Academic development: Autonomy pathways towards gaining legitimacy
- Authors: Vorster, Jo-Anne E
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/445759 , vital:74427 , ISBN 9781003028215 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003028215-16/academic-development-jo-anne-vorster
- Description: Despite playing a critical role in universities grappling with change, practitioners working in the field of academic staff development often struggle with legitimacy. Being a relatively young field in higher education, the challenges faced by these actors are largely un-theorized and under-researched. This chapter explores how academic staff development practitioners at eight universities seek (and gain) legitimacy amongst disciplinary academic peers. Drawing on LCT concepts of ‘autonomy codes’, it analyses practices in terms of the fields from which they come and the purpose to which they are directed. Data include publications by academic developers and interviews with academic developers, academics and senior managers of the eight institutions. The chapter demonstrates how academic developers often struggle to gain legitimacy as they occupy a liminal position between academic or administrative positions in relation to the disciplinary experts they work with. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the most successful academic development work occurs when disciplinary staff view academic development as enabling them to become better teachers. The chapter reveals how legitimacy may be more successfully enabled in the field of academic staff development.
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- Date Issued: 2020
Changing curriculum and teaching practice A practical theory for academic staff development
- Authors: Clarence, Sherran , van Heerden, Martina
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/445770 , vital:74428 , ISBN 9781003028215 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003028215-9/changing-curriculum-teaching-practice-sherran-clarence-martina-van-heerden
- Description: An underdeveloped aspect of academic staff development research in higher education is using theory to help academic lecturers to understand and inform their practices, so as to better enable student development and learning. This chapter illustrates how a theorized way of talking about teaching and learning, specifically using the LCT dimension of Semantics, both semantic waves and the semantic plane, may create exciting and productive conversations with academic lecturers. Using two ‘vignettes’ drawn from English Studies and Political Studies, the chapter illustrates how teaching practice and curriculum design can be enhanced by using LCT in academic staff development work, and by extension in curriculum design, teaching and assessment practice.
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- Date Issued: 2020
Decolonizing the science curriculum: When good intentions are not enough
- Authors: Adendorff, Hanelie , Blackie, Margaret A L
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/445796 , vital:74433 , ISBN 9781003028215 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003028215-14/decolonizing-science-curriculum-hanelie-adendorff-margaret-blackie
- Description: Universities across the world are facing the need to transform as access is opened up and student cohorts diversify. In the case of South Africa, these calls for transformation are specifically related to ‘decolonization’. Since 2015, South African universities have experienced growing student protests as students mobilize against institutional racism and demand that higher education curricula are decolonized. This chapter uses the LCT specialization plane, which explores the basis of legitimacy in relation to knowledge and knowers, to analyse the content of these calls for decolonization, particularly with respect to science education. The analysis provides a way into real dialogue. Having established what is at stake in the conversation we turn to the ‘autonomy code’ to explore what decolonization might look like in practice and shows why current decolonization attempts might be perceived as perpetuating past injustices. Although focused on the South African context, this chapter offers generalizable principles applicable to any educational institutions undergoing transformation.
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- Date Issued: 2020
Learning how to theorize in doctoral writing: A tool for teaching and learning
- Authors: Wilmot, Kirsten
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/445824 , vital:74435 , ISBN 9781003028215 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003028215-8/learning-theorize-doctoral-writing-kirstin-wilmot
- Description: Doctoral writing is an elusive research practice. Given their size, individuality and disciplinary complexity, analysing doctoral dissertations is a complex task – one that makes defining exact rules for students to follow difficult, if not impossible. In order to open up access to increasingly diverse students, there is a need to make this tacit writing practice explicit. To do so requires a more detailed understanding of what doctoral writing involves. This chapter illustrates an approach that can provide such an understanding. Drawing on the concept of ‘semantic gravity’ from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), the chapter focuses on a student’s progression from ‘raw’ data description to fully realized theoretical discussions of data. The findings demonstrate how, through the drafting process, specific movements in writing – notably, from strongly contextualized to more abstract meanings – are developed over time. In showcasing these findings, the chapter reveals how LCT is able to make this aspect of doctoral writing explicit and demonstrable to students and supervisors.
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- Date Issued: 2020
Misalignments in assessments: Using Semantics to reveal weaknesses
- Authors: Rootman-le Grange, Ilsa , Blackie, Margaret A L
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/445837 , vital:74436 , ISBN 9781003028215 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003028215-5/misalignments-assessments-ilse-rootman-le-grange-margaret-blackie
- Description: Creating cumulative learning opportunities is a key challenge in all physical sciences. This is particularly the case for introductory university modules that are mandatory for enrolment in more specialized courses. Students are expected to accumulate a foundational base of knowledge, and build on and apply this knowledge to different contexts in later courses. Since assessment is a core learning opportunity, it is important to consider the roles it can play in addressing this challenge. This chapter provides an example of how LCT can be used to evaluate and inform the quality of assessments. Using the example of a chemistry assessment in an introductory course offered to first-year health science students, we draw on LCT concepts of ‘semantic gravity’ and ‘semantic density’ to show how the ability to shift between abstract and highly-condensed meanings and relatively context-dependent meanings in student assessments is indicative of cumulative knowledge-building. Furthermore, analysis reveals how some assessments are not well suited to produce these learning outcomes. As such, the chapter provides insights into how LCT can inform the design of assessments in order to encourage the development of cumulative learning in similar contexts.
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- Date Issued: 2020
The role of assessment in preparing academic developers for professional practice
- Authors: Quinn, Lynn
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/445865 , vital:74438 , ISBN 9781003028215 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003028215-15/role-assessment-preparing-academic-developers-professional-practice-lynn-quinn
- Description: Academic developers are tasked with supporting institutions in times of change. Essential for preparing academic developers for professional practice is enabling them to engage with and integrate existing knowledge with new knowledge, and apply their understandings to new contexts. Focusing on the summative assessment processes and products of a course specifically for academic developers, this chapter shows how cumulative knowledge-building can be achieved in both course design and pedagogy. Drawing on LCT concepts of ‘semantic gravity’ and ‘semantic density’, two high-achieving portfolios were analysed. The analysis indicates that movements between knowledge that is relatively abstract, decontextualized and complex to knowledge that is relatively concrete, context-dependent and simpler, represents a key characteristic of cumulative learning for professional practice courses. The chapter demonstrates how LCT can reveal the tacit ‘rules’ for success in the course, as well as how pedagogic strategies can be designed to achieve the desired outcome.
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- Date Issued: 2020
‘Nothing so practical as good theory’: Legitimation Code Theory in higher education
- Authors: Winberg, Christine , McKenna, Sioux , Wilmot, Kirsten
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/445850 , vital:74437 , ISBN 9781003028215 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003028215-1/nothing-practical-good-theory-christine-winberg-sioux-mckenna-kirstin-wilmot
- Description: Universities are grappling with multiple shifts that have made the processes of supporting student learning and enabling the professional development of academic staff ever more challenging. Common sense approaches abound but do little to address the complexities of the issues being faced in our institutions. This book brings together a rich collection of studies that uses a powerful common framework, Legitimation Code Theory, to attend to these concerns about higher education studies. The chapters provide specific real world examples of how this framework acts as conceptual lenses, analytical tools and as teaching resources to open conversations about how it is we come to know and what it is that is deemed worth knowing. In Part I ‘Student Learning across the Disciplinary Map’, the authors explore ways of understanding and supporting student achievement across different disciplinary contexts – from STEM disciplines and fields to the Arts and Humanities – and at different levels – from introductory higher education courses to doctoral-level studies. Part II, ‘Professional Learning in Higher Education’, takes an in-depth look at academic staff development in higher education. Each chapter in the book focuses on pertinent issues in higher education practice, from how to support an increasingly diverse student body, to how to support university teachers in contexts of rapid change and growth. This chapter provides an introduction to the conversation and offers an entry into the LCT tools used in this collection: Specialization, Semantics and Autonomy.
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- Date Issued: 2020