NWU Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Conference on 21September 2017
Address to the guests and staff of the NWU(Roots Conference Facility, Potchefstroom)
Africa and the NWU: place, purpose and alignment of teaching and learning to transformation ideals and values in the next five years.
Prof RJ Balfour, DVC Teaching and Learning
Introduction and acknowledgements
Good morningeveryone and welcome to this special event to show-case and share developing best practice in teaching and learning at NWU in 2017. On behalf of our Vice-Chancellor, Professor Dan Kgwadi, and management I wish to welcome not only our colleagues from across the NWU, but also a number of special guests:
Prof Brenda Leibowitz, the SARCHI Chair of Teaching and Learning at the University of Johannesburg;
Prof Liqwha Siziba, NWU-TAU Fellowship holder and Associate Professor specialising in academic literacy development;
Prof Dawid Gericke, Chief Director for the Centre of Teaching and Learning (CTL) at NWU;
Dr Gerhard Du Plessis, Director for the Focus Area for Curriculum Development in the CTL;
Dr Esmarie Strydom, Director for the Focus Area for Staff Development in the CTL and
Dr Jessica Poole who together with a supportive group of administrators and colleagues, helped to organise this event. Thank you for the energy and work that went into this event.
All our colleagues and guests presenting papers in the next two days; thank you also for that interest and passion for teaching and learning.
The Continental Education Strategy for Africa (2016-2025) and the NWU
I wonder how many colleagues, let alone students would have come across the Continental Education Strategy for Africa (2016-2025)? Or how many be aware that its Guiding Principles or Strategic Objectives have been adopted by the African Union? The Guiding Principles are described below with the purpose orienting this SoTL conference to the African and South African contexts in which the NWU, as an African university, must function.
1. Knowledge societies are called for ...(and) are driven by skilled human capital.
2. Holistic, inclusive and equitable education with good conditions for life-long learning ...for sustainable development;
3. Good governance, leadership and accountability in education management...
4. Harmonised education and training systems are essential for the realisation of intra-Africa mobility and academic integration through regional cooperation
5. Quality and relevant education, training and research are core for scientific and technological innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship;
6. Fit and well-fed learners (CESA, p.7).
What springs immediately to mind in reading about these Principles is just how much synergy (see the words underlined above) there is between our new NWU Strategy and CESA. To my mind this speaks too an alignment precisely between how the NWU leadership have defined the University’s purpose going forward and also the directions as regards education as adopted by the AU. Awareness of our African context, and awareness of the key drivers of the NWU Strategy need to lead to a reconsideration by academics and other staff of the approaches taken to teaching and learning at NWU. That such documents exist, however, does not yet mean they live in the hearts, minds and hands of our people.
Some weeks ago on one of the visits the DVCs undertake to meet with faculties and their leadership groups, one member of our staff asked in a Q & A session as to whether leadership at the University “had a plan” and whether the plan was a “good one”? The questions occur in the context of our having just emerged from, and just having begun to implement the new NWU Strategy which takes among others, the form of the restructuring with which we are still engaged. But knowing this as we all do, the questions had a rhetorical purpose also; displaying not so much only the question, as much as questioning the credibility of any plan, and indicating perhaps also scepticism about the plan. Either way the questions do point to a need among academics to align their curriculum and pedagogy to the NWU Strategy and to explore the implications of this and other policy documents, for practice.
I’d like to imagine that after eighteen months consulting academics and support staff, as well as external stakeholders about the development of the new NWU Strategy, and an equal amount of time refining and consulting the NWU Teaching and Learning Strategy, as to whether colleagues are aware of these now final documents? Are you aware? Are you thinking about the implications of these two documents for yourselves, your practices and thinking?
Like Africa, so too with the NWU, there is a plan. And beyond the NWU you will find many synergies between our thinking and that of the AU resonating across the continent of which we are part. CESA described twelve strategic objectives all associated with improving quality in education (both at the level of schooling as well as post-schooling levels). I want to describe the twelve strategic objectives if only to ask that as you listen, you identify again those key words and phrases you have heard as so much part of our strategic thinking at NWU:
SO 1: revitalise the teaching profession to ensure quality and relevance at all levels of education;
SO 2: Build, rehabilitate, preserve education infrastructure and develop policies that ensure a permanent, healthy and conducive learning environment in all sub-sectors so as to expand access to quality education;
SO 3: Harness the capacity of ICT to improve access, quality and management of education and training systems;
SO 4: Ensure acquisition of requisite knowledge and skills as well as improved completion rates at all levels and groups through harmonisation processes across all levels for national and regional integration;
SO 5: Accelerate processes leading to gender parity and equity;
SO 6: Launch comprehensive and effective literacy programmes across the continent to eradicate the scourge of illiteracy;
SO 7: Strengthen the science and math curricula in youth training and disseminate scientific knowledge and culture in society;
SO 8: Expand TVET opportunities at both secondary and tertiary levels and strengthen linkages between the world of work and education and training systems;
SO 9: Revitalise and expand tertiary education, research and innovation to address continental challenges and promote global competitiveness;
SO 10: Promote peace education and conflict prevention and resolution at all levels of education and for all age groups;
SO 11: improve management of education system as well as build and enhance capacity for data collection, management, analysis, communication and use;
SO 12: Set up a coalition of stakeholders to facilitate and support activities resulting from the implementation of CESA 16-25 (CESA, pp.8-9).
NWU is South Africa’s second largest university with between 65000 to 71000 enrolled students between 2015-17. It enjoys a reputation as an excellent institution for quality teaching and learning in areas such as Health, Engineering, Commerce and Teacher Education. But its size and complexity carriedin 2015 associated risks as described in the NWU Annual Report of 2015, for example
1) the management model
2) leadership transition
3) transformation
4) alignment of internal and external communication
5) risk management
6) student experience (p.20)
Mitigating and addressing those risks entailed a re-thinking of our purpose in relation to our functioning and this activity has led to a re-alignment of purpose to practices to obtain a better fit for the NWU in terms of its context and national and international purpose as University.
Alignment of Purpose to Policy andValues to Actions
Risks increase in measure to the lack of thorough planning on the one hand, and dearth of good leadership, on the other hand. Given the complexity of the organisation, its mighty investment in contact and continuous education programmes (both the formal distance education programmes as well as non-formal courses such as short learning programmes), curriculum transformation has to be proactively directed and lead. The direction as mapped in the NWU Teaching and Learning Strategy is clear, but who is tasked to lead? Who among us is called to lead implementation? Isn’t it problematic in an academic organisation to imagine that academic leadership should come from the Vice Chancellor or Deputy Vice Chancellor alone at this time? As a community of professionals, every academic has a leadership role to play. The new NWU Strategy and the Teaching and Learning Strategy are our “maps to the stars” colleagues; and every academic leader, every academic needs to consider how these documents will become meaningful in the classrooms in which you stand, the laboratories in which you demonstrate and the workshops in which you engage with students. My invitation to you today is to consider for yourselves this question: what does transformation of the curriculum mean for, and in my context?
Transformation entails two components: the first focus on the renewal of existing curricula in terms of the new directions of the NWU and latest innovations in relation to pedagogy, design or the use of ICTs for learning. The second focus is on the planned and sustained activitiesof curriculum design, support and making because without the focus on planning and sustainability curriculum transformation cannot be expected to become both the hall-mark and watermark of the NWU. I would like to pause to use this metaphor of the hall-mark and watermark in terms of teaching and learning. Hall-marks are those symbols and signs printed overtly into precious metals and documents (the NWU degree certificate seal is a hall mark that pledges to the recipient and to the workplace into which s/he enters, that the qualification is of sound quality, of relevance and of worth to a potential employer and to the society to which the graduate must contribute). Watermarks are more subtle; these patterned traces are evident when you turn your paper currency to the light and there in the paper itself is another form of the seal, not placed on it, but seeming as though to float within the very fibre of the texture of the paper of your bank note, letter-paper or degree certificate. If these metaphors can be extended, the hall-marks are those formal features of a qualification, programme and curriculum (as defined by the 2009 in the NQF and HEQSF, 2013), whilst the watermarks might be considered as the evidence of graduateness, or exit attributes, or the values which staff and students display in respect of the knowledge, skills, awareness, and behaviours in terms of their contributions to the nation, society, the environment and the professional and local communities in which staff and graduates work and live. The formal features of the curriculum are meant to lead to and assist in identifying the watermarks. Some scholars refer to this relationship in binary terms: for example, of the overt and covert curriculum, the formal and the hidden curriculum, or as I sometimes think in terms of the stated and the experienced curriculum. There is recognition in the scholarship that hidden features of the curriculum can sometimes seem contrary to and incongruous with, the curriculum. Typically these disjunctures occur when the institutional culture (which reflects a set of experienced rather than stated institutional values), influences negatively classroom practices, or when administration, affects how the University addresses issues such as inclusion, access, gender awareness, race and sexual orientation,then we see and feel a misalignment with the formal outcomes and values associated with the qualifications and formal curriculum. Remember our values as NWU: ethics, integrity, academic freedom, responsibility, embracing diversity and ask yourselves whether you experience (practice as well as believe in) these values?
Awareness of the risk of disjuncture, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely what motivated the NWU (Council and the Senate) in 2016 to write into the NWU Strategy those features by which we wished to be measured in the form of a new Internal Success Model:therein is an explicit focus on teaching and learning from the perspective of student experience: Teaching and learning is, in fact, the first factor mentioned in the Internal Success Model: it refers to quality in external peer evaluation, student satisfaction, employability, employer feedback= graduate attributes (p.3).
Also in that model is mentioned a “clearly differentiated student value proposition”: what is it?
- Equity of access
- Sense of belonging
- Empowering and supportive student experience
- Seamless learning and teaching experience
- Aligned programme offerings
- Active, responsive and caring citizens.
Items 2 and 3 above relate to curriculum transformation and its relationship to the institutional culture (or the experienced curriculum). Institutional culture needs in itself to be characterised by freedom of development, academic freedom to explore new ideas and innovation, as well as the experience of support whether for students or members of the academic staff. In the period of transition the risks of not connecting curriculum transformation closely with the development of institutional culture, are high, but not beyond our reach. Do we take responsibility for ourselves in owning and modelling academic freedom in our curriculum such that students experience it and learn to think critically?Or do we restrict our critique and reflections to corridor talk about our students, our colleagues, our leadership? How much of our colleagial engagement concerns ways to narrow disjunctures and the dissonances between stated and experienced culture within the stated and the experienced curriculum? Education, that matter with which we are all busy, remains a woefully under-explored resource in terms of the role student experience and the renewal of the curriculum (p.29).
That said, our experience in higher education is not only the experience of hindsight or blind-spots: we have strengths that equip us well for the tasks ahead. NWU has always enjoyed the benefit of a loyal and committed staff and a commitment to excellent administration and a careful focus on planning undertaken by competent people (whether in the area of our support divisions, or in our Faculties). And thus my sense is that we have every reason to expect that NWU will meet the challenge of making the transitionary moment, a transformatory moment also, to make the most of the opportunity to plan afresh in one of the three key areas of our core business: the transformation of teaching and learning.
To my mind transformation entails, and has always entailed a focus on the achievement of good quality in education. And at the outset we have to acknowledge that throughout our universities, issues concerning quality education provision have not all yet been addressed and the system itself is regarded as expensive and sluggish with variable quality entailed. Even our formal policy frames are not yet complete as noted even in the HEQSF document there is acknowledgement that qualification standards still have to be generated for many qualifications in SA: for example teacher education professional standards as associated with the qualifications are still not in place. Thus the development of education in South Africa occurs not on a ‘developmental trajectory of linear progress, but rather as energy and opportunity are created. And as noted earlier, a mapping of compliance to requirements is not an adequate perspective on transformation as a holistic, integrated and intrinsic activity associated with the transformation of pedagogy (the how to), content (the design) and assessment experience. It is precisely this nuance that students and the Fallist Movements of 2015 brought vocally and visibly to our attention in higher education.
To sum up: Policy and compliance, as we have learnt as NWU from the experience of the CHE-NWU LLB Report do not achieve changes to the institutional culture. They are instead the parameters in which change occurs; but in themselves they are not change. Documents are not change colleagues. Without you changing, or me changing, no snowfall of words falling from paper will make us seem more inclusive, more aware, or more supportive of student success.
The challenge South African universities have since 2016 has moved beyondaccess, to student experience of engagement in an era of multimodality in which self-direction becomes not a pleasant feature of our pedagogy, but a demand we hear from the mouths of our students, even if differently configured in terms of contact and distance education modality, blended learning design, virtual learning experiences and so on. Is our offering adequate, relevant and sufficient?Is it enabling and empowering? Consider how long it has taken the sector to wake up to the need for the Level 5 Higher Certificate as a bridge between schooling and higher education, long overdue given the twenty years of problematic and painful experience accumulated with extended and preparatory programmes. In the past two years the focus of the CHE has shifted to notions of quality and standardisation to recognising that these more nebulous features of the curriculum come closer to transformation than standardisation or quality enhancement processes do.