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TURNING ACCESS INTO SUCCESS
Teaching is crucial for supporting students’chances of success in higher education,
yet often makes limited use of theory to foster contextualized, systemic under-
standings of access and success. Theorized yet practical ways of empowering uni-
versity educators are needed to develop their practices and turn access into success
for their students. This book harnesses Legitimation Code Theory ‘LCT’to inspire
university educators to understand, reimagine and create socially just teaching and
learning practices. Chapters bring this powerful theory to bear on real-world
examples of curriculum design, inclusive practices, cumulative learning, assessment
practices, and reflection. Each chapter guides the reader through these cutting-edge
ideas, illustrates how they can make real differences in practice, and sets out ways of
thinking that educators integrate those ideas into practice. The outcomes will help
students access the powerful knowledge and ways of knowing they need for success
in higher education.
Sherran Clarence is a Research Associate in the Centre for Research, Teaching
and Learning (CHERTL) at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her research and
practice focus on academic staffand student development in the areas of literacies,
academic writing, doctoral knowing and becoming, and teaching and learning
development in higher education.
LEGITIMATION CODE THEORY
Knowledge-building in research and practice
Series editor: Karl Maton
LCT Centre for Knowledge-Building
This series focuses on Legitimation Code Theory or ‘LCT’, a cutting-edge approach
adopted by scholars and educators to understand and improve their practice. LCT
reveals the otherwise hidden principles embodied by knowledge practices, their different
forms and their effects. By making these ‘legitimation codes’visibletobelearnedor
changed, LCT work makes a real difference, from supporting social justice in education
to improving design processes. Books in this series explore topics across the institutional
and disciplinary maps of education, as well as other social fields, such as politics and law.
Accessing Academic Discourse
Systemic Functional Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory
Edited by J. R. Martin, Karl Maton and Y. J. Doran
Building Knowledge in Higher Education
Enhancing Teaching and Learning with Legitimation Code Theory
Edited by Chris Winberg, Sioux McKenna and Kirstin Wilmot
Turning Access into Success
Improving University Education with Legitimation Code Theory
Sherran Clarence
Teaching Science
Knowledge, Language, Pedagogy
Edited by Karl Maton, J. R. Martin and Y. J. Doran
Decolonizing Knowledge and Knowers
Struggles for university transformation in South Africa
Edited by Mlamuli Nkosingphile Hlatshwayo, Aslam Fataar, Hanelie Adendorff, Paul
Maluleka and Margaret A. L. Blackie
Enhancing Science Education
Exploring knowledge practices with Legitimation Code Theory
Edited by Margaret A. L. Blackie, Hanelie Adendorffand Marnel Mouton
Legitimation Code Theory
A Primer
Karl Maton
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit:
www.routledge.com/Legitimation-Code-Theory/book-series/LMCT
TURNING ACCESS INTO
SUCCESS
Improving University Education with
Legitimation Code Theory
Sherran Clarence
First published 2021
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Sherran Clarence
The right of Sherran Clarence to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
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publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-33562-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-33561-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-32057-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
For my mum, Jeanette
CONTENTS
List of illustrations viii
Preface x
Acknowledgements xiii
1 Context is key: Laying the foundations for ‘better’teaching and
learning practices 1
2 Creating a responsive curriculum: Specializing knowledge and
knowers for success 21
3 Can we change the university? Critiquing exclusion in the
curriculum 47
4 Enabling cumulative learning: Teaching students to surf waves
of meaning 74
5‘Show me what you’ve learned’: Guiding cumulative assessment
practice 99
6 Learning through reflection: Sustainable feedback and
evaluation practices 126
7 Afterword: From access to success 153
Index 166
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
2.1 The specialization plane 35
2.2 Specialization plane for part of the disciplinary map 38
3.1 The arena created by the epistemic–pedagogic device 55
3.2 Imagined fields of production and recontextualization for
comparative politics module 64
3.3 Whole EPD for the comparative politics module 66
4.1 Imagined semantic waves for applying the concept ‘class’83
4.2 Imagined down escalators for the ‘class’example 86
4.3 High and low semantic flatlines for the ‘class’example 87
4.4 Listing of rights theorized as up and down escalators 89
4.5 Higher semantic flatline for the nasciturus fiction 91
4.6 Semantic wave on teaching of nasciturus fiction 92
4.7 ‘Connecting the dots’in teaching the process of
problem-solving 94
5.1 Basic semantic wave profile for ‘cumulative learning’108
5.2 The semantic plane 110
5.3 Semantic wave for the Trolley Problem, Philosophy 113
5.4 Semantic wave for the Mechanics task, Physics 115
5.5 Semantic plane shifts for Task 1, Philosophy 117
5.6 Semantic plane shifts for Task 2, Physics 118
5.7 Semantic wave for a written response to Task 1, Philosophy 120
6.1 The specialization plane 133
6.2 Specialization plane for Political Science research assignmenet 140
6.3 Semantic profile for Political Science rubric 141
6.4 Semantic gravity waves for assignment feedback A and B 144
6.5 Evaluation form for a short professional development course 147
6.6 Two layered semantic gravity profiles for evaluation 148
Tables
2.1 Extracts from charters of graduate attributes for universities in
South Africa, Scotland and Australia 28
6.1 Rubric for 3rd year Political Science assignment 139
List of illustrations ix
PREFACE
I wrote this book for two main reasons. The first is that I found, in the writing I did
following the completion of my PhD in 2014, that what I really wanted to say to
educators was going to take a larger amount of space than a paper (or three) could
provide. I needed to make a more complex, connected argument about enabling
socially just teaching and learning and this book made that possible. The second reason
is that I have found, in my own teaching and in the work I have done with colleagues
in staffand student academic development, that the theories I have chosen to use in
this work have been helpful and empowering. These theories, especially, have been
the inspiration and enabler of change, growth and improvement in the educational
environments I have been part of thus far. I wanted to share what I have learned
because I believe it could help readers think about themselves, their context and their
students in ways that can open up more critical conversations about what higher
education really needs to do to widen student success.
I have been working in higher education for almost twenty years now, primarily
in academic support and development. When I started out as a postgraduate and
then professional tutor, I had no larger frameworks to draw on to think about,
reflect on or understand what my students or I were doing (or where and why
things were going awry). I fell back onto a great deal of what I critique in this
book: an individualized notion of success and the idea that my students needed to
try harder, work smarter and be better prepared for university. I considered myself
a hard-working, committed teacher; I cared about my students and genuinely
wanted all of them to do well.
But not all of them did well, and I wonder sometimes if I inadvertently hindered
the success of some of my students, especially those already at a systemic disadvantage
relative to their peers from supportive, well-resourced backgrounds. I wonder if my
feedback, for example, while intending to helping them write better assignments,
actually confused them because it assumed they could understand and act on my
advice without struggle. I wonder if my classroom engagement and activities also
assumed the ability of students to participate in the same kinds of ways, not
accounting for diversity in how they made sense of their learning.
Reflecting on this early teaching practice now, I can see there were two main
constraints on my ability to create and enact better, forward-looking teaching and
learning practice. First, I was teaching academic literacy and writing courses that
were positioned adjacent to rather than embedded within the disciplinary writing
and learning practices with which they aimed to assist students. Our materials and
activities were decontextualized in terms of the knowledge that students read and
wrote about and the formats or genres in which we asked them to write. In my
modules there were few overt and specific connections between their disciplinary
writing and the more general forms we worked with. This created gaps in their
understanding, and also in students’ability to enact the desired disciplinary literacy
and knowledge practices in their disciplinary assignments. This kind of teaching
deepened the divide for many students between what was expected as successful
academic learning and what they were able to do. This was, as you may imagine, a
wider divide for working-class students from poorer or less resourced home and
school backgrounds.
The second constraint on my teaching practice was that I was not formally or
overtly encouraged by course coordinators or colleagues to use learning theory to
develop a more coherent understanding of my own teaching practice as it related
to students’learning. I had a sense of what success looked like and what teaching
and learning could be, but it was tacit and remained un-critiqued for several years.
Without recourse to ways of connecting my practice to theory that could help me
see differently what I was doing, my ability to become a more effective educator
was constrained.
This all changed in 2009 when I began to work as the coordinator of a university
writing centre in Cape Town. I realized I needed a theorized way of thinking about
writing and literacy development and found my way to New Literacy Studies and
academic literacies research. This was transformative, both professionally and person-
ally. The critical work done in this field enabled me to develop a more systemic, less
individualized perspective on learning and teaching. I was able to see and critique the
ways in which my own prior work had contributed to the maintenance of an unequal
status quo and the exclusion of many students from access to powerful knowledge and
ways of knowing, being and doing at university. This was not easy, but it was enor-
mously empowering, both for me and for many of the colleagues I worked with
during my time in the Writing Centre.
Working with theory enabled us to see and solve problems in ways that went
beyond ‘common-sense’and ad hoc approaches. We could develop a way of
working that connected our approaches to learning with critical theory and with
other colleagues and peers working in similar ways in other writing centres and
academic development environments. We could connect individual students’
struggles with their written assignments to larger, theorized notions of recognizing
and enabling successful writing in and across the disciplines. This approach
Preface xi
strengthened our ways of working and our sense of purpose as writing development
practitioners, and it helped us to assist the students and lecturers who came to us in
more contextually relevant and sustainable ways.
During this period I completed my PhD, which used a relatively new sociological
framework called Legitimation Code Theory to analyze relations between teaching
and knowledge-making practices in two academic disciplines. Legitimation Code
Theory enabled me to theorize teaching, learning and writing in higher educa-
tion in new and empowering ways, complementing the academic literacies
theory that was already informingmyworkatthistime.Specifically, using this
theoretical framework and its practical ‘tools’to critique and change my practice
as an educator and an academic developer inspired me and helped me to inspire
those I have been fortunate enough to work with in recent years.
I completed this book in June 2020, in the midst of learning how to teach online
and how to support my own students and peers via tele-conferences, learning man-
agement systems, WhatsApp and email in new and previously under-explored ways.
The world has changed, perhaps forever, and we are changed by the global crisis
sparked by COVID-19. It has touched every part of our lives, personal and profes-
sional. Education at every level has been affected and the last few months have been
overwhelming, exhausting and challenging for many educators and students. Yet, as
much as this has been a really difficult time, we have been given opportunities to
rethink and reimagine what teaching is, what learning is, and how to design teaching
and learning that is more inclusive, creative, fit-for-purpose, and empowering for
students and lecturers. It is my hope that this book will contribute to ongoing con-
versations about how to improve higher education teaching and learning, both in
remote and contact forms.
I hope you will find the analysis and discussions in the chapters provocative,
helpful, and informative. I hope that you will use this book creatively in your own
teaching contexts, with peers and students, and that collectively we will continue
to strive for more socially just, inclusive, successful educational practice within and
across the contexts in which we work.
Sherran Clarence
Cape Town, June 2020
xii Preface
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am deeply grateful to several different groups and individuals for support, advice,
feedback, and assistance over the last five years of writing and researching this book.
To Rhodes University for the research funding that enabled me to undertake
postdoctoral fieldwork in 2014 and 2015, part of which is included in this book, and
to the National Research Foundation for a Doctoral Sabbatical Grant during the final
stages of writing my doctoral thesis, parts of which are also included in the book.
To my scholarly community who followed the ups and downs of the writing
process via social media and my blog and sent so much kind encouragement
andsupport,especiallyJo,Jodie,Jan,Liezel,Anita,Anthea,Deborah,Sharon,
Steve, Martina, Lawrence, Laurence, Jennifer, Mags, Mat, AJ, Daniel, Eszter,
Susie, Lee, Rose, Janét, Thando, Daniela and Danielle. Very special thanks to
my fabulous CHERTL colleagues for all their encouragement, advice and
support: Lynn, Jo-Anne, Sioux, Anthea, Mandz, Roxana, Carol, Kelly, Kirstin,
and Chrissie. I am so grateful that I get to work with you all.
To the lecturers who allowed me to sit in on their classes, interview them, and
read all their course materials. You made this research possible and also enjoyable.
Thank you for your generosity and kindness.
To Steve Kirk, for listening to many rambling thoughts, for your insight and
advice, and for letting me hog our Skype conversations more often than not. Your
feedback on the whole draft text helped me to become a better, sharper writer. To
Chrissie Boughey, for your generous and thoughtful feedback on the whole draft.
You helped me to see things I missed in the higher education context and nuance
my argument. Thank you.
For feedback and advice on early drafts of different chapters, my thanks to
Anna-Vera Meidell Sigsgaard, Mlamuli Hlatshwayo and Martina van Heerden.
I am so grateful to Karl Maton and Sioux McKenna for encouraging me to
develop the book proposal during my postdoctoral fellowship in 2015 and 2016. I
am especially grateful to Karl for believing in this book and in my ability to write it
when my own belief and motivation flagged, for reading and commenting inci-
sively on all the drafts of the proposal and the final manuscript, and for including it
in this book series.
To Ethan and Sam, for keeping me accountable to the writing goals posted on
the fridge, asking me how things were going and listening to the answers, and
letting me have the last piece of chocolate to help with the writing stress.
To my husband, Laurence, for all the driving, cooking, cups of coffee and tea,
hugs, time offfrom parenting tasks, and constant encouragement. You read all
seven chapters and your feedback was invaluable in shaping the final text. ‘Thank
you’is not enough.
xiv Acknowledgements
1
CONTEXT IS KEY
Laying the foundations for ‘better’teaching and
learning practices
Being a university-based academic these days is hard work. Academic lecturers and
researchers across higher education globally have many competing demands on their
time and headspace. To be a successful academic you have to be a dedicated and
well-prepared teacher, a productive and successfully published researcher, a compe-
tent and organized administrator, and an active contributor to your academic or
professional community, at the very least. An ability to bid for and secure research
funding and to supervise postgraduate students to completion can be added to this
list in many contexts, as is sharing your research in the public domain through
writing for newspapers or popular online publications, and speaking on television
or the radio. You must attend meetings and spend time with students in and out
of class, and write and read and think, and mark assignments, and travel to con-
ferences, and so much more, as part and parcel of taking on this role. Many have
to do this without the security of tenure. This can be all be overwhelming in and
of itself, and this is without factoring in a personal life, which may well comprise
several additionally demanding roles.
Teaching presents just as many challenges as it does rewards. I hear this from many
lecturers I work with –Ifeelitmyselfasanacademic–and within many current
university environments this has become even harder work over the last few decades.
Since at least the 1990s, many universities in the Global South, for example, have been
increasing student enrolments. Starting earlier, in the 1970s and 1980s, universities in
the Global North have also been growing (see Boquet, 1999; Lillis, 2001), shifting to
‘open admissions’or ‘mass’higher education (Trow, 1999). In both contexts this
growth has led to changes in the composition of the student body: in addition to being
bigger, student bodies are more linguistically, socioeconomically, culturally, ethnically
and internationally diverse. This has created uncertainty for many lecturers, especially
for those who have been teaching for a long time and who learned to teach at uni-
versity before massification brought these changes. Even lecturers accustomed to larger
universities and diverse student groups may find it hard to manage challenges
presented by both the larger classes and the students’differing experiences of
prior learning.
Teaching and learning at university is characterized by sets of practices, enacted
between students, lecturers and, in many cases, also tutors.
1
These practices that we
create, see and experience are underpinned and shaped by deeper sets of values,
beliefs, and ideologies. These assumptions are about the purpose and role of higher
education in society and in relation to the economy, the nature of knowledge and
being a knower, what success is and how it is achieved. These beliefs, values and
ideologies are linked to broader trends or ways of thinking that dominate society.
The ways in which society is structured shape what we do, how we act, what we
think within our universities because these are part of society. Our graduates need
to need to make economic and social contributions to society.
In recent decades, the most notable trends shaping societies and their universities
across the Global North and South are neoliberal capitalism and related forms of
massification, globalization, and governance. These exist alongside calls for greater
social inclusion and social justice (see also Bottrell & Manathunga, 2018; Fataar,
2019; Quinn & Vorster, 2019). The first part of this chapter opens with the con-
text for why this book has been written and why you need to read it. It then
moves to consider these trends influencing higher education in large and small
ways, specifically at how they inform and define success in higher education, and
what this means for the development of better teaching and learning practices. The
final part outlines how the book is structured, how to approach it as a reader, and
details what you can expect to find in the book.
Towards ‘better’teaching practice: why you need to read and use
this book
Whether you have many years of experience or are new to teaching and lecturing
in a university, whether you are tenured or working on contract, whether you
have ten students or 500 students, you have the same moral and ethical responsi-
bility: to do the best you can to enable the greatest number of your students to
achieve meaningful success. As lecturers, curriculum designers, academic devel-
opers, tutors, we need to create the most enabling environments we can with all
students in mind, and not just the previously privileged for whom higher education
success used to be reserved. While we are not required to do all the work of
helping students to become successful –they need to be actively working on
developing their knowledge and ways of knowing too –we are certainly not
exempt from asking and critically reflecting on crucial questions about what success
is, how student learning needs to be enabled and enhanced, and how different
structural factors create stumbling blocks for many students.
As lecturers, tutors and academic developers, we have relative power and agency
to remove stumbling blocks, to challenge inequalities, and to design and enact
teaching in different, more socially just, and more expansive ways. But we cannot
2Context is key
do this time-consuming, emotionally and mentally demanding work alone, and
without powerful resources to assist us. In addition to colleagues and peers who
share these goals, we need to use theorized and scholarly approaches to change
teaching and learning in ways that are contextually relevant, but also connected
across higher education systems and structures. In connecting with other research-
ers and practitioners outside of our own contexts around shared concerns and
solutions, we can build knowledge about, challenge and reimagine our practices on
a global level. We may well experience different realizations of the dominant
trends shaping higher education, and society, around the world, and need to con-
sider these carefully in how we write our curricula, engage with our students, and
enable successful achievement. But in spite of contextual differences, these trends
also connect us together, and these connections can enable us to share knowledge
and contribute across borders to more robust conversations about the purposes and
practices of higher education.
In higher education studies as a field of research and practice there are many
books, papers, websites and blogs devoted to teaching and learning practice, from
curriculum design to teaching with technology to academic writing development.
Many of these draw quite tacitly on theory to make their arguments and offer
advice, and many present their arguments and advice as a form of common-sense, or
practical wisdom. This has led to comments about the atheoretical nature of teaching
and learning practice and research, including academic development work (Haggis,
2009; Manathunga, 2011; Quinn, 2012). Yet, there is theory that informs and shapes
teaching and learning. A few of the main theoretical frameworks are cognitive
learning theory, social learning theory, behavioural learning theory, and critical and
social realist theory. The problem for many lecturers, who are specialists in their
disciplinary knowledge and related ways of knowing, being and doing, is that much
of the theory that informs educational research and practice is difficult to access,
make sense of and use in practical, useful ways.
2
In the field of higher education
studies we use theory quite often to analyze teaching and explain what is, and is not,
occurring in different contexts, but we seem to struggle to use theory to create better
teaching and learning practice. In some instances, theory is even absented in the
search for homogenizing ‘best’practices that can provide a single, clear to answer to
multiple, complex questions and challenges (Jacobs, 2019).
Although a great deal of research in higher education studies cited in the following
chapters troubles the notion of finding or creating a one-size, homogenizing set of
‘best’teaching practices that can apply across different disciplines, this idea remains a
seductive one (Jacobs, 2019). As noted in the opening section, teaching is hard work
and the work does not really get easier as our university and wider societal contexts
continue to change. Finding a ‘best practice’to apply and work with can seem like a
relatively straightforward and manageable thing to do in the face of complexity and
overwhelm. But the problem with this notion of one ‘best’way of doing things is
that it reinforces rather limited notions of success. It assumes that teaching and
learning across quite different disciplinary, institutional and national contexts is similar
enough for one set of assumptions to apply to all of them. This notion also assumes
Context is key 3
that the basis for successful implementation rests with the lecturers and their students,
absenting consideration of the different structures that enable or hinder this success. If
the ‘best practice’does not work, there tends to be a knee-jerk recourse to blame:
students, for not working hard enough; lecturers, for not being sufficiently com-
mitted; the university, for not being well enough resourced or supportive. All this
blame may feel justified, but it is not helpful, or constructive. It becomes a vicious
cycle that undermines the probability of wider and deeper student success.
‘Access’in this book is understood as Wally Morrow (2015) posited it: as
‘formal’access to university places and spaces. You apply, you are offered a place,
you take it up and you have access to the university and to all of its services and
structures (i.e. the library, IT labs, sports grounds, social spaces, lecture venues,
lecturers and so on). But, as Morrow (2015, p. 77) argued, formal access does not
automatically grant students access to ‘the knowledge that the university dis-
tributes’. To achieve success, students need access to the knowledges that uni-
versities create, legitimate and distribute, and they need to further have the means
to make sense of, use and also critique this knowledge. ‘Success’is understood in
this book as the ability to use higher education to transform yourself and your life
project through ‘an intense engagement with [yourself], others and with dis-
ciplinary knowledge’(Case, 2013, p. 135). Enabling success, and the enlargement
of student agency –students’abilities to grow, act and learn in personally and
socially transformative ways –is at the heart of university education. This success
cannot just be the expectation or reality for the ‘elite’or for the relatively few who
have already had ready access to well-resourced schools, educated parents and
family members, libraries and computers; it has to become a reality for all students
who are granted formal access to university spaces.
In keeping with this critical, nuanced understanding of success, and with a
deeper framework that focuses on context as key to understanding student success
and responsive teaching and learning practices, this book will seek to develop a
notion of better teaching and learning practices. Here, ‘better’implies ongoing
reflection, theorized approaches to teaching and learning informed by a relational
view of higher education’s contexts, purposes and goals, and a willingness on the
part of both the system and the individuals within it to be open to critique and
change. Context here does not just refer to where the students and lecturers come
from and what kind of university they are working in. It also refers throughout this
book to the disciplines that students and lecturers are working within, as well as the
knowledges, skills and practices, and dispositions or aptitudes that students are
required to develop and master. Throughout the book I will be referring to these
aspects of teaching and learning as knowledge and ways of knowing, doing and
being. These terms are open enough to encompass: skills, such as drawing an
accurate vector diagram; practices, such as creating an expository argument; and
dispositions and aptitudes, such as how we speak to one another, how we behave,
act, dress and interact.
In making a contribution to theorizing and enacting better, more conscious
teaching and learning practices in a range of higher education contexts, this book is
4Context is key
placed between alienating or inaccessible theory and atheoretical, homogenizing
‘tips and tricks’and ‘best practices’. In the chapters that follow, I will explore global
issues or challenges lecturers across higher education face in designing and enacting
contextually responsive or relevant curricula (Chapters 2 and 3), enabling students’
cumulative learning and meaning-making in their specialized disciplines (Chapter 4),
and planning and enacting assessment and evaluation in ways that further develop
students, and lecturers, meaningful learning and growth (Chapters 5 and 6). All of
these issues will be considered through the lens of critical social theories: Legit-
imation Code Theory and academic literacies theory. The goal in doing this is to
show how useful and powerful theorizing your own teaching practice is and to
introduce one theoretical framework that has proven useful in making sense of,
doing and changing teaching and learning in higher education. My hope is that this
will offer new and refined ways of thinking about your own educational practice.
Before considering how the book is structured and how to approach it as a reader, I
would like to brieflyexpandonthe‘context’mentioned in the title and to consider
access and success more carefully in relation to the focus of the book as a whole.
Troubling dominant notions of student success in higher education
‘Massification’, a term many academics are familiar with now, was coined to describe
the mass increase in enrolments across higher education contexts. In the first half of the
twentieth century in European and other industrialized countries, higher education
was considered an ‘elite’occupation, available only to a small section of society
(Mohamedbhai, 2014). With the growth of democracy globally in the latter half of the
twentieth century, higher education opened up to greater portions of the population
in these countries, shifting these systems from elite to mass provision of higher educa-
tion, and in some cases (such as Brazil) to universal provision of higher education (see
Trow, 1999). In essence, an elite system can be interpreted as being reserved for a
talented and able few, a mass system sees higher education as a right for those who
qualify to participate, and a universal system understands higher education as the
society’s obligation to the people (Mohamedbhai, 2014). A key effectofshiftstowards
mass and universal systems is increased heterogeneity in student and also staffcompo-
sition, in terms of gender, race, class, language, nationality, ethnicity and culture, as
well as attendant changes to administrative and educational structures and practices.
Massification as a concept can speak to increased student numbers and it can be
extended to consider the effects on university infrastructure, including physical
spaces, staffing, physical and virtual resources, and teaching and learning (see Quinn
& Vorster, 2019). Mass student enrolments meet two demands placed on higher
education: the need for universities to play a greater role in meeting the demands
of the knowledge economy for more ‘skilled’workers; and the need for higher
education to be democratized so as to enable access to its benefits for a wider cross-
section of students, especially those previously excluded. The outcome of this is
supposed to be an increase in social equity, enhanced life chances or social and
economic mobility, and greater participation of these students in social and
Context is key 5
economic life. This has, however, not been fully realized for reasons we will
discuss a little further on and in the chapters that follow. This is linked to a disconnect
between the espoused aims of democratized higher education systems and the kinds of
outcomes that are actually enabled through the curriculum, teaching, assessment and
engagement in wider campus life.
Universities are fundamentally social spaces. Public universities especially, as part of
broader public culture, are powerful vehicles for the deepening and development of
public participation and democratic citizenship (Giroux, 2002), a purpose which stands
in contrast to corporate culture’s‘neoliberal’learning subject. The focus in this system,
as Giroux indicates, is on the private individual, and on private, personal gains and
successes. Coughlan (2006) argues that this belies the link between expanding access to
higher education and democratizing it: in systems where this individualistic culture is
influential, there is a profound disconnect between the goals of social justice and
equitable student access and success and how universities actually make this real for all
students. Significantly, this disconnect concerns knowledge: what kinds of knowledge
students have access to, who this knowledge is for, how students are able to engage
with and use this knowledge, and how knowledge is conceived as part of the ‘social
justice’or emancipatory purposes of higher education to begin with (Mavelli, 2014).
Rather than expanding the possibilities for genuine success, universities influenced
by individualistic values tend to narrow in on an ‘ideal’subject they want to create or
produce. This notion of who the ‘University of X’graduate is, or should be, may
tacitly but profoundly inform the design, teaching and assessment of the curriculum,
the primary vehicle through which access to knowledge and also ways of being a
knower is facilitated. This ‘ideal’subject is created through a narrowing of legitimate
or valued forms of knowledge and attendant ways of knowing: some bodies, some
ways of being, some knowledges, only some histories are accepted and reproduced,
which means others are marginalized or actively repressed. Conforming is the path to
success here rather than widening the possibilities for different ways of being and dif-
ferent knowledge(s) to be centred, or at least openly valued. Examples that point to
pushback against this notion of success are student activism in the United States against
Islamophobia and widespread racism on many university campuses (Al-Sharif &
Pasque, 2016), and calls for decolonizing knowledge and curriculum and re-centring
African subjectivities, knowledges and bodies in South Africa (Heleta, 2016).
To enable greater access to both the public goods of higher education and indivi-
dualized notions of success, universities have been widening participation or formal
access to diverse groups of students since the 1960s and 1970s, many from the working
classes who were previously excluded from higher education. But many of the atten-
dant discourses or practices of widening participation and enabling formal access
have been couched in different forms of deficit thinking (see Archer, 2007; Smit,
2012). In essence, this means that students who are different from or do not conform
to neoliberalism’sdominant‘middle class, masculinized “rational”and strategizing
subject’position (Allen, Quinn, Hollingworth, & Rose, 2013, p. 434) are mar-
ginalized until and unless they can conform to what the system regards as the ‘ideal’
student, consumer and citizen.
6Context is key
In this system, social inclusion is understood in narrow, non-democratic terms as
compliance and passive conformity. You may see this playing out in your context
as a conflation between access and inclusion: if students have places at the uni-
versity and access to all of its services and benefits then they can be considered
‘included’in the social of the university. However, we can see in rising student
activism on campuses across the Global North and South that the ‘social’of the
university is not open to all; in both overt and more tacit ways, university cultures
and structures continue to include those whose ways of being effectively cohere
with what the university values and desires in a ‘successful’graduate and exclude
others, regardless of their ‘formal’access. The role of teaching and learning against
this backdrop may be cast as providing students with the accepted or recognized
knowledges, skills and identities that will enable them to become successful mem-
bers of society. But this may be a limited notion of this role if what we are really
after is democratic, socially just higher education, and for students to have ‘not just
skills to reproduce existing power structures, but knowledge to articulate a different
vision of the future’(Mavelli, 2014, p. 868).
Over the last two decades, corporate culture (Giroux, 2002) has become a growing
influence in university governance and management across the Global North and
South. Its values and beliefs are pervasive and are felt both overtly and tacitly in
everything from the setting of admissions criteria and allocation of funding and
resources, to curriculum design, teaching and assessment practices. This culture is
underpinned by an autonomous model of the ideal student learner, characterized as
highly motivated, self-regulated, independent, strategic and adaptable (Allen et al.,
2013; Boughey & McKenna, 2016). To be a success in this system is to be motivated
and hardworking, flexible and strategic, and make the most of whatever learning
opportunities you are presented with.
The converse of this, of course, is that students who do not succeed within this
system are cast as not properly motivated, independent and strategic, and thus not
the ‘right’university students. This is a significantly problematic set of beliefs and
values for teaching and learning that aims to be just and inclusive; first, it fails to
appreciate the importance of the social context in which students and lecturers co-
exist within a university. Second, it is unable to see the ways in which the social
context is marked by gendered, classed and racialized inequalities that give a lie to
the simplistic equation that wider participation equals greater diversity and success
(see Burke, 2013; Mavelli, 2014). Behind the supposed universal notion of the
motivated, self-reliant, strategic and adaptable student may lie quite specific male,
white, heteronormative and middle-class assumptions and world-views, views that
are reinforced implicitly by the role-models that dominate many university spaces.
Universities are tasked with contributing to social, political, environmental and
economic development through the education of skilled and knowledgeable
graduates and the progressive creation of new knowledge (see Green, 1994). But
what comprises the social in higher education, or in the societies it serves, is not
homogenous or generic. Universities are made up of disciplines and fields of study
and within these are different subject areas and foci, all of which together comprise
Context is key 7
a heterogeneous ‘map’of different ways of specializing both knowledge and those
who know and use it. This means that, rather than being seen as a force that
threatens the academic project and that should be tamed and managed, difference
or diversity could actually be seen as a resource. Enabling meaningful social
inclusion and social justice through education would then imply widening what
counts as valid knowledge and valid ways of knowing and being, rather than
limiting these to those which serve the narrow interests of society’selite,con-
sciously or unconsciously. Yet, this is almost impossible unless we understand and
define what counts as success in a more expansive, critical and systemic manner
than ‘neoliberal’culture currently does.
One way in which notions of student success are currently being troubled and
redefined is through recourse to theories of social justice that are able to explain
the systemic, structural and historical nature of current injustices, marginalization
and exclusion of certain bodies, ways of knowing and forms of knowledge. Social
justice is hard to define in one sentence or a soundbite, as theorists and thinkers
come at this concept from different perspectives depending on their disciplinary
background and the problems they are thinking through using the concept. Nancy
Fraser’s work is perhaps most useful, especially for the arguments made in this
book: she understands social justice, and by the same turn, social injustice, as being
systemic, structural, and institutionalized (see Fraser 1997; 2008).
Rather than locating the blame for social injustice or the onus for creating
greater justice within individuals, Fraser (2008) argues that true social justice can
only be created when we dismantle and recreate institutions that hinder the
advancement of the many to elevate the few. Her approach helps us to think about
and theorize the ways in which universities support approaches to teaching and
learning that, either tacitly or overtly, are premised on deficit thinking about stu-
dent learning and an individualized view of success as achieving the dominant,
valued subject identity prized by neoliberal corporate culture (see Burke, 2013;
2015). Within our universities, we need to collectively be mindful of the dominant
discourses and approaches to both access and success that those in positions of
power use to shape what happens to students, as well as what is expected of lec-
turers and tutors. If we are unable or unwilling to see the deeper principles that
organize the contexts in which we work, we are likely to support and further
skewed versions of student success that privilege students who, by virtue of their
race, class and gender at least, are already closer to being the ‘ideal’student and the
‘ideal’citizen (see also Luckett, 2016).
Practically speaking, we need theories of teaching and learning that can embrace a
relational way of making sense of the university, the curriculum, and the point of
higher education. Learning –the process of becoming a skilled, knowledgeable,
transformed knower who can contribute meaningfully to both economic and social
life –is both an individual and social process. Students do need to be responsible,
independent and motivated to work hard and try new things. We all need to be
these things when we are engaged in learning something new, and most of the
knowledge and ways of knowing, doing and being that students encounter at
8Context is key
university are new. But what higher education tends to do –one could argue what it
has always done –is to disconnect the individual from the social in terms of under-
standing how the latter may both enable and limit the development of the former.
I am underpinning the arguments made in the chapters that follow with a
systemic view of social justice and equity that challenges the primacy of decon-
textualized individualism. This larger ideological framework creates a golden
thread that runs through the chapters, linking the different arguments made about
aspects of developing better teaching and learning practices. This is a choice I
have made as a researcher and practitioner in response to the context in which I
work, which is grappling with big questions about inclusion, exclusion and social
justice in a higher education system marked by significant racial, gender and
socioeconomic disparities. This is my context. Yours may be quite different and
prompt different overarching concerns for you as an educator and researcher.
Apart from these concerns with enabling more socially just educational praxis
(theorizedpractice),whatthisbookreallywantstodoismakethatbetterpractice
possible in practical, effective ways through helping lecturers and academic
developers consider, theorize, and do teaching and learning differently.
To this end, I have chosen to use a theoretical framework and set of ‘tools’that
can enable this work on two levels. Firstly, the framework I am using here –
Legitimation Code Theory or LCT (see Maton, 2007; 2014; 2016) –has at heart a
concern with these larger questions this section has pointed to: whose knowledge
counts in higher education, in society and why? Who gets access to this knowledge
and how? What kinds of meanings matter, and how are these made legitimate, or
valued? But LCT is also a practical theory, in that the tools it provides can be –are
being –used by lecturers and by students to make different aspects of learning and
teaching more open for critique and change, more accessible and comprehensible,
and more equitable. This makes LCT useful for the work this book is doing to
contribute to current conversations in the field of higher education studies about
improving teaching and learning in meaningful, actionable ways.
LCT, a brief introduction
Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) is a sociological framework influential in edu-
cational and social research and practice around the world. Scholars in diverse
disciplines, such as Political Science, Jazz Studies, Engineering Sciences, English
Studies and Biology, are finding the conceptual tools within the framework
powerfully useful for exploring, understanding and addressing problems in edu-
cational and social contexts.
3
Karl Maton began developing LCT during the late
1990s. He began by incorporating, connecting and building on ideas from,
principally, Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein. Research and practice using
concepts and insights from LCT is now part of educational and social contexts in
many different countries (e.g., United Kingdom, France, Denmark, Mexico, the
Philippines, and South Africa). LCT has become both a theoretical framework
and a diverse community of practice and scholarship.
Context is key 9
LCT understands ‘knowledge as an object of study’that, while socially created
and used, is also ‘real’, in that it has ‘properties, powers and tendencies’(Maton,
2014, pp. 9–10). This means that while knowledge is created by actors living and
working within specific social and historical contexts, it cannot be reduced to those
contexts or to the motivations and beliefs of those actors. What they give rise to
has its own reality, in the sense of having effects. The forms of knowledge and
related practices that we create in particular contexts have the ability to shape and
influence those contexts and the actors within them (Maton, 2014, pp. 1–22). This
is important to mention here because LCT is deeply concerned with questions of
knowledge and knowers.
Much educational research in the past four or five decades has focused on a great
deal on knowers –students especially –and how teaching can become more stu-
dent-centred and responsive to students’learning needs, goals and so on (Haggis,
2003; 2009). What LCT has sought to reclaim is knowledge –what differentiates
and specializes different forms and kinds of knowledge and what makes these dif-
ferent forms and kinds powerful in specific contexts (e.g., university, professional
practice, and so on). This is important for the research reflected in this book: what
I want to help readers reflect on and improve in their own teaching and learning
contexts requires a theorized understanding of the relationship between the
knowledge students are learning and who and what they need to become and do
in relation to that. In other words, how do students become physicists or lawyers
or political analysts or designers, etc.?
TheLCTframeworkcomprisesthreeactive‘dimensions’or sets of concepts,
each of which explores different set of organizing principles that underlie prac-
tices, beliefs and dispositions (Maton, 2014, p. 18).
4
These dimensions –called
Specialization, Semantics and Autonomy –enable researchers and practitioners to
get at what lies beneath what is seen and experienced on the surface, for example,
in a lecture, an assessment cycle, or in a curriculum. Analysis of these organizing
principles can help reveal the ‘rules of the game’or ‘ways of working, resources
and forms of status’within fields (Maton, 2014, p. 17). Each set of organizing
principles is conceptualized through a species of legitimation code (specialization
codes, semantic codes, autonomy codes).
The goal of the LCT framework as a whole is to offer us a way to see more effec-
tively what we cannot with a common-sense or everyday set of understandings; it is a
specialized theoretical apparatus concerned with exploring meaning-making and
knowledge-building with different underpinning organizing principles, or orientations
to meanings and knowledge. But we have different problems or concerns –different
meanings –we want to understand, such as how to better teach abstracted concepts
that do not have easy empirical references in the real world (see Blackie 2014, on
teaching inorganic chemistry), or how to capture the ways in which musicians develop
their knowledge, practice and aesthetic sense and share this with others (see Richard-
son, 2020, on jazz education). The problems we want to understand and solve may ask
for different ‘tools’or conceptual ways of working. So, we can use, for example,
Semantics (Blackie, 2014) or Specialization (Richardson, 2020), a different dimension
10 Context is key
(Vorster, 2020 using Autonomy), or a combination of two or more dimensions
(Chapter 6, this volume).
The community of scholars and educators who enact LCT in their research and
teaching are concerned with questions about access, success, and social justice. These
concerns are at the heart of this book, and this, in addition to the practical and
accessible nature of the LCT ‘toolkit’of concepts and codes, is why I have chosen
to use this approach. The kinds of questions driving the research reflected in the
following chapters are: what knowledge counts as valuable or legitimate in different
contexts (i.e. school, university, government, social movements, etc.)? How is that
knowledge made legitimate, reproduced, and shared? Who gets access to what
knowledge, where, and how? Further, why are some excluded from knowing
while others are not? How do we make sense of the current ways of working with
knowledge and knowers so that we can make changes where these are needed?
The two dimensions I shall use in this book are Specialization and Semantics.
‘Specialization’focuses on what kinds of knowledge, and what kinds of knowers are
created, valued and nurtured by educational practices (Maton, 2014; Maton & Chen,
2020). Chapters 2, 3 and 6 use concepts from this dimension to reveal the hidden
principles underlying curriculum design and feedback-giving. ‘Semantics’examines
the context-dependence and complexity of practices and how education connects,
relates and builds meanings in and across the curriculum (see Maton, 2014; 2020).
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 use concepts from Semantics to examine teaching, assessment
and feedback practices.
Why we need stronger, explanatory theory in education
White (2017) explains that theory has three characteristics: it is abstract, it is testa-
ble, and it is explanatory. In being all three of these things, theory enables us to
create more powerful understandings of how the world works. Theory is powerful
because it enables meanings to transcend single or local contexts and thus can be
used or applied beyond the problems or challenges we are confronted with in the
present. In teaching and learning, theorizing practice is linked to more sustainable,
longer-term development and change, such that you can use the theory to improve
not only the current module, task or teaching activity you are working on, but also
future modules and further work with students and colleagues. To enable this dual
empowerment, both immediate and longer-term, we need a theory that speaks to
something deeper than only teaching or only learning. We need to dig down to
what lies beneath the acts of teaching and learning, to ask ourselves what is the
point of teaching; why and what and how do students need to learn?
The theory we then need to provide us with the ‘explanatory power’(Maton,
2014) to create and enact better teaching and learning practice needs two dimensions.
On the one hand, theory needs to be able to characterize knowledge as an object of
research and practice as well as having subjective dimensions, as it is created in parti-
cular social and historical moments by human beings (see Bhaskar, 1998), thus making
it variable over time. On the other hand, we need to be able to characterize the
Context is key 11
processes and practices we use to create, make sense of, and use knowledge to become
knowing subjects, or knowers. The theory or theories we need have to provide us with
a language for naming and describing what counts as knowledge, who the valued
knowers are, and why, in a particular context, at a particular time, we choose to value
and develop this knowledge and these knowers over possible others. We also need the
theory we use to show us how to design teaching and learning that genuinely provides
all students with the means to acquire the valued knowledge and to become legitimate
knowers, because this is the basis for success in higher education, and widening student
success needs to be our collective goal.
One of the principal reasons LCT has been chosen as the ‘toolbox’for the
chapters that follow is that it enables this kind of theorizing and so moves us
towards improved praxis. It can enable us to think from, for example, binary
positions or states that tend to characterize teaching and learning development work
(‘typologies’) towards a continuum or range of practices (‘topologies’). In essence,
this means that LCT can take our thinking out of the many binary ‘boxes’apparent
in educational thinking, such as deep and surface approaches to teaching (Biggs,
2012; Marton & Säljö, 1976), high road and low road transfer (Salomon & Perkins,
1989), and active and passive learning, as implied in studies on inquiry-based learn-
ing, authentic learning and pedagogic constructivism (see Healey, 2005; Kotzee,
2010). Moreover, it can then enable us to consider and create different, creative
options for practice and research. This is valuable in theorizing higher education
practices with a view to creating better, more accessible teaching and learning prac-
tices, because so much of educational thinking and working is premised on binary
thinking or putting our practices (and students) into boxes.
For example, surface approaches to processing information and knowledge
(Marton and Säljö’s original work in the 1970s) has been transformed into deep or
surface approaches to learning underpinned by educational psychology and indivi-
dualized understandings of student learning (Haggis, 2003). Students who are
deemed ‘surface learners’are framed negatively as doing the wrong kinds of
learning; the right kinds of learning being ‘deep learning’and by extension, being
deep learners. Apart from misrepresenting the original work in this area, in putting
this onus on students to do the right kinds of learning rather than on higher edu-
cation to provide appropriate forms of teaching, how does this way of thinking
help us work out what is ‘deep’and ‘surface’about the learning in the first place?
When you think, in your own context, of how you want students to process the
knowledge, practices, ways of acting and so on in your subject or its larger dis-
cipline, what is ‘deep’and what is ‘surface’in what students are doing? I suspect
what you might arrive at in considering a response is a way of characterizing how
students show their level of specialism in the discipline, or their growing ability to
act, write, read, think and speak like someone who belongs to the same commu-
nity of disciplinary practice and knowledge you belong to. There may be both
more and less ‘deep’ways of developing this disciplinary identity, and students and
lecturers will use different teaching and learning strategies in response to particular
learning goals or outcomes at particular points in time.
12 Context is key
To work out what these particular goals, outcomes and strategies could be, we
need to see learning and becoming more as a continuum of meanings and posi-
tions. We also need to see what makes different forms of learning, teaching,
knowledge and knowing special or particular, as well as what commonalities and
differences they may share. Further, what counts as knowledge and knowing in
different contexts also has to mean something in relation to both the specific,
present context and beyond it so that the current learning and knowledge can be
cumulatively added to and developed into the future. Context here can mean a
range of different things, such as a module, a specific disciplinary subject, or a
physical context, for example, a lab or a workplace-learning site. Meanings that are
‘powerful’(Chapter 2) are those that can be used within specific knowledge and
knower building contexts and have application or meaning beyond those contexts,
so that they can be taken forward as part of a lifelong or ongoing learning process.
How the book works
The structure of the book is organized around teaching and learning as a ‘cycle’
broken into different interconnected steps or processes: designing a curriculum and
writing or developing course materials (Chapters 2 and 3); classroom-based teach-
ing and interaction with students (Chapter 4); designing and discussing assessment
tasks (Chapter 5), and working with feedback and evaluation (Chapter 6). Within
different national and local contexts, there are particular challenges that shape the
conditions academic lecturers and academic developers work within, and the issues
they need to manage and make sense of as they work on different parts of the
teaching and learning cycle. However, although context is key and what counts as
a priority challenge will differ between local, regional and national higher educa-
tion institutions and sectors, the challenges this book discusses, theorizes and aims
to offer responses to are common to university lecturers and academic developers
across these differences.
This book is not a textbook. It has not been written to provide the definitive
word on successful teaching practice or to claim that there is one theory or one
approach to improving your own teaching and learning practice within your con-
text. As the opening sections note, context is important and the different trends that
are currently influential in higher education will shape your context in different
ways. This means that you need to be aware of your own national, institutional and
disciplinary concerns, structures, cultures and resources, and work out as you read the
chapters what the more pressing issues are in teaching and learning that you need to
reflect on, theorize and change. These may be closely mirrored in the discussions in
the chapters because the challenges discussed in the book are relatively well known
to many university lecturers across different higher education sectors. Yet, even if
they are not, the book has been written as a sourcebook, so that you can use it to
think about what matters most to you and your students at the point in time at
which you read (and re-read) it. You may come back to some of these chapters later
on in your academic career and find new points to focus on and think about.
Context is key 13
This book can be navigated in one of two ways: you can read it chronologically,
chapter by chapter. If you do this you may notice some repetition of the LCT tools and
of aspects of the teaching and learning challenges the book tackles. This is because the
book has been written in such a way that you can also dip in and out of it, reading the
chapters out of order or only reading those which are of most interest to you right now.
Tools from the LCT framework are introduced in the chapters in which they are used
in analysis, rather than in a separate theory chapter. However, while the theory is made
sense of through a specific analysis, it is also introduced in more context-independent
terms. This will hopefully make it possible for you to work out how to apply and use
the theory in your context if your problem is different from the one represented in the
selected data. Each chapter has its own self-contained argument, although, as I indicated
earlier, the central thread of socially just, systemic understandings of enabling success
runs through the book, connecting the chapter arguments together.
I hope that, however you choose to navigate the book, you will use it, because it
is written to be a source both of inspiration for improving teaching and learning
practice, and as an account of theoretically powerful approaches to unpacking,
making new sense of and changing practice.
Overview of the chapters in the book
Chapter 2 opens the exploration of teaching and learning practices by starting with the
relationship within the disciplines between knowledge and knowers. This chapter
draws out the discourse of ‘employability’that many universities around the world are
grappling with. One of the effects of this discourse has been the development of sets of
generic skills and attributes that all lecturers are asked to incorporate into their curri-
cula, teaching activities and assessment tasks and assignments. Yet, many struggle to
work out how to do this because to make meaning of these generic aspects of
becoming employable (as understood by this discourse), there needs to be a valid
contextualization within the specialized body of knowledge and ways of knowing,
being and doing within the disciplines.
If the knowledge we come to university to acquire is powerful because it is specia-
lized, then the ways in which we come to know it, use it and make it part of our
identities needs to be specialized too. Using tools for theorizing different expressions of
what makes knowledge and knowers special and also valid, this chapter shows you
how to uncover, theorize and express your own discipline’sbasis for legitimate or valid
achievement and success. Being able to see, name and explain this to yourself can help
youtoreflect on the learning outcomes you have created for your modules, the
alignment of these with both the discipline’s underlying organizing principles, as well
as with the teaching and assessment activities designed for students.
Building on Chapter 2’s exploration of disciplinary organizing principles
expressed as specialization codes, Chapter 3 poses a different question about
knowledge and knowers. While it is important to understand the nature of knowl-
edge and what it is to be a knower to enable students to achieve success. Teaching
and learning cannot stop here. It is also vital to consider the extent to which our
14 Context is key
dominant and valued practices are, in fact, reinforcing exclusive, limited participation
in higher education and in society through valuing and reproducing knowledges and
knowers that maintain inequitable statuses quo, rather than challenging these. Using
adifferent ‘tool’, this chapter looks at how curricula are designed through the choi-
ces lecturers and curriculum designers make about what the valid basis for success is,
and what it is not. The analysis here shows you how the deeper logics and organiz-
ing principles of your own curriculum can be uncovered, theorized and reimagined
to create genuine spaces for socially just teaching and learning.
Moving a step onward in the teaching and learning cycle, Chapter 4 tackles the
tricky topic of how to enable ‘joined-up’or cumulative learning and knowledge-
making. In essence, this chapter begins with a problem many lecturers grapple
with: the tendency many students have to break their knowledge and related
knowing, doing and being practices into pieces, often aligned with learning for
tests or completing assignments. The most common result of this segmentation of the
whole of meaning captured within a curriculum is that students’ultimate transfor-
mation into different kinds of skilled, knowledgeable, professional graduates may
be undermined. This is echoed in comments across industry in different countries
about graduates lacking, particularly, forms of professionalism or valued ways of
acting in and adapting to working environments.
Rather than addressing these complaints with generic graduate attributes,
Chapter 4 argues for teaching to create clearer, meaningful connections between
parts of the curriculum (units or topics), between different modules within a degree
programme, and between academic and related professional or vocational contexts
students will eventually move into. This chapter uses tools from Semantics to help
you theorize the ways in which knowledge and learning are both contextualized
and abstracted from context. It demonstrates how successful learning is about
meaning-making that connects knowledge with ways of knowing, doing and being
to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.
Chapter 5 continues working with Semantics tools to look closely at assessment
practices. Specifically, the chapter looks critically at the false divide created in many
universities between ‘content’and ‘skills’, which can lead to generic, decontextualized
approaches to teaching students critical, disciplinary ways of presenting, writing about
and creating knowledge. This chapter uses examples of assessment tasks from the nat-
ural and social sciences to unpack the ways in which students’thinking and writing
work in response to assignments is specialized by the knowledge they are working
with, as well as by the ways of knowing, doing and being that specialize knowers in
the discipline. The argument here is that, whether they are able to do so on their own
or are able to work with academic developers, disciplinary lecturers need to make the
ways of thinking and writing about knowledge an overt part of their curriculum and
teaching practice. This chapter shows you how to develop a more complex and
nuanced understanding of success for your students as related to the successful acqui-
sition and enactment of their disciplinary literacy practices.
The final substantive chapter, Chapter 6, closes the teaching and learning cycle
by looking at feedback to students on assessment tasks and assignments, and
Context is key 15
evaluation of teaching by students. This chapter argues that, if framed by narrower
or unconscious notions of ‘ideal’ways of expressing a disciplinary identity or of
being a successful student, feedback can serve to reinforce narrower, individualistic
notions of success. In doing so, feedback practices can actually further exclude
students who do not see or realize the ‘rules of the game’from understanding how
to improve their learning and become successful knowers.
Evaluation, as a form of feedback to lecturers from their students, can also reinforce
both generic notions of successful teaching and an individualized notion of teaching
success. In the first instance, evaluation can reinforce generic notions of successful
teaching through asking questions that provide little information about learning and
teaching in specific subjects and disciplines. These kinds of questions may provide basic
data to show evidence of quality as compliance, but they are unable to show how
the teaching has actually opened wider spaces for student participation, engage-
ment and successful learning. In the second instance, generic evaluation data limits
lecturers’ability to critically reflect on and change their teaching practice. In pro-
viding a thin account of general student satisfaction (or unhappiness), it isolates the
lecturer from a consideration of the structures supporting (or discouraging) them in
their daily student-facing work.
Using tools introduced in the previous four chapters, this chapter will consider
feedback to students both in relation to the specialized learning outcomes students
must successfully achieve and in relation to further learning. In terms of evaluation, it
looks at how you could ask for feedback on your teaching that enable you to reflect
both on the present module and teaching context and on your own ongoing devel-
opment as a specialized knower and teacher in your discipline or field.
Chapter 7 is written in the style of an afterword of sorts –aclosing‘chapterette’. It pulls
together the key threads that run through the book, introduced here in Chapter 1, to
draw the book to a close. The larger thread is the ways in which current social, political
and economic ideologies and trends may threaten more expansive, socially just and
socially transformative enactments of higher education and teaching and learning prac-
tice. Sub-threads focus on: the need to see and theorize the individuals in higher educa-
tion as part of complex social and socializing worlds within and outside of the university;
the need for knowledge and knowers to be theorized in specialized rather than generic
ways; and the value of theorizing learning and knowing in both context-dependent and
context-independent ways that can be both more and less complex depending on the
purpose of the teaching and learning and the disciplinary context itself.
Afinal thread that the book pulls through the chapters that follow is the need
for us, collectively, to have hope for change and the courage to make change
possible. We can begin to unpack our practices with a view towards transforming
them, using a set of theoretical tools that can provide us with a sophisticated yet
also accessible, practical language with which to talk about knowledge and related
ways of knowing, being and doing. This work, underpinned by a notion of social
justice as requiring systemic, institutional change, is not easy or quick. But it is vital
work to do in enabling higher education to realize its important civic, educational,
and social purposes.
16 Context is key
A brief glossary of sorts
We, us and our
I am an academic developer and a lecturer. My teaching and learning practices are
constantly in revision as I find ways to do better and to work in more socially
responsive, conscious, theoretically informed ways. At times in the following
chapters, I may refer to ‘we’or ‘us’or ‘our’, and in doing so I am simply signalling
that I do not stand apart from my readers, but consider the work I am proposing in
each chapter my own work too.
Disciplines and subjects
I refer in the chapters mainly to disciplines as the organizing structures we reference
in the teaching and learning cycle. This is because the discipline is the larger
structure that socializes knowers and creates boundaries around what does and does
not ‘count’as valid knowledge. Subjects are the ways in which we unpack and
access the discipline: think of the subjects of criminal law, civil law, constitutional
law and tort (or delict) law all being part of the discipline of Law. While I
acknowledge that there is complexity in how we define a ‘discipline’at university
or college level, I think it is safe to argue that there is a shared sense of this term
and the term ‘subject’in relation to it in spite of these additional meanings.
At certain points, I also use ‘subject’to refer to people –we are subjects in the
sense of being part of higher education as a system and subject to its rules, structures,
practices and so on. Here, terms such as ‘subject position’and ‘ideal subject’are used
to denote the identities we may take on, or resist, as we engage with and encounter
different knowledges and different knowing others (peers, students, managers, etc.)
within our university contexts.
Courses and modules
My understanding, based on my experience of working in several different uni-
versities in my own country and other countries is that the term ‘course’relates most
commonly to professional or academic development courses, such as a Postgraduate
Diploma in Higher Education or a short course on assessment design or teaching
with technology. The term ‘module’typically refers to the building blocks of a
curriculum; for example, in a first year History curriculum students may have to
register for four modules, two in each semester. While the terminology may differ in
your context, I am using these understandings of ‘course’and ‘module’in this book.
Units and topics
Within modules, the curriculum is often divided up into smaller pieces, usually
dictated to some extent by the university calendar and how many weeks and lecture/
Context is key 17
tutorial periods each lecturer has to use for the teaching and learning programme.
These are variously called units or topics, such as week 1 in a module on South African
History since 1900 might deal with the topic of the country becoming a union in
1910 and the implications of this for the black and white inhabitants of the country at
the time. The next topic in week 2 may move to consider the progress from the union
to the development of the apartheid ideology and so on, moving topic by topic or unit
by unit towards present day.
Tasks and assignments
This book understands tasks more generally than assignments, as anything students
are asked to do as part of the learning process. This can include informal, in-class
tasks, such as talking to two peers about a specific question or issue and then
reporting back or a short piece of written or performed work (such as a short oral
or presentation). An assignment is generally understood as a more formally
designed and assessed piece of work, usually structured into the formal assessment
plan for the module and related to students’eventual certification.
Other key concepts and ideas, specifically knowledge and ways of knowing, doing
and being will be defined and discussed in the chapters as they are used. The term
ways of knowing, doing and being has also been defined in this chapter (see Notes).
Notes
1In South Africa, for example, this term usually refers to senior undergraduate or postgraduate
students who assist lecturers by facilitating small group tutorials, or ‘tuts’to complement or
supplement lectures. In North America, this role might be called a Teaching Assistant, and in the
UK it may refer to a postgraduate student or a lecturer, both of whom may take on this role.
2This term will be used throughout the book to signal that all disciplines have knowledge
that they consider core to the history, development and growth of the discipline. But
how that knowledge comes to be known, debated, created and so on is also marked by
particular practices and skills, by particular ways of thinking, speaking and acting, and is
shared using particular textual, oral and visual formats. These are what this book refers to
as ways of knowing, doing and being.
3The LCT website (http://www.legitimationcodetheory.com) has a comprehensive set of
papers, dissertations and research that use LCT to explore various aspects of teaching,
learning, assessment, curriculum across the disciplines, from the natural sciences to the
social science and Humanities.
4A fourth dimension, Temporality, is under development and testing.
References
Allen, K., Quinn, J., Hollingworth, S., & Rose, A. (2013). Becoming employable students
and ‘ideal’creative workers: Exclusion and inequality in higher education work placements.
British Journal of Sociology of Education,34(3),431–432.
Al-Sharif, M. B., & Pasque, P. A. (2016). Addressing Islamophobia on college campuses.
Higher Education Today. A blog by the American Council on Education. 4 May, 2016. https://
www.higheredtoday.org/2016/05/04/addressing-islamophobia-on-college-campuses/.
18 Context is key
Archer, L. (2007). Diversity, equality and higher education: A critical reflection on the ab/uses of
equity discourse within widening participation. Teaching in Higher Education,12(5–6), 635–653.
Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique (revised
ed.). London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bhaskar, R. (1998). Philosophy and scientific realism. In M.S. Archer (Ed.), Critical realism:
Essential readings (pp. 16–47). London: Routledge.
Biggs, J. (2012). What the student does: Teaching for enhanced learning. Higher Education
Research & Development, 31(1), 39–55.
Blackie. M. A. (2014). Creating semantic waves: Using Legitimation Code Theory as a tool
to aid the teaching of chemistry. Chemistry Education Research & Practice, 15(4), 462–469.
Boquet, E. H. (1999). ‘Our little secret’: A history of writing centers, pre-to post-open
admissions. College Composition and Communication, 50(3), 463–482.
Bottrell, D., & Manathunga, C. (Eds.). (2018). Resisting neoliberalism in higher education.
Volume I: Seeing through the cracks. The Netherlands: Springer.
Boughey, C., & McKenna, S. (2016). Academic literacy and the decontextualised learner.
Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 4(2), 1–9.
Burke, P. J. (2013). The right to higher education: Neoliberalism, gender and professional
mis/recognitions. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 23(2), 107–126.
Burke, P. J. (2015). Re/imagining higher education pedagogies: Gender, emotion and
difference. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4), 388–401.
Case, J. M. (2013). Researching student learning in higher education: A social realist approach.
London: Routledge.
Coughlan, F. (2006). Access for success. South African Journal of Higher Education,20(2),209–218.
Fataar, A. (2019). Towards a pathway to pursue knowledge in the South African higher education
laboratory. Plenary panel discussion at the 3rd Legitimation Code Theory Conference, Wits
University, 1–5 July 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK9eQ3Lk_9M&t=1091s.
Fraser, N. (1997). From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a ‘postsocialist’
age. In Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the ‘postsocialist’condition (pp.11–39). London
and New York: Routledge.
Fraser, N. (2008). Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalizing world. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Giroux, H. A. (2002). Neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education:
The university as a democratic public sphere. Harvard Educational Review, 72(4), 425–463.
Green, D. (Ed.). (1994). What is quality in higher education? Milton-Keynes: Society for
Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.
Haggis, T. (2003). Constructing images of ourselves? A critical investigation into ‘approaches
to learning’research in higher education. British Educational Research Journal,29(1),89–104.
Haggis, T. (2009). What have we been thinking of? A critical overview of 40 years of student
learning research in higher education. Studies in Higher Education,34(4),377–390.
Healey, M. (2005). Linking research and teaching: exploring disciplinary spaces and the role of
inquiry-based learning. In R. Barnett (Ed.), Reshaping the university: New relationships between
research, scholarship and teaching (pp. 67–78). Berkshire: McGraw Hill/Open University Press.
Heleta, S. (2016). Decolonisation: Academics must change what they teach, and how. The
Conversation, 20 November. https://theconversation.com/decolonisation-academics-m
ust-change-what-they-teach-and-how-68080.
Jacobs, C. (2019). Keynote address, Annual HELTASA Conference, 27–29 November 2019,
Rhodes University, South Africa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUXHGCXcOMc&
t=2249s.
Kotzee, B. (2010). Seven posers in the constructivist classroom. London Review of Education, 8(2),
177–187.
Context is key 19
Lillis, T. M. (2001). Student writing: Access, regulation, desire. London: Routledge.
Luckett, K. (2016). Curriculum contestation in a post-colonial context: A view from the
South. Teaching in Higher Education, 21(4), 415–428.
Manathunga, C. (2011). The field of educational development: Histories and critical questions.
Studies in Continuing Education,33(3),347–362.
Marton, F., & Säljö, R. (1976). On qualitative differences in learning: I –Outcome and
process. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 46(1), 4–11.
Maton, K. (2007). Knowledge-knower structures in intellectual and educational fields. In F.
Christie & J. R. Martin (Eds.), Language, knowledge and pedagogy: Functional linguistic and
sociological perspectives (pp. 87–108). London: Continuum.
Maton, K. (2014). Knowledge and knowers: Towards a realist sociology of education. London:
Routledge.
Maton, K. (2016). Legitimation Code Theory: Building knowledge about knowledge-building.
In K. Maton, S. Hood, & S. Shay (Eds.), Knowledge-building: Educational studies in Legitimation
Code Theory (pp. 1–24). London: Routledge.
Maton, K. (2020). Semantic waves: Context, complexity and academic discourse. In J. R.
Martin, K. Maton & Y. J. Doran (Eds.), Accessing academic discourse: Systemic functional lin-
guistics and Legitimation Code Theory (pp. 59–85). London: Routledge.
Maton, K., & Chen, R. T-H. (2020). Specialization codes: Knowledge, knowers and stu-
dent success. In J. R. Martin, K. Maton & Y. J. Doran (Eds.), Accessing Academic Discourse:
Systemic functional linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory (pp. 35–58). London: Routledge.
Mavelli, L. (2014). Widening participation, the instrumentalization of knowledge and the
reproduction of inequality. Teaching in Higher Education, 19(8), 860–869.
Mohamedbhai, G. (2014). Massification in higher education institutions in Africa: Causes,
consequences and responses. International Journal of African Higher Education, 1(1), 59–82.
Morrow, W. (2015). Bounds of democracy: Epistemological access in higher education. Cape Town:
HSRC Press.
Quinn, L. (Ed.). (2012). Re-imagining academic staffdevelopment: Spaces for disruption. Stellenbosch:
SUN Press.
Quinn, L., & Vorster, J-A. (2019). Why focus on ‘curriculum’? Why now? The role of
academic development. In L. Quinn (Ed.). Re-imagining curriculum: Spaces for disruption
(pp. 1–22). Stellenbosch: SUNPress.
Richardson, S. A. (2020). Teaching jazz: A study of beliefs and pedagogy using Legitimation Code
Theory. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia). Retrieved from
https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/22066.
Salomon, G., & Perkins, D. N. (1989). Rocky roads to transfer: Rethinking mechanisms of
a neglected phenomenon. Educational Psychologist, 24(2), 113–142.
Smit, R. (2012). Towards a clearer understanding of student disadvantage in higher education:
Problematizing deficit thinking. Higher Education Research & Development,31(3),369–380.
Trow, M. (1999). From mass higher education to universal access: The American advantage.
Minerva, 37(4), 303–328. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41827257.pdf.
Vorster, J-A. (2020). Academic development: Autonomy pathways towards gaining legitimacy.
In C. Winberg, S. McKenna & K. Wilmot (Eds.), Building knowledge in higher education:
Enhancing teaching and learning with Legitimation Code Theory (pp. 272–288). London:
Routledge.
White, P. (2017). Developing research questions. 2nd edition. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
20 Context is key
NOTES
Chapter 1
1In South Africa, for example, this term usually refers to senior undergraduate or postgraduate
students who assist lecturers by facilitating small group tutorials, or ‘tuts’to complement or
supplement lectures. In North America, this role might be called a Teaching Assistant, and in the
UK it may refer to a postgraduate student or a lecturer, both of whom may take on this role.
2This term will be used throughout the book to signal that all disciplines have knowledge
that they consider core to the history, development and growth of the discipline. But
how that knowledge comes to be known, debated, created and so on is also marked by
particular practices and skills, by particular ways of thinking, speaking and acting, and is
shared using particular textual, oral and visual formats. These are what this book refers to
as ways of knowing, doing and being.
3The LCT website (http://www.legitimationcodetheory.com) has a comprehensive set of
papers, dissertations and research that use LCT to explore various aspects of teaching,
learning, assessment, curriculum across the disciplines, from the natural sciences to the
social science and Humanities.
4A fourth dimension, Temporality, is under development and testing.
Chapter 2
1I am using the term curriculum to encompass ‘what is taught, how it is taught and assessed, as
well as who the teachers are, and who the students are’(Quinn & Vorster, 2019, p. 13).
2These terms are explained in Chapter 1 in detail, but to recap briefly, ‘ways of knowing,
doing and being’encompasses what might be termed skills, practices, literacies and disposi-
tions or actions, and speaks to both explicit and tacit aspects of the disciplines that mark out
their specific nature and character. This term references the work of James Paul Gee (2015),
as my understanding of ways of being, in particular, is heavily influenced by his work.
Chapter 3
1See P. Fara (2016), The lost women of Enlightenment science, New Scientist, https://www.
newscientist.com/article/2090136-the-lost-women-of-enlightenment-science, and Western
Civilization II Guides (2013), Women during the Enlightenment and their contributions,
http://westerncivguides.umwblogs.org/2013/12/04/women-during-the-enlightenment-and-
their-contributions/.
2In this instance we are referring specifically to rules of the game in a Bourdieusian sense,
as the hidden rules that shape how universities function as arenas of struggle, who has
power, why they have power, and how that power acts to structure and shape the arena
and those within it. See Bourdieu speaking with Loïc Waquant for an accessible account
of his thinking (Wacquant, 1989).
3The Culture Trip (n.d.), The 14 oldest universities in the world, https://theculturetrip.
com/europe/italy/articles/the-12-oldest-universities-in-the-world/
4UCT Online (n.d.) 125 years of women on campus, https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/
-2011-08-08-125-years-of-women-on-campus
5Please see Curtis, Reid & Jones (2014); Garuba (2015); Lamb (2015); Menon, (2015);
NUSConnect (2016); Hlatshwayo & Fomunyam (2019) for more details on the different
debates in these contexts.
6Maton has developed the EPD through extending Basil Bernstein’spedagogicdevice
(see Bernstein, 2000). Chapter 2 of Bernstein’s book, Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and
Identity could be a further resource here if you want to read deeper into the origins of
this theoretical tool.
7Here you may also use knowledge from the field of reproduction. As you can see in
Figure 3.1, knowledge flows from the field of production towards the field of repro-
duction but also from the field of reproduction towards the field of production. We may
use what we create and learn in the acts of teaching and evaluation to inform our choices
in the field of recontextualization, as well as what has been created and shared in the field
of production.
8Field here is used quite specifically to refer to a broad set of practices that coalesce to
create a distinctive ‘big D Discourse’(Gee, 2015), with underpinning values, beliefs, ways
of knowing, ways of doing, ways of being, and accepted bodies of knowledge. These will
be contested, as not everyone who claims membership in the field will agree on what
these are, but they offer a base from which to engage in the creation, sharing, and
debating of what counts as knowledge, and who the knowers are. You could think, for
example, of the field of economics, or the field of medicine, or the field of conservation
biology. Access to the field for students is not direct but is mediated through the curri-
culum and attendant teaching of different disciplines or subjects.
9Interested readers could read the work of Hanelie Adendorff, Margaret Blackie, Marnel
Mouton and Ilsa Rootman-Le Grange who have been working with LCT to decolonize
and change biology and chemistry education in South Africa. There is also a panel dis-
cussion on decolonizing education that features inputs on doing this work from different
disciplinary perspectives, including the sciences, featured on the LCT Centre’s YouTube
channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK9eQ3Lk_9M
Chapter 4
1To recap briefly from earlier chapters, Gee (2015) defines a big D Discourse as ways of
speaking, reading, writing, thinking, valuing, believing and acting, all of which constitute
a particular, socialized identity. This Discourse is what disciplinary teaching and learning
needs to provide successful access to, as well as opportunities to acquire and master all of
its particular aspects so students can join a disciplinary community of practice.
2For a basic account of President Bolsonaro’s use of WhatsApp to spread disinformation
ahead of the polls, read Luca Belli’s article in The Conversation and Mike Isaac and Kevin
Roose’s piece in the New York Times, both in the reference list.
3This definition is accessible here: https://www.lexico.com/definition/class.
4Basic definitions offered by https://www.biologyonline.com/dictionary/class#:~:text=
(2)%20A%20taxonomic%20group%20comprised,Mammalia%20belongs%20to%20phylum
%20Chordata.
5Genre is helpfully defined by Tardy (2011, p. 54) thus:
Genres are typified forms of discourse –that is, forms that arise when responses to a
specific need or exigence become regularized. With repeated use, responses begin to
conform to prior uses until the shape of these responses become expected by users.
Genres, then, are recognizable by members of a social group. For example, scientific
researchers may recognize conventional ways to report research findings, business
people may recognize conventional ways of articulating a company’s mission and
politicians may recognize conventional ways of delivering a campaign speech. Within
each of these groups, we also find variations related to socio-rhetorical context:
research reports, mission statements and campaign speeches are likely to be carried
out differently depending on factors like academic discipline, workplace context or
geographic region.
Chapter 5
1Brenda Leibowitz’s paper offers an in-depth and nuanced look at different factors,
including cultural and personal issues that influence or shape literacy practices.
2This format refers to the ‘Introduction-Body-Conclusion’form of essay writing that
many standalone literacy or writing modules tend to use. It refers to creating a basic essay
by having: an Introduction with background information, thesis statement and paper
outline; three ‘Body’paragraphs that each have topic and supporting sentences to develop
ideas; and a Conclusion that restates the thesis and summarizes the main points in the
Body. This can be a useful starting point, but many students are not shown how to adapt
this basic form using disciplinary knowledge, language and forms of argumentation,
which is what essay writing is really for. Many may get stuck in the basics without a clear
sense of how to improve or move forward which limits their capacity to improve their
learning and their results or marks.
3If you would like to follow up with further reading on this issue of language and literacy,
I can recommend two of the books in the reference list: Brian Street’sSocial Literacies
(2014) and Theresa Lillis’sStudent Writing (2001). You could also search for David Barton
and Mary Hamilton’s work, as well as the work of Cheryl Geisler, Hilary Janks and
Shirley Brice Heath.
4If you are interested in learning more, you could look at Eszter Szenes and Namali
Tilakaratna’s work for examples from Business Studies and Social Work as well.
5In brief, Utilitarianism argues that, in the face of moral and ethical dilemmas, the right
ethical choice will produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The right
action here is understood in terms of the consequences it will produce. See https://plato.
stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/ for a basic overview in more detail.
Chapter 6
1You may note that I am enacting semantic gravity (SG) differently here than in previous
chapters, such as Chapter 4. There, stronger semantic gravity (SG+) denoted a social
context, such as case study examples or contexts of application. Here, SG+ is a symbolic
context: a text that students have to create. Part of the value and strength of these LCT
tools and concepts is their adaptability to and within different contexts and problems.
REFERENCES
Allen, K., Quinn, J., Hollingworth, S., & Rose, A. (2013). Becoming employable students
and ‘ideal’creative workers: Exclusion and inequality in higher education work placements.
British Journal of Sociology of Education,34(3),431–432.
Al-Sharif, M. B., & Pasque, P. A. (2016). Addressing Islamophobia on college campuses.
Higher Education Today. A blog by the American Council on Education. 4 May, 2016. https://
www.higheredtoday.org/2016/05/04/addressing-islamophobia-on-college-campuses/.
Archer, L. (2007). Diversity, equality and higher education: A critical reflection on the ab/uses of
equity discourse within widening participation. Teaching in Higher Education,12(5–6), 635–653.
Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique (revised
ed.). London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bhaskar, R. (1998). Philosophy and scientific realism. In M.S. Archer (Ed.), Critical realism:
Essential readings (pp. 16–47). London: Routledge.
Biggs, J. (2012). What the student does: Teaching for enhanced learning. Higher Education
Research & Development, 31(1), 39–55.
Blackie. M. A. (2014). Creating semantic waves: Using Legitimation Code Theory as a tool
to aid the teaching of chemistry. Chemistry Education Research & Practice, 15(4), 462–469.
Boquet, E. H. (1999). ‘Our little secret’: A history of writing centers, pre-to post-open
admissions. College Composition and Communication, 50(3), 463–482.
Bottrell, D., & Manathunga, C. (Eds.). (2018). Resisting neoliberalism in higher education.
Volume I: Seeing through the cracks. The Netherlands: Springer.
Boughey, C., & McKenna, S. (2016). Academic literacy and the decontextualised learner.
Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 4(2), 1–9.
Burke, P. J. (2013). The right to higher education: Neoliberalism, gender and professional
mis/recognitions. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 23(2), 107–126.
Burke, P. J. (2015). Re/imagining higher education pedagogies: Gender, emotion and
difference. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4), 388–401.
Case, J. M. (2013). Researching student learning in higher education: A social realist approach.
London: Routledge.
Coughlan, F. (2006). Access for success. South African Journal of Higher Education,20(2),209–218.
Fataar, A. (2019). Towards a pathway to pursue knowledge in the South African higher education
laboratory. Plenary panel discussion at the 3rd Legitimation Code Theory Conference, Wits
University, 1–5 July 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK9eQ3Lk_9M&t=1091s.
Fraser, N. (1997). From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a ‘postsocialist’
age. In Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the ‘postsocialist’condition (pp.11–39). London
and New York: Routledge.
Fraser, N. (2008). Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalizing world. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Giroux, H. A. (2002). Neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education:
The university as a democratic public sphere. Harvard Educational Review, 72(4), 425–463.
Green, D. (Ed.). (1994). What is quality in higher education? Milton-Keynes: Society for
Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.
Haggis, T. (2003). Constructing images of ourselves? A critical investigation into ‘approaches
to learning’research in higher education. British Educational Research Journal,29(1),89–104.
Haggis, T. (2009). What have we been thinking of? A critical overview of 40 years of student
learning research in higher education. Studies in Higher Education,34(4),377–390.
Healey, M. (2005). Linking research and teaching: exploring disciplinary spaces and the role of
inquiry-based learning. In R. Barnett (Ed.), Reshaping the university: New relationships between
research, scholarship and teaching (pp. 67–78). Berkshire: McGraw Hill/Open University Press.
Heleta, S. (2016). Decolonisation: Academics must change what they teach, and how. The
Conversation, 20 November. https://theconversation.com/decolonisation-academics-m
ust-change-what-they-teach-and-how-68080.
Jacobs, C. (2019). Keynote address, Annual HELTASA Conference, 27–29 November 2019,
Rhodes University, South Africa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUXHGCXcOMc&
t=2249s.
Kotzee, B. (2010). Seven posers in the constructivist classroom. London Review of Education, 8(2),
177–187.
Lillis, T. M. (2001). Student writing: Access, regulation, desire. London: Routledge.
Luckett, K. (2016). Curriculum contestation in a post-colonial context: A view from the
South. Teaching in Higher Education, 21(4), 415–428.
Manathunga, C. (2011). The field of educational development: Histories and critical questions.
Studies in Continuing Education,33(3),347–362.
Marton, F., & Säljö, R. (1976). On qualitative differences in learning: I –Outcome and
process. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 46(1), 4–11.
Maton, K. (2007). Knowledge-knower structures in intellectual and educational fields. In F.
Christie & J. R. Martin (Eds.), Language, knowledge and pedagogy: Functional linguistic and
sociological perspectives (pp. 87–108). London: Continuum.
Maton, K. (2014). Knowledge and knowers: Towards a realist sociology of education. London:
Routledge.
Maton, K. (2016). Legitimation Code Theory: Building knowledge about knowledge-building.
In K. Maton, S. Hood, & S. Shay (Eds.), Knowledge-building: Educational studies in Legitimation
Code Theory (pp. 1–24). London: Routledge.
Maton, K. (2020). Semantic waves: Context, complexity and academic discourse. In J. R.
Martin, K. Maton & Y. J. Doran (Eds.), Accessing academic discourse: Systemic functional lin-
guistics and Legitimation Code Theory (pp. 59–85). London: Routledge.
Maton, K., & Chen, R. T-H. (2020). Specialization codes: Knowledge, knowers and stu-
dent success. In J. R. Martin, K. Maton & Y. J. Doran (Eds.), Accessing Academic Discourse:
Systemic functional linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory (pp. 35–58). London: Routledge.
Mavelli, L. (2014). Widening participation, the instrumentalization of knowledge and the
reproduction of inequality. Teaching in Higher Education, 19(8), 860–869.
Mohamedbhai, G. (2014). Massification in higher education institutions in Africa: Causes,
consequences and responses. International Journal of African Higher Education, 1(1), 59–82.
Morrow, W. (2015). Bounds of democracy: Epistemological access in higher education. Cape Town:
HSRC Press.
Quinn, L. (Ed.). (2012). Re-imagining academic staffdevelopment: Spaces for disruption. Stellenbosch:
SUN Press.
Quinn, L., & Vorster, J-A. (2019). Why focus on ‘curriculum’? Why now? The role of
academic development. In L. Quinn (Ed.). Re-imagining curriculum: Spaces for disruption
(pp. 1–22). Stellenbosch: SUNPress.
Richardson, S. A. (2020). Teaching jazz: A study of beliefs and pedagogy using Legitimation Code
Theory. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia). Retrieved from
https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/22066.
Salomon, G., & Perkins, D. N. (1989). Rocky roads to transfer: Rethinking mechanisms of
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