Chapter 3: Locating the PDMM within the HE curriculum context 3.1. Introduction
3.4 Locating the PDMM within the SA OBE response to macro forces
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These interests, Barnett (2000: 258) asserts, are necessary if HE is to prepare students to succeed in what Beck (1992 in Barnett, 2000: 262) describes as a world structured by manufactured risk – the risks humanity has generated through the “technological and conceptual schemas [it has] wrought on the world” (ibid.).
The development of the PDMM course is deeply informed by Mode 2 conceptions. The course draws on knowledge from several disciplines and on research emanating from a variety of professional and social sources. We aim to graduate students with the vocational knowledge, skills and attributes required to work in an industry that has been, and increasingly continues to be, transformed by the same forces that are impacting on education today. However, as past students have attested (see Du Toit, 2007), the vocational nature of the programme does not necessarily equate with an instrumentalist agenda. We are deeply conscious of the multiple roles mass media have to play in uncertain times and, in preparing students for leadership within this industry, cannot be satisfied with a technically orientated response. A critical concern with management education, as Reynolds and Trehan (2000:
267) suggest, is essential given the “considerable influence which managers as a professional group exercise over the lives of employees, the wider community and the environment”.
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NQFs possible; without clearly defined outcomes, descriptions of qualifications would be
“haphazard and highly confusing” (ibid.).
The South African National Qualifications Framework (SANQF) was established in 1997 to
“integrate education and training, in order to boost skill and productivity levels, promote strong economic growth, as well as addressing issues of equity and social justice” (Ensor, 2003: 326). Deeply embedded in a Mode 2 understanding of knowledge production and reproduction, the SANQF aims to coordinate an integrated approach to learning that rejects a
“rigid division between ‘academic’ and ‘applied’, ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, ‘knowledge and skills’” (Republic of South Africa, 1995: 15). The impact of the formation of the SANQF and its accrediting body, the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA), for HE has been largely about the form rather than the content of the curriculum (Luckett, 2001: 52), particularly since universities are permitted to register whole qualifications on the framework (Ensor, 2003: 337). SAQA does stipulate that qualifications must “represent a planned combination of learning outcomes” intended to “provide learners with applied competencies and a basis for further learning” (Nkomo, 2000: 14). Assessment tasks should take on an integrated form in which students demonstrate applied competence, involving foundational competence (knowing that), practical competence (knowing how) and reflective competence (knowing how that you know) in solving real world problems. Consistent with a Mode 2- orientation, SAQA also stipulates that higher order generic competencies (known as critical cross-field outcomes (CCFO) be infused across curricula (see SAQA, 2001: 24 for a detailed list of the CCFOs).
The central place of OBE on NQFs has, to some degree, served to polarise thinking about teaching and learning in HE in much the same way as the Mode 1-Mode 2 debate. However, for many this polarisation appears to be less concerned with whether OBE has a place in higher education, but rather to do with the form it takes. Writers such as Ecclestone (1999), Barnett (2000), Tarrant (2000), Knight (2001) and Hussey and Smith (2002) suggest that a prescriptive, behaviourist-driven approach to OBE can encourage curriculum-as-product thinking, which fails to prepare students for unknown and unpredictable futures, overlooks unspecified and unexpected outcomes and encourages reductionist approaches to education.
These writers are not, however, dismissive of the approach, but rather contend that it needs to take on a more liberal form. They suggest that OBE has the potential to provide a means for explicitly and publicly articulating teaching intentions and structuring courses. OBE can also
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help to focus attention on what is to be learned as opposed to what is taught and how theory and practice may be integrated. It has the potential to make the learning process more democratic and to support a more student-centred understanding of teaching and learning.
As lecturer on a professionally orientated course I am comfortable with the more liberal position. I believe there is room within an OBE approach for both an understanding of the curriculum-as-practice and the curriculum-as-praxis as long as the requirement to define outcomes is sufficiently open to include broader competency statements and complex learning (Knight, 2001: 374) that go beyond technical and instrumental performance. There must also be room to allow for what Hussey and Smith (2003) describe as unintended or unexpected outcomes. Level descriptors for NQF registered qualifications are sufficiently broad to include outcomes informed by communicative and emancipatory knowledge interests. Similarly, the SAQA definition of applied competence as: “A learner’s ability to integrate concepts, ideas and actions in authentic, real-life contexts which is expressed as practical, foundational and reflexive competence” (SAQA, 2005: i) is sufficiently open to accommodate these interest. However, I share Luckett’s (2001: 56) view that these requirements do not place sufficient emphasis on the critical orientations of the curriculum- as-praxis. While not precluding an emancipatory interest, the requirements stop short of requiring teaching that develops “metacognitive cognition (an awareness of how and why one thinks as one does)” (ibid.) and “epistemic cognition (the capacity to think epistemically, to recognise and examine the assumptions and limits of theories of knowledge and to be able to suggest alternatives” (ibid.). I believe such learning is integral to any curriculum designed to prepare students to deal with supercomplexity.
The manner in which the PDMM curriculum has been constructed is generally consistent with salient features of the current OBE approach that include: (1) being needs-driven, (2) criterion-referenced, (3) adopting a design-down approach with learning content being specified once outcomes are determined12, (4) specifying learning outcomes, (5) placing students at the centre, (5) providing building blocks for higher-level outcomes (Malan, 2000:
24). The programme emphasises both formative and summative assessment as required by SAQA (Nkomo, 2000: 14).
12 This is not always the case. It is not uncommon to identify content that we feel would benefit students and then to work
backwards in seeing how such content can be developed into an outcome for a module. This position is supported by Knight (2001) who draws on complexity theory in arguing that complex learning cannot be reduced to a linear approach to curriculum development as envisaged in the ideas of rational curriculum planning.
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Having explored how the PDMM course is located within a particular framework for understanding the concept of curriculum and having located this within the South African OBE13 context, I now move to a discussion of the role of assessment within higher education.
13While an examination of NQF’s success in transforming higher education in South Africa is beyond the scope of this study, it is notable that it has been critiqued on a variety of levels relating to both the conceptual foundations on which it is based and the manner in which it has been implemented. Among the critiques are questions regarding the outcomes basis of the NQF as a vehicle for “opening up learning pathways for all South Africans” (Young, 2003: 5), continuing epistemological debates concerning equivalence between qualifications, and the extent to which the framework has succeeded in promoting more integrated curricula that bring together Mode 1 and Mode 2 learning (Ensnor, 2004). A detailed critique of the development and implementation of the NQF may be found in Keevey (2005).
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Chapter 4: Assessment in Higher Education