Educational Development in South Africa: From social reproduction to capitalist expansion? Higher Education Policy , 20, 5-18.

24

Boughey, C. (2009). A meta-analysis of teaching and learning at the five research intensive South African universities Not Affected by Mergers. Pretoria: Council on Higher Education.

Boughey, C. (2010). A meta analysis of teaching and learning at four South African universities of technology. Pretoria: Council on Higher Education.

Bourdieu, P. (2002). Forms of capital. In N. Biggart (Ed.), Readings in Economic Sociology. Malden, Mass: Blackwell.

Chouliariki, L. &. Fairclough, N. (1999). Discourse in Late Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Christie, F. (1985). Language Education. Victoria: Deakin University Press.

Coetzee, S. &. Boughey, C. (1994). Personal Voice and academic knowledge: The story of writing to learn in Occupational Therapy continues . . . In B. &. M.Walker (Ed.), Voices, Learning and Development. Bellville: University of the Western Cape Press.

Cornell, C. Collaborative work on a 'Foundation Course' in history as argument: Towards a case study. Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the South African Association for Academic Development, Port Elizabeth Technikon, 3rd - 5th December 1992.

Cornell, C. &. Witz, L. (1992). The debate continues: Critical perspectives on the development of the History I curricuum at the University of the Western Cape. Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the South African Association for Academic Development, 1st - 3rd December 1993.

Council on Higher Education, (2001). Founding Document of the Higher Education Quality Committee. Pretoria : CHE.

Cummins, J. (1986). Language proficiency and academic achievement . In J. &. M.Swain (Ed.), Bilingualism in Education (pp. 222-251). London: Longman.

Davies, E. &. Tisani, N. (1993). 5 years of tutor training at Rhodes University. Proceedings of the 1993 Conference of the South African Association for Academic Development, University of the Western Cape 1st - 3rd December 1993.

DoE. (2001). National Plan for Higher Education . Pretoria : DoE.

DoE. (2004). A New Funding Framework: How grants are allocated to public higher education institutions. . Pretoria : DoE.

DoE. (2007). Higher Education Qualifications Framework, Government Gazette, October 7th 2007. Pretoria: Government Printers.

25

DoE. (2008). Report of the Ministerial Task Team on Teaching Development Grants. Pretoria: DoE.

DoHET. (2009). Ministerial Statement on Higher Education Funding 2010/2011 to 2011/2012. Pretoria: DoHET.

Donald, C. &. Rutherford, M. (1994). Evaluation of a first year of a college of science. South African Journal of Higher Education , 8 (2), 45-53.

Fataar, A. (2000). Engaging the narrowing education trajectory in South Africa. South African Review of Education , 6, 19-30.

Feurstein, R. R. (1980). Instrumental enrichment: An intervention program for cognitive modifiability . Baltimore, MD: University Park Press.

Garraway, J. (2006). Creating productive interactions between work and the academy. Higher Education , 52, 447-464.

Garraway, J. (2007). In praise of difference: Analysing work/academic negotiations in designing university curricula. REsearch and Development in Higher Education , 30 (1).

Garraway, J. (2009a). Higher education and the world of work. In E.Bitzer (Ed.), Higher education in South Africa: A scholarly look behind the scenes. Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University Press.

Garraway, J. (2009b). The role of difference in the creation of work-responsive curriculum units. Higher Education Research and Development , 28 (6), 571-584.

Garraway, J. (2010). Knowledge boundaries and boundary crossing in the design of work responsive university curricula. Teaching in Higher Education , 15 (2), 215-226.

Gee, J. (1990). Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourse. Basingstoke: Falmer.

Geisler, C. (1993). Academic Literacy and the Nature of Expertise . Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum .

Haggis, T. (2009). What have we been thinking of? An critical overview of 40 years of student learning research in higher education. Studies in Higher Education , 34 (4), 377-390.

Halliday, M. (1973). Explorations in the functions of language . London: Edward Arnold.

Halliday, M. (1978). Language as social semiotic: the social interpretation of language and meaning. London: Edward Arnold.

26

Halliday, M. (1985). An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold.

Heath, S. (1983). Ways with Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

HEQC. (2008). External Evaluation of the Higher Education Quality Committee. Pretoria: CHE.

Hunter, P. Academc support programme staffing and institutional policy. ASPects 5: A selection of papers and workshop items presented at the ASP Workshop 1985. University of Cape Town, 4th - 6th December 1985.

Knoblauch, C. &. Brannon, L. (1984). Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton Cook.

Kraak, A. (2001). Policy ambiguity and slippage: Higher education under the new state 2004-2001. In A. K. Young (Ed.), Education in Retrospect: Policy and Implementation since 1990. Pretoria: HSRC.

Luckett, K. (2007a). The Introduction of External Quality Assurance in South African Higher Education: An analysis of stakeholder response. . Quality in Higher Education , 13 (2), 97-116.

Luckett, K. (2007b). Methodology Matters: What methods for quality improvement? Perspectives in Education , 25 (3), 1-11.

Luckett, K. (2009). The Development of Agency in First Generation Learners in Higehr Education: A social realist analysis. Teaching in Higher Education , 14.

Luckett, K. (2010a). A meta-analysis of a review of an academic development programme using a social realist approach. Proceedings of the Higher Education Close Up 5 Conference, University of Lancaster 20th - 22nd July.

Luckett, K. (2010b). A 'Quality Revolution' Constrained? A critical reflection on quality assurance methodology from the South African higher education context. Quality in Higher Education , 16 (1), 71-76.

Mandew, M. Exploring the notion of 'cultural capital' and its implications for educational development. Proceedings of the 1993 Conference of the South African Association for Academic Development, University of the Western Cape, 1st - 3rd December, 1993.

Mehl, M. (1988). Academic support: Developmental giant or academic pauper? South African Journal of Higher Education , 2 (1), 17-20.

Mentis, M. &. Frelick, S. (1993). Teaching thinking and thinking teaching: Adaptations of Feurstein's cognitive theories in a university setting. South African Journal of Higher Education , 7 (1), 101-109.

27

Motha, C. &. May, M. Towards improving students' academic writing: A joint venture with academic mainstream. Proceedings fo the 11th National Conference of the South African Association for Academic Development, University of Fort Hare 27th - 29th November 1996.

Moulder, J. (1991). Remedial education programmes: Miracle or failure? . South African Journal of Higher Education , 5 (1), 5-10.

Muller, J. (2006). Differentiation and progression in the curriculum. In M. Y. Gamble (Ed.), Knowledge, Curriculum and Qualifications for South African Further Education. Cape Town: HSRC Press.

NEPI. (1992). National Education Policy Investigation. Report on Post-secondary Education. Pretoria.

Oldfield, S. (2001). The South African state in transition: A question of form, function and fragmentation. In E. &. Pampallis (Ed.), Education and equity: The impact of state policies on South African education (pp. 35-52). Cape Town: Heineman.

Pavlich, G. &. (1993). Diversity and Quality: Academic Development at South African Tertiary Institutions. Braamfontein: CASE.

Potter, C. &. (1993). Academic performance in Engineering. South African Journal of Higher Education , 7 (1), 33-46.

Quinn, L. &. Boughey, C. (2009). A case study of an institutional audit: A social realist account. Quality in Higher Education , 15 (3), 263-278.

Quinn, L. (2007). A social realist account of the emergence of a formal academic staff development programme at a South African university. . Grahamstown : Rhodes University.

Republic of South Africa, (1995). South African Qualifications Authority Act (Act 58 of 1995). Pretoria: Government Printers.

Scott, I. (1984). ASP selection and the issue of compulsion: A UCT perspective. ASPects 5: A selection of papers and workshop items presented at the ASP Workshop held at the University of Cape Town, 4th - 6th December, 1984. Cape Town.

Scott, I., Yeld, N. & Hendry, J. (2007). Higher Education Monitor 6: A case for improving learning and teaching in South African higher education. Pretoria: Council on Higher Education.

Sewell, W. A theory of structure: Duality, agency and transformation. American Journal of Sociology , 98 (1), 1-29.

28

Shay, S. (2008a). Beyond social constructive perspectives on assessment: The centering of knowledge. Teaching in Higher Education , 13 (5), 596-605.

Shay, S. (2008b). Assessment at the boundaries: Service learning as case study. British Education Journal of Research , 34 (4), 525-540.

Starfield, S. (1990a). Science and language: a new look at some old issues. South African Journal of Higher Education , 4 (2), 84-89.

Starfield, S. (1990b). Contextualising language and study skills. Proceedings of the English Academic Conference on English at Tertiary Level published as a special edition of the South African Journal of Higher Education. Pretoria.

Street, B. (1984). Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Street, B. (1995). Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education. London: Longman.

Street, B. (1996). Preface. In M. P. Breier (Ed.), The Social Uses of Literacy. Bertsham & Amsterdam: SACHED & John Benjamin.

Taylor, G., Ballard, B., Beasley, V., Bock, H.K., Clanchy, J. & Nightingale, P. Literacy by Degrees. Milton Keynes: SRHE & Open University Press.

Tisani, N. (1991). Discipline specific skills: The history skills project at Rhodes. Proceedings of the 6th Conference of the South African Association for Academic Development, University of the Witwatersrand, 5th - 7th December, 1991.

Torr, L. (1991). 'Academic support in the history department, University of Natal, Durban'. Proceedings of the 6th Conference of the South African Association for Academic Develoment. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand .

van Dyk, P. &. Van Dyk, A.C. (1993). Student achievement: A hierarchical classification as predictor. South African Journal of Higher Education , 7 (3), 239-245.

Volbrecht, T. &. (2005). Curriculum responsiveness from the margins? A reappraisal of academic development in South Africa. In H.Griesel (Ed.), Curriculum Responsiveness: Case Studies in Higher Education. Pretoria: SAUVCA.

Vorster, J. (2010). A social realist account of curriculum development processes in a South African university. Grahamstown: Rhodes University.

Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. New York: Columbia University Press.

29

Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and Language . Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Walker, M. &. Badsha, N. (1993). Academic Development: The 1990s. South African Journal of Higher Education , 7 (1), 59-62.Wallace, B. &. Adams, H.B. (1989). Assessment and development of the potential of high school pupils in the third world context of KwaZulu/Natal. South African Journal of Higher Education , 3 (1), 83-97.

Winberg, C. (2006a). Knowledge production in an architectural practice and a university architectural department. Perspectives in Education , 24 (3), 43-56.

Winberg, C. (2006b). Undisciplining knowledge production: Development driven higher education. Higher Education , 51 (2), 159-172.

Winberg, C. (2007a). Communication practices in workplaces and higher education. South African Journal of Higher Education , 21 (4), 781-798.

Winberg, C. (2007b). Work-based higher degrees: Responding to the knowledge needs of chemical engineers. Journal of Education and Work , 20 (4), 319-334.

Winberg, C. (2009). Engineers are from Mars and educators are from Venus: Research supervision in engineering and educational collaboration. South African Journal of Higher Education , 23 (1), 205-217.

Wright, J. (2008). The role of discourse in the constitution of radiographic knowledge: A critical realist account. Grahamstown: Rhodes University.

Yeld, N. &. Haeck, W. (1997). Educational histories and academic potential: Can tests deliver? Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education , 22 (1), 5-16.

Yeld, N. (2003). Academic literacy and numeracy profiles: An analysis from the results of the AARP and TELP tests of incoming students (2001/2 entry years). In South African Universities’ Vice Chancellors’ Assocation (SAUVCA), Into Higher Education: Perspectives on entry thresholds and enrolment systems. Pretoria: SAUVCA.

30