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A Meta-Analysis of Teaching and Learning

at five

Research-Intensive South African Universities

Professor Chrissie Boughey

Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching & Learning

Rhodes University

Table of Contents

1 Introduction................................................................................................................1

2 An argument for ‘social’ understandings of teaching and learning.....................2

2.1 Two models of learning and teaching......................................................................22.2 Privileging the autonomous.....................................................................................32.3 Sustaining the social................................................................................................62.3.1 Gee’s Social Literacies............................................................................................72.3.2 Bourdieu’s work on ‘cultural capital’ and ‘field’....................................................82.3.3 Communities of Practice..........................................................................................92.3.4 Identity.....................................................................................................................92.3.5 Bernstein’s pedagogic device and horizontal and vertical discourses...................112.4 Developing social understandings.........................................................................11

3 An analytical framework for the research............................................................14

3.1 Bhaskar’s Critical Realism....................................................................................143.2 Archer’s Social Realism........................................................................................16

4 Research design and methods.................................................................................18

5 The Five Cases..........................................................................................................22

5.1 The University of Pretoria.....................................................................................225.1.1 The Actual.............................................................................................................225.1.2 The Real.................................................................................................................225.1.2.1 Culture.............................................................................................................225.1.2.2 Structure...........................................................................................................285.1.2.3 Agency.............................................................................................................305.1.3 Conclusion.............................................................................................................305.2 The University of Cape Town...............................................................................305.2.1 The Actual.............................................................................................................305.2.2 The Real.................................................................................................................315.2.2.1 Culture.............................................................................................................315.2.2.2 Structure...........................................................................................................365.2.2.3 Agency.............................................................................................................375.2.3 Conclusion.............................................................................................................375.3 Rhodes University.................................................................................................385.3.1 The Actual.............................................................................................................385.3.2 The Real.................................................................................................................385.3.2.1 Culture.............................................................................................................395.3.2.2 Structure...........................................................................................................415.3.2.3 Agency.............................................................................................................425.3.3 Conclusion.............................................................................................................435.4 The University of Stellenbosch.............................................................................435.4.1 The Actual.............................................................................................................435.4.2 The Real.................................................................................................................44

HEQC Draft 1: Feb 2009 i

5.4.2.1 Culture.............................................................................................................445.4.2.2 Structure...........................................................................................................495.4.2.3 Agency.............................................................................................................505.4.3 Conclusion.............................................................................................................505.5 The University of the Witwatersrand....................................................................515.5.1 The Actual.............................................................................................................515.5.2 The Real.................................................................................................................515.5.2.1 Culture.............................................................................................................525.5.2.2 Structure...........................................................................................................575.5.2.3 Agency.............................................................................................................595.5.3 Conclusion.............................................................................................................59

6 Cross-Case Analysis.................................................................................................60

6.1 Introduction............................................................................................................606.2 The Actual at the Five Research Intensive Universities........................................606.3 Culture...................................................................................................................616.3.1 Privileging Research..............................................................................................616.3.2 Accountability and responsiveness........................................................................656.3.3 The autonomous ‘other’.........................................................................................656.3.4 Teaching as best practice.......................................................................................676.3.5 eLearning...............................................................................................................686.3.6 Conclusion.............................................................................................................696.4 Structure.................................................................................................................706.4.1 Traditional structures.............................................................................................706.4.2 New structures.......................................................................................................716.4.2.1 Programme structures......................................................................................716.4.2.2 Quality management structures.......................................................................736.4.3 Conclusion.............................................................................................................756.5 Agency...................................................................................................................76

7 The institutional audits............................................................................................78

7.1 The case studies.....................................................................................................787.1.1 The University of Pretoria.....................................................................................787.1.2 The University of Cape Town...............................................................................807.1.3 Rhodes University.................................................................................................847.1.4 The University of Stellenbosch.............................................................................877.1.5 The University of the Witwatersrand....................................................................917.2 An overall comment..............................................................................................937.3 A way forward?.....................................................................................................93

List of references..............................................................................................................95

HEQC Draft 1: Feb 2009

1 Introduction

The research which underpins this report was commissioned by the Higher Education

Quality Committee (HEQC) and focuses on a meta-analysis of teaching and learning at

the five South African research-intensive institutions not affected by mergers: the

University of Cape Town, Rhodes University, the University of Stellenbosch, the

University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Pretoria. The research draws on

three sets of documents: Self Evaluation Portfolios produced by the universities

themselves and submitted to the HEQC as part of audit processes, the analyses of

institutional data prepared by the HEQC, and the Audit Reports, again prepared by the

HEQC. Other teaching and learning related documents, which were made available to

Audit Panels during the audit processes, were also consulted. These documents included

policies on teaching and learning, teaching and learning strategies and various other

documents which provided statements about institutional understandings of teaching and

learning.

This report falls into six sections. Following on from this introductory section, Section 2

argues for the need for what are termed ‘social’ understandings of teaching and learning

at South African universities and, thus, for the particular theoretical frameworks

informing the research. Section 3 outlines the ontological and epistemological

assumptions underpinning the research and which form the basis for the model of

teaching and learning which is outlined in later sections. Section 4 then provides details

of the research approach and methods used. Section 5 contains case studies of the five

universities studied in the research. Section 6 then develops an overall analysis of

teaching and learning at the five universities based on the case studies. Section 7

concludes the report with an analysis of the extent to which audit reports picked up on

issues identified in the meta-analysis and makes recommendations for future audits.

HEQC Draft 1: Feb 2009 1

2 An argument for ‘social’ understandings of teaching and learning

2.1 Two models of learning and teaching

Approaches to understanding learning in higher education can be placed into two broad

categories. The first category understands learning as an act which is dependent on factors

inherent to the individual such as intelligence, aptitude, cognition, motivation and the

availability of various ‘skills’ including language ‘skills’. Successful learners are then

variously constructed as ‘intelligent’, ‘cognitively able’ and ‘motivated’ and a failure to

learn attributed to a deficit in inherent capacities, to the fact that learners have not

managed to acquire appropriate ‘skills’ or to a failure to exercise the agency to learn. In

the South African context, and in the face of research (Scott et al., 2007) which shows,

overwhelmingly, that the success rates of black students are far below those of their white

peers, the discursive construction of learning as dependent on factors inherent to the

individual such as cognition, intelligence and motivation is clearly problematic. Dominant

discourses therefore tend to draw on the socio-economic context in order to argue that

failures in learning are due to the inferior educational experiences available to the

majority of students and which have resulted in their failure to develop i) their cognitive

capacities to the full, ii) the learning ‘skills’ and approaches necessary to succeed in

higher education or iii) the understandings of the behaviours needed to succeed and which

drive motivation. In spite of this tendency to draw on context to explain poor learning and

what, in liberal terms, is constructed as ‘disadvantage’ or ‘underpreparedness’, what

remains is essentially an ‘autonomous’ model which locates the capacity (including the

will) to learn within individuals.

The second category of understandings of learning acknowledges the socially constructed

nature of learning (and, thus, of teaching). All students entering higher education clearly

have the capacity to learn. Some, however, manage to learn in ways which are socially

privileged and, thus, manage to construct and access forms of knowledge and knowledge

construction which are also socially privileged by the university itself. The ability to

access socially privileged ways of learning and knowledge construction is then

understood to be dependent on the social communities to which the learner has access.


Of crucial importance in accessing socially privileged ways of learning and of knowledge

construction are the communities of practice to which the learner belongs including the

family of origin. Middle class child rearing practices, for example, have been shown (see,

for example, Scollon & Scollon, 1981; Heath 1983) to act as precursors for schooling

with the result that the child of a middle class home is much more ready to engage with

school-based learning than children from other social groups. Middle class children are

then supported in their school-based learning through practices which occur as a matter of

course in their homes (Heath, 1983). While the provision of pre-school education might

address some of the disparities between the ability of different social groups to succeed at

school, in the context of higher education, the situation is complicated by the fact that

school-based learning practices do not necessarily provide an induction into academic-

learning practices and academic knowledge construction practices (see, for example,

Geisler, 1993).

An example to clarify this point concerns the school-based practice of requiring learners

to engage with what are commonly termed ‘comprehension’ exercises. Typically, school-

based comprehension passages require learners to i) read a short text and ii) answer

questions based on that text. The type of reading required of such an exercise is

essentially ‘referential’ in that it requires learners to refer to the text to find the answer to

the question. While some referential reading is necessary in higher education, what is

more valued is a set of practices, most commonly referred to as ‘critical reading’,

involving the use of other texts and experiences to interrogate a text in order to come to

conclusions rather than to ‘find answers’. The dominance of referential reading in most

school-based learning (and not only in what, in South Africa, are euphemistically referred

to as ‘former DET schools’), however, is but one reason why the idea that schools

necessarily prepare students for higher education needs. to be interrogated and why

experiences outside school need to considered in the context of the notion of

‘preparedness’ for higher education. A student in whose home extracts from a newspaper

are read aloud and critiqued using the newspaper reader’s own experiences as a matter of

course is introduced to ‘critical reading’ practices as a part of daily life. This is but one

example of the way home-based or community-based practice prepares students for

higher education in ways not offered by many schools.


2.2 Privileging the autonomous

In spite of the fact that ‘social’ understandings of learning and teaching have been

available to South African higher education for some years now, ‘autonomous’

understandings continue to be privileged (Boughey, 2008a). The earliest ‘social’

understandings related to teaching and learning emerged in the mid to late 1980s

(Boughey, 2007). In 1988, for example, and in the context of the South African Academic

Development movement, Mehl was arguing that:

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 (1988:17).

Arguably, however, Mehl’s critique of the social structure of the university was lost in the

face of more pragmatic concerns which became more and more dominant as the change in

political dispensation approached. By the early 1990s, for example, the argument was

being advanced that previous initiatives couched under the banner of ‘Academic Support’

and intended to address the issue of ‘disadvantage’ or ‘underpreparedness’ by focusing on

the student would not suffice in a new political dispensation where the ‘underprepared’

would soon constitute the majority of the student body (see, for example, Moulder, 1991).

Concerns at a theoretical and structural level were therefore relocated in a concern for

pragmatism. Although the result of critiques such as Mehl’s and arguments such as

Moulder’s was a call for ‘transformation’ in the form of curriculum reform and the

development of academic staff who would be able to meet the needs. of the student body

in a so-called ‘infusion model’ (Walker & Badsha, 1993), what resulted, as perusal of any

of the proceedings emanating from Academic Development conferences in the 1990s will

show, were attempts at reform and development which were still rooted in what have

been termed above ‘autonomous’ rather than ‘social’ models of learning and teaching.

An example may be useful to illustrate this point. One of the strongest traditions in the

earliest South African Academic Support Programmes (ASPs) focused on the teaching of

study ‘skills’ and ‘strategies’. Over time, a more theorised tradition emerged related to the

identification of ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ conceptions of and approaches to learning (see, for


example, Marton & Säljö (1976); Entwistle & Ramsden, 1983; Biggs, 1987). Deep

conceptions of and approaches to learning are associated with attempts to understand,

rather than merely remember, and with intrinsic motivation (Fourie, 2003) in that the

student seeks to satisfy his/her own curiosity and learn for learning’s sake. ‘Surface’

conceptions and approaches, on the other hand, focus not on integrating new knowledge

with existing conceptual frameworks but rather on remembering without necessarily

understanding. Surface conceptions of learning are then understood to be extrinsically or

instrumentally motivated and are often associated with a fear of failing (Fourie, ibid).

Once these two approaches to learning had been identified, the strategies or behaviours

associated with them could also be observed. Students adopting a surface approach to

learning, for example, tended to simply try to remember words or formulae and then to

apply these to problems in a mechanical fashion. A deep approach, on the other hand,

would be more likely to result in behaviours intent on integrating new learning into a

coherent whole with existing learning.

As Haggis (2003:91) points out, however, although ‘[k]ey researchers in [the] area

attempt to make it clear that the ‘approaches to learning framework is ‘relational’

(Ramsden, 1987), and that it accommodates a multiplicity of elements that can only be

understood within a context’ (my emphasis), in the literature on higher education

elements of the framework have come to be named separately. As a result, ‘deep

approaches to learning’ have become ‘deep learning’ and ‘deep and surface approaches

have come to be seen as a form of predisposition or ‘learning style’. What began as a

conceptual framework which was holistic, cognisant of context and essentially ‘social’

shifted over time to support an ‘autonomous’ conception of learning which located ‘deep

learning’ within individuals.

‘Approaches to learning’ research has been, and continues to be, very influential in South

Africa as well as elsewhere in the world. In the 1990s in South Africa, it informed

numerous attempts to develop curricula which would provide space for students to

experience ‘deep learning’ through the inclusion of, for example, small group

methodology. In a similar vein, staff development initiatives focused on getting

academics to use teaching techniques which would also foster the development of ‘deep

learning’ in their students. What is significant, however, is that even though this work

was directed at curricula and academic staff, its ultimate focus was still the student who


was identified as not practising ‘deep learning’. Even more significant in the context of

the argument being advanced in this section of this report, is the appropriation and

relocation of the ‘approaches to learning’ work. As already indicated, the initial work on

approaches to learning acknowledged the role of context in determining the approach to

learning which would be privileged in that it would be perceived to lead to the production

of valued knowledge. Over time, the acknowledgement of context was lost in the face of

dominant understandings of learning as an ‘autonomous’ and decontextualised process.

2.3 Sustaining the social

In spite of the dominance of autonomous models of learning (and, thus, of teaching), a

minority of practitioners working in the field of Academic Development in South Africa

have consistently drawn on ‘social’ understandings. The fact that a concern with ‘social’

understandings of teaching and learning has not been more widespread needs. to be

contextualised within the instability of the field of Academic Development/Teaching and

Learning itself.

In the early 1990s, the field of Academic Development/Teaching and Learning grew as a

result of funding made available via the Independent Development Trust (IDT). The early

1990s were therefore characterised by high levels of activity in both teaching and learning

related research and practice. The development of a more stringent macro economic

framework in the mid 1990s in South Africa meant that funding for higher education fell

in real terms. In the face of this fiscal discipline, one of the first areas to experience cuts

in many institutions was Academic Development. This had detrimental effects for the

capacity which had been developed in the field as posts were lost or frozen once soft

funding provided by the IDT fell away. The collapse of the South African Association for

Academic Development (SAAAD), a professional organisation which had contributed

enormously to capacity building, in 1998 meant that the field of Academic

Development/Teaching and Learning suffered a further blow.

Although, and as Boughey (2007) argues, attempts to deal with globalisation (evidenced

in developments such as the establishment of the National Qualifications Framework and

the introduction of Outcomes Based Education) and what Fataar (2003) terms the

‘incursion of market forces’ (evidenced in the need for institutions to become more

efficient and goal directed) in the late 1990s, offered new opportunities for practitioners


working in the field of Academic Development/Teaching and Learning, dominant

discourses in the field shifted from a concern with equity to a concern with efficiency. In

this kind of context, it is not surprising that the concern to develop and apply ‘social’

understandings of teaching and learning which characterised much work in the early

1990s tended to be marginalised. As the following sections will show, however, much of

the work produced by experienced practitioners in the field continues to draw on ‘social’

understandings of teaching and learning and to develop understandings of the university

as a ‘social space’1.

Some of the major theoretical positions informing their work are now outlined.

2.3.1 Gee’s Social Literacies

One of the most influential texts informing South African work located within a social

understanding of teaching and learning has been James Paul Gee’s (1990, 2003) Social

Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourse. Key to Gee’s work is his identification

of the construct of ‘Discourse’2 defined (2003:131) as

a socially accepted association among ways of using language, other symbolic expressions and ‘artefacts’, of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing, and acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or ‘social network’, or to signal (that one is playing) a socially meaningful ‘role’.

The ability to demonstrate membership of a Discourse (and, thus, to demonstrate mastery

of the ways of using language, thinking, feeling, believing, valuing and acting which

characterise it) is then defined as ‘literacy’. For Gee, then, the much-used term ‘academic

literacy’ would refer to the ability to demonstrate membership of academic Discourses.

Key to Gee’s theoretical position is the identification of primary and secondary

Discourses and literacies. According to Gee (1990, 2003) everyone is born into a

Discourse and acquires a primary literacy ‘for free’. Membership of secondary Discourses

and mastery of secondary literacies are then acquired (not taught) over time. The extent to

which one can acquire membership of a secondary Discourse and mastery of a secondary

1 In this context it is important to note that the theme of the Joint Conference of the South African Association for Research and Development in Higher Education and the Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa held in December, 2008 was Higher Education as a Social Space. 2 Gee deliberately capitalises the term ‘Discourse’ to distinguish it from the use of the word ‘discourse’ (small ‘d’) which relates to the stretches of language typically analysed by linguists. It is also intended to signal Gee’s specialised use of the word which can be used in many different ways.


literacy is then dependent on factors such as exposure to the target Discourse and on the

‘distance’ between the primary Discourse and the target Discourse.

The relevance of Gee’s theory to the South African context is not hard to see. Academic

communities are characterised by specific ways of using language, thinking, valuing and

believing (i.e. ‘Discourses’). These ways of thinking, valuing, believing and using

language are related to what the community counts as knowledge and how that

knowledge can be known. A ‘scientific’ Discourse, based on positivism, would thus be

very different to Discourses located in the social sciences. Students whose primary

Discourse shares some of the values, ways of thinking, ways of believing and ways of

using language with academic Discourses are privileged in the sense that they already

stand on the periphery of the secondary Discourse. Students whose primary Discourse

exhibits very different ways of thinking, acting, believing and valuing are likely to find

accessing and acquiring academic literacies much more difficult.

Gee’s work has been taken up by a number of experienced practitioners working in the

area of academic literacy in South Africa including inter alia Boughey, 2000, 2005(a),

2008b; Foster & Leibowitz, 1998; Jacobs, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008;

Leibowitz, 2001, 2004, 2005; McKenna, 2004; Thomson, 2008). However, although the

term ‘academic literacy’ has increasingly gained currency in Academic Development and

other teaching and learning related communities, it is rarely used in a way which draws

on the theoretical base described above. Most commonly, it is appropriated to describe

skills-based approaches located in autonomous views of learning (Boughey, 2008a).

2.3.2 Bourdieu’s work on ‘cultural capital’ and ‘field’

A second social theorist who has been influential in informing South African work on

teaching and learning is Pierre Bourdieu. Key to his work (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1973;

Bourdieu, 1986) is the construct of ‘cultural capital’ defined as the knowledge, practices

and values which allows people to access and succeed in elevated social groups and

institutions. Cultural capital is transmitted to children by parents. The application of

Bourdieu’s work on cultural capital to a higher education system characterised by

inequity is immediately apparent not least because it begins to allow us to understand

differences in success and graduation rates between different population groups in South

Africa (for details see Scott et al. (2007). Since race is conflated with social class in South


Africa, the failure rates of black working class students can be contextualised in an

understanding which involves social class and the transmission of privileged values,

attitudes and knowledge from one generation to another.

More recently, Bourdieu’s work has been taken up (particularly by researchers working in

the Centre for Higher Education Development at the University of Cape Town) in relation

to the assessment of student learning. Shay (2005), for example, uses Bourdieu’s

constructs of ‘field’ (1990, 1996) and ‘habitus’ (1998) to show how assessment in higher

education is a socially situated interpretative act. The corollary of this observation is that

valued performances are also socially situated and are necessarily open to those who have

not gained access to the social contexts in which the performances are judged.

2.3.3 Communities of Practice

Also significant in what have been termed ‘social’ understandings of teaching and

learning is the construct of the ‘Community of Practice’ (CoP) derived from the work of

Etienne Wenger (1998). According to Wenger, learning results from an individual’s

participation in the practice of a social community. Related to this learning is the

construction of the individual’s identity as a member of the community. The term

‘community of practice’ therefore describes a group of individuals engaged in communal,

goal directed activity through which they continuously create both shared and individual

identities.

Linked to the notion of a Community of Practice is the idea of ‘situated learning’,

learning which is embedded in physical and social contexts and which results from

practice in those contexts as a result of active participation with other members of a social

community. Newcomers to a community of practice engage in legitimate peripheral

participation involving a form of apprenticeship (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and which gives

them access to this ‘situated learning.’

In South African higher education, the construct of the Community of Practice has

important implications for the development of understandings of disciplinary

communities and of the way (student) apprentices can access the learning which sustains

those communities. It has also been used extensively to theorise and research curriculum

issues at the new universities of technology (see, for example, Garraway, 2005; Winberg,

2006).


2.3.4 Identity

Crucial to all the theoretical positions outlined above are issues of identity since all

perceive membership of social groups (and the identity formations related to that

membership) as crucial to success in learning. Gee’s work (1990, 2003), for example,

sees literacy (or the ability to demonstrate membership of a Discourse) as related to the

ability to play an appropriate ‘role’ according to context:

Imagine that I park my motorcycle, enter my neighbourhood ‘biker’ bar, and say to my leather-jacketed and tattooed drinking buddy, as I sit down: ‘May I have a match for my cigarette please?’. What I have said is perfectly grammatical English, but it is ‘wrong’ nonetheless (unless I have used a heavily ironic tone of voice). It is not just what you say, but how you say it. In this bar, I haven’t said it in the ‘right’ way. I should have said something like ‘Gotta match?’ or ‘Give me a light, would’ya?’

Now imagine that I say the ‘right’ thing (‘Gotta match?’ or ‘Give me a light, would’ya?’), but while saying it, I carefully wipe off the bar stool with a napkin to avoid getting my newly pressed designer jeans dirty. In this case, I’ve still got it wrong. In this bar, they just don’t do that sort of thing: I have said the right thing, but my ‘saying-doing’ combination is nonetheless wrong. It’s not just what you say or even just how you say it. It’s also what you are and do while you say it. It is not enough just to say the right ‘lines’, one needs. to get the whole ‘role’ right (like a role in a play or movie). In this bar, the biker bar, I need to play the role of a ‘tough’ guy, not a young urban professional (‘yuppie’) relaxing on the weekend. Other bars cater to different roles, and if I want to, I can go to many bars so long as I play many different roles (Gee, 1990:xv).

Wenger (1994: 2) supports Gee’s position when he notes that:

1. institutional identities are not just functions, but they are the enactment of an understanding of institutional practices, and thus imply ways of being in and seeing the world.

2. …they are not just labels or titles, but are constructed in the day-to-day practice of learning to live within an institution.

South African work on identity in higher education is a rich and growing field and has

tended to include work on language (see, for example, Leibowitz et al. 2005a, Leibowitz,

forthcoming) although work has also examined identity as a resource (Leibowitz et al.

2005b). More recent work explores the need to engage with diversity in changing

contexts (see, for example, Rohleder et al., 2008, Leibowitz, et al., forthcoming).

Key to all the work on identity is the understanding, for some students, South African

universities are alien social spaces and learning to ‘be’ in those spaces impacts on identity


in negative ways and involves more than the acquisition of a set of neutral, a-social, a-

cultural ‘skills’ (see, McKenna, 2004 in particular).

2.3.5 Bernstein’s pedagogic device and horizontal and vertical discourses

More recently, the work of British Sociology Basil Bernstein has increasingly been drawn

upon in order to understand curricular and other structures in South African higher

education. In the context of the social theories of learning reviewed in this section, the

explore the academy at a structural level is important given that students need to be able

to access and negotiate structures which may be alien to them.

Key to Bernstein’s work is his identification of the ‘pedagogic device’ (see Maton &

Muller, 2007) which provides an account of i) the way knowledge considered to be

worthwhile in society is constructed and positioned ii) the way that knowledge is

transformed into pedagogic discourse (a process termed ‘recontextualisation’) and iii) the

translation of this pedagogic discourse into a set of standards. The result of the pedagogic

device is conflict and struggle as different social groups attempt to control the way

educational knowledge is constructed.

The last area addressed by Bernstein’s work concerns the structure of different fields of

knowledge production. Two forms of knowledge structure are identified: a hierarchical

knowledge structure which attempts to create general theories and propositions

integrating knowledge at its lower levels (typically found in the natural sciences) and a

horizontal knowledge structure defined as ‘a series of specialised languages with

specialised modes of interrogation and criteria for the construction and circulation of

texts’ (Bernstein, 1999:273).

In South Africa, Bernstein’s sociological accounts of knowledge and of pedagogy have

led to work on curriculum as an area of contestation (see, for example, Vorster,

forthcoming) and provide insights into why some social groups enjoy greater success in

higher education than others.

2.4 Developing social understandings

In a paper written as a keynote address delivered at the Higher Education Close Up 4

conference held at the University of Cape Town in July 2008, Haggis provides a review


of more than forty years worth of research on teaching and learning in higher education.

Her analysis shows that, over the past forty years, work on student learning in higher

education has taken a ‘predominantly individualistic approach to the study of student

learning’ (p.6) in spite of the fact that other disciplinary areas such as psychology and

sociology were developing ‘a range of social and interactional perspectives which explore

the relationship between individual and ‘context’ in a variety of much more complicated

and nuanced ways’ over the same period (p.6).

In concluding her review, Haggis (2008:10) notes that:

... what we know about student learning depends on where we look, and is always a reflection of specific purposes and interests, which are tied to particularities of special and temporal contexts. One characteristic of the theoretical shifts which I argue have been largely ignored is an increasing demand for critical reflexivity; a call to pay attention not only to issues such as gender and power, but to turn this attention back on all of the practices and assumptions of teachers and researchers themselves. Higher Education has arguably focussed most of its efforts until very recently upon attempting to shore up certainties in relation to knowledge of students as ‘other’, and has not been particularly good at examining its own cultures and ways of being. In the wider world of Education, ‘what we know’ is contradictory and contested, and is understood to be rooted inextricably in value positions. It is only recently in Higher Education, however, that a range of different value positions have begun to emerge, and finding ways to engage with value positions is still arguably problematic.

The range of ‘value positions’ which Haggis notes have only just begun to emerge in

higher education relate to work rooted in what, in this report, have been termed ‘social’

understandings of learning and teaching. For Haggis, questions which need to be asked

about student learning are not ‘What can we discover about how individuals learn?’,

‘What are the implications of our knowledge about individual learning for classroom

teaching and curriculum design?’, How can we get our students to take a deep approach

to the content of our curricula?’ or ‘What is going on outside the classroom which might

impact on learning outcomes?’ but rather questions such as ‘How does the way we speak,

and what we ask students to write, create impediments to students’ learning?’ (p.7).

As the review in the preceding section has attempted to show, this sort of focus on ‘us’

(the academics/the disciplines/the institution) rather than ‘them’ (the students) has long

been perceived as offering the potential to offer understandings of the patterns of poor

performance in the South African higher education system by experienced practitioners in

the field of Academic Development/Teaching and Learning. For reasons also outlined


above, this sort of approach has tended to be marginalised in the face of the dominance,

and concomitant lack of questioning, of autonomous accounts of student learning. Given

this position and also that the focus of an audit is the institution, it is appropriate that any

analysis of teaching and learning should also be centred on the institution and draw on

social understandings of learning and teaching. This is a central assumption of the

research on which this report is based.

If learning and teaching are to be examined through the lens of critical social theory, then

it is also necessary to develop an analytical framework for the examination which is also

‘social’. In order to do this, the research has drawn on the work of Roy Bhaskar (1979)

and Margaret Archer (1995, 1996, 1998) outlined in the next section of this report.


3 An analytical framework for the research

3.1 Bhaskar’s Critical Realism

From a philosophical perspective, arguably the most coherent critique of institutional

audits in South Africa (Luckett, 2007) is made from a position based in Roy Bhaskar’s

Critical Realism. According to Luckett, the methodology used for institutional audits in

South Africa is essentially pragmatic in that it assumes that empirical analysis, and more

specifically the recommendations and commendations based on that analysis, have the

power to bring about change. Luckett is sceptical of this position because of the realist

understanding of a stratified and layered ontology.

Bhaskar (ibid) identifies three ontological layers: the empirical, the actual and the real.

For Bhaskar, the real, the deepest layer of reality, consists of underlying structures and

causal mechanisms which give rise to events in the world. This layer is intransitive.

Bhaskar then identifies the actual as the domain of events – what actually happens when

structures and mechanisms are activated. The empirical then consists of commonsense

experience – what we come to know as a result of sensory experiences, a process which is

tempered by our own historicity and social location. Our understanding of the empirical is

thus fallible.

This stratified ontology requires an understanding of the world as an ‘open’ system.

Danermark et al. (2002:206) define an open system as one in which there are no clear

connections between cause and effect. The lack of cause and effect is explained by noting

that ‘[w]hen generative mechanisms operate in combination with each other, the more

mechanisms involved, the more difficult to anticipate the outcome.’ The purpose of

research based in a critical realist ontology is to identify and try to understand the

structures and mechanisms which operate as ‘causal forces’ at the level of the real. The

concept of ‘causal forces’ or ‘causal powers’ rather than direct causation entails an

understanding that objects of study have intrinsic properties (structures and mechanisms)

which are capable of generating events. These causal properties exist (and are thus ‘real’)

regardless of whether they are exercised or whether they are known (identified). Critical

realist research therefore involves the identification of these basic underlying properties

and mechanisms.


In the context of institutional audit, the adoption of Bhaskar’s ontology entails an

acknowledgement of the existence of structures and mechanisms at the level of the real

which give rise to multiple events at the level of the actual – events in life of the

institution. Such events would include lectures, meetings, an academic sitting down to

assess student’s work, a workshop to develop a curriculum, a student learning that she has

failed a course by reading a list of student numbers and marks on a noticeboard and so on.

The empirical then refers to contesting interpretations or experiences of those events. An

institution, for example, might make claims about its student profile (i.e. the number of

students who actually study at the university) at the level of the actual which is based

upon one set of experiences (at the level of the empirical) of what is entailed in the

production of a just society. The institutional account is thus socially constructed and

theory laden and is thus partial.

Luckett’s position is that the ‘flat ontology’ of audit methodology, which essentially

operates only at the level of the empirical, ‘fails to penetrate the level of the real and

uncover the workings of social structure and social agency’ (2007:7). The account

provided by an audit analysis, is thus partial, potentially fallible and does not have the

power to bring about the change envisaged by those who developed it.

The position taken in this research is that, while an audit panel might work at the level of

the empirical (and this is the level at which any analysis must begin since all of our

experience is located at this level) what the panel in fact does, albeit unknowingly, is ask

the question ‘If this is what the world (i.e. the institution) looks like (to us), what must the

world (i.e. the institution at the level of the real) really be like?’ What the panel then does,

again albeit unknowingly, is delve beneath the level of commonsense experience in order

to identify mechanisms from which the institutional account at the level of the empirical

has emerged. This process then allows them to challenge the institutional account.

An example may help to illustrate this point. In a Self Evaluation Portfolio, an institution

might state that its student population is 52% black. This claim exists at the level of the

actual and the empirical. 52% of students attending lectures, writing examinations etc. (at

the level of the actual) may indeed be of African origin although they would also be of

many different nationalities and from different social classes. At the level of the

empirical, however, the observation (and experience) of the number of black students can

be understood as emerging from the mechanism of ‘aggregation’ – of aggregating all


black students regardless of their nationality and social class into a single category. The

audit panel which challenged a claim made at the level of the empirical by disaggregating

the broad category ‘black’ into South African black and international black would be

identifying this mechanism and thus moving beyond the level of the empirical, albeit

unconsciously.

Luckett’s claim about the failure of audit methodology to penetrate the level of the real

can therefore be seen to be only partially true. The issue with the claim would appear to

relate to the extent to which an audit panel might consciously attempt to identify the

workings of social structure and agency and the extent to which it delved sufficiently

deeply (and analytically) in order to do so.

The research on which this research is based draws on previous work (Luckett, 2008,

Quinn & Boughey, 2008) on audit methodology in order to explore further the usefulness

of realist ontology in better understanding South African universities. In the context of a

meta-analysis of teaching and learning in audit processes, the research aims to identify the

structures and mechanisms (and, thus, system level issues) which have given rise to the

teaching and learning ‘events’ which exist at the level of the actual and teaching and

learning related experiences which exist at the level of the empirical. The identification of

these structures and mechanisms will then better allow an evaluation of the extent to

which audit processes have contributed to the potential for change.

3.2 Archer’s Social Realism

The methodological approach adopted for the purposes of this research is based on

Archer’s Social Realism (1995,1996,1998). According to Archer (1995), examination of

both structure and agency is central to any study of the social world. The theoretical

tendency in sociology in both the structural and cultural domains has been to conflate or

elide the ‘parts’ and the ‘people’. Archer argues against what she calls the ‘Fallacy of

Conflation’ (1996:xv): both the conflation of structure and agency and of culture and

agency. Her theory, she claims, is one which is ‘capable of linking “structure and agency”

or “culture and agency”, rather than sinking the difference between the “parts”

(organisational or ideational) and the “people” who hold the positions or ideas within

them’ (1996:xiv).


For Archer, culture, structure and agency are viewed as ontologically separate categories,

each with distinct properties and powers. In order to identify the interplay of categories,

each has to be analysed separately. This insistence on separability involves an

understanding that structure, culture and agency are ‘temporally distinguishable

(1996:66), a concept that implies that historicity needs. to be taken into account in any

analysis.


4 Research design and methods

As already noted, the data for the research on which this report is based consisted of i)

Self Evaluation Portfolios prepared by the five research-intensive universities not affected

by mergers ii) analyses of data produced by the HEQC for audit purposes and iii) the

Report of the Audit Panel for each institution.

A case study approach was adopted with each of the five institutions constituting a single

case. The following template, based on the ontological and epistemological assumptions

outlined above, was developed to guide the analysis of data for each case:

INSTITUTION

EMPIRICAL(Transitive)

Institutional Account

ACTUAL(Transitive)

EventsMeetings, Workshops, Teaching Events etc etc.

REAL(Intransitive)

1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.

1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.

1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.

Discourses

Mechanisms

Mechanisms

1.2.3.4.5.

1.2.3.4.5.

CULTURE STRUCTURE AGENCY

For each institution, the template describes the three layers of ontology (the empirical, the

actual and the real) acknowledged by social and critical realists. Following Archer, (1995,

1996, 1998), culture, structure and agency are located separately at the level of the real


although in reality they co-exist. Specific structures and corporate agents and individual

actors are then listed. Emergent mechanisms associated with each of the domains of

culture, structure and agency are then listed. For the domain of culture, mechanisms are

identified as discourses defined (Kress, 1989:7) as:

... systematically organised sets of statements which give expression to the meanings and values of an institution. Beyond that, they define, describe and delimit what it is possible to say and not possible to say (and by extension – what it is possible to do or not to do) with respect to the area of concern of that institution, whether marginally or centrally.

The level of the actual allows for the identification of events at the institution which have

emerged as a result of mechanisms exercised (or not exercised) at the level of the real.

The level of the empirical then allows for the institutional account of itself.

For the purposes of the analysis, the term ‘structure’ was loosely defined as an entity such

as a committee, a faculty, a working group and so on. A policy or plan emerging from a

structure was then identified as a mechanism even though both committee and policy

would ultimately constitute structures since a mechanism such as a policy ultimately

becomes part of the institutional structure.

Two templates were completed for each institution – one providing an overall

institutional level analysis and another focusing more specifically on teaching and

learning.

The data which formed the basis of the analysis necessarily privileged some domains

rather than others. An audit portfolio, for example, might contain many different ‘voices’

in the sense that various sections have been written by individual authors and have been

brought together into a whole which is more or less coherent. Anyone reading the

portfolio without ‘insider’ information is unlikely to be able to identify the individual

voices with the result that the ‘institutional voice’ predominates. In these circumstances, it

is difficult to identify individual actors and to associate those actors with mechanisms.

The analysis only allowed for this association in rare cases.

Another problem in the use of the template relates to the distinction between agency and

structure. A committee or a centre can be understood as a group of collective agents.

However, it can also be understood as a structure. For the purpose of the analysis, the

domain of structure was privileged and agency was only used to categorise powerful


individuals (for example, the Vice Chancellor, Deans etc) or groups of individual such as

a Senior Management Committee. There is no doubt that engagement with more data

(including, for example, transcripts of interviews by the audit panel) in more depth would

allow agency to be identified more thoroughly. As this report aims to show, however,

analysis at the broad level which both time and data permitted provided illuminating and

useful insights into teaching and learning at the five universities studied.

The research began by reading the data provided by the HEQC for each institutional case

and by using the reading to complete two successive drafts of the templates. The

templates were then used to build a study of each case by asking the following questions

each one:

In the domain of CULTURE:

How does the institution construct itself? (i.e. What does it tell us about how it

understands itself?)

How are academic staff members constructed?

What does the institution tell us about the need to assure and promote quality?

How is the student constructed? (i.e. Who does the institution understand the student

to be?)

How is students’ learning constructed? (i.e. How does the institution understand

students to learn?)

How does the institution understand teaching?

In the domain of STRUCTURE:

What structures has the institution established in order to assure and promote quality?

How do these structures relate to the construction of the institutional understandings

of i) itself ii) teaching and learning and iii) of students in the domain of culture?

In the domain of AGENCY:

Who are the key agents related to teaching and learning?


How do these agents relate to the construction of institutional understandings i) itself

ii) of teaching and learning and iii) of students in the domain of culture.

Answering these questions lead to the construction of each institutional case.

Once the five cases had been constructed, a secondary ‘cross-case’ analysis was

performed to identify underlying features of the five universities.


5 The Five Cases

5.1 The University of Pretoria

5.2 Rhodes University

5.2.1 The Actual

In 1996, 35% of students enrolled at Rhodes University were African, 3.3% Coloured and

8.7% Indian. The majority of white students therefore stood at 53.1%. By 2003, the

situation had changed to the extent that black students constituted more than half of all

enrolments in a context of overall growth at an institutional level (IP:10).

This apparently favourable demographic profile has to be interrogated, however, in the

context of the loss of Rhodes University’s East London campus to the University of Fort

Hare in the 2003 restructuring of the South African higher education system. Of the 3286

African students enrolled at Rhodes University in 2003, 1250 were studying on the East

London campus (IP:12). An understanding of the University’s current demographics

therefore has to taken into account the loss of the East London campus. When the number

of African students who were not South African born is deducted from the total number

of students studying on the Grahamstown campus, then the proportion of South African

students stood at only 29% of the total enrolment in 2003 (IP:12).

In 1996, white students constituted the largest group of enrolments across all CESM

categories. African enrolments were concentrated in ranked order from highest to lowest

in the i) Humanities and Social Sciences, ii) Education iii) Science Engineering and

Technology and iv) Business and Commerce (IP:17).

Graduation and success rates at the University are relatively favourable when compared

with figures at a national level. This apparent success needs. to be contextualised against

the high admissions requirements for the institution overall.

5.2.2 The Real

The following analysis of mechanisms emerging from the domains of culture, structure

and agency at the level of the real attempts to account for events at the level of the actual


and for the institution’s own account of itself provided in the Self Evaluation Portfolio

submitted to the HEQC as part of the audit process.

5.2.2.1 Culture

The fact that Rhodes is the smallest university in South Africa impacts heavily on the

institution’s construction of itself and particularly on the construction of its relationship to

students. The favourable staff/student ratio is claimed to be critical to the student

experience which is constructed as one of offering ‘all round’ development. This offering

of a different, ‘whole’ student experience is what, it is claimed, makes the institution

different to all other universities in South Africa.

Embedded in this construction of difference are claims of ‘excellence’ which, like at other

universities in the study, is understood to relate to an international reputation and to

‘gold’ standards (Harvey & Green, 1993). The claim that the university has an

international reputation is bolstered by its demographic profile which consists of 25% of

international students, another factor which is claimed adds to the experience offered by

the institution.

Smallness also impacts on the relationship the senior management has with its staff and

on the way the university is run. Senior management, according to the Self Evaluation

Policy, have an ‘open door policy’ which provides access to even the most junior staff

member in a short period of time. Key to the institutional account of itself is then the

discourse of ‘collegiality’ – a discourse which is used to substantiate the lack of what are

termed ‘bureaucratic’ and ‘managerial’ structures. If colleagues work well together,

sharing information and a common understanding of goals, then there is no need for

structures and mechanisms which will facilitate the attainment of those goals. The

discourse of collegiality also has obvious implications for the assurance of quality.

According to the Self Evaluation Portfolio, the QA system at the University is

characterised by ‘minimum bureaucracy and maximum effectiveness’. What this

effectively means is that the assurance of quality rests on a trust that ‘colleagues’, who

share the same values, will do what is needed to ensure that the ‘excellence’ prized by the

institution is maintained.

The ‘collegiality’ privileged in the institution’s account of itself, is linked to what is

identified in the Self Evaluation Portfolio as the dominant ‘white middle-class’ culture.


Senior black staff members, readers are informed, have noted that this culture is not an

obstacle to the inclusivity prized in institutional discourse. The University is open to all

regardless of the social spaces from which they come. Given the dominance of the white

middle class culture, questions about the extent to which the inclusivity is based on

assimilation or on the celebration of difference obviously arise. In the context of the

assurance of quality of teaching and learning, questions also arise about the way the

values underpinning the collegiality impact on the learning experiences of diverse groups

of students. While a trust in collegiality based on shared values might be sufficient to

assure the quality of the learning experiences for students whose ‘culture’ is also white

and middle class, the extent to which this process will assure that all students are provided

with what they need to be able to learn is questionable.

Also key to the institution’s construction of itself is a discourse centring on a claim that

the University is a ‘liberal arts’ institution, a claim which rests on the fact that it within

the curriculum of the undergraduate degree it is possible to include subjects from a

number of different faculties. Linked to this is the idea of the ‘total student experience’ –

that the University will provide its students with what they need to develop as ‘well

rounded’ individuals. Arguably also linked to the institutional understanding of what is

meant by the term ‘liberal arts’ is the rejection of what is termed in the Self Evaluation

Portfolio the ‘programme route’ in favour of the decision to retain the double major

disciplinary degree structure which is understood to provide students with the sort of

‘broad’ education much prized in institutional discourse.

If this is the way the institution constructs itself, what are the implications for the way it

constructs students, teachers and of teaching and learning more generally? As at other

institutions in the study, the notion of ‘potential’ is key to the construction of the student.

According to the Self Evaluation portfolio, students need to be provided with an

environment which will allow them to reach their ‘full potential’. The idea of full

potential then implies that potential is an inherent characteristic ready to be nurtured. This

is also the case for disadvantaged students as, according to the Self Evaluation Portfolio,

‘educational disadvantage’ needs. to be engaged with so that all students can ‘develop’

their full potential. Related to the identification of a factor inherent to the individual as

key to academic success is a second discourse attributing agency to students. Students

need to be ‘active participants’ in an education process which ‘aims to add value to their


personal educational experience’. This educational process then involves ‘connecting’

intellectual and social lives to produce excellent graduates. Given the dominant

institutional culture of white middle ‘classness’, the implications for students from

backgrounds which are other than white and middle class and who have to exercise the

agency needed to ‘connect’ intellectual and social lines are not difficult to identify.

In the Self Evaluation Portfolio, one construction of teaching centres on the provision of

an environment which allows students to connect their social and intellectual lives in a

way which will allow them to become the well-rounded individuals characterised as

‘excellent’ graduates. This construction places enormous responsibility on the students

and requires the exercise of considerable agency. This is in contrast to the role of the

institution which is merely to ‘provide’ the environment. Clearly the institutional slogan

of ‘Where leaders learn’ can be linked to this point since the leaders much prized by the

institution can presumably muster the ability to exercise the agency the University

requires of them.

In the Self Evaluation Portfolio, a second construction of teaching emerges however in

contrast to this dominant institutional discourse. This second discourse constructs

teaching as an intellectual activity which has to be learned – as something other than

commonsense. The co-existence of these two discourses in the Self Evaluation Portfolio

is an indication of clashes and contestations in an institution which prizes its research

activities.

5.2.2.2 Structure

Key to the institutional account of teaching is the identification of Heads of Departments

(HoDs) as ‘implementers of institutional strategy’. The trust placed in colleagues to ‘do

the right thing’ because of the assumption of a shared set of values has already been

noted. This discourse of trust then results in the HoD structure not contributing to the

achievement of strategic goals as well as it could.

This is especially the case for teaching and learning. Another structure at the University,

the Teaching and Learning Committee, is identified as being responsible for the

promotion of quality in teaching and learning and is noted as having been responsible for

the development of a number of policies intended to assure the quality of teaching and

learning. Each of these policies then requires HoDs to report on the way they have been


implemented at a department level on an annual basis. As the Audit Report notes,

however, monitoring of policy implementation by calling for reports from HoDs at an

institutional level is weak – a manifestation of the trust placed in HoDs to ensure that

their departments run as they should because of the sharing of a common set of values at

institutional, departmental and individual levels. Mechanisms in the form of policies

developed by one structure, the Teaching and Learning Committee, are then countered by

mechanisms in the form of discourses emerging from the domain of culture. That this is

the case is substantiated by the identification, in the Self Evaluation Portfolio, of a degree

of ‘cynicism’ on the part of HoDs to the need to report on policy implementation and to

manage teaching and learning more generally.

The interplay between structure and culture also manifests itself in relation to teaching in

another way. The construction of the University’s role in relation to teaching and learning

as the provision of an environment which allows intellectual and social spheres to be

‘connected’ in order to produce ‘excellent’ graduates has already been noted in Section

5.3.1 above. The Self Evaluation Portfolio then privileges the structure of the residence

system as being key to this process constructing it as ‘the heart of the University

(SEP:30). The Audit Report, however, notes that the Panel found little evidence of the

conscious use of the residence system to integrate students’ intellectual and social lives.

An set of overall observations in the Audit Report, moreover, relate to the apparent

inability or reluctance on the part of the institution to draw on available resources in the

domains of structure and agency to drive its aspirations expressed at the level of culture

because of the discourse privileging collegiality and which relies on the trust that

colleagues will ‘do the right thing’ because they share a common set of values. What

appears to be happening, therefore, is that overall there is an inability to align the

mechanisms emerging from the three domains of structure, culture and agency.

5.2.2.3 Agency

As already noted, the institutional discourse privileges agency on the part of students who

are constructed as needing to be active in an educational process which brings together

the social and the intellectual. The dominance of white middle class assumptions at the

level of culture has also been noted. The Audit Report notes the concern of the Panel that

‘not all students have the same kind of experience at Rhodes’ (AR:104) picking up on a

statement in the Self Evaluation Portfolio that class increasingly plays a role in relation to


social integration (SEP: Appendix 39:2). It is arguably the case, therefore, that

mechanisms emerging from the domain of culture and which are related to whiteness and

being middle class can work to counter agency exercised by some groups of students or

some individual students. This is but one more example of the interplay between the three

domains.

Yet another example relates to the discourse of collegiality which places trust in the HoD

structure. It is, however, highly likely that as individual actors, HoDs can choose to

exercise their agency either to assure quality in relation to teaching and learning by

implementing policies or to ignore the monitoring of the implementation of those

policies. As collective actors, HoDs can also contribute to the dominance of a discourse

which is cynical towards the need to monitor policy implementation and, thus, contribute

to the assurance of quality in teaching and learning.

5.2.3 Conclusion

The overall picture of Rhodes University is of an elite institution where size contributes

significantly to discourses of institutional identity. The construction of the institutional

identity as inclusive does not acknowledge the existence of a covert value system which

influences who might and who might not be included. This observation applies to both

staff and students.

culture, however, that change is most difficult to achieve.


6 Cross-Case Analysis

6.1 Introduction

This section on the report will now move into an analysis of all five case studies.

Following the analytical framework set up in Section 3, the cross-case analysis will

explore the levels of culture, structure and agency and the interplay between mechanisms

emerging from all three levels. Before proceeding to the analysis at this level, however, it

is necessary to provide an overall description at the level of the actual.

6.2 The Actual at the Five Research Intensive Universities

As described in Section 2 above, in critical/social realist accounts, the level of the actual

relates to the level of events – to what actually happens. Each of the case studies in

Section 5 above has provided a glimpse into the level of the actual at each of the five

research-intensive universities. Although there are differences across the five universities,

the following observations can be made of the group:

With the exception of the University of the Witwatersrand, enrolments of South

African black students at the other four institutions in the study are not representative

of the demography of the country as a whole. This is in spite of the huge take up of

places in higher education by the black majority in the years since the 1994

democratic election (see, for example, Cooper & Subotsky, 2001).

Enrolments of black students need to be analysed according to i) level of study

and ii) CESM category. While it is not possible to make overall generalisations across

the group of universities studied, it is possible to note that there is a tendency for

black students to be enrolled in the Humanities and Social Sciences and Education

and at undergraduate levels and even diploma levels. Large numbers of black students

are also enrolled in distance programmes where they are offered.

The success and graduation rates of black students do not match those of their

white peers across the board.

Although some of the universities in the study meet benchmarks set by the

Department of Education in respect of graduation rates, some fall below them in spite

of the fact that all have relatively high entrance requirements. Institutions are


therefore taking students from the very top of the matriculant pool. This is also the

case for students who enter the institution via alternative admissions routes and who

are placed on foundation or extended programmes. Such students would mostly gain

places on three year programmes at other institutions with lower admissions criteria.

At the level of the actual, therefore, what we have is a description of institutions which

are not performing well in respect to either equity or efficiency when the outcomes of

teaching and learning are considered.

The following cross-case analysis of mechanisms emerging from the domains of culture,

structure and agency at the level of the real in the five universities, attempts to provide an

explanation for these events.

6.3 Culture

This section of the Report focuses on the identification and analysis of sets of discourses

(or, in critical/social realist terms, ‘mechanisms’) which lead to the emergence of events

at the level of the actual through their interplay with mechanisms emerging from other

domains.

6.3.1 Privileging Research

Arguably the most powerful set of discourses at all five institutions in the study relate to

an understanding of their own status as producers of knowledge. Institutions variously

describe themselves as ‘research-led’, ‘research-oriented’, ‘research-focused’ and

‘research-driven’ and this fundamental construction of their purpose then leads to the

emergence of a number of effects including a light touch with respect to the management

of quality in teaching and learning and of academic staff themselves. In spite (or, perhaps,

because) of the privileging of research in institutional vision and mission statements and

of mechanisms intended to drive the research function, there is little evidence in any of

the documentation studied for the purposes of this research of engagement with any sort

of deep engagement with the idea of what being ‘research-led’, ‘research-oriented’,

‘research-driven’ and so on might mean for teaching and learning.

Understandings of the terms ‘research-led’, ‘research-oriented’ and so on in the

documentation studied relate to i) the infusion of research findings into the curriculum ii)

the possibility of students being taught by ‘research-active staff members and iii) the use


of research on teaching and learning to improve teaching and learning. Each of these

understandings is problematic. The idea that being ‘research-led’ involves the infusion of

research findings into the curriculum invites questions about the extent to which this is

possible, certainly at undergraduate levels in institutions where the majority of enrolments

at undergraduate level. The construction of ‘research-led’ teaching and learning as

involving the availability of research active staff to teach has also been called into

question in 5.2 above. Not only would an institution need to clarify what constituted

‘research active’ status, but it would also need to develop mechanisms to ensure that the

experience of being taught by an active researcher was more than a mere likelihood. In

respect of this understanding, there is also a need to question the extent to which the mere

status of being ‘research active’ can inform and enhance teaching. An active researcher

might be good at research and might not be good, or even interested, in teaching. Even if

s/he is good at teaching, the relationship of the good teacher to the good researcher still

needs. to be interrogated.

As the case studies in Section 5 also show, the understanding that research on teaching

and learning can be used to enhance those same activities is also questionable because of

the interplay between mechanisms arising from the domains of culture, structure and

agency. There is evidence, in the cases studied, of structures/collective agents having

produced research which has the potential to improve teaching and learning and of other

mechanisms then working against the possibility of this research being applied in

practice. The use of a definition of being ‘research-led’ in relation to teaching and

learning which drew on this understanding to drive institutional practice would therefore

require the conscious attempts to manage other mechanisms.

Yet another understanding of the term ‘research-led’ in relation to teaching has been

developed in the international literature (see, for example, Brew, 2008). This

understanding relates to opening up possibilities for students to do research even at

undergraduate level. Learning, in this understanding, is ‘inquiry based’ and the task of

teachers is to create the structures spaces in which students can inquire.

Although this latter definition of being research-led in relation to teaching opens up huge

possibilities for teaching and learning and has been taken up in, for example, the

Australian higher education system because of this (Brew, 2008), in the context of the

‘social’ model of learning described in Section 2 above, it is possible to develop another,


arguably more productive understanding of the term ‘research-led’ in relation to teaching

at universities such as those in the study. This more productive understanding is

dependent on the elimination of the distinction between knowledge production and

knowledge dissemination which also drives the distinction between research and

teaching.

The notion of knowledge ‘dissemination’ has particular implications for teaching.

Teachers have the knowledge and the purpose of their acts of teaching is its dissemination

to students. Teaching is then constructed around a set of discourses involving the idea of

‘getting the knowledge’ across to students. This process of ‘getting the knowledge across’

is, however, complicated by i) the way academic disciplines structure the knowledge

itself (Bernstein, 1999) and ii) by the relationship of language to both the knowledge and

the way it is structured (Halliday, 1973, 1978, 1994). When the work of scholars such as

Bernstein (ibid) and Halliday (ibid) is considered, however, it is possible to turn the idea

of teaching as an act of knowledge dissemination on its head and to argue that all acts of

teaching at universities such as those in the study are about teaching students how to

construct academic knowledge regardless of the level at which the teaching takes place

and regardless of the innovation in that teaching. In respect of this latter point, arguably

the most traditional teaching at universities such as those in the study is actually focused

on teaching students how to construct knowledge although this is largely an unconscious

process.

A typical first year sociology class in a faculty of humanities serves to illustrate this

claim. Typically, academics teaching at this level lay out of the main theories

underpinning the discipline. As they do so, they are mapping disciplinary terrain and,

even if they are not conscious of doing this, modelling how the way knowledge is

structured in the discipline. Students are then typically required to write an assignment

responding to a question, a quotation or some other prompt. What is expected of them as

they write this assignment is a series of knowledge claims, each of which is substantiated

by reference to the literature, and which then build into an overall argument taking a

position in relation to the prompt – a process which is often referred to as ‘giving an

opinion’ or as ‘creative and critical thinking’. As they write the assignment, students are

effectively taking the first steps in learning how to construct academic knowledge and

which may culminate in the ability to write the literature survey in a doctoral dissertation


or academic article. The same academic will also produce a series of knowledge claims in

her own explication of the theories and will substantiate each of these claims. Once again,

she is modelling the construction of academic knowledge albeit unwittingly. Shay’s work

on curriculum in a history department at one of the universities in the study (2008d)

arguably provides yet another example of the way teaching in an academic department

involves the teaching of knowledge construction and not simply ‘knowledge’ itself.

Significant to the claim that teaching at universities such as those in the study is about the

teaching of knowledge construction, is that this is largely unconscious and covert. In

some disciplinary areas, however, the teaching of knowledge construction is more overt.

In a science practical session, for example, students are taught the rules for knowledge

construction arising out of a positivist ontology. These rules involve observation,

accuracy in experimentation and so on. The laboratory practical report then requires the

use of deduction and other cognitive process to come to substantiated conclusions. In

spite of this explanation of the activities which take place within them, dominant

constructions of laboratory practicals tend to focus on the ‘application’ of knowledge.

If this explanation of teaching at research-led universities is accepted, then it is clear that

dominant discourses constructing teaching at the universities in the study serve mask

what is actually going on. This masking then impedes what Morrow (1994) terms

‘epistemological access’ for some groups of students. Students whose primary Discourses

(Gee, 1990, 2003) share some of the values and assumptions regarding knowledge

construction with academic Discourses are better able to access the covert processes

which underpin teaching. This point has profound implications for what we might do to

improve teaching and for the sort of theories we draw on to explain both our teaching and

our students’ learning.

The same set of discourses privileging research in relation to teaching also serves to

construct academic staff. At the universities in the study, staff are constructed as scholars

who need to have the freedom to explore the fields in which they practice without

interference. Related to the privileging of research is the privileging of independent

thought and argumentation and the assignment of the right to challenge being managed in

respect of teaching and learning. Related to this is a discourse of trust, trust that

academics will ‘do the right thing’ because they share the same values and attitudes

related to knowledge and what can count as knowledge production and because these


values will then guide their practice. The overall effect of these discourses is a reluctance

to manage teaching and learning because of a fear of impinging on academic autonomy

and collegiality.

6.3.2 Accountability and responsiveness

A second set of discourses at the universities in the study centre on a construction of

themselves as accountable to South African society and to the continent more generally.

These discourses often draw on the research-based discourses analysed above to construct

the institutions as national and international resources. Given the dominance of research-

based discourses which allow for a more traditional construction of the university, to

some extent this second set of discourses remains symbolic particularly in relation to

teaching and learning as there is little evidence in the documentation studied of ways in

which they have impacted on teaching practices. Where they have impacted is in relation

to the provision of alternative access routes and to the development of foundation and

extended programmes. Structurally, these programmes then sit apart from the mainstream

leaving an ‘articulation gap’ between the mechanism aimed at social responsiveness and

accountability and other mechanisms (traditional programmes and teaching) aimed at

more traditional goals.

Discourse related to social responsiveness and accountability have also impacted on the

design of new programmes and on structures such as academic departments which have

sometimes been reorganised into schools because of the need to engage in

interdisciplinary work. The extent to which teaching in any of these programmes is

different to that in other more traditional offerings is highly questionable, however.

6.3.3 The autonomous ‘other’

A third set of discourses at the universities in the study centre on the construction of

students as a-social, a-cultural, autonomous beings and, thus, on the ability to succeed in

higher education as dependent on factors inherent to the individual such as ‘motivation’

and ‘potential’. At the same time as students are constructed as autonomous of social

context, so too are academic practices which are then understood as being accessible to

all. Significant in the context of the study, where i) two institutions have identified the

shift from using Afrikaans as a medium of instruction to using both English and

Afrikaans as media of instruction as a means of opening themselves up to diverse groups


of students and where ii) many black students use English as an additional language, is

the fact that academic practices related to language are also constructed as autonomous

phenomena. The result of the construction of academic practices as autonomous is that

learning too is understood to be culturally and socially neutral.

This is an important point as analyses of institutional culture in both the self evaluation

portfolios submitted by institutions and the audit reports prepared by the HEQC tend not

to understand learning as a socially embedded and, thus, ‘cultural’ phenomenon.

Considerations of, or allusions to, ‘culture’ in the documentation thus tend to exclude

teaching and learning. This is in spite of the fact that the notion of a ‘culture of learning’

does appear institutional documentation. When the term ‘culture of learning’ is used, it

tends to refer either to i) the development of an environment which is conducive to

learning or ii) to exercise of the agency to learn on the part of students and where ii)

might be related to i). What is lacking, therefore, is an understanding that teaching and

learning are ‘cultural’ practices and operate to exclude some students in the same way as

other institutional practices which are more ‘social’ and less ‘intellectual’.

Students at all institutions in the study tend to be constructed as ‘other’ to academic staff

and to the ‘institution’. Academic staff are there to teach the students and the institution

exists to provide a ‘rich’ environment (where rich often refers to capital resources) in

which students can exercise the agency to learn. It would be useful to consider how an

understanding of teaching as the teaching of knowledge construction would impact on

this process of ‘othering’ since it could imply an understanding of teachers and students

as joint participants in a quest to produce knowledge.

In spite of the ‘othering’ of students, difference in the student body is acknowledged but

mostly as ‘educational’ or ‘historical disadvantage’. As long ago as 1993, Bradbury was

pointing out the political expediency, in the context of apartheid, of labelling the

difficulties some students experienced in higher education as due to their status as

speakers of English as an additional language. In many respects, the labels of

‘educational’ and ‘historical disadvantage’ function in the same way as they attribute

‘difficulties’ to contexts outside the student and, thus, elide social and cultural

‘difference’. In the struggle against apartheid, the elision of difference was important.

Post-apartheid, conceptual tools with the potential to explain differences in practice

without attributing any form of inferiority to anyone are available. In spite of this, cultural


and social differences continue to not to be taken into account in the face of a dominant

construction which sees success as being dependent on innate ‘potential’ which has not

been realised, in some cases, because of factors (in the schools) outside the students’

control.

6.3.4 Teaching as best practice

Yet another set of discourses are evident in the documentation in relation to attempts to

enhance the quality of teaching and learning at institutional level. These discourses relate

to other discourses evident in countries such as the United Kingdom which have

consciously tried to improve the quality of teaching and learning at a national level. The

discourses, here termed ‘teaching as best practice’, draw on work produced in the field

popularly known as the ‘scholarship of teaching and learning’ which, as Haggis (2003)

points out, can be problematic because of the way descriptive models developed from

research are appropriated and reconstructed, often as ‘truths’ by ‘staff developers’ and

subject teachers doing pedagogical research’ (p.91). An example of this phenomenon was

provided earlier in Section 2 focusing on the reconstruction of ‘deep approaches’ to

learning as ‘deep learning’ or even ‘active learning’.

Another significant feature of what have been termed ‘teaching as best practice’

discourses is the privileging of method over theory. Typically, this would involve the

promotion of constructs such as problem-based learning, small group work and outcomes-

based teaching and assessment. The promotion of method, when this is divorced from

engagement with theory and research, can be problematic. Shay (2005) for example, has

shown how criterion referenced assessment, much touted in dominant South African

discourses as a means of improving assessment practice in higher education, can be far

from criterion referenced as assessors draw on a range of contextual information to make

judgements which are not captured in the criteria provided to students. In order to make

these observations, Shay draws on the work of Bourdieu (1990, 1996, 1998). The danger,

then, in much work intended to enhance the quality of teaching and learning work is that

practice can rest on unexamined assumptions.

There is certainly evidence that this is the case in some of the documentation studied for

the purposes of this research. Policies, ‘Education Principles’ and Teaching and Learning

Strategies all draw on what, at worst, may be termed ‘buzz words’ in the literature related


to the scholarship of teaching and learning. These same words are introduced almost

casually elsewhere in the documents studied in descriptions of institutional values,

approaches and strategies.

When the difficulties of getting academic staff to engage with their own professional

development as educators and with consideration of issues related to teaching and

assessment in curriculum design is considered because of the influence of other dominant

discourses, then there is clearly a need to ensure that whatever engagement does take

place is not trivialised. This then points to a capacity issue in the field of teaching and

learning in South Africa more generally. As this Section of the report will also argue

later, even when the capacity for engagement based on theory and research is available at

institutional levels, the potential of this capacity to enhance teaching and learning is not

maximised because of the interplay of other mechanisms.

6.3.5 eLearning

Also evident in the documentation studied for the purposes of this research is a set of

discourses which privilege the use of Information and Communication Technologies

(ICTs) in teaching and learning as cutting edge practice. In two of the universities, large

amounts of money have been directed at the development of the use of ICTs as elements

of institutional strategy which may be related to growth in student numbers.

A number of problems arise in relation to the use of ICTs in teaching and learning.

Although learning platforms such as WebCT and Moodle (its open-source equivalent) can

provide rich spaces for engagement with students around their learning, this potential is

often not drawn upon and eLearning spaces simply become repositories for lecture notes

and reading texts. In the lecture theatre, teaching continues as it always has centring on

what Morrow (2007) terms a ‘performance model’ of teaching involving a performance

by a single individual in front of a group of students. Investment in ICTs is therefore only

maximised if eLearning spaces are built into what Morrow (ibid) terms a ‘managed’

model of teaching. This would mean that the use of ICTs would have to be conceptualised

within an overall model of the curriculum and would be used to achieve the goals of that

curriculum. Typically, this would involve a rethinking of assessment so that students are

given a task which requires independent study and the eLearning platform is used to

guide that study through focus group discussions, the use of ‘forums’ and other kinds of


sharing. Some lecture based teaching might still take place. Ideally, however, the teacher

would become a resource available to students electronically (see, for example,

Bezuidenhout, 2008). This sort of practice is a far remove from the way heavy investment

in ICTs is being used in relation to assessment at one institution in the study. In the case

in question, ICTs merely become a means of increasing the efficiency of multiple choice

assessments in the context of the need to assess the learning of large numbers of students.

A second problem in relation to the promotion of the use of ICTs in teaching and learning

in a context such as South Africa is related to understandings generated in the field which

has become known as New Literacy Studies. Following on the work of researchers such

as Street (1984, 1993, 1995, 1996), literacy is acknowledged not as a ‘technology’

involving the encoding and decoding of meaning into and from print but rather as a set of

social practices centring on the meanings assigned to different kinds of texts and to the

way readers and writers understand their own relationship with those texts and with other

people who will read them. This means that engagement with electronic texts is also a

socially embedded phenomenon. Although research into engagement with what are

termed ‘digital literacies’ in South Africa is beginning (see, for example, Snyder &

Prinsloo, 2007) this work is still in its infancy and, in any case, is likely to be set aside in

favour of what Street (ibid) terms ‘autonomous’ models of literacy which the ability to

read and write as involving a set of acultural, asocial, apolitical ‘skills’. That this latter

model of literacy is informing the conceptualising the use of ICTs in teaching and

learning is evident in the documentation studied. There is the potential, then, for the

investments made in the use of ICTs in teaching and learning not to be maximised. This is

a subject worthy of further research.

6.3.6 Conclusion

At the institutions in the study, then, it is possible to identify the existence of a set of

dominant discourses constructing teaching, teaching in relation to research, students and

teachers. Mostly these discourses are not productive in the critical/social realist sense that,

as mechanisms, they are unlikely to lead to desirable change at the level of the actual.

When the interplay between these mechanisms emerging from the domain of culture with

others emerging from the domains of structure and agency is taken into account, the

description of events at the level of the actual becomes more understandable. It is to this

interplay that this Report now turns.


6.4 Structure

This section of the Report identifies and analyses two broad sets of structures. For the

purposes of the Report, the sets termed ‘traditional structures’ and ‘new structures’.

6.4.1 Traditional structures

‘Traditional structures’ relate to the traditional functioning of the university and include,

inter alia, faculties, departments, the head of department system, the external examining

system, courses, modules and so on. A number of observations can be made regarding

these structures:

They are sustained by a set of discourses (which are value driven and, thus,

essentially ideological) regarding the function of the university in society, what a

university should be like, what should be taught in it, how it should be taught and so

on. These discourses have been challenged over time not least by the processes of

restructuring in South African higher education which have taken place since the early

1990s.

They have long been involved in the ‘assurance of quality’ where the term, again,

is used in its traditional sense. The external examining system, for example, requires

that a peer from another institution of a similar standing should scrutinise students’

work in order to ensure that it is of an ‘appropriate’ standard and in order to ensure

that the courses, from which the work scrutinised emanates, contain ‘appropriate

material’. The faculty system is used in a similar way. Typically, new courses are

submitted to the faculty board for peer review and approval. Marks many also be

scrutinised by the faculty board at the end of the semester or year. The faculty also

serves to regulate the behaviour of its members though, as they share many of the

same values (in discourse), the likelihood of such regulation being necessary is rare.

The sharing of values and participation within dominant discourses within the

institution means that a large degree of trust is vested in these traditional structures

and, as a result, they are granted substantial autonomy to run their affairs.

Dominant discourses (mechanisms) emerging from the domain of culture in the have

already been identified at institutional levels in the case studies and more generally in

Section 6.3 above. From a critical/social realist perspective, the interplay between these


mechanisms and the traditional structures discussed in this section (and, indeed the

discourses form part of the value system on which the structures are based) will work to

produce the effects noted at the level of the actual.

6.4.2 New structures

What have been termed ‘new structures’ can again be divided into two categories: those

related to programmes and those related to quality management.

6.4.2.1 Programme structures

The restructuring of the South African higher education system following the shift to

democracy resulted in a number of new constructs being developed to guide teaching and

learning in higher education. The establishment of the South African Qualifications

Authority (SAQA) and the National Qualifications Framework (NQF), for example,

resulted in the development of the construct of a ‘programme’ which is broadly defined as

a planned series of learning opportunities leading to a qualification. A programme is thus

distinct from the qualification to which it leads. Qualifications are then registered on the

NQF and described by i) a purpose statement and ii) a series of learning outcomes. At the

same time as SAQA and the NQF were emerging, a series of discourses at national level

(see Kraak, 1999) began to privilege the need for more vocational programmes in the

context of the need to deal with globalisation as well as because of the availability of

Gibbons’ ‘Mode 2 Knowledge’ thesis (Gibbons et al., 1994). As a result, institutions

increasingly began to develop programmes which were interdisciplinary in nature. This

was then often accompanied with the wholesale reorganisation of academic departments

into schools. All but one of the institutions in the study developed programmes in this

way although not all of the programmes which were developed were ‘vocational’ with the

result that the reorganisation of academic departments into schools is not a uniform

phenomenon.

The development of programmes (which are themselves structures) led to the

development of other structures in the form of programme committees and programme

convenor/co-coordinator systems. In an institution which relies on programmes, clearly

programme committee structures and programme convenor systems are critical to the

management of quality in teaching and learning. What appears to have happened in the

case of the four of the five institutions in the study which have moved to the offering of


programmes is that no overall management of the programme structures takes place

because of i) the granting of trust to traditional structures such as faculties in which

programmes are located ii) the granting of large degrees of autonomy to those same

structures iii) the ‘light touch’ applied to the management of teaching more generally.

Given the need for the overall management of teaching and learning in complex

structures such as programmes, the role of the programme convenor/co-coordinator is

crucial. There is no evidence in the documentation studied, however, of institutions

identifying the need for the development of staff who step into programme convenor/co-

coordinator positions. What could then be the case, is that a programme, a construct

which is often underpinned by an entirely different set of assumptions about knowledge

and learning (since learning is outcomes based), is managed by an individual who has not

engaged with these assumptions in any serious way.

One obvious place to look for evidence of such engagement would be assessment at

programme level. The use of the learning outcome as a guiding principle in curriculum

design requires that assessment should be ‘aligned’ with learning outcomes (see Luckett

& Sutherland, 2000). ‘Alignment’ then involves assuring that assessment (which is

understood to drive learning) does indeed measure what the outcomes state learners

should be able to do in order to achieve the qualification. In most cases, this would

involve moving away from traditional ‘essay’ type assignments towards a range of

assessment tasks requiring more practical application. At the same time, alignment with

learning outcomes would also require learners to be provided with formative

(developmental) assessment opportunities in order to receive feedback on their learning

and improve performance. The extent to which the principles of outcomes based

assessment guides assessment practice at South African universities including the

universities in this study is highly questionable in spite of the existence of other structures

such as assessment policies and assessor training programmes.

Given the shifts in theoretical assumptions underpinning programmes and the changes in

practice these assumptions imply, programme committees and programme convenor/co-

coordinator systems are clearly key to the management of quality in teaching and

learning. Given the autonomy granted to faculties and the light touch applied to the

management of teaching and learning in all the institutions in the study, however, it is


highly unlikely that these key structures are functioning in ways which will enhance

quality.

6.4.2.2 Quality management structures

The introduction of quality assurance at a national level in the South African higher

education system has led to the establishment of a second set of structures related to

quality management in the institutions in the study. These include teaching and learning

committees, quality assurance committees, quality units, and centres/units focusing on

teaching and learning development/higher education development.

Once again, observations about dominant discourses and the resultant light touch applied

to the management of teaching and learning apply in relation to the structures identified in

each section. At some institutions in the study, teaching and learning committees have not

been established at senate level. At other institutions, teaching and learning committees

have been established at faculty and even at programme level. In the context of the

autonomy granted to faculties, however, the establishment of teaching and learning

committees at this level would appear to relate to the exercise of agency on the part of

Deans or, possibly, programme convenors/co-coordinators. The extent to which issues

related to teaching and learning are discussed and managed is therefore unreliable across

institutions. When the dominant discourses related to teaching and learning identified in

this study are considered, then the quality of the discussion and management of those

issues would also call for further questioning.

With the notable exception of one institution in the study, significant is are the ‘low key’

nature of the structures established in relation to quality assurance. At the University of

Pretoria, the work of the Quality Unit is privileged in institutional discourse although

arguably this is the case because of the institution’s own construction of itself within

discourses related to globalisation. Elsewhere, the management of quality is often related

to ‘managerialism’ and ‘bureaucracy’ and this then results in phenomena such as the

existence of a ‘Quality Assurance Working Group’ (my emphasis) at the University of

Cape Town and of the location of much quality management work in Institutional

Planning Offices where, arguably, it is less overt.

One significant effect of the establishment of structures related to quality management

has been the introduction of programme review systems. Although the institutions in the


study all use some sort of review system, there is no coherent evidence in the

documentation studied regarding the extent to which the reviews incorporate questions

about teaching and learning. There is evidence in the documentation (REF) of reviews

being used for rationalisation and for pursuing an efficiency agenda at least one

institution. Even when reviews might incorporate questions about teaching and learning,

however, dominant discourses related to teaching, teachers and students identified in this

study would mean that questions would need to be raised about the assumptions on which

that questioning was based.

The final set of structures related to the management of quality in teaching and learning

which merit discussion in this report are centres focusing on teaching and learning. All

the institutions in the study have established or have redeveloped such centres although

all have different strengths and capacities and all tend to work in different ways.

Arguably the most well positioned structure of the five in the study is the Department of

Education Innovation at the University of Pretoria given the correlation between the idea

of ‘education innovation’ and the institutional goal of producing an ‘innovation

generation’. As the Audit Report points out, however, the guiding documents produced

by the Department do not realise this potential given their focus on a set of general

educational principles which could have been taken from the plethora of handbooks on

teaching and learning in higher education. Other centres at institutions in the study have

the capacity to produce high level research which has the potential to guide the institution

towards the goals it has set for itself. Leibowitz et al.’s (2005a,b) work on identity in

relation to language has enormous potential to guide work on teaching and learning at the

University of Stellenbosch, for example. So too does the high level of research produced

at the Centre for Higher Education Development at the University of Cape Town. The

extent to which the work emanating from structures such as centres for teaching and

learning is taken up at an institutional level is dependent on the interplay between

mechanisms emerging from the domains of culture and agency, however. The

‘commonsense’ assumptions about teaching, teachers and students identified in dominant

discourses along with the availability of ‘methods’ type approaches to the improvement

of teaching (for example, active learning, problem based learning and so on) work against

research of this kind being used productively to drive teaching and learning.


At this point, it is worth returning to Haggis (2008) work to locate the observations made

above in an international context. According to Haggis (ibid) much of the research on

teaching and learning in higher education produced over the last forty years has focused

on the student as a psychologised, autonomous individual and on teaching as a neutral

activity. Haggis then goes on to identify work located in more ‘social’ understandings as

cutting edge and offering the most promise for the future. As pointed out earlier in this

Report, ‘social’ understandings of teaching and learning have been available in South

Africa since the late 1980s. That they are only now emerging in the international

literature attests to the quality of some of the thinking which has been available to South

African higher education in the past. What needs. to be examined is why those ‘social’

understandings have not been taken up in ways which can bring about improvement. One

response to this question lies in the identification of dominant discourses. Another lies in

the lack of national structures to build capacity in teaching and learning development

following the demise of the South African Association for Academic Development

(SAAAD) in 2008. Yet another response lies in the work produced by national structures

in other countries, most notably the United Kingdom, and which has influenced much of

the international literature on teaching and learning. Regardless of the reasons for the lack

of take up on work which first began to be produced nearly two decades ago, attention to

the development of capacity in the field is clearly called for.

Research on what are termed ‘academic development units’ as ‘organisational units’ is

currently being conducted and is available as work in progress (Gosling & Leibowitz,

2008). This work investigates the staffing, funding, remits and institutional location of

centres such as those in this study at a national level. Clearly this work will be of interest

to the HEQC once it has been completed.

6.4.3 Conclusion

The analysis of the working of structure at the five universities in the study presented in

this section has attempted to illustrate the interplay of structure with culture and the way

culture serves to work against newly established structures to improve quality in teaching

and learning. It has also attempted to show how mechanisms emerging from the domain

of culture have served to privilege the working of more traditional structures. The overall

result of this interplay is a tendency towards what social realist Margaret Archer ( 1995,

1996, 1998) would term ‘morphostasis’ (or reproduction) rather than ‘morphogenesis’


(transformation or change). What does emerge as significant in the analysis, however, is

the awareness on the part of the institutions in the study to establish structures intended to

assure quality. The challenge is not to use those structures to bring about quality

improvement.

6.5 Agency

As already indicated in various places throughout this report, the identification of agency

has not been possible because of the nature of the documentation studied and because of

the depth of the overall investigation. This section will therefore focus on attempting to

develop an overall statement on the workings of agency at the five institutions in the

study. That agency is important and that it is possible to examine its working in more

detail is evident in Quinn & Boughey’s (2008) work on institutional audit. Their

identification of key agents contributing and working against change was only possible

because of the privileged insider view they were able to take in relation to their study.

What is evident from the level of analysis made possible by the study is the existence of

key agents at institutional level. These key agents emerge from structure and include

Deputy Vice Chancellors, Deans and Heads of Departments. Some of the structures in

which potential key agents are located have been termed ‘traditional’ in this study. The

extent to which these agents will be able to exercise agency in ways which will lead to

quality improvement is therefore open for question given the dominance of the discourses

identified earlier in this report. Other potentially key agents are located in newer

structures related either to the establishment of programmes or to the introduction of

quality assurance. Once again, the extent to which their agency can/will be exercised will

be dependent largely on the workings of the domain of culture.

At an institutional level, there are, nonetheless, ways in which the potential for the

exercise of agency in relation to teaching and learning could maximised. Should the

cultural conditions allow, a requirement that all programme co-ordinators should engage

with some sort of developmental activity focused on assessment would empower them to

interrogate assessment more rigorously at programme level. Similarly, engagement of

Deputy Vice Chancellors with researchers working in teaching and learning centres could

allow them to exercise their own agency in more informed ways.


Other mechanisms operating at a national level also offer the promise of improving the

capacity of individuals to exercise agency. The inclusion of Deans on audit panels, for

example, opens individuals up to alternative discourses and alternative experiences all of

which could impact on their own willingness or ability to exercise agency in their home

institutions.

The next section of this Report picks up on some of the ideas explored here as it attempts

to explore the effects of audits on teaching and learning at the five institutions in the

study.


7 The institutional audits

This section of the Report will now look at the extent to which the audits conducted at the

five institutions in the study picked up on issues identified in the meta analysis. It will do

this by examining the commendations and recommendations made in each audit report

where these can be said to apply to teaching and learning.

7.1 The case studies

7.1.1 The University of Pretoria

The Audit Report on the University of Pretoria makes 9 commendations and 17

recommendations. Of the 7 commendations, 3 can be seen to apply to teaching and

learning. Of the 17 recommendations, 9 can be judged as applying to teaching and

learning. The following table sets out which of the recommendations and commendations

have been identified as applying to teaching and learning.

Commendations Recommendations

The HEQC commends the University of

Pretoria for:

2. the extent and effectiveness of thwork of

the Quality Assurance Unit.

7. the many support structures that

provide assistance to departments for the

development of new programmes and for

its robust approval system.

9. for the electronic resource developed by

the Department of Education Innovation

to support implementation of the

assessment framework, which

communicates pedagogical assessment

principles and associated assessment

policies, while also identifying their

implications for assessment practices.

The HEQC recommends that the University

of Pretora:

1. consider conducting an institutio wide

debate on the meaning of the terms

‘innovation’ and ‘innovation generation’,

in relation to both educational processes

and institutional culture.

3. engage in a systematic assessment of the

impact of the implementation of the

language policy paying particular

attention to staff loads, student success

rates, the consistency with which the

policy has been implemented across

faculties, and the unforeseen

consequences of the implementation on

institutional culture.

4. consider conducting an institutional


climate survey as the first step towards

the development of a transformational

strategy for the institution which reflects

its willingness to contribute to an

emerging and inclusive democracy in the

country.

6. consider re-examining its 10 principles of

education in terms of their usefulness

and specificity to support the realisation

of the University’s vision and mission.

Of particular importance in this regard

would be the examination of the view of

teaching and learning informing the 10

principles of education and the extent

and effectiveness of their application

across the Faculties.

7. develop appropriate systems to monitor

and approve the performance of the

committees and other units, which

impact on the core functions.

8. investigate the need and possible impact

of the creation of an integrative structure

or mechanism tasked with responsibility

for the monitoring and review of

teaching and learning initiatives across

all Faculties.

9. reconsider the role and location of the

Department of Education Innovation in

the context of the urgent need to review

the conceptualisation, organisation and

operationalisation of teaching and

learning at the institution.

10. reconsider the mechanism that it uses in


programme review to ensure that good

practice takes place within the core

programmes.

11.take steps to ensure that its assessment

framework is adopted consistently across

all departments and Faculties and across

income generating units.

Perusal of the commendations and recommendations suggests that the audit panel was

successful in identifying many of the issues identified as a result of this analysis. Several

recommendations (1,4,6) are directed at the domain of culture and focus on the need for

the institution to examine the assumptions which underpin its approach to teaching and

learning. Problematic, however, is the separation, in recommendation 1, of ‘educational

processes’ and ‘institutional culture’ since the analysis argues that educational processes

are culturally and socially situated. Other recommendations (7,8,9,10,11) are directed

primarily at the development of structures intended to manage quality in teaching and

learning consistently across the institution. Closer examination of these recommendations

in the light of the analysis offered in this Report suggests, however, that underpinning this

focus on structure is a call for engagement with culture. The recommendation (7), for

example, that the University should ‘develop appropriate systems to monitor and approve

the performance of the committees and other units, which impact on the core functions’

speaks directly to the ‘light touch’ to the quality management of teaching and learning

emerging from the granting of both trust and autonomy to traditional structures. Similarly,

the recommendation (10) that the University should ‘reconsider the mechanism that it

uses in programme review to ensure that good practice takes place within the core

programmes’ speaks to the need for issues related to teaching and learning to be

interrogated across the institution and therefore engages directly with the cultural

assumption that teaching and learning should not be managed.

7.1.2 The University of Cape Town

The Audit Report on the University of Cape Town makes 13 commendations and 16

recommendations. Of the 13 commendations, 1 can be seen to apply to teaching and

learning whilst 8 of the recommendations can be seen to apply. Relevant commendations

and recommendations appear below in tabular form.



The HEQC commends UCT for :

4. the pioneering and innovative work done

in the Alternative Admissions Research

Project run by CHED.

The HEQC recommends that UCT:

2. continue to review trends in its

undergraduate admissions and

throughput rates and ensure better co-

ordination of faculty planning and

support mechanisms in order to

accelerate improvements in the equity

profiles of Black and especially South

African born African students.

3. strengthens its transformation related

initiatives to give effect to the

interventions identified in the Portfolio,

the Institutional Climate and Student

Surveys and other relevant documents in

order to ensure that the effectiveness of

the core functions and the quality of their

operations are not weakened by

identified and unresolved transformation

issues. This includes additional measures

to strengthen the capacity of the

Transformation Office in order to ensure

improved co-ordination and

implementation of the new proposed

institutional interventions on

transformation.

4. give serious consideration to re-

positioning the QAWG as a Senate

Committee, thus enabling it to insert its

work into the formal academic oversight

responsibilities of Senate.

5. explore a more substantial articulation

between teaching and learning and


research within a set of institution-wide

arrangements that could give stronger

expression to the conceptualisation of

research-based teaching and address its

implications for academic governance at

different levels within the institution.

6. that UCT investigate more closely the

impact that the casualisation of academic

staff might be having on the quality of

the student learning experience at the

undergraduate level as well as the ways

in which the employment of adjunct

academic staff might be compromising

high quality research-based teaching.

7. strengthens its admissions and placement

strategies through a wider institutional

use of AARP and ensure consistency in

its implementation across all faculties.

8. strengthen its existing systems to track

and monitor students’ academic

progress. This should include a review of

the collaboration between faculties and

CHED to identify problems in teaching

and learning and design appropriate

interventions so as to ensure that

CHED’s work is fully utilised in support

of quality objectives for staff and

students across the University.

10. give priority to the consistent

implementation of the formal

programme review system across all

faculties, and address the consistency of

the link between research and teaching


within evaluation parameters.

11. consider instituting structured assessor

training for all levels of the research and

academic staff as a way of responding to

national policy in this area and of

improving a fundamental aspect of the

teaching and learning process.

13. Give attention to clarifying the notion

of ‘research-led’ through wider debate

across the institution so that academics

and students can contribute to its

implementation across all core function s

in a way that gives coherent and

substantial institutional content to the

notion.

Once again, the audit panel can be seen to have identified many of the issues identified as

a result of the analysis described in this Report. Although the majority of the

recommendations can be seen to be directed at the domain of structure, once again any

action recommended by the panel requires an engagement with culture.

Recommendations related to structure can be seen to relate to the need to exert a firmer

touch on the management of quality in teaching and learning and also to draw on the

work produced by CHED to improve teaching and learning. Since much of the research

produced by CHED challenges dominant institutional assumptions, this call for an

institutional resource to be drawn upon more rigorously also operates at the level of

culture. Some recommendations are related more directly to the domain of culture.

Recommendation 13, for example, calls on the institution to examine the meaning of

being ‘research-led’, an issue existing at the level of culture and identified in this analysis

as being common to all five institutions.

7.1.3 Rhodes University

The Audit Report on Rhodes University lists 15 commendations and 19

recommendations. Of the 15 commendations, 3 can be seen to relate to teaching and


learning. 11 of the 19 recommendations also fall in the area of teaching and learning. The

following table identifies relevant commendations and recommendations.


The HEQC commends Rhodes on/for

3. its initiatives for the professionalisation

of teaching and learning at the

institution, and the development of a

mentoring system to support previously

disadvantaged students.

4. the quality of research on teaching and

learning undertaken by the staff of the

Academic Development Centre.

8. for the way in which the staff

development function of the Academic

Development Centre has been

conceptualised and implemented,

resulting in enhanced levels of

professionalism in teaching and learning,

especially among young staff.

The HEQC recommends that Rhodes:

1. consider the possibility of initiating

institution-wide debate about the

meaning of the liberal arts tradition in

order to contextualise its value and

currency in South Africa and address its

compatibility with the University’s

claimed African identity. Such a debate

may provide critical reference points fro

the discharge of the three core functions

and for conceptualisations of quality in

those core functions.

2. develop a recruitment strategy that

indicates firstly, institutional enrolment

targets for African, Coloured and Indian

students; secondly the resources and

mechanisms that will be put in place in

order to achieve those targets, and

thirdly, the support mechanisms which

the University will institute in order to

facilitate the academic success of

students.

5. consider the development of a bold and

transparent strategy to address negative

impacts of its institutional culture. This

needs to include an institution-wide

implementation plan to transform

relevant aspects of Rhodes’ institutional

culture and clear monitoring mechanisms


to track progress.

6. engage with the issue of how, within a

decentralised system of quality

management, faculties and academic

departments could actively engage with

and give expression to the achievement

of institutional level objectives, which

pertain to the conception of quality as

both fitness for and fitness of purpose.

7. consider, within its framework of

collegial governance, a re-

conceptualisation of quality management

to give greater weight to quality support,

development and monitoring as strategic

tools for the achievement of institutional

level objectives.

8. consider the identification and use of a

set of performance indicators which

could reinforce the institution’s planning

and quality management functions, and

explore the utilisation of suitable

benchmarking tools in a formalised and

regular manner to support decision

making for academic planning and

quality improvement.

9. review its current arrangements for

monitoring the implementation of its

teaching and learning policies to enable

the institution to ensure that high quality

teaching is consistently offered across all

academic departments and that

appropriate developmental initiatives are

in place where required. This should be


done in a way that is consonant with the

requirements of departmental autonomy

and collegiality.

10. develop and implement appropriate

mechanisms to monitor and assess the

effectiveness of the Extended Studies

Unit of the ADC and its programmes. In

the design of such mechanisms, the

institution should consider the need to

document the ways in which extended

programmes contribute to the throughput

and success rates of different groups of

students in different disciplines.

11. explore an appropriate mechanism to

monitor the effectiveness of its

voluntaristic approach to the evaluation

of teaching and learning. This should

entail the incorporation of student

evaluations of courses in the evaluation

of teaching and learning as well as the

development of appropriate mechanisms

to monitor the extent of and frequency

with which evaluation of courses and

whole qualifications are being used to

improve teaching and learning.

12. review the identity, functions, and

resourcing of the Academic

Development Centre. This should

include a review of its relationship with

the University’s central planning

structures and the senior leadership

responsible for teaching and learning.


13. Formalise its policy on external

examinations and ensure that the systems

needed to monitor and respond to

external examiner reports are effective in

achieving appropriate and consistent

management of summative assessment at

both undergraduate and postgraduate

levels of study.

Possibly more than in any other of the audits studied, the panel auditing Rhodes

University identify structural issues related to the management of teaching and learning.

Underpinning all of these issues of structure, however, are discourses related to the ideal

of collegiality which comes across so strongly in the Institution’s Self Evaluation

Portfolio. The Panel can therefore be seen to be working at the level of culture even

though their focus appears to be structure. As at the Universities of Cape Town and

Pretoria, the recommendations and commendations also focus on the role of a structure

intended to contribute to the quality of teaching and learning, the Academic Development

Centre, and attempt to reposition it more centrally in the functioning of the University.

The recommendations also include a direct call for institutional culture to be interrogated

although the construct of ‘culture’ is not overtly seen to include teaching and learning

issues. Given the ‘social’ model of teaching and learning identified in this Report, this is

arguably an omission.

7.1.4 The University of Stellenbosch

The Audit Report on the University of Stellenbosch makes a total of 9 commendations

and 21 recommendations. Of these, 3 commendations and 11 recommendations can be

seen to apply to teaching and learning. The following table identifies relevant

commendations and recommendations.



The HEQC commends Stellenbosch

University on/for:

3. the work done by the Centre for

Teaching and Learning to develop and

improve the quality of teaching and

learning at the University within the

framework of the Teaching Management

Plan and Vision 2012.

5. its innovative use of technology to

support learning processes as

demonstrated in its E-campus initiative.

6. the development and successful

implementation of the Programme for

the Educational Development of

Academics (PREDAC), which inducts

new academic staff members into

different aspects of teaching and learning

at the institution.

The HEQC recommends that Stellenbosch

University:

1. conduct a rigorous review of its access

model in order to identify its key

determining premises and the major

preconditions for its successful

implementation. This should include a

critical assessment of the extent to which

the current Language Policy supports

quality teaching and learning at the

undergraduate level and enables the

institution to give effect to its

commitment to serving a broader

community and embracing diversity. The

review of the new access model should

also include the development and

operationalisation of faculty specific

indicators for equity and access, which

could form part of the performance

management system for faculty staff.

3. review the way in which different

faculties give effect to the institution

wide goals in the three core functions

and monitor their achievement, with a

view to the acceleration of the

implementation of the institution’s 2000

Strategy and Vision 2012.

4. develop appropriate and viable

mechanisms to ensure that the quality of

tuition, infrastructure and support

services in the Faculty of Military


Sciences at the Saldanha campus is

comparable with acceptable standards at

the rest of the University.

5. review the resourcing of the Division of

Academic Planning and Quality

Assurance and the Division of

Institutional Planning in order to

strengthen their roles and capacity in

supporting the work of the Quality

Committee at an institutional level.

6. investigates the most appropriate means

to achieve a more consistent

understanding of quality and its

operationalisation at the different layers

of the academic structures while giving

due attention to concerns about the

appropriate levels of academic freedom

and collegiality, necessary for the

development of innovation and critique

which are characteristic of academic life.

7. consider ways in which to make a clear

and strong link between the renewal of

teaching and learning and the

institution’s strategic goals as articulated

in its Strategic Plan and Vision 2012, as

a way of integrating change in this core

function with the operationalisation of

change at institutional level.

8. consider strengthening the importance of

teaching and learning at the institution

by redefining the position of the

Committee for Learning and Teaching in

Senate, revising its composition to


include representation from the

Academic Planning and Quality

Assurance unit and reviewing its

relationship to other committees such as

the Programme Advisory Committee.

9. consider as a matter of urgency the

possibility of exploring new avenues to

raise institutional awareness of the

critical importance of teaching and

learning and its equivalent significant

status with research as a core function of

the university. This should include the

introduction of a more centrally

monitored arrangement for the

improvement of teaching skills across

faculties as part of the performance

management system for academic staff.

10. review the function and effectiveness of

the different Senate and related

committees involved in academic

planning and teaching and learning (e.g.

APC, CLT, PAC) with a view to

streamlining the governance of

programmes and strengthening the

arrangements for the assurance of quality

of teaching and learning across the

institution.

Perusal of the recommendations and commendations made by the Audit Panel at the

University of Stellenbosch shows that both follow the same broad trends as those

identified at other institutions. Recommendations tend to focus on structural changes

which will result in a firmer touch on the management of teaching and learning.

Underlying these structural changes are changes at the level of culture. In the list of


recommendations made for Stellenbosch University, moreover, there is a direct appeal at

the level of culture for the status of teaching to be raised. As at other universities, the

panel also commends the work done by the Centre for Teaching and Learning and thus, in

an indirect manner, affirms its value to the institution.

What the Panel does not do is engage with the autonomous model of teaching and

learning identified as a result of analysis of the University’s Teaching and Learning

Strategy and discussed in 5.4.1 above. Given the overt statements about teaching and

learning made in the Strategy document, this could be considered an omission.

7.1.5 The University of the Witwatersrand

The Audit Report on the University of the Witwatersrand makes a total of 10

commendations and 17 recommendations. Of these, 1 commendation and 7

recommendations can be seen to apply to teaching and learning. The following table

identifies those which are relevant.


The HEQC commends the University of the

Witwatersrand for/on

3. the development of a strategy to

professionalise teaching and learning as

a way to improve the quality of students’

educational experience at the institution.

The HEQC recommends that the University

of the Witwatersrand:

1. develop a common understanding of

what it means to be in the ‘top 100’

research-driven universities in the world,

why this is important for the university,

and the measures to be undertaken to

achieve this goal.

2. continue to develop and implement

strategies that will allow it to identify

and act upon those areas where the

tension between central management and

academic collegiality may be

endangering academic freedom and

discouraging innovation and creativity.

Similarly, it needs to identify aspects of

this tension that might be used to resist


change.

5. consider developing an overarching plan

that gives clear expression to the

institution’s conceptualisation of

teaching and learning, and which sets out

objectives, targets, monitoring and

evaluation mechanisms, as well as

allocation of responsibilities and

committed resources at Faculty level.

6. consider creating some form of co-

ordination of academic development

activities and projects as a way of

providing more systematic support for

institutional commitment to the

professionalisation of teaching and

learning.

7. examine the implications for teaching

and learning of its vision of being a

research focused university, in order to

define innovative and more substantial

articulation between research and

teaching and learning.

8. reconceptualises staff development as a

mechanism of support for the

development and implementation of its

conceptualisation of teaching and

learning and that it finds a mechanism to

align its approach to staff development.

and the range of its offerings to the

actual needs of staff.

Scrutiny of the recommendations and commendations made in the final case in the study

affirms the trends identified in other cases. Recommendations are directed at structural


issues but, underpinning each of these, is a need to work at the level of culture

particularly where culture relates to the privileging of autonomy and of research. More

directly than in some other Audit Reports, the Panel also asks the Institution to consider

its identity as a ‘research-focused’ university with an ambition in relation to teaching and

learning.

7.2 An overall comment

Looking across recommendation and commendations in all five cases, it can be seen that

audit panels have tended to identify:

The tensions between central management/steering structures and other structures

traditionally granted academic autonomy.

The privileging of research in the institution’s identity and the lack of

consideration of what this means for teaching and learning other than for teaching and

learning to be accorded less importance and a lower status of research.

Voluntaristic approaches to the implementation of mechanisms intended to assure

quality in teaching and learning – a phenomenon related to the tensions between

central management and other structures.

The potential value of work done by centres/units focusing on teaching and

learning.

As the individual analyses indicate recommendations are then focused on structural

changes which are dependent on change in the domain of culture. One significant

problem, however, appears to be the failure to perceive what in one report are termed

‘educational processes’ as elements of culture. Given that the Audit Reports also make

direct reference to culture in some cases, this is an area which could merit further

attention.

7.3 A way forward?

Depending on the reception of the analysis in this Report, it would be possible to use the

framework used to i) analyse other categories of institutions and then to ii) develop a

framework which would guide audit panels in future audits which might be focused more

directly on teaching and learning. This would be exiting work which the Centre for


Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning at Rhodes University would be keen

to be involved with.


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