AYUDAS VISUALES INDICADORAS DE ZONAS DE USO RESTRINGIDO

The structural conditions at T1 are a strong conditioning influence on new academics’ exercise of agency in this study. The structural morphogenesis in HE initiated by socio- cultural action in the early years of democracy, marking the transformation to a non-racial, non-sexist, democratic society, has serious implications for how university teachers are constructed, and how they and others perceive their roles and responsibilities. The resilience and robustness of a fledgling democracy like South Africa lie partly in the strength of its social pillars, HE being a significant pillar in shaping and enabling not only entry points to tertiary study, but also exit points into the field of work and then back into society. I now look briefly at the structural changes that affect discursive understanding of the purpose of university education and the part that academics (new and established) have to play in the new dispensation.

Policy work and policy innovation were the vehicles through which the philosophical vision for an integrated HE system was made manifest, and work in this area was extensive, culminating in the publication of a White Paper (3) in 1997 titled, ‘A Programme for the Transformation of Higher Education’. This report was acclaimed both domestically and internationally as a landmark in HE policy formulation (OECD 2008), as it opened a space for policy debate, negotiation, consultation with stakeholders, consensus building and the inclusion of dissenting views (Badat 2004; Bundy 2006; CHE 2004). Structural reforms (including government’s steering instruments such as policies, funding frameworks, and the establishment of professional bodies to consult, govern, advise and monitor HE) were instantiated to redress the inequities of the past and to begin the process of nation building (CHE 2004; DoE 2008b). In HE, the structural transformation of the historical and social legacy of differentiated education (CHE 2010) brought about new institutional configurations (CHE 2004).The Higher Education Act No. 101 of 1997 provided the legal framework and foundation for the governance structure for universities. The vision of a reconfigured higher education system was guided by the principles of equity and redress, democracy, development, quality, effectiveness and efficiency, academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and public accountability (DoE 1997). These notable reforms served and continue to serve as structuring mechanisms for the aims, strategic goals and vision for democratic change and redress of the past imbalances in HE (DoE 2001).

through the HE system was thus high on the agenda (CHE 2010; HESA 2011; Scott, Yeld, and Hendry, 2007) to ensure that students could contribute effectively to the growth and development not only of themselves as critical citizens, but also of the economy as a whole (DOE 2008b).

At the same time that the structural morphogenesis was in progress, disjunctions between policy reform and the values and attitudes attached to the purpose of HE signalled that the tensions in this contested terrain needed to be resolved. Reaching consensus on the purpose of HE in South Africa has always been a complex matter (CHE 2013a); post 1994, South African HE was faced with a strategic decision either to prioritise a social obligation to service the public good (Singh 2001) and to promote critical citizenry (Nussbaum 1997; Badat 2009), or, given South Africa’s economic history, to address the economy first, through knowledge production for the market (Habib 2013; Ball 2012). The knowledge production argument was bolstered by the discursive understanding that the aim of tertiary education is ‘to open access to the labour market and to provide an opportunity to break away from the reproduction of poverty and disadvantage’ (Mdepa and Tshiwula 2012: 29). To resolve this disjunction, the HE sector chose to do both, but the conjunction deepened rather than tamed the concomitant tension between the instrumentalist view of producing intellectual workers and graduates for a knowledge economy (Boughey 2008), and the view driven by a social justice agenda of developing full human capacity to function effectively in society (Badat 2009; Nussbaum 2007). This dual purpose was set to influence the simultaneous achievement of the goals in HE in both negative and advantageous ways.

This phase of policy reforms was bolstered by the National Plan for Higher Education (NPHE) in 2001 (DoE 2001), which gave momentum to a restructuring plan to eradicate the inherited inequities, ineffectiveness, and inefficiency of a costly and duplicitous apartheid system (OECD 2008). This plan strongly advocated a process of institutional mergers, reducing the number of higher education institutions from 36 to 23, and creating new institutional types (DoE 2001). This reconfiguration process differentiated between three kinds of universities: traditional, comprehensive, and universities of technology (DoE 2008a), reflected in redrafted institutional mission statements of universities based on their unique contextual nuances and focal points (CHE 2013a).

Soon after this, the Department of Education (DoE)4 and the Council on Higher Education

4

The Department of Higher Education and Training is one of the departments of the South African government which oversees universities and other post-secondary education in South Africa. It was created in 2009 after the election of President Jacob Zuma, when the former Department of Education was divided. Similarly, the

(CHE), which had a policy advisory mandate, were established. CHE also has executive responsibility for accreditation, quality assurance and quality promotion through a permanent subcommittee, known as the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC), as well as for the monitoring and evaluation of the achievement of policy goals and objectives, including annual reporting on the state of higher education in South Africa, and promoting students’ access to higher education (CHE 2007). The National Qualifications Framework (NQF)5, a single national quality assurance system, comprising programme accreditation and reaccreditation, institutional audits and development and promotion of quality in higher education, was further instated.

The stage was set (structurally anyway) for the unfolding of a new HE system, with its component parts, to bring to fruition the transformation goals envisaged by the new government, but as structural reforms were implemented, necessary contradictions emerged, presenting a situational logic that agents and the system had to respond to in discursive terms. The new structurally-reconfigured universities were entities in their own right, having emerged from a deep political and economic system and process (Lange 2014), and capable of exerting their own influences on the sector, as they did. Universities are the emergent product of the political and socio-economic systems in which they are embedded (Habib 2013). Whatever the argument, it was evident that the HE sector could not escape the super complexity (Barnett 2000) of its embedded reality.

By mid-2000, the reconfiguration of HE and the outcome of the mergers, presented a paradoxical problem: structurally HE needed to be unified but culturally and socially it needed to diversify in order to uphold the uniqueness of entities merging for the first time in the country’s history. This complexity was also reflected in state policy documents on HE that foregrounded the importance of levelling the playing fields in education through a commitment to equity (Boughey 2007b).

Compounding the tension in HE, the effects of the economic crises and economic trends at an international level were experienced in local contexts. Parallel to the South African political and economic development, global economies were locked to a large extent into each other’s fate in an open market, thus the integration of the South African economy within the global economy had dire consequences for HE in South Africa (Habib 2013). Here again, Department of Basic Education (DBE) was created in 2009 to oversee primary and secondary education in South Africa,

5 _{The revised HEQF in 2013, in line with the previous HEQF, provides the basis for integrating all higher}

education qualifications into the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) – see CHE’s Discussion Document on the HEQF Review, 2010

by splitting its priorities and focus, South Africa faced two ways: on the one hand it embodied a Third World economic reality but, as a new democracy, it embraced First World aspirations and ambitions influenced by the neo-liberal economic agenda in advanced industrial societies during the 1980s (CHE 2013b).

The change from an ‘elite higher education system’ to a ‘mass higher education system’ was made possible by structural enablements such as policies on widened access, increased participation, and diversified education, but this change was juxtaposed with a corporatisation (Chomsky 2011) and marketisation (Bertelsen 1998) based on HE’s location in a macro-economic transformation agenda (Habib 2013). The adoption of the macro- economic policy, Growth, Employment And Redistribution (GEAR) – A Macroeconomic Strategy, has further affected universities by making them more like business organisations (CHE 2010). The growing impact of globalisation and global trends on higher education put pressure on students to think of themselves as consumers, investing only in their own personal human capital with a view to reaping high financial rewards (Holmwood 2011). When we value our students only for what they achieve, they become resources in an instrumental sense (Noddings 1992). The notion that university education is seen as something purchased at a high price for private benefit leads to the commodification of knowledge and the marketisation of higher education provision (Bundy 2006; Walker 2002). The discourse of equity in HE was now being counterbalanced by a new discourse on efficiency (Boughey 2007b), which meant that the HE transformation goals were shifted further afield (Bozalek and Boughey 2012).

The changes in HE had ushered in a large proportion of ‘new’ students who were ‘underprepared’ for a university that had been historically designed and conceptualised for an elite few who, in possession of the economic and cultural capital, were in familiar territory in the disciplinary contexts of the academy and could reproduce their privileged positions of wealth and superiority, inherited from their parents. Students from increasingly diverse social, cultural, linguistic and educational backgrounds were introduced to an education system that they could not negotiate. The unification of academic life on a structural level was now being enacted differentially in the socio-cultural realm through individual biographies of ill-prepared students confronting new situations without reference points with which they were familiar. This contextual discontinuity (Archer 2012a) highlighted that universities needed to change too, to become more accessible through their knowledge production and engagement.

A study of the cohort of students entering South African universities in 2000 highlights not only the skewed participation rates of the different racial groups, but also the reality that black South Africans have less chance of succeeding compared with their white counterparts (Scott et al. 2007). From a gender-equity perspective, female students enrolled in larger numbers in the field of humanities, particularly in teacher education programmes, but remained seriously underrepresented in programmes in science, engineering and technology, and in business, commerce, and management (Badat 2004; Cloete 2002; Cooper and Subotzky 2001). Cooper and Subotzky’s (2001) Skewed Revolution shows how the former ‘technikons’ (a uniquely South African institutional designation) moved quickly to recruit working-class black students who were looking for ‘work-ready’ qualifications. The affective and institutional cultural factors, and the teaching and learning processes taking place in HEIs, had a major influence on student performance (OECD 2008: 344).

It can be seen that the gains derived from nearly two decades of policy work are not distributed equally since black South Africans simply are not completing their studies at the same rate or in the same time as their white peers. This has led to the proclamation of a ‘crisis’ in teaching and learning in popular discourses related to higher education (Boughey 2013:1).

This ‘crisis’ in education meant that, although students had physical access, they did not have epistemological access (Morrow 1992) to the ways the university engaged with knowledge. Students also did not have access to the elevated discourses (Boughey 2002) of the academic language of the university, which was a gatekeeper to that knowledge (Ibid.; Jacobs 2007; Leibowitz, Adendorff, Daniels, Loots, Nakasa, Ngxabazi, Van der Merwe and Van Deventer 2005; McKenna 2004). If universities were to contribute to a more equitable South African society,

. . . then access and success must be improved for black (and particularly black working class) students who, by virtue of their previous experiences, have not been inducted into dominant ways of constructing knowledge (Boughey 2008: 2).

The huge schism between student access and student success, manifest in the attrition rates, undergraduate success, and graduation figures (Scott et al. 2007), showed that improvement in equity of access and outcomes, especially for black students, was critical. Lecturers too were ill equipped to confront and embrace the diverse and heterogeneous classrooms and students they now confronted. Stark disjunctions were evident in the differing expectations of students’ roles and the role of the lecturer, widening the gap

between the skills and experiences that both parties were drawing on in the academic space. Significant demands were now made on the teaching role of academics (HESA 2011), for the massification of HE presented a new focus on the explicit ‘teaching’ of academic literacy skills to disadvantaged students (Quinn and Vorster 2012). Thus, while many strides were advanced structurally to shape the academic identity formation of universities and, by many accounts, there have been positive changes and developments in HE since the beginning of democracy (CHE 2013b), participation and engagement on a social and cultural level were still minimal and nowhere near intended numbers, especially among black and coloured students (Scott et al. 2007).

Various reasons have been advanced to explain these patterns, such as under- preparedness for university study, inadequate funding for students, a non-supportive socio- economic environment, and so on (DHET 2013). State advisors were quick to point out that policy is not the only driver of change in this context, yet criticism was levelled at the DoE for reneging on its policies and promises (CHE 2004: 37) when the redress funding (Steyn and De Villiers 2007) geared towards the attainment of these goals did not materialise. Several institutions faced serious threats to their sustainability, further aggravated by ‘governance crises’ (CHE 2004: 27). Those students entering HE through revised university access policies and financial aid schemes, such as the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), were not completing their studies, and drop-out, failure and completion rates did not reflect the grand ideals of strategic transformation outlined in previous structural policies and documents (Scott et al. 2007). This was a serious indictment on what the system had done (or not done) in terms of efficient use of the country’s resources to realise the transformation goals (CHE 2004).

The significant investments made through material resources and the creation of a new educational landscape post 1994 still left HE a highly contested terrain. The lack of fit between education policy and education practice could be described as ‘nothing more than a struggle for the achievement of a broad political symbolism to mark the shift from apartheid to post apartheid society’ (Jansen 2001: 272). There was little displacement of past structures (Wolpe1991), and little success in terms of de-colonising, de-racialising, and de- gendering inherited intellectual spaces (Badat 2007). Institutions remained bastions of past tradition and discrimination (CHE 2010). This highlighted the need, as a matter of urgency, for the transformation of HE to be mediated by concerns for social justice (Lange 2006: 40; Singh 2006: 66) and the social inclusion of students (CHE 2013a).

This impasse had to be circumvented and the one area targeted for this was teaching and learning, and, by implication, also the university teacher. In fact, the lack of adequate professional development of university teachers was cited as one of the serious contributing factors to the inability to effect change in the system (Fiske and Ladd 2004). A key challenge was to ensure that academic staff development (ASD) practitioners, as well as new and established academics, possessed the teaching and learning capabilities that were essential to produce high-quality graduates and enhance equity of opportunity and outcomes for students (HESA 2011).

Professional development was now seen as vital in its perceived potential to address the shortcomings of a fractured HE system. In the next section, I problematise the discursive constructions of the university teacher as ‘saviour’ of an ailing system and key to solving the crisis in education (Boughey 2011), but here I will analyse the structural features relating to the (limited) improvement in the arena of university teaching per se to meet the transformation goals of 1997 (CHE 2004).

The plan to professionalise the HE academic and teaching staff was bolstered structurally through government’s outlay of huge monetary amounts in the form of teaching development grants (discussed below) for the professional development of academics. Teaching development took on greater salience as a more formal approach to staff development in HE, with an explicit focus on lecturers and their teaching ability, teaching resources, and professional skills, as well as on managing the academic core functions of teaching, research, and community engagement. These functions required support and specialist pedagogic expertise from staff developers and other stakeholders (HESA 2011).

The conjunction between structural and cultural morphogenesis meant that structural changes by the DHET and CHE led to ideational expansion, in that teaching was now considered important, even at research-intensive universities. A cultural morphogenesis triggered the shift in emphasis from student learning, which characterised the work of academic development movements of the 80s and 90s (Volbrecht and Boughey 2004), to staff development. Structurally, HE, of necessity, had contributed via funding and policy to a renewed focus on developing university lecturers as professional teachers, with targeted efforts aimed at opening up and uplifting the status of teaching in the university (MoHET 2012). The age-old tradition of Research holding the key to academic prestige and rewards was slowly being eroded by a focus on teaching.

However, locating teaching and the teacher as central to student success within the current academic context, given the socio-cultural challenges discussed above, meant that the systemic level of HE was being overlooked regarding its conditioning, influences and mechanisms in the domains of structure, culture and agency (Boughey 2013). It also meant that academic staff developers needed to take on a more significant role in mediating contextual challenges (CHE 2010) by working more closely with disciplinary experts in collaborative projects, in order to bridge the gap between general academic practices and specific disciplinary practices needed in specific knowledge areas (Jacobs, 2006). This led to a more nuanced way of working with academics (Boughey 2005), in keeping with calls from the government and related bodies to develop curricula and teaching methodologies that were more responsive to the needs of learners (CHE 2010).

Efforts to improve the calibre of academics in HE included a number of formal qualifications offered to university teachers, such as the new postgraduate qualifications in HE teaching and learning (Rhodes University, University of the Western Cape, Stellenbosch University, University of Cape Town, among others) which are an indication that efforts to promote a scholarly approach to teaching development (Bamber 2002) are being strengthened. Even though formal certification is essential, concerns have been noted about the dangers of credentialism in the drive towards the accredited professionalisation of higher education teachers (Winberg and Garraway 2014b). With this structural support of teaching excellence awards, teaching development grants, institutional audits on teaching, and a proliferation of scholarly publications on teaching (Boyer 1990), in national and international contexts, teaching has also grown discursively in recognition and status.

The structural enablements for teaching and professional development have important implications for this study, in the hope that new academics, as they are recruited and professionally developed in HE, will avert the crisis in education by teaching in effective ways. Most significant of the efforts to bolster teaching is the recent Teaching Development Grant (TDG), which has an explicit focus on the development of university teachers and their teaching practices. The White Paper on Post-School Education and Training and the National Development Plan (Essop 2013) emphasise this urgency because, despite a range of interventions, ‘including support through the fiscus for expanding extended degree programmes and teaching development grants, the challenge of poor throughputs from