The ways in which knowledge is constituted in Higher Education in South Africa today needs to take into account the historical diversity of learners’ academic and literacy competencies. The thesis begins by considering the ways in which, historically, many learners in Higher Education have been under prepared for the challenges of studying complex disciplines through the medium of English, which is often their second or third additional language. It also considers the sometimes inappropriate response of Higher Education to the plight of these learners and the present and potential role of language specialists working in collaboration with disciplinary specialists to support these learners. In this ethnographic research, I use an ontological metatheory, critical realism, as my analytical lens. Critical realism is an appropriate analytical lens for exploring and gaining insight into the possible causal mechanisms that generate the stratified and often inscrutable nature of social reality, including the role of language and discourse in education. I employ a case study design to explore the role of discourse in lecturers and clinical radiographers’ constitution of the knowledge of entry level Radiography learners at the Groote Schuur campus of Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). Taking discourse as my unit of analysis, I develop a model of knowledge constitution based on a Hallidayan framework (1978). This model comprises two contexts of culture (Higher Education and Health Care) within which are embedded two contexts of situation (the university classroom and a clinical radiography workplace). In these contexts, I focus on how lecturers and clinical radiographers constitute radiographic knowledge through the field, tenor and mode of their discourse. My research sheds light on learners’ construal of various aspects of this process of knowledge constitution, and I consider implications for Radiography teaching and learning. I conclude that, because of the dual contexts in which the learners’ knowledge is constituted, literacy requirements in the two contexts are quite different. For this reason, learners may often be unmotivated to enhance their literacies, particularly in reading and writing; yet, in the interests of the future growth of the profession, the latter will be required of them as practitioners who conduct research and publish. I argue that the real empowerment of Radiography learners thus lies in their lecturers’ agency: there is a need for them to implement certain practices that will shape the learners’ identity, not only as clinical practitioners, but as researchers and writers. In doing this, they will ensure that the learners’ potential is realised and they have the capacity to make meaningful contributions to the growth of the future radiography profession.

This thesis sets out to obtain an understanding of what it means to be an assessor in higher education, more especially within the Rhodes University context. The concept of assessment, a highly contentious and complex issue, is examined against a background of competing understandings of the nature and purpose of higher education, including the striving for excellence versus the call to more equitable ideals associated with a mass higher education and training system. An overview of salient issues is presented in which both traditional and alternative paradigms of measurement and assessment theory are explored with a view to considering foundational principles upon which sound assessment practice should be based. Specific methods and instruments of assessment are examined with the purpose of evaluating their potential for empowering students as active participants in their own learning and in the assessment process. In a field in which much of the literature seeks improved assessment merely through the administration of increasingly sophisticated assessment techniques, a phenomenological investigation offered a unique way of understanding the meaning assessors make of their practice. Making use of in-depth interviews with five lecturers at Rhodes University the researcher, interacting in a personal manner with people not viewed as experimental objects but as human subjects, assisted participants in moving towards non-theoretical descriptions that accurately reflected their experience. Insights contained in the data were synthesised and integrated into a consistent description of the essential nature of the experience, the primary endeavour of the phenomenologist being to transform naïve experience into more explicitly detailed conceptual knowledge. The essence of how these educators understand themselves as assessors at Rhodes University is perhaps best encapsulated by a considerable sense of agency or initiative on their part. While participants make use of a variety of assessment strategies, they are conscious that assessment cannot be viewed in isolation from other aspects of their teaching and the curriculum. Not only do they make use of different assessment methods but, conscious of accommodating the diverse needs of students, understand their responsibility in terms of providing learning opportunities to assist students in meeting the course outcomes and fulfilling their potential. Rather than allowing pressures from within and outside of the academy to dictate, these lecturers, with significant hard work, courage and a capacity for reflective practice, have embraced the challenges associated with higher education in a state of transition.

Knowledge is often tacit and under researched in educational fields. In order for student access to knowledge and its related academic discourses to be facilitated, a deep understanding needs to be gained of the form that this knowledge takes. This study interrogates the ways in which knowledge is constituted in the first year of a Public Management Diploma and a Public Administration Degree at a comprehensive university in South Africa. The study takes a social realist approach that understands reality as fact but sees our knowledge thereof as a social phenomenon. The study was concerned with knowledge structures and knower structures as it argues that these have not been adequately accounted for in the sociology of education research. But this study comes to this concern from a strongly ideological view of student reading and writing. This study calls on a social practices approach that sees literacy as embedded within specific academic discourses, which vary from context to context. It uses this ideological understanding of literacy as the orienting framework for the study of knowledge. The study takes place in a Higher Education mileu that has begun to transform from its divisive past. The transformation brought about new institutional formations such as the comprehensive university, with its mix of vocational, professional and formative programmes and varied emphasis on contextual and conceptual curriculum coherence. Increasingly, the transformation agenda also shifts concern from simply providing physical access to a previously disenfranchised majority to ensuring full participation in the context of high attrition rates in first year and low retention rates. The data was analysed using the Specialisation Codes of Legitimation Code Theory to see what was being specialised in the Diploma and Degree curricula of the Public Management and Administration fields. These fields are characterised in the literature by ongoing tensions about focus, and perceptions of there being a theoretical vacuum and an inability to deal adequately with challenges in the South African public sector. Analysis of lecturer interviews and first-year curriculum documentation showed that both the Public Management Diploma and Public Administration Degree have stronger epistemic relations (ER), with an emphasis on claims to knowledge of the world. The data showed relatively weak social relations (SR), in that there was not the valuing of a particular lens on the world or a specific disposition required for legitimation within this field. The combination of ER+ and SR- indicates that these curricula are Knowledge Codes, where legitimation is through the acquisition of a set of skills and procedures. The programmes were characterised by fairly low-level procedural knowledge, which may point to a workplace-oriented direction that is dominant in the comprehensive university. In keeping with concerns raised in the literature about this field, there was little evidence of theoretical or propositional knowledge in the Public Management Diploma and while the Public Administration Degree had some evidence of this, it was arguably not to the extent expected of a degree as described in the National Qualifications Framework. This study was limited to the first-year of the Diploma and Degree and subsequent years could present different findings. Lecturers showed awareness of student challenges with literacy practices and made concerned attempts through various interventions to address this but they were found to value the surface features of writing practices over personal engagement with the knowledge. Though the expectations of student literacy practices in tests and assignments were aligned to the ways in which knowledge was constructed in the curriculum, there was little evidence of student induction into disciplinary discourses of the field as knowledge was presented as being neutral and student writing primarily took the form of retelling objective facts. The implications of these findings could include student exclusion from higher-level academic discourse, more powerful knowledge in the workplace and, finally, constrain them from becoming producers of knowledge.

This study, which is part of a National Research Foundation project on Social Inclusion in Higher Education (HE), focuses on the exercise of agency among new academics, conducive to the social inclusion of students. Transitioning from varied entry points into higher education, new academics face numerous challenges as they embed themselves in disciplinary and institutional contexts. Given the complexity and contested nature of the current higher education landscape, new academics are especially vulnerable. Using Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism as meta-theoretical framing and Margaret Archer’s social realist theory, with its methodological focus on analytical dualism and morphogenesis, this study offers a social realist account of how new academics engage with enabling and constraining conditions at institutional, faculty, departmental and classroom levels. Through an analysis of six individual narratives of mediation, this study explicates and exemplifies the range of agential choices exercised by new academics to mediate their contested spaces. A nuanced social and critical account of the material, ideational and agential conditions in HE shows that the courses of action taken by these new academics are driven through their concerns, commitments and projects in higher education. Yet, despite the university’s espousal of embracing change, the current induction and transition of new academics is inadequate to the task of transformation in higher education. Systemic conditions in HE, conducive to critical agency and social justice, are not enabling. Bhaskar’s Seven Scalar Being, used as an analytical frame and heuristic, guides the cross-case analysis of the six narratives across seven levels of ontology. The findings highlight that, despite difficult contextual influences, the positive exercise of agency is a marked feature of new participants in HE in this study. This has immediate implications for ways in which professional and academic development, and disciplinary and departmental programmes, could create and sustain conducive conditions for the professionalisation of new academics through more sensitised practices. Using alternative research methods such as photovoice to generate its data, this doctoral study proposes that new research methodologies, located in the third space, are needed now more than ever in HE sociological research, to recognise the researcher and the research participants as independent, autonomous and causally efficacious beings. To this end, this study includes a Chapter Zero, which captures the narrative of the doctoral scholar as researcher, who, shaped and influenced by established doctoral practices and traditions in the field, exercises her own doctoral agency in particular ways.

The area of discourse acquisition and writing in higher education has become a much researched field. In South Africa the interest in discourse acquisition and writing has been partly in response to the change in student profile, particularly over the past ten years. While South African researchers and academics are increasingly focusing their interest in discourse acquisition and writing on the unique circumstances here, they rely on theories based on research done in very different social contexts. These theories are not necessarily universally appropriate. South Africa is currently undergoing a period of transformation in higher education aimed at greater access and equity for black students and academics. The accompanying sense of frustration and disillusionment among students and academics underlines the need to reappraise all aspects of higher education. Much of the research on discourse acquisition and writing is undertaken in arts programmes: vocational fields - such as engineering education - tend to be neglected. If the envisaged growth in science and engineering education is to be realised, it is essential that research in discourse and writing be undertaken in engineering programmes. This study investigates discourse acquisition as experienced by students in a South African engineering faculty. The experiences of six final year technikon students are investigated to gain a better understanding of what it means to acquire the discourse of engineering. The phenomenological method used requires that the researcher suspends or brackets a priori theoretical notions or pre-conceptions so that that which the students experience, rather than what the researcher expects in terms of theory, can emerge. What emerges from the students' experiences is partially congruent with established discourse and writing theories. However, some of the student experiences of discourse acquisition differ in significant ways from what is described in mainstream writing and discourse acquisition theory. The differences in the manner in which these students experience their acquisition of engineering discourse leads to a new understanding of the phenomenon. The students do not experience the alienation or struggle described in mainstream theoretic accounts of discourse acquisition. Students' approaches to writing are affected by their awareness of their multiple identities and the different locations in which they learn. Their approaches to writing are significantly different in some respects from descriptions in mainstream theories in some respects. The description of their experiences gives a different understanding of what it means to acquire the discourse of engineering, and may contribute to the reappraisal of engineering education in a contemporary South African context.

This thesis reports on a critical, ethnographic investigation into the reading practices of a group of 14 foundation year students at Rhodes University in 2002. The university had identified all the student-participants as 'underprepared' for university learning: they were from poor, socio-economic backgrounds, used English as an additional language, and had been educated in township or rural schools. Using the Socio-cultural model of literacy (Heath, 1984; Gee, 1990 & Street, 1993), the study explores the culturally-shaped attitudes and assumptions about reading that the students brought with them into a tertiary learning context from their homes, communities and schools. It reports on their subsequent efforts to become academic readers in the disciplinary context of History. Framing Theory (Reid and MacLachlan, 1994) was employed to analyse the kinds of matches and mismatches that arose between the students' frames about the nature and purpose of reading, and those implicitly accepted as normative by teachers in the History department. It accounts for the students' difficulties in achieving epistemological access in terms of a conflict of frames: both the students and their teachers usually failed to recognise each others' constructions about the nature and purpose of 'reading for a degree'. The study'S critical purpose required that its potential for generating emancipatory consequences needed to be investigated. Thus the study reports on how both sets of participants began to reframe their understanding of academic reading, by describing the ways in which they reflected on the findings in the final stages of the research process. / KMBT_363 / Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in

The restructuring of higher education through incorporations and mergers has attracted a lot of attention over the past few years in South Africa. These incorporations and mergers have displaced institutions of higher education and positioned them in new organisational homes, thus subjecting faculties, schools and departments to a process of relocation, new knowledge acquisition, identity change and meaning-making processes. The merger has resulted in three types of universities; i.e. traditional universities, comprehensive universities and universities of technology. The introduction of the comprehensive university as a new institutional type has brought with it questions about the idea of the university and the purpose of higher education in general. Mergers in particular have initiated conversations about sense-making and meaning during change. Amidst all this, people within the merging institution have been confronted with a new organisation with which they have to identify. At universities in particular, questions about academic identity and organisational identity have become unavoidable. The boundaries that gave definition to a university have been (re)moved. The structure of the university, as it was known, has changed. Hence, in the newly merged NMMU, academics are in the process of internalising and giving meaning to the new organisational values and norms of a comprehensive university. Needless to say, the challenges facing the newly merged NMMU are cultural, structural and geographic. Bringing together different institutional and personal cultures involves a human dimension that needs to be nurtured by trying to form a coherent and cohesive organisation that is created from culturally diverse and uncomplementary institutions. Another challenge is bringing together different organisational structures, systems and programmes that are informed by different institutional cultures. Furthermore, the challenge of having multiple campuses that are geographically separated exacerbates the situation. Along with all these challenges, the NMMU has the task of constructing an integrated institutional identity through organisational forms and programme models that will embody the multiple functions that are typical of a comprehensive university. The aim of the current study was to explore how the meanings that academics assign to the notion of a comprehensive university are instrumental in constructing an organisational identity; describing in detail how at the NMMU academics make meaning of the comprehensive university and how that meaning-making process influences the construction of an organisational identity; and formulating recommendations based on the qualitative findings and quantitative results of the research. In an effort to achieve the aim alluded to above, this study employed the mixed methods approach that used a sequential, exploratory, transformative design. The complexity of the study was such that it required to be investigated through qualitative and quantitative analytical methods in order to confirm, triangulate and obtain a holistic picture of the situation under investigation. The sample for the qualitative interviews consisted of thirteen purposefully selected academics from all levels at the NMMU. The interviews were transcribed and coded into themes, categories and sub-categories. These themes were then developed and translated into statements for the questionnaire that was administered randomly to all NMMU academics. A total of 108 academics responded to the questionnaire. The responses to the questionnaire were analysed using the SPSS programme. The findings and results of the study revealed that there was a fairly common understanding of the term comprehensive university among academics. However, the details about its procedures appeared to be the privileged ownership of management. This situation mitigated the necessity for a sense-making process that would allow for negotiation, modification and alteration of already held assumptions. A pertinent concern amongst academics was the neglect of the ‘human factor’ during the change process. The management style also came under scrutiny, especially in terms of the facilitation and mediation of change. There was a consensus on the call for cohesion and unity that was believed to be one of the main features that would make the construction of the NMMU organisational identity possible. The vision, mission and values of the NMMU were believed to be central to the creation of cohesion and unity, which would subsequently result in the birth of an organisational culture that could inform the organisational identity of the NMMU. Strategies to actualise and realise the organisational identity were proposed by participants. Notwithstanding, the impact of the merger was identified as having a major influence in shaping the organisational identity of the NMMU.

Internationally, the practice of admissions entry testing in Higher Education (HE) has gained momentum over the past few decades, sparking ongoing research on its effectiveness. On a national level, three factors have signalled a timeous evaluation of admissions practices at HE institutions. Firstly, changes in the school curriculum and the new format of the National Senior Certificate (NSC) have impacted on the admissions criteria of HE institutions. Secondly, with the merging of HE institutions an alignment in admissions practices between the institutions involved were necessitated. Thirdly, South Africa has embarked on the development of National Benchmark Tests (NBTs). The primary aim of this research study was to develop a set of recommendations to guide admissions testing practices in the South African HE context. These recommendations had to place special emphasis on the multicultural and multilingual context of this country. To achieve this aim a systematic review was conducted on HE admissions testing in Israel, as it was identified as a multicultural and multilingual country that had successfully implemented national HE admissions testing. More specifically, a retrospective systematic review was performed on research regarding the national HE admissions test, the Psychometric Entrance Test (PET), used in Israel. The systematic review also contained a narrative overview on the educational landscape in Israel and the specifications of the PET, from which themes were also extracted. Eight broad themes emerged through the systematic review and narrative overview as being of critical importance to an effective national HE admissions test. These were the components of the test, the implementation of the testing programme, the method in which the test results are used to make HE admission decisions, the reliability xi of the test, the validity of the test, bias inherent in the test, other psychometric aspects related to the admissions test, and the effect of coaching or specialized preparation on test results. These themes, together with their sub-components, were used to develop eight recommendations that can guide the development and implementation of the National Benchmark Test (NBTs) in South Africa. Both the themes that emerged during the systematic review and narrative overview as well as the recommendations that were made to guide the development and implementation of a national admission test, represent an important contribution to the field of admission testing and decision-making in South Africa.

This study examines the nature and character of consensus and contentions around the discourse of community engagement in a South African university context. This is against the background of the growing body of literature that advocates for the need for universities to make their impact felt in communities in more direct ways than through teaching and research. The examination is also against the background of the assumption that the success or failure of community engagement initiatives is, in part, a function of how stakeholders agree/disagree on the meaning and purpose of community engagement. The University of Fort Hare is used as a case study. Interviews and Focus Group Discussions were used for qualitative data collection, whilst a survey was conducted for gathering quantitative data. The study revealed that stakeholders attach different meanings to community engagement, with those possessing power and influence acting as key decision makers. Thus powerful stakeholders (in this case, the university and donor organizations) are at the core of the decision making process, while beneficiaries are pushed to the periphery. Moreover, both the meanings and the activities within which they cohere have important implications for the way beneficiary communities perceive university-community partnerships.

This study investigated the access to learner support services by Unisa‟s ABET students in the Department of Adult Education in one of the rural provinces in South Africa. Specifically, a survey using questionnaire and focus group interview was carried out to determine the access gaps in to the learner support services by Unisa‟s adult students. A literature study preceded the empirical study to fully comprehend the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of the role of learner support in bridging the transactional distance between students on the one hand and the institution on the other hand. In the empirical study phase, a questionnaire was administered to 150 ABET Students in one province in South Africa through the stratified sampling technique and one focus group interview comprising 10 students who access support services at one of the regional offices to assess the importance they attach to the support services that are offered at the regional centres and the extent to which they are able to access them. The focus group interview comprised questions on the students‟ understanding of learner support services and their experiences in accessing them. Moore‟s theory of transactional distance was used as the theoretical base for the study. Out of a total of the 150 questionnaires that were distributed, 117 were the usable representing 78.0% response rate. One of the conclusions drawn from this study is that, although Unisa has most of the learner support services in place but for various reasons, a lot of the students are not able to access the support services as expected as the needs gap for almost all the support services were high. The chi-square tests found significant differences (p is less than 0.05) between the students on the extent to which they are able to access the support services. An integrated learner support framework was suggested for Unisa and other distance providing institutions to address the access gaps adult students‟ encounter in their studies.