Delia Marshall

• University of the Western Cape

The question of whether academic development and higher education research can be considered fields is one of ongoing significance, centred on debates about knowledge-building. This study analyses the published outputs of a highly influential South African scholar, Suellen Shay, to identify the characteristic modes of knowledge generation that she...

Science disciplines are inherently multimodal, involving written and spoken language, bodily gestures, symbols, diagrams, sketches, simulation and mathematical formalism. Studies have shown that explicit multimodal teaching approaches foster enhanced access to science disciplines. We examine multimodal classroom practices in a physics extended curr...

Its November 2001. A university in dire straits, financially bankrupt burdening a debt in excess of R100-million, a disillusioned and demoralised staff complement still reeling from the trauma of retrenchments, coupled with an academic project facing collapse as student numbers dwindle by a third to less than 10 000. Is there a future for such an i...

In what ways does access to undergraduate education have a transformative impact on people and societies? • What conditions are required for this impact to occur? • What are the pathways from an undergraduate education to the public good, including inclusive economic development? These questions have particular resonance in the South African higher...

Around the world, more young people than ever before are attending university. Student numbers in South Africa have doubled since democracy and for many families, higher education is a route to a better future for their children. But alongside the overwhelming demand for higher education, questions about its purposes have intensified. Deliberations...

In contemporary times there is a renewed focus on the purposes of university education in science or engineering, especially in emerging economy contexts like South Africa where the massification of higher education is in its early stages. The contributions in this issue by Muller and Walker both recognise the crucial importance of expanding episte...

Academic development is a recent project in the university, intended to enable the university to respond to the needs of a more diverse student body. In South Africa, such work arose during late apartheid, and has now moved to a more central institutional position advocating responsiveness in the light of the educational disparities that are the le...

This paper uses Tronto's political ethics of care as a normative framework to evaluate a model of teaching and learning professional development. This framework identifies five integrated moral elements of care – attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and trust. This paper explicates on each of these elements to evaluate the pilo...

In the South African higher education sector, there is increasing concern about the poor retention and throughput rates of undergraduate students. There is also concern that the participation rates in higher education, relative to population demographics, remain extremely racially skewed. With the quality of schooling unlikely to change dramaticall...

Student learning inventories are used by both researchers and educators as tools to identify ‘at risk’ students. This article critically interrogates the results of one of these inventories, the 18-item Approaches to Learning and Studying Inventory. In-depth interviews were held with a purposive sample of 10 first-year engineering students who had...

For some time there has been a focus in higher education research towards understanding the student experience of learning. This article presents a narrative analysis of the experience of a teacher who re-entered the learning world of undergraduate students by enrolling in a challenging chemical engineering course. The analysis identifies multiple...

This article explores the use of narrative analysis to provide a methodology for student learning research with a sociocultural orientation. The narrative which is the primary focus of this article is drawn from a study in which a series of individual interviews was conducted with a class of senior engineering students. The interview with a particu...

Research on student learning in physics has tended to focus largely on an individual perspective on learning. This can be contrasted with a sociocultural perspective which focuses on the social and linguistic dimensions of learning. As an exemplar of this perspective, this paper uses Gee's notions of ‘little d’ discourse and ‘big D’ Discourse as a...

In this paper we propose that learning in engineering involves taking on the discourse of an engineering community, which is intimately bound up with the identity of being a member of that community. This leads to the notion of discursive identity, which emphasises that students' identities are constituted through engaging in discourse. This view o...

In this paper we propose that learning in engineering involves taking on the discourse of an engineering community, which is intimately bound up with the identity of being a member of that community. This leads to the notion of discursive identity, which emphasises that students’ identities are constituted through engaging in discourse. This view o...

More than a decade prior to the official dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, a number of universities launched foundation programmes to assist disadvantaged students. This article focuses on science and engineering foundation programmes, locating them within their political and institutional context and then tracing the evolution of their edu...

In this paper we explore an alternative way of characterising the student learning experience, drawing on sociocultural perspectives on learning. Here, learning is not merely the application of an approach to a cognitive task, but a social process of identity formation. In particular, we draw on Gee's concept of Discourse models to identify the imp...

In this chapter the authors take the perspective of learning where one views underpreparedness more broadly in terms of ‘epistemological access’ and not merely by focusing on content deficits of entry-level students. The chapter maps out the historical trajectory of academic development initiatives in the UWC Science Faculty, starting with the ‘inf...

This article attempts to describe students’ process of learning physics using the notion of experiencing variation as the basic mechanism for learning, and thus explores what variation, with respect to a particular object of learning, that students experience in their process of constituting understanding. Theoretically, the analysis relies on anal...

This article presents a qualitative analysis of the essential characteristics of university students' "focus of awareness" whilst engaged with learning physics related to the Bohr model with the aid of a com- puter simulation. The research is located within the phenomenographic research tradition, with empi- rical data comprising audio and video re...

This article reports on a phenomenographic-based study of the expectations of teaching among undergraduate physics students. Data are drawn from a range of course-contexts at each of two quite different universities --- one South African and one Swedish --- and five qualitatively different expectations of physics teaching are identified and exempli...

This article responds to the concerns raised by Haggis in 2003 regarding the use of approaches to learning theory in higher education. It is argued that the misrepresentations of the theory observed in the literature are not a reason for discarding the theory entirely. This article reasserts key features of the theory, argues for its relevance to m...

This article describes two approaches to learning (in addition to the classic deep and surface approaches) identified in studies of student learning in engineering contexts. The first study identified the ‘procedural deep’ approach in a group of engineering foundation programme students in the UK, while the second study identified the ‘procedural s...

This is a report on a qualitative study of students' learning where a physics computer simulation session is used to supplement lectures on the topic. Drawing on phenomenography as the analytical framework, the students' learning-focuses were analysed. The result is a description of four distinctly different learning-focuses that emerged when the s...

In this article links are explored between the characterizations of learning stemming from the phenomenographic research orientation and from Donald Schön’s reflection-in-action, an extension of John Dewey’s idea of reflection. The aim is to argue that these parallels open up new ways of viewing Schön’s work which facilitate theoretical development...

Research on student learning in higher education has highlighted the central role that students' conceptions of learning play in influencing their approaches to learning. This article reports on a study of conceptions of learning among engineering students on a one-year foundation course. Students were interviewed about their conceptions of learnin...

A reflective practicum was developed for a group of university physics tutors using Schönian framed coaching experiences. A central theme of the practicum was getting the tutors, as a function of their tutoring practice and its consequences, to reflect on the dynamics of their experiences of academic learning in order to evoke personal metalearning...

Context "Bridging" and the more developed "foundation" course offerings at South African universities historically were set up to provide access to students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds in the context of redress in a very unequal and racially divided educational system (Boughey, 2005 & Department of Education, DoE 2001). The underly...

This research is built upon the student-learning literature that describes the characteristics of relationships between various aspects of experiences of learning and teaching. It draws on research which examined physics and chemistry lecturers' conceptions of teaching (Prosser et al, 1994), lecturers' approaches to teaching (Trigwell et al,1994),...