Neoliberalism’s conditioning effects on the university and the example of proctoring during COVID-19 and since
- Authors: McKenna, Sioux
- Date: 2022
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/426929 , vital:72401 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2022.2100612"
- Description: Neoliberalism has shaped the academy in ways that constrain its potential as a public good. Neoliberalism is based on the assumption that, by submitting to the so-called neutral forces of the market, wealth can be created alongside the achievement of equality and efficiency. Although this assumption is demonstrably false, neoliberalism remains politically powerful. As an example, this article discusses how neoliberalism has enabled the rapid uptake of proctoring software during the covid pandemic and since. ‘Proctoring' is the online monitoring of students’ behaviour as they sit for exams. Many within the academy consider proctoring software to be dehumanizing – essentially legalized spyware. They argue that the software invades privacy and is inherently racist and ableist, amongst other things. It is hoped that by understanding how structural forces such as neoliberalism affect both our agency and university activities, frequently against the common good, strategies can be developed to change these structures.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2022
Reimagining academic identities in response to research demands at Universities of Technology
- Authors: Gumbi, Thobani , McKenna, Sioux
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/185897 , vital:44446 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.14426/cristal.v8i1.234"
- Description: In the last volume of this journal, Garraway and Winberg called for a reimagination of Universities of Technology (UoT) within the South African higher education system. This article continues that conversation by looking at the implications that the formation of the UoT had for academics’ identities. Technikon lecturers’ identities were closely tied to workplace expertise, but demands for research in UoTs have changed this. A social realist analysis of interviews with fifteen academics at three UoTs finds that research remains a contested issue. Interviewees understood research to take the form of acquiring postgraduate qualifications, rather than as an ongoing activity tied to their identities. Echoing Garraway and Winberg’s study, the bureaucratic nature of the institutional culture was referred to as a constraint. There was also a view that for this programme, Dental Technology, a demand for research was needed from industry if this was to be a valued aspect of academics’ identities.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
The obstinate notion that higher education is a meritocracy
- Authors: Sobuwa, Simpiwe , McKenna, Sioux
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/187150 , vital:44574 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.14426/cristal.v7i2.184"
- Description: Student success is an enormous concern in light of the high drop-out rates in South African universities. There is a wealth of local and international research which provides complex explanations for these statistics, but the common-sense understanding is that those students who have the right attributes and who work hard will do well. While the notion of higher education as a meritocracy is pervasive, it is invalid given the effects of numerous other mechanisms at play in the students' educational experiences. This article draws from the literature to discuss the problems of the meritocratic explanation in how it fails to sufficiently account for the centrality of agency and the ways in which this intersects with societal structures. We argue that more useful understandings of student success and failure require social theory that acknowledges the complexities underpinning student success or failure.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
Writing groups as transformative spaces
- 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2018