BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE FOR STUDY
1.5 Current discussion on AD in the HE in South Africa
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competency and conceptual understanding. They went on to state that at tertiary level the language problem cannot be dealt with in isolation; and that these students require a holistic approach of intervention. Their thinking was that if tertiary institutions were committed to opening access to students who would otherwise not gain entry, there was a need to ensure that the academic and intellectual skills of these students are enhanced to their full potential. This calls for the University to put into place mechanisms to support the alternative admissions policy and consolidate the potential academic ability of students.
An equally relevant point raised by Gasa et al. (1994) was that all students experience difficulties adjusting from secondary to tertiary education, an issue they expand on by commenting that:
[u]niversity is a unique learning experience with new demands and expectations. Coping with these demands involves learning how to learn, modifying existing study strategies, abandoning others and developing new, more effective strategies, as well as monitoring one’s learning. What has been observed is that the successful students, of whatever race, are students who are active learners who think about and react to course content and use a variety of thinking skills to fit different academic situations” (48).
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Higher education has now become a more marketable commodity and students would have to apply their knowledge and communicate in various contexts outside the environment of the university. One of the specific goals HE in South Africa was called upon to advance was “to improve the quality of teaching and learning throughout the system and, in particular to ensure that curricula are responsive to the national and regional context”
(Department of Education (DoE), 1997: 1.27).
The DoE Education White Paper (1997b) also hoped that the programme-based approach to higher education would improve the responsiveness of the system to “[the] present and future social and economic needs, including labour market trends and opportunities, the new relations between education and work, and in particular, the curricular and methodological changes that flow from the information revolution, the implications for knowledge production and the types of skills and capabilities required to apply or develop the new technologies” (2.6).
One of the gaols in implementing the transformation strategy in HE in the Education White Paper (DoE, 1997b) is “to produce graduates with the skills and competencies that build the foundations for lifelong learning, including, critical, analytical, problem-solving and communication skills, as well as the ability to deal with change and diversity” (1.27)
Academic development in the higher education sector has also featured in the National Plan for Higher Education in South Africa (DoE, 2001: 21) in which the commitment to the promotion of AD in HE and its expectations of AD in HE is reflected below:
The Ministry remains committed to the funding of academic development programmes as part of the new funding formula. However, it should be made clear that higher education institutions have a moral and educational responsibility to ensure that they have effective programmes in place to meet the teaching and learning needs of the students they admit. This requires that institutions should integrate academic development programmes into their overall academic and financial planning (21)
In addition, the Ministry of Education in South Africa considers the role of academic development programmes in improving the efficiency of the higher education system in terms of graduate outputs as being critical (DoE, 2001: 22). The value of AD in the HE sector cannot be undervalued. In 2008, the ‘Report of the Ministerial Committee on Transformation and Social Cohesion and the Elimination of Discrimination in Public Higher Education Institutions’ supported a review of the undergraduate qualification
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structure in terms of its appropriateness and efficacy in dealing with the learning needs of students. The review of the undergraduate qualification structure would be considered in light of the context of schooling in South Africa, and given the acknowledged gap between school and higher education. In addition to considering the ‘desirability and feasibility’ of the introduction of a four-year undergraduate degree, the review would include the role of academic development programmes and their integration into a new four-year formative degree (DoE, 2008: 73).
According to Boughey (2007), AD in South Africa has gone through a number of shifts, seeing it move from a focus on equity to a focus on efficiency (1). This has included the shift from the provision of ASPs as a form of support for the small number of black students entering historically white liberal institutions in the early 1980s. Then, in the early 1990s, there was the change in focus from the student to the institution as the higher education system prepared to transform itself in anticipation of a new political order. This involved the development of teaching methodologies and curricula which would meet the needs of the anticipated black majority in the student body (Boughey, 2007: 2).
Volbrecht and Boughey (2004) comment on Higher Education Development as a phase in AD. According to these researchers, critical to this phase is the construction of the work of the AD movement as a resource for institutional efficiency in relation to teaching and learning. This satisfies the goal identified in the The Department of Education’s (1997b) White Paper. What Boughey (2007) argues for is the need for:
AD practices to become more nuanced and more contextualised in order to contribute to differentiated learning needs at programme level within a differentiated system. The location of Academic Development within a quality framing would allow this to happen since the practices would need to be contextualised at programme level in order to ensure that those programmes were, indeed, fit for purpose and able to bring about the transformation of learning (8).
With institutional efficiency, institutions were not only required to become more effective in using the resources at their disposal but also to recurriculate in order to meet the demands of globalisation and to attract students who were looking for work-oriented qualifications. As a result, AD practitioners began to be perceived as a resource to be drawn on in the quest for overall institutional efficiency (Boughey, 2007:3).
28 1.6 The Provision of Foundation Programmes
Many prospective students in South Africa come from schools that have not equipped them for admission to university. They do not obtain the required matriculation points for admission to specific undergraduate degrees. A number of universities in the country have developed alternative access programmes to identify candidates who have the potential to succeed at University which serve as alternative routes into university admission. One example of an alternative access route is the provision of the foundation programme. An understanding of the nature of the foundation programme is necessary for this study.
Boughey (2010) differentiates between a bridging course and a foundation course. The former is “a course which looks back into the school curriculum and attempts to upgrade students’ performance on the school-leaving examination, while the latter looks forward into the university in the acknowledgement that academic knowledge and academic learning are qualitatively different to school based practice” (6). The Department of Education (2001) describes foundation programmes as state subsidised programmes of learning that are intended to assist underprepared students to cope with the demands of a mainstream academic programme. “Foundation programmes maybe defined as special programmes for students whose prior learning has been adversely affected by educational and social inequalities” (Kloot et al. 2008: 800).
The provision of these bridging or foundation programmes meant that some measure of progressive change was being adopted by HEIs to make a university qualification accessible to all sectors of the population. Volbrecht and Boughey (2004) describe the provision of these programmes – the foundation programme, in particular – as a consequence of a “shift in the attitude of the HWUs to take ownership of the phenomena of disadvantage and underpreparedness” (62). Such intervention programmes were also necessary to fill the articulation gap12 between secondary schooling and higher education sectors, giving the educationally disadvantaged students the opportunity to realize their academic potential at university. However, this move created anxiety that institutional standards would be compromised to accommodate students whose inadequate schooling
12 The “articulation gap” is the gap between “students’ capabilities and universities’ expectations” (Marshall, 2009: 65).
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would have rendered them underprepared for tertiary studies and were thus in need of support.
Like the earlier issues of viewing educationally disadvantaged students as being deficient and in need of remediation to ‘fit in’ the higher education sector, foundation programmes offered at HWUs were criticized for being separate units (i.e. add-ons) created to support or remedy black students’ underpreparedness. This is aptly summed up by Nzimande (2010) in the Stakeholder Summit on Higher Education Transformation report which reads:
The ability of foundation programmes to successfully bridge the academic divide is often hindered by a failure to integrate these programmes into the core curriculum of the institution as such programmes are simply seen as add- ons. Moreover, the remedial nature of foundation programmes often means that the students who take these courses are marked negatively at a social level as their apparent shortcomings are exposed (20).
The provision of the foundation programmes had racial undertones of marginalising the educationally disadvantaged black students from the greater mainstream university culture and environment.
Despite the negativity associated with foundation programmes, they were necessary in allowing educationally disadvantaged students access into higher education studies.
Besides the point of being able to enter through the doors of higher education learning institutions, these students, especially those in foundation programmes, needed to be able to achieve some measure of success in their studies. Cele and Menon (2006) refer to this balance as “‘equity of access and equity of outcomes” (40) and they argue that neglect of this balance results in the continued participatory exclusion of historically marginalised groups in the broader economic and social spheres of life. For universities to rectify this, they need to ensure that students from previously disadvantaged backgrounds, upon access into university, are able to achieve academic success by not only graduating, but by doing so within an appropriate time frame.
1.7 The Establishment of Foundation Programmes in Science at Higher Education