Student Development and Support

5.0 Introduction

As academics, we have an often unwritten pastoral obligation to our students, at least from humanist and transformative pedagogical perspectives. In addition to the mainstream teaching and learning activities, we assume leadership responsibilities and we are expected to develop holistic graduates. That means, we have to think of education from the hands, head and heart doctrine and support and develop students to become respectable members of the global society. In this subpage, I draw you to my student support and development endeavours.

5.1 Respect And Support For The Development Of Students As Individuals

In a dynamic and complex higher education environment like in South African, where the residues of the draconian apartheid regime still linger on and are evident in the type of students coming to university, it is important that as teachers we understand our role in availing social justice through our curricula. Larrivee (2000) asserts that in such an environment, teachers must be reflective practitioners who continuously evaluate their roles and consider themselves as learning facilitators and social mediators.

Like with my teaching practice, curriculum activities and assessments approach, my student development and support initiatives are undergirded by philosophical perspectives. I am driven by the yearning for social justice particularly for students coming from impoverished backgrounds. Thus, I mentor and counsel a number of my students who show potential, either academically or entrepreneurially. Two of my notable protégés is Mr Mnelisi E. Xaba and Stability Buthelezi. Mr Xaba has been my protégé since 2015 to date and I guided him academically from a Diploma in Marketing to a Master of Technology in Marketing graduate. Currently, we are working on his PhD proposal. Mr Buthelezi was not an academic student but I saw potential in him when he pitched his clothing apparel (AnadaOne Clothing) as a second-year student in 2016. Since then, he has constantly come to me for business advice and I am happy that he has managed to set a formal shop in the Durban CBD.

As a vote of confidence in my mentorship skills and the rapport I develop with my students, a number of my students who progress academically still come to me for advice. For example, Mr Ntokozo Sithole, an Advanced Marketing graduate recently wrote to me seeking advice on postgraduate qualifications pathways (see his email to me). There is also Zinzi Booi who I identified as a driven student and helped her secure a paid internship position with a Stellenbosch research firm before finishing her Diploma. Even after graduation, we still kept in touch and our mentor-protege relationship is still strong. She is currently employed as a Qualitative Research Executive at Columinate in Johannesburg. Due to our cordial relationship, she constantly requests me to refer other graduates to her organisation for internships. As a member of the Marketing Association of South Africa (MASA), I used my network to pave way for our third and fourth-year students to be allowed to register for professional membership (see my letter to MASA), something which would enhance their employability.

Inspired by the theory of literacy-as-social-practice, particularly the notion of Discourse (Gee, 1990), I initiated an Embedded Academic Literacy Project for the Department of Marketing in conjunction with the Academic Literacy & Language Unit (ALLU). This project came as a realisation that our students struggle academically as they were poorly prepared for the rigours of higher education and to assimilate into the marketing field. In his theory of literacy-as-social-practice, Gee (1990) suggested that academic fields are semiotic domains with teachers as members of the affinity group and students as apprentices who have to be onboarded into mastering the domain's design grammar. With that in mind, I thought an embedded academic literacy project would enable students to improve their fluency in the meaning-making social practices in both the marketing field and higher education in general. Though our initial focus was on the rhetorical use of language (reading, writing and speaking) within higher education and the field of marketing, in particular, we also aimed to work on students' ways of behaving, interacting, thinking, valuing and believing acceptable in the higher education, marketing field, industry and communities where these students come. This is exactly what is espoused in Gee's (1990) notion of Discourse. Unfortunately, the project was hampered by a lack of dedicated Literacy specialists and also the disruption due to the pandemic.