Generic gold standard or contextualised public good? Teaching excellence awards in post-colonial South Africa
- Authors: Behari-Leak, Kasturi , McKenna, Sioux
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/66774 , vital:28992 , ISSN 1470-1294 , https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2017.1301910
- Description: Publisher version , Teaching Excellence Awards have raised the profile of teaching as a scholarly project. There are however a number of questions about what constitutes teaching excellence and how ‘excellence’ is understood in current higher education. In a post-colonial South Africa, where significant injustices permeate our society, we question whether excellence can be understood in a generic manner. Furthermore, we argue that as universities are a public good, teaching excellence needs to explicitly attend to the ways in which universities contribute to broad goals of transformation and inclusivity. We analysed data from the national Teaching Excellence Awards and 13 South African universities’ awards to interrogate the discourses that underpin ‘excellence’ in this context of social inequality. We found that while the awards have gone some way to enhancing the position of teaching in institutions, ‘excellence’ was largely articulated in fairly generic ways which failed to take into account the enablements and constraints of the discipline and the institution. Furthermore, the guidelines and criteria privilege a decontextualised notion of excellence that seeks a ‘gold standard’ and validates performativity, rather than a contextualised response to the needs of the students.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2017
Student-generated content: an approach to harnessing the power of diversity in higher education
- Authors: Snowball, Jeanette D , McKenna, Sioux
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/66763 , vital:28991 , ISSN 1470-1294 , https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2016.1273205
- Description: Publisher version , Internationally, classes in higher education institutions are becoming larger and more diverse. Support for ‘non-traditional’ students has often taken the form of additional remedial classes offered outside the main curriculum, which has met with limited success. Sociocultural theories of learning argue that the potential clash between the sociocultural context of disciplinary knowledge and the very different home contexts of many non-traditional students needs to be acknowledged. One way to achieve this is to use student-generated content, which allows teachers to bring student experiences and voices into the community of practice and acknowledges the importance of their prior experiences in knowledge production. Building on such sociocultural approaches to teaching and learning, this paper focuses on the use of student-generated podcasts as a means to harness the diversity of student experiences in a large (nearly 600 students) first-year Economics class at a South African University.
- Full Text: false
- Date Issued: 2017