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Going to university: the Influence of higher education on the lives of young South Africans

- Case, Jennifer M, Marshall, Delia, McKenna, Sioux, Mogashana, Disaapele

Mapping the field of Higher Education Research using PhD examination reports

- McKenna, Sioux, Quinn, Lynn, Vorster, Jo-Anne E

  • Authors: McKenna, Sioux , Quinn, Lynn , Vorster, Jo-Anne E
  • Date: 2018
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/66669 , vital:28979 , ISSN 1469-8366 , https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2018.1428178
  • Description: Pre-print , The PhD is the highest formal qualification and signifies a scholar’s rite of passage as a legitimate contributor of new knowledge in a field. Examiner reports make claims about what is legitimate in a thesis and what is not and thus articulate the organising principles through which participation in a field is measured. The authors analysed 39 examiners’ reports on 13 PhDs produced over a five-year period by scholars from the Higher Education Research doctoral studies programme at Rhodes University in South Africa. Drawing on aspects of Karl Maton’s Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), this study uses the dimensions of LCT:Specialisation and LCT:Semantics to explore what kinds of knowledge, skills and procedures and what kinds of knowers are validated in the field of Higher Education Research through the examination process. The study found that despite concerns in the literature about the a-theoretical nature of the Higher Education Studies field, examiners valued high-level theoretical and meta-theoretical engagement as well as methodological rigour. In addition, examiners prized the ability to demonstrate a strong ideological position, to use a clear doctoral voice, and to recognise the axiological drive of the field. The analysis showed that examiners were interested in strong contextualisation of the problem-spaces in higher education in South Africa but also commented positively on candidates’ ability to move from troubling an issue within its context to being able to abstract findings so as to contribute to the field as a whole.
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  • Date Issued: 2018

Postgraduate writing groups as spaces of agency development

- Oluwole, David O, Achadu, A, Asfour, Fouad-Martin, Chakona, Gamuchirai, Mason, Paul, Mataruse, P, McKenna, Sioux

  • Authors: Oluwole, David O , Achadu, A , Asfour, Fouad-Martin , Chakona, Gamuchirai , Mason, Paul , Mataruse, P , McKenna, Sioux
  • Date: 2018
  • Subjects: To be catalogued
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/187194 , vital:44578 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.20853/32-6-2963"
  • Description: Academic writing is a peculiar phenomenon – it varies greatly from discipline to discipline and its requirements are rarely made overt. Taking on the writing practices of the academy has implications for identity and it is thus unsurprising that it is seen to be a risky endeavour. This article analyses the experiences of postgraduate scholars who have participated in writing groups that meet weekly to read each other’s work and provide supportive critique. Thirty-two people provided detailed, anonymous evaluations of their writing groups and these were studied using a discourse analysis. Three main findings are discussed here. Firstly, writing circles allowed for academic writing development to be engaged with as a social practice, where the disciplinary norms could be made more explicit through peer deliberation, and where they could also be challenged. Secondly, the lack of hierarchical power in the writing groups was key to making safe spaces for agency development, and also for providing positive peer pressure whereby participants were spurred on to work on their writing. Thirdly, the fact that the groups were interdisciplinary, within cognate disciplinary families, provided an interesting challenge in that the students had to consider what these non-specialist readers would or would not understand. This process assisted students in clarifying their writing. Participants’ evaluation of the writing groups revealed an overall sense that these contributed to postgraduate student wellbeing and were places of significant agential development.
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  • Date Issued: 2018

The lenses we use to research student experiences:

- Hlengwa, Amanda I, McKenna, Sioux, Njovane, Thandokazi

  • Authors: Hlengwa, Amanda I , McKenna, Sioux , Njovane, Thandokazi
  • Date: 2018
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , book
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/142736 , vital:38112 , ISBN 9781928331902 , http://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/e3388578-a030-46de-8d8e-df18dcb52bec/Higher_Education_Pathways_9781928331902.pdf#page=160
  • Description: The recent student protests that erupted in the South African higher education landscape in 2015 and 2016 suggest that research concerning student experiences in our institutions has become all the more crucial. In light of this, our chapter argues for theoretically rigorous and conceptually rich approaches to research on the student experience, without which we will not be in a position to address the significant concerns raised by these protests. There is, of course, already a robust body of work detailing the student experience (for example Case, 2013; Case, Marshall, McKenna, and Mogashana, 2018; Walker and Wilson-Strydom, 2017). However, questions are often raised about the extent to which such research is being drawn on in subsequent studies (Niven, 2012) and this suggests that limited accounts of student experience remain dominant despite this body of research (Boughey and McKenna, 2016). It thus seemed important to make sense of the ways in which current research on student experience is being constructed.
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  • Date Issued: 2018

Writing groups as transformative spaces

- Wilmot, Kirstin, McKenna, Sioux

  • Authors: Wilmot, Kirstin , McKenna, Sioux
  • Date: 2018
  • Subjects: To be catalogued
  • Language: English
  • Type: text , article
  • Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/${Handle} , vital:44576 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2018.1450361"
  • Description: Curriculum transformation is a central concern for higher education in response to rapidly expanding technologies, globalisation and the widening diversity of the student and staff body. This is particularly true for South Africa, which is still grappling with inequalities and pressure for social redress in its universities. Early responses to supporting students took the form of add-on, ‘deficit-model’ approaches which understood poor student retention and success rates as emerging from students’ lack of neutral literacy ‘skills’. Recent initiatives have begun to adopt more socio-cultural understandings of literacy that seek to challenge traditional power structures and cultivate horizontal peer-orientated spaces for learning with a focus on practice rather than on product. Writing groups, as spaces for academic writing development, embrace this orientation and are argued to provide a transformative framework that foregrounds proactive student learning and experience, while still accommodating disciplinary learning through peer engagement. Drawing on the successful implementation of such forms of support at a research-intensive university, this paper argues that writing groups can play a critical role in both personal (student) transformation and broader curriculum transformation. Data include anonymous questionnaires and surveys with participants and coordinators of the writing groups. An inductive, constant comparative analysis indicated that students feel empowered in this space to develop not only their writing practices but also their transforming identities as scholars. Writing groups were found to provide ‘safe spaces’ where academic practices can be made explicit and where they can be challenged. The paper therefore argues that writing groups can play a small but key role in broader transformation efforts.
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  • Date Issued: 2018
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