12

Building student academic resilience in a context of diversity in Higher Education

Presenter

Alan Cliff is an Associate Professor and co-ordinator of the Staff Development cluster at UCT’s Centre for Innovation Learning and Teaching. He teaches courses in educational psychology, educational assessment and adult education to mostly postgraduate education students and convenes courses in educational assessment and evaluation for students at certificate, diploma and master’s levels.

Alan has supervised master’s and PhD students in areas such as the development of literacies practices in disciplinary contexts; the validation of standardised admissions tests; the use of alternate admissions tests for admission and placement purposes; and factors that facilitate the development of electronic systems literacy in the workplace.

As co-ordinator, Alan contributes to work on alignment between curriculum and student assessment, with new and established academics and professional staff. Regionally, Alan teaches courses on assessment design and academic literacy. His current research interests are in the use of theories and principles of Dynamic Assessment to facilitate student learning; and in the processes of staff development as 'literacies practice' and induction into professional learning communities. Alan contributes to the development of educational assessment policy in the further and higher education sectors nationally.

Abstract

The concept of academic resilience has had a long history of association with construct theory within psychology and has been derived principally from theories that view resilience as an innate characteristic of the individual. Furthermore, within neo-liberal discourses, the concept of academic resilience has tended to be focused on the student-as-individual and the building of academic resilience as being primarily the responsibility and charge of this individual. In the context of Higher Education, the responsibility of the academy has been on the presentation of intellectual, affective and physical challenges to the student with the goal of these challenges being the development of individual robustness as a consequence of responses to these challenges.

This keynote presentation explores academic resilience from the departure point of literacies theory as this has found expression in the work of the then-Alternative Admissions Research Project (AARP) – now the Centre for Educational Testing for Access and Placement (CETAP) – at the University of Cape Town. Drawing on a range of scholars in sociolinguistics and applied language studies, the presentation focuses on the development of resilience at individual (micro), programme (meso) and institutional (macro) levels as a consequence of a multi-level ‘reading’ of the academy through a literacies lens. As such, the development and building of resilience with students is viewed as literacies practice for all stakeholders: the students themselves; academics and professional staff who work with them; and the Higher Education systems of which all are a part. Literacies theory and research is seen as the creating of enabling contexts within which students build resilience and the creation of these contexts depends as much upon the development of systems and academics’ literacies as it does those of students. Literacies work in these contexts move us away from deficit views about what students lack to views about the ways in which all stakeholders contribute to the development of systems resilience: Higher Education contexts create the enabling conditions for the development of resilience at all levels (micro, meso, macro). As such, academic development is seen as the responsiveness of the Higher Education system to students’, academics’ and institutional needs for resilience. Agency for this responsiveness lies at all levels of the system; not just at the level of the student. And in a context of diversity, agency as a necessary but not sufficient condition for the development of resilience has to be read as a ‘property’ of individuals, groups and systems. Literacies work accordingly means understanding resilience (and its possibly undesirable corollaries, reluctance and resistance) as a consequence of multi-stakeholder engagement in teaching and learning contexts. This includes an understanding of how teaching and learning contexts can work towards undermining agency and consequently also the development of resistance.

The presentation will conclude with some considerations of the ways in which Higher Education and academic development systems and stakeholders can serve to promote or inhibit the development of resilience. It will offer a view of the intended goals of academic development work as literacies work and pose some challenges for this work in contexts of diversity and against the backdrop of decolonising debates around knowledge, curriculum, teaching and learning.

Presentation & Resources