CHAPTER FOUR: ACADEMIC SUPPORT AND DEVELOPMENT
4.2. ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES
A shift thus occurred in the early 1990s from a deficit model of support for under-prepared students, to an approach emphasising academic development of all aspects of teaching and learning, including admissions policies, curriculum and materials development and teaching styles (Sanders and Seneque, 1992). Instead of being isolated in separate units, academic development now became faculty and departmentally based, due to a belief that student
difficulties could best be addressed from within departments, by the staff directly concerned with student learning.
Lazarus (1987) describes this shift as a change in role from academic development practitioners being missionaries to becoming agents of change. Where ASPs offered remediation to high risk students in separate support centres, ADPs focussed on high risk courses and worked within established faculty and departmental structures (Blunt, 1993). Academic development thus sought to transform all levels of the institution, as seen in the following definition:
[Academic development is] the development of students' academic, personal and social skills.Itencompasses the individual and collective professional development of academic staff.Itmeans driving academic development as a research and practice-based discipline.
Finally it demands the development of [the institution's] capacity to improve, thereby meeting the stated objectives of contributing to educational and social change
(Walker and Badsha, 1993, p.62).
ADPs also established a new set of goals, namely transformation, Africanisation and
mainstreaming (Bulman, 1996). I consider these goals to exist in a hierarchy, with transformation forming the overarching goal of all ADPs, while Africanisation represents the outcome to which change is directed, and mainstreaming the strategy for achieving transformation.
Widespread organisational transformation is a recurrent theme in the literature on academic development: "academic development is institutional change and capacity building as much as individual (whether student or lecturer) development" (Walker and Badsha, 1993, p.61). As a result of this change in direction, universities and technikons began to establish Transformation Forums to review all aspects of the teaching and learning process. Students were encouraged to contribute to these transformation processes. Their status at the bottom of the university
hierarchy, however, (Gray, 1984), and feelings of disempowerment as described in the previous chapter, inhibited their participation.
As a result of the emphasis on transformation, a new view emerged of academic development practitioners adopting an advisory role, assisting departments and faculties in the development of curricula relevant to the local context. Systems theory offers a useful distinction between first order, or surface change, and second order, or deep, far-reaching changes in fundamental aspects ofa system's structure and organisation (Watzlawick,Weakland and Fisch, 1974). Academic development practitioners were urged to act as facilitators and catalysts of change at all levels of university practice, including student learning, staff development and organisation-wide
development, and thus bring about second order changes:
First order change (surface change/ reform) improves current practice without altering the basic organisational arrangements or changing the way lecturers and students perform their roles. Second order change (deep change/ transformation) challenges the way the institution is put together, its goals, structures and roles, including collaborative work
cultures (Walker and Badsha, 1993, p. 61).
While second order change remains a goal of academic development, however, it is, in many instances, a goal not yet realised, due to lack of institutional support (Boughey, 1994) or resistance by academics (Frielick, 1993).
The second goal of Africanisation is also in many cases not achieved. Despite calls for universities to develop new educational epistemology that more closely reflects our context (Frame, 1993 and Mandew, 1993), curricula, research programmes, and staff composition in many cases have not been adapted to the socio-political realities of South Africa.
Mainstreaming has been somewhat more successfully achieved due to the awareness that
academic development is no longer sustainable as an ad hoc, separate activity. This has involved two steps. Firstly departments have been urged to take responsibility for academic development, often by locating an academic development practitioner, who is also a discipline specialist, inthe department. Moves have also been made away from voluntary additions to the mainstream curriculum, to a focus on curriculum development: "A general trend of academic support programmes seems to be towards more faculty and departmental involvement and ownership,
with a shift away from voluntary, extra tuition programmes towards compulsory, credit-bearing, integrated courses" (Hofmeyr and Spence, 1989 in Carter, 1991, p. 35).
Analysis of the academic development initiatives at various institutions reveals wide disparity in the extent to which the above three goals have been realised, as well as diversity in terms of philosophy, structure, and even terminology used to describe core activities (Bulman, 1996). At the historically white Universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand, which enjoyed more and earlier funding than the historically black universities, ASPs date back to the early 1980s and mainstreaming of academic development became university-wide policy by the early 1990s (Carter, 1991). At Rhodes University, ADP tutors have been accommodated in departments, responsible for assisting staff in the development of discipline-specific academic skills modules, integrated into lecture courses (Carter, 1991). At the University of Natal academic development is widespread and located in departments, with a few functions such as research, evaluation and resource development centralised (Bulman, 1996). In the university's Vice Chancellor's Review and Planning Guidelines (University of Natal, 1994) the mainstreaming of academic
development and transformation of all aspects of the teaching-learning process has become university policy.
At historically black universities, however, the picture is less impressive. The University of Zululand, for example, only began to receive funding for academic support in 1993. All ASP posts are of a short term, temporary nature, even at management level, and the focus is almost exclusively on student development, in the form of academic skills workshops, voluntary tutorials, and academic literacy courses. At the University of Durban Westville, the focus is on tutorial-based student development, although a new focus on curriculum development began to emerge by the mid-1990s. ADP staff were, however, aware of a large gap between their idealised notion of a long-term, mainstreaming approach and the difficulties of practice, including minimal endorsement and lack of interest by senior academics. At the M.L. Sultan and Natal Technikons
,
there is little departmental ownership of Academic Development, with ASPs offering voluntary, content-based tutorials and skills workshops, which have no impact on existing curricula
(Bulman, 1996).