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2017 - Academic Development Symposium Western Cape Region

Reflections on epistemological access in

curriculum structure in higher education.

Friday, 15 September 2017 to Saturday, 16 September 2017

Preamble

Historically, higher education in South Africa has struggled with low participation, poor success and high attrition of predominantly black South Africans. Several policy changes and initiatives were implemented to redress past inequalities and to improve the quality of the higher education offering. However regardless of the interventions the retention and success rates remain poor in particular amongst black students, prevalent in particular in the programmes of Science, Engineering and Technology (Scott, 2007) and in particular in Mathematics due to the lack of smooth transition between school and university mathematics (Bassitere, et al, 2015).

The challenges of access and retention have led to rethinking curriculum interventions to address major articulation gaps between secondary and higher education. These reforms are responses to an entanglement of ‘wicked problems’ facing higher education globally including unequal educational provision, massification, and the rising expectations of middle-class families, growing demand for specialized knowledge, the employability agenda, shrinking public funding, to name a

few (Altbach, Reisberg, and Rumbley 2009). Curriculum reform has therefore become a contested space in relation to curriculum structure and the implications for addressing inequalities. (Shay, 2015)

Inequality remains one of the key struggles in all areas of South Africa with complex and multi-dimensional factors, including social and academic factors. Social include schooling background, socio-economic status, race and gender, and the social context of learning. Academic factors are student and staff related, and include issues of pedagogy, language, and literacy, teaching and assessment practices, and curriculum structure.

Current debates focus on the role of higher education in prioritising redressing these historical inequalities. Shay (2015) argues that higher education could play a transformative role by “reversing” cycles of inequality of disadvantage for families who have been historically disadvantaged. On the other hand according to Shay, higher education could perpetuate inequality by maintaining the existing order (Shay, 2015).

Bernstein (1975) defines the curriculum as “what counts as valid knowledge, placing knowledge at the centre of the conceptualization of curricula. Maton (2014) argues that knowledge is rooted within social realism, in other words it is not only social but also real in that it has properties, powers and tendencies that have effects. The fundamental objective of curriculum is to enable access to knowledge, in other words enabling epistemic access, a term invented by Morrow (2009) to highlight that formal access to the institutions that produce knowledge is not enough, meaningful access is access to the knowledge goods. (Shay, 2015).

Objectives

The objective of this academic development symposium is to create a platform for academics, teachers, educational managers and students to unpack and debate epistemological access within curriculum structure. The intention is to include participants from all stakeholders involved with education in South Africa, including basic and higher education as well as TVET colleges. Students will also share their views on the epistemological access gap, and how they (as students) perceive how curriculum structures impact on their success rates and challenges as stakeholders. Further scholastic and stakeholder engagement will also provide a meaningful opportunity for reflection whilst providing an enabling environment to drive student retention and throughput.

Programme Sessions

Programme Director

Prof Matshepo Matoane

Keynotes

The curriculum as border-crossing and imagined/enacted transgression: An exploration

Prof Paul Prinsloo

African students within a ‘westernised’ curriculum: challenges and possibilities

Ms Sisipho Saunders

The role of TVET colleges in broadening epistemological access

Ms Rhazia Hamza

Epistemic violence in higher education

Prof Mbulungeni Madiba