Inclusion and Exclusion.

Date Released: Mon, 14 December 2009 14:38 +0200

Professor Chrissie Boughey, Dean of Teaching and Learning at Rhodes University, gave a keynote address at the second Southern African-Nordic Centre (SANORD) conference held at Rhodes.

Reflecting the theme of the conference, Chrissie's address was entitled "Inclusion and Exclusion in the Changing University: A Teaching and Learning Perspective".

Inclusion and Exclusion in the Changing University: A Teaching and Learning Perspective

This morning an email providing a link to an article on a website focusing on higher education was doing the rounds here at Rhodes. My experience of working in a number of institutions of higher education in South Africa and elsewhere suggests that the email was being forwarded so assiduously because the article to which recipients were being referred touched on sentiments very common to the academic heart – sentiments revolving around a resistance to the focus on teaching which has come to characterize what I have called in the title to this presentation the ‘Changing University’. A focus which stresses the importance of teaching in changing academic environments and which attempts to ensure that teaching enjoys the same attention as the far more prestigious, and some would argue more satisfying, ‘pillar’ of academic life - research.

Before I go any further in exploring the subject of the circulating email, however, I need to backtrack in order to ask why teaching is so important in what I have called the ‘Changing University’ and what is the ‘Changing University’ anyway?

In his book Beyond all Reason, British academic Ron Barnett identifies a number of ‘pernicious’ ideologies pervading current thinking about universities. These include the idea of the university as an entrepreneurial institution, the need for it to be competitive in the face of the commodification of knowledge, the focus on quality in the context of entrepreneurial activity and competition and, finally, constructions of the idea of the academic ‘community’. While it would be perfectly possible to explore each of these aspects of change in this talk tonight, my focus, given the theme of this conference, is on but one ‘element’ of the changing university, the student body, which, regardless of context has grown and which has also diversified as it has ‘massified’.

In the ‘Changing University’ what do these processes of massification and diversification actually mean? On one level they mean that universities enroll more students and academics are therefore called upon to teach larger classes. More significantly, however, they mean that universities enroll larger numbers of different kinds of students – a phenomenon which, in the United Kingdom certainly, has led to the increased use of the term ‘non-traditional’ when applied to students and, in South Africa, is associated with the terms ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘underprepared’.

What does it mean to be ‘non-traditional’, ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘underprepared’? For many, these terms are a form of shorthand for educational background. A ‘non-traditional’ student in the United Kingdom will have experienced a comprehensive state school rather than a state grammar school or a public ‘private’ school. In South Africa, the ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘underprepared’ come from ‘former DET’ schools – a term used to signal the poverty of resources both physical and intellectual which continues to pervade much of the South African schooling system today. To my mind, however, US academic James Paul Gee (2008) provides us with a more satisfactory understanding of phenomenon of diversity in higher education today, with his use of the term ‘Discourse’ deliberately written with an upper case ‘D’.

For Gee, ‘big D’ Discourse is a kind of role – a seeing, doing, speaking, reading, writing, thinking and, importantly, valuing combination. The ability to play this role, Gee terms ‘literacy’. We are all born into a ‘primary’ Discourse and acquire a primary literacy simply by virtue of being brought up with other human beings. Some of us are fortunate enough to be born into primary Discourses which match more closely the Discourses of formal schooling and education. Others are less fortunate and need to acquire secondary Discourses, secondary roles which impact on their very being as individuals, which will allow them to succeed at school, gain entrance to a university and then succeed in higher education which are very different to those which characterize the communities outside formal education to which they belong.

In some Discourses (and typically those associated with the educated middle classes) for example, values and attitudes related to what can count as knowledge and how that knowledge can be known match more closely the ontological and epistemological values of the academy. These values then give way to ways of behaving, of speaking, reading, writing and learning, which also match academic practices. The extent to which a school regardless how well resourced, how good, can allow a learner to develop the roles needed to succeed in higher education when that same learner returns to a home characterized by very different ways of valuing what can count as knowledge, is open to question. My own research has certainly identified the power of home-based Discourses in the lives of students. The association of educational background with terms such as ‘non-traditional’, ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘underprepared’ is therefore highly questionable – a more robust link would be with social class.

Following Gee, then, (and, I would also point out a host of other theorists working from a similar concern to understand why some social groups fare better in education than others including French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and British sociologist Basil Bernstein) learning (and teaching) are socially embedded rather than the neutral phenomena we usually prefer to construct them as. Learning is not so much dependent on attributes inherent to the individual such as intelligence, motivation, aptitude or and so called ‘language ability’ but rather on the forms of social and cultural capital the individual can bring to her learning. And teaching, from this perspective, ultimately involves an unconscious, unexamined set of beliefs and associated practices which make perfect sense to the academic teacher but which may mean very little to many of the students in her class.

In the years since 1994, the South African higher education system has been subject to ongoing processes of ‘transformation’ including mergers, the emergence of new institutional types, the development of new curricula associated with the establishment of the National Qualifications Framework and so on. Through all this, evidence of the way this ‘transformation’ has impacted on social inclusion is not heartening. A recent piece of research on the cohort of students admitted to South African universities in 2000 conducted by Ian Scott, Nan Yeld and Jane Hendry at the University of Cape Town shows (Scott et al., 2007), for example that only one in five students graduated in regulation time – that is in the time envisaged they should take to complete their qualifications. Even more shocking are rates for attrition calculated by the same group of researchers - 29% for first time entering students - and rates for completion with the same research showing that 56% of students admitted in the same 2000 left the higher education system without ever graduating. Most chilling of all is the observation that the group of students who suffered most were those who the higher education system needed to serve most given their historical lack of access – black South Africans.

What, then, is happening in teaching and learning in South African universities which has allowed so little progress towards social inclusion to be made? It is at this point that I’d like to refer briefly to a piece of research my colleagues and I at the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning here at Rhodes are conducting for the Higher Education Quality Committee. The research - a ‘meta analysis’ of teaching and learning – uses data produced in the first cycle of institutional audits to build pictures of teaching and learning within institutional types which will later be laid across each other in order to build a more composite understanding of what is going on in South African higher education. Work on the first group of universities, five so called ‘research intensive’ universities not affected by mergers was completed earlier this year and, with your permission, I’d like to share insights from this with you this evening.

The research design uses a framework developed from Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism (1979) and Margaret Archer’s (1995, 1996, 1998) social realism to analyse ‘structures and mechanisms’ from which very different experiences of teaching and learning emerge. Documents analysed included the self evaluation portfolios submitted by the universities for institutional audit purposes, institutional profiles derived from HEMIS data and analysed by the HEQC and audit reports written by audit panels. Part of the research involved a discourse analysis, where the term ‘discourse’ was defined not in Gee’s (2008) terms but rather, following 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.
Following Archer, these discourses were understood to operate in the domain of culture and constructed university teachers, students and acts of teaching and learning themselves.

The first set of discourses constructing university teachers provides insights into the email circulating this morning which I mentioned at the beginning of this presentation. All five institutions in the research constructed their academics as independent thinkers and argumentative beings who needed to be left alone to get on with their thinking and knowledge producing. The implication of this construction of teachers was that teaching could not be managed – and that to do so would constitute an infringement of academic life. Ironically, given what I will point out shortly, this construction of university teachers located academics in their social contexts – social contexts which were essentially concerned with the production of knowledge and were acknowledged as different to other learning contexts identified in the data such as schools and colleges.

The second set of discourses constructing students, on the other hand, involved a denial of the social contexts in which students lived their lives and a lack of acknowledgement of the way these contexts could impact on the way students understood knowledge itself and acts of learning. In the research, the construction of students as what we came to term the ‘autonomous other’ emerged – with the ability to succeed clearly located in the inherent ‘potential’ students needed to bring to their learning . University learning was then constructed as a neutral, a-political, a-cultural phenomenon which was open to all in spite of the wealth of theory and research which suggests otherwise and is spite of all the evidence which shows that some groups of students, for the reasons I have explained earlier, fare much better in education than others.

The result of these discourses constructing university teachers and university students was a further construction of the role of the university as a provider of spaces and resources to learn and with learning then dependent on individual students exercising the agency to learn.

Significantly, as well as attempting to understand teaching and learning, one of the secondary aims of the researcher I have outlined so briefly was to shed some light on the effects of attempts to assure and enhance quality in South African higher education. All the institutions in this part of the study had established structures and put in place agents in order to do this. One of the most significant findings of the research, however, was that ‘culture’ rubbed against structure and agency in order to negate these efforts to assure and enhance quality. What point is there in having a Senate Teaching and Learning Committee if the members of that committee rely on the sort of understandings of teaching and learning I have outlined above? What point is there for having a DVC Teaching and Learning or a Dean Teaching and Learning if teaching and learning are understood as matters of efficiency and effectiveness and do not take into account the value laden social contexts from which our students come and in which academics teach?

Clearly, the research I have outlined her still needs to be completed but the part of the study which has already been conducted suggests that, if we are serious about social inclusion and exclusion in South Africa, then more complex and critically reflective understandings of the university and of what it means to teach in it need to emerge. Only then, I would argue, will emails such as the one I referred to earlier cease being circulated in vindication of the ‘leave me alone’ stance adopted by many and only then will we begin to address inclusion in meaningful ways. And South Africa is not alone in this regard.

Thank you.

References
Archer, M.S. 1995. Realist Social Theory: The morphogenetic approach. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Archer, M.S. 1996. Culture and Agency: The place of culture in social theory. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Archer, M.S. 1998. ‘Social theory and the analysis of society’ in T.May & M. Williams (eds.) Knowing the Social World. Open University Press: Buckingham.
Bhaskar, R. 1979. The Possibility of Naturalism: A philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences. Harvester: Brighton.
Gee, J.P. 2008. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourse. (3rd edition). Routledge: London.
Kress, G. 1989. Linguistic Processes in Sociocultural Practice. Oxford University Press: Oxford.
Scott, I., Yeld, N. & Hendry, J. 2007. A Case for Improving Teaching and Learning. Monitor 6. Council on Higher Education: Pretoria.