Chrissie Boughey

• MA, MA, PGCE, DPhil.
• Professor Emeritus at Rhodes University

This version of a paper about to be published in a special edition of Teaching in Higher Education dedicated to the memory of Suellen Shay resulted from a presentation at a symposium in her honour held in May 2022.

This paper argues that the field of Educational Development has not fulfilled its potential to contribute to the transformation of teaching and learning in South African universities because of conditions constraining the agency of practitioners. It draws on, and extends, previous work. It then draws on, and extends, previous work (Shay, 2012; Boug...

This paper responds to a question posed by [Shay, Suellen. 2012. “Educational Development as a Field: Are We There Yet?” Higher Education Research and Development 31 (3): 311–323. doii:10.1080/07294360.2011.631520] about the status of knowledge building in the field of Educational Development. In her paper, Shay critiques knowledge produced in the...

This report on research produced in the field of teaching and learning in South African higher education was commissioned by the South African Research Chair on Teaching and Learning at the University of Johannesburg.

The introduction of ECPs in South African universities is seen by many as South Africa’s key strategy for addressing the problem of poor patterns of student success and has its basis on the uncontested acceptance that an extended study duration may be necessary to bring some categories of learners to a level of parity with the readiness expectation...

This paper draws on concepts from the field known as the sociology of knowledge to identify the challenges involved in introducing research in the undergraduate curriculum. It begins by using Bernstein’s (2000) ‘pedagogic device’ to conceptualise the introduction of research as a movement from the field of reproduction to the field of production wi...

In South Africa, the push for global rankings and the possibility of attaining funding mean that participation in international projects is often prized. However, although international projects in higher education can bring enormous benefits, they can also exhibit 'social dynamics' (Bradley, 2008) that impact on the extent to which all involved ca...

This literature review was commissioned under the auspices of the SARChI Chair on Teaching and Learning Professor Shireen Motala. Although the review begins by drawing on earlier work, its main focus is an analysis responding to Suellen Shay's 2012 call for the development of a theorised, systematised body of knowledge in the field of Educational D...

Drawing on the South African case, this book looks at shifts in higher education around the world in the last two decades. In South Africa, calls for transformation have been heard in the university since the last days of apartheid. Similar claims for quality higher education to be made available to all have been made across the African continent....

This article draws on a long term ethnographic study which explored the way the home based practices experienced by children in a marginalised community in a large South African city, Port Elizabeth, prepared them for, and supported them in, schooling. The study was informed by the field known as ‘New Literacy Studies’ and which draws extensively o...

This article explores the way the curriculum could be restructured to promote students' success.

This paper reports on the use of a framework developed from Bhaskar's critical realism and Archer's social realism to analyse teaching- and learning-related data produced as a result of the first cycle of institutional audits in the South African higher education system. The use of the framework allows us to see what this cycle of audits did achiev...

Research-intensive universities, such as the Russell Group in the UK, the Ivy League Colleges in the USA and the Sandstone Universities in Australia, enjoy particular status in the higher education landscape. They are, however, also often associated with social elitism and selectivity, and this has led to critique as higher education systems seek t...

Argumentative and Trustworthy Scholars: The construction of academic staff at research-intensive universities’

In South African higher education, the development of academic literacy is often seen to be the responsibility of those working in the field that is known as ‘academic development’. This paper uses an analysis of submissions to the 2012 annual conference of the Higher Education Learning and Teaching Association of Southern Africa, the forum most us...

The question of how to make higher education more inclusive has been a central concern in South Africa and elsewhere over the past two decades. However, in South Africa there remains a disjuncture between policy aimed at promoting inclusivity and the experiences of students and staff in the higher education sector. In this article, the relationship...

This article uses an argument based on Gee's (1990) constructs of Discourse and literacy to argue for a conceptualisation of teaching as not about the dissemination of knowledge but rather about teaching students how to make knowledge

This paper uses an analytical framework developed from the work of philosopher Roy Bhaskar and sociologist Margaret Archer to explore the emergence of a body of research on teaching and learning in South African higher education. This research, generated in a field known as ‘Academic Development’ in South Africa and as ‘Educational Development’ in...

This article reviews demographic shifts in access to higher education in South Africa from the late 1980s onwards before going on to look at the extent to which black South Africans have benefitted from those shifts. In the context of analyses which show that black South Africans experience less success in the higher education system than their whi...

Across the world, university teachers are increasingly being required to engage with diversity in the classes they teach. Using the data from a large Economics 1 class at a South African university, this attempts to understand the effects of diversity on chances of success and how assessment can impact on this. By demonstrating how theory can be us...

This article challenges the idea that positivism is capable of representing the complexity of social pharmacy and pharmacy education. It is argued that critical realism provides a framework that allows researchers to look at the nature of reality and at mechanisms that produce, or have the tendency to produce, events and experiences of those events...

Excerpt: This invited essay considers how thinking about institutional differences can enhance the scholarship of teaching and learning. It does this by drawing on a recent piece of South African research which used data produced as part of a national process of auditing institutions for quality assurance purposes (Boughey, 2009; Boughey 2010; Boug...

This Thesis explores the 'Where Leaders Learn' slogan of Rhodes University. It does this by means of the analysis of discourses constructing leadership and leadership development within the institutional context. the discourse analysis was made possible as a result of interviews with a range of people involved in leadership and leadership developme...

Since 1994, the South African higher education system, fragmented and divided along racial lines during the years of apartheid, has been subject to a wide range of initiatives directed at bringing about the ‘transformation’ necessary for a more equitable dispensation and, ultimately, a new social order. One of the ‘levers’ being used in transformat...

This article uses ‘close-up’ ethnographic research to provide an account of students’ engagement with learning in a South African university. Broadly based on Halliday’s (1973, 1978, 1994) understanding of texts resulting from contexts, the account challenges dominant constructions of the problems students encounter as stemming from the use of inap...

Drawing on an analysis of the history of the area of endeavour known, in South Africa, as Academic Development and, internationally, as Educational Development, this article argues the need for a Third Generation model of Academic Development Practice in South Africa. The Third Generation model links Academic Development with quality management and...

Incl. bibl., abstract At an international level, the peaceful transition to democracy in South Africa has often been lauded as miraculous. While political transformation might have been highly successful, changes in other spheres have proved to be much more problematic. This paper examines the change in higher education in South Africa and, more pa...

The need to increase the number of African students studying at tertiary level, particularly in science, technology and commerce, has led to the establishment of foundation programmes at many institutions. In spite of attempts to provide formal access in this way, the issue of what constitutes `epistemological' access still remains under-researched...

In South Africa, the focus of the democratic government elected in 1994 has shifted from the need to achieve equity in relation to access to higher education to the need to achieve greater efficiency in terms of the way the tertiary system functions as a whole. One result of this shift is that debates about what it means to provide‘epistemological...

This article examines a number of discourses that construct students 'problems' as they engage with tertiary study at a historically black South African university. These dominant discourses are then linked to Street's 'autonomous' model of literacy and Rampton's 'autonomous' model of applied linguistics in order to interrogate their ideological bi...

This article describes understandings derived from work in a first year Systematic Philosophy class at a historically black South African university which challenge the assumptions on which the writer has based her practice as a teacher of English as a second language for many years. These assumptions focus on the perception of problems related to...

Attempts to use the mainstream curriculum of tertiary institutions to develop reading and writing skills can often be problematical. This is partly due to the large numbers of students in many classes, and partly to the reluctance of mainstream lecturers to transfer the time they previously devoted to the delivery of content to the development of s...

Thesis (D. Phil.-Dept. of Linguistics)--University of the Western Cape, Bellville, 2000. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 318-355). Critical challenges to dominant ELT discourses -- Dominant language related discourses at the University of Zululand -- An alternative construction of students' literacy-related problems --Resisting pedagogy...