In the first part of the study, phenomenological interviews were conducted with three members of the Law Deans Working Group of 1996, who drafted the proposals for the new degree. Employers of graduates were interviewed to ascertain their perceptions of graduates' readiness for professional practice.
Opening Statement
Introduction
In this chapter, the focus and purpose of the study will be clarified and the historical context will be elaborated in order to set the research. Finally, a summary of the chapters in the dissertation will explain the structure of the study.
Focus and purpose of the study
Current statistical data will be included to gain some understanding of the phenomenon of student experiences in the new law degree. The current implementation of the university degree will be reviewed against the backdrop of a new post-apartheid higher education regulatory framework.
Purpose statement
Their perception of the curriculum experience was necessarily influenced by their current experience as a lawyer in South Africa. The objectives of the study can be broadly stated as follows: (i) to identify the ways in which the policy makers' vision of the post-apartheid curriculum in 1996/7 has been implemented by South African law schools through their curricula; and (ii) explore how the experiences of the law curriculum at a specific law school prepare its graduates for practice as competent legal professionals in South African society.
Background context: Higher Education policy in post-apartheid South Africa
The contested nature of what counts as quality in higher education centers on the distinction between “fitness of purpose” and. This review of the policy context of higher education will now look more closely at the framework for legal education in universities and the legal profession in South Africa.
Legal Education: framework for dominance, division, stratification
Our legal education in South Africa was heavily influenced by the apartheid policies of the government. This legacy continues to impede progress toward equitable outcomes in legal education and can also be observed in the historical foundations of the legal system itself.
Historical origins of South African law
This outline of the current structural features of the South African legal system foreshadows the divisions, hierarchies and degrees of differentiation that have dominated the field of legal education. Historical segregation, culminating in the explicit policy of apartheid, has characterized much of the structure of the legal system and continues to play a defining role in legal education, despite attempts by the democratically elected government to rectify the past.
The development of legal education
This separation of races was clearly articulated as the apartheid policy of the Nationalist Party, which ruled the country from 1948 until the transition to a constitutional democracy in 1994. Student advocates learn advocacy skills under the close supervision of a practicing advocate before writing a bar exam administered by the Bar Council's General Council, the Bar .
Transition to constitutional democracy
It is estimated that in 1994 85% of the legal profession in South Africa consisted of white lawyers. A Task Force on Legal Education for the Restructuring of Legal Education in South Africa, selected from Law Deans representing 20 law faculties and including representatives of the legal profession, was commissioned in 1995 by the Ministry of Justice and Political Development to make proposals for a new legal profession. develop. education framework (McQuoid-Mason, 2004).
Effect of the new LLB degree on representivity in legal professions
Of the 50% who continued studying, less than half (22%) graduated within the minimum time period for the degree (Letseka & Breier, 2008). This 'snapshot' of the state of legal education at universities and in the legal profession highlights the whole issue.
Present status of curriculum debates: SALDA and the stakeholders
Ultimately, the development of valid and equitable law and the fate of the law and that of all parties are in the hands of judges. The draft proposal “LLB and the preparation of law graduates in South Africa” was approved in July 2009 by the wider reference group.
Outline of the structure of the study
Phenomenography seeks to understand the qualitatively different ways in which a phenomenon (the legal curriculum) was experienced by the participants (the graduates). His contribution to curriculum research is in the form of an analysis of policy translation into practice in post-apartheid legal education.
Legal curriculum policy-making: implementation;
Introduction
In a South African context, the needs of legal graduates can best be met by selectively combining aspects of both approaches to develop an integrated curriculum model that will address the silencing of the self that currently exists. Development of curriculum policy will provide the initial background framework for the review of scholarship on the various aspects of the study.
Curriculum policy development
Educational policy has also been described by Ball as "a compromise of ideas, needs and interests" (1990). These conceptions found in the literature of the education policy-making process provide an important background for the particular events that took place in the South African education policy development in the immediate post-apartheid period.
South African curriculum policy development during the 1990s
In reality, the government lacked the material support needed to implement much of the ambitious political rhetoric set out in the education policy documents. I have argued that these predictions have been borne out in practice by the experience of legal education over the past decade.
From policy to practice: developing curricula that interpret policy
So it was clear that education policy could not be considered a phenomenon occurring outside or distinct from the wider political currents of the moment. It has been suggested that this may be due to the “segregated nature of academic institutions” (Squires, 1987, p. 129).
Implementation of curricular change
Departments and program teams were identified as the critical "organizational units" to effect change. The South African Ministry of Education in p. 8)44 identified an "implementation vacuum" in relation to policy.
Reconceptualisation of legal education: Introduction and overview
- American experience: disjuncture and distress
- English legal education: statesman policy-maker or technician?
- Australia: What lawyers must know / must be able to do?
- South African legal education
In the United States, the "splitting" of the three apprenticeships of legal education: conceptual knowledge (cognitive), action (practice), and moral discernment (ethic-social) calls for the reintegration of doctrine, skills, and development into the curriculum of a sense of professional responsibility, according to a group of education experts. (Sullivan, Colby, Wegner, Bond, & Shulman, 2007). Some legal education literature has addressed the language difficulties of African law students in South Africa.
Concluding remarks
There is silence about the integration of ethical values, the development of reflective practice and of professional identity and discernment, and nowhere in the literature is the student experience of the legal curriculum considered. In this study I have attempted to draw together insights gained from both bodies of scholarship, and to extend them to encompass an understanding of the curriculum in the context of South African legal education.
Theorising conceptualisations: curriculum and professional identity
Introduction and outline of the chapter
Theorizing conceptualizations: curriculum and professional identity. ii) interaction of curriculum areas. iii) development of professional identity through the curriculum. In the sections that follow in this chapter, the account of curriculum theory is preceded by a brief historical introduction.
Historical background to curriculum theorising
This is followed by an investigation of the interplay of different areas of the curriculum, and the chapter concludes with an exploration of theorizing about the experience of the curriculum as preparation for a profession. By 1969, Schwab declared a "crisis" in the field of curriculum studies in the United States.
Curriculum possibilities: what are the meanings of
The authors emphasize the evasion, the "shadowy" nature of curriculum, based on the many different interpretations of the term, as discussed above. This theme of the different meanings attributed to the term “curriculum” will be expanded in the next section, where it is shown that a series of factors influence curriculum development.
Factors affecting curriculum development
Approaches to curriculum formation are thus shaped by underlying epistemological assumptions and ideas related to the relative significance of the constituent aspects of curriculum. In the next section, the three main conceptions of curriculum that are generally held by educators are described.
Approaches and models of curriculum development
The largely shared and similar emphasis in curricula at all South African law faculties on "core curriculum content" indicates that curriculum as process is not a common conception of curriculum. A conception of curriculum as what happens in the (lecture) classroom, as "a continuous social interaction between students, teachers, knowledge and milieu", reflects the influences of the structural context (the institution, the faculty, the ethos that created by the lecturer). ) as well as the socio-cultural context (the social, political, demographic, economic characteristics) that have an impact on the teaching and learning experience (Cornbleth, 1990).
Curriculum in the context of Higher Education
In the next section, we will review the specific meanings attached to curriculum in higher education. In the next section, we will discuss a particular focus on the ways in which the curriculum in higher education has been theorized.
The interplay of curricular domains
The knowledge domain has a dynamic structure that responds to changing interests and topics in the field, such as the emergence of new subjects. Rather, it can involve one in the most profound historical, ethical, sociological and legal investigations.
Development of professional identity through the curriculum
The theoretical scheme proposes a model for curricular change that will achieve an integration of knowledge, skills and the development of the ethical self, to support the development of professional identity throughout the foundational academic education phase. The process of professional identity formation, centered on the development of the self, within a context of intellectual professional knowledge and professional knowing-in-action, is not only constructed during formal university education, but more obviously through the professional socialization phase.
Theorising professional legal entity by extending conceptualisations
No South African research has yet been conducted on the effectiveness of formative academic learning as preparation for professional practice in the context of the legal profession. The theoretical insights discussed relate to the different notions of curriculum and curricular possibilities as well as to the interplay of the domains of the curriculum.
Research design: phenomenology and
Introduction
This chapter introduces the research design through a discussion of the interpretive paradigm in which the study is situated. The following is an overview of the objectives of the study and the critical questions central to the study.
Objectives of the study; the research questions
Through the lens of the interpretivist paradigm, I use the analytical tools, constructs, and methodological approaches that make it easier to make sense of the data. Two methodological approaches, phenomenology and phenomenography, are used in different parts of the study to support and develop the theorizing through the conceptual links between the research paradigm and the theory that supports these methodological approaches.
Two methodological lenses
In the first part of the study, phenomenological methodology provided a detailed and textured approach to understanding a phenomenon: the experience of curriculum change. The focus on curriculum in the second section of the study is concerned with the qualitatively different ways in which the curriculum was experienced by a sample of participants (Graduates: Dataset 4), which indicates the applicability of the phenomenographic method.
My positionality as “deep insider-researcher”
My immersion in the legal education field means that I am aware of details about the personalities, the institutions and the history of many of the participants. Reflexivity recognizes that the researcher is inevitably part of the world she is researching – since no objective reality exists anyway.
The five Data Sets
Reflexivity, or reflective analysis, has been routinely used to examine the influence of one's own background, perceptions, and interests during data collection and analysis (Kreftling, 1991). Before turning to a substantive explanation of how the data were generated in the various data sets, a brief outline of the manner in which the baseline curricular comparison was constructed is presented, followed by a general explanation of the methodological orientations of phenomenology and phenomenography. and a description of the sampling methods chosen for each data set.
Baseline curricular comparison: methodology
The comparative table and analysis was undertaken by me as a preliminary step, prior to the elicitation of interview data from the four participant datasets, as the information gathered for the table provided a valuable starting point. The information from the table generated certain understandings that informed my discussion with current Law Deans during their interviews, and enabled me to work out with them some of the contradictions and complexities that arose from the analysis of the table. explore.
Phenomenological methodology: lived experience of curriculum change
The essential elements of phenomenology have been postulated as: "lifeworld" and lived experience; awareness of the presence of things in the world; intentionally or. This process was at the same time consistent with the requirements of my methodology and my purpose in the study of developing a richly textured evaluation of the phenomenon under consideration (Cohen et al., 2007).
Participants and sampling methods: phenomenological study
- Data Set 2: ex-Law Deans, Task Group members and Another
A copy of the interview schedule was sent to each former dean one week prior to the interview date (Appendix 4). I also interviewed the dean of the merged institution (HBU and HWU) where the graduates in the second part of the study were students.
Planning and conducting phenomenological interviews
The participants were extremely articulate respondents and spoke at length about their personal experiences, reflecting on the past and recalling details. Participants' descriptions included vivid details of the events that occurred and included reflection on the experience.
Data elicitation
I was also aware of the fact that the period they discussed with me had political associations in a South African context, and this could influence their responses with an awareness of the need for 'political correctness' on the part of the participants . However, participants appeared to be open about their personal experiences and two of the three participants felt comfortable expressing their opposition to the ANC government's policy position on legal qualifications during that period.
Phenomenological data analysis
After completing the first descriptive aspects of the writing, there is a second, more detailed iteration, back to the literature. This is called the essential, invariant structure (or essence) and consists of a combination of the previous descriptions.
Phenomenographic methodology: variation in experiences of the curriculum
A “collective mind map” (Uljens, 1996) was produced from the participants' views as they appeared in the interview transcripts. Similarly, this duality that constitutes employers' concepts will become apparent in the data analysis.
Participants and sampling methods: phenomenographic study
Thus, the sample size of 16 graduate lawyers fairly closely reflected the overall demographics of law student registrations. To confirm that the race and gender composition of the sample was consistently appropriate, I compared it to current enrollments by race and gender at the same law school in 2009.
Planning and conducting phenomenographic interviews
- Data elicitation (Graduates): experiencing the Law curriculum
- Data elicitation (Employers): graduates’ preparedness for professional practice
- Analysis strategies for Data Set 4: Graduates
- Analysis strategies for Data Set 5: Employers
This caveat was considered in the data analysis to increase the validity of the study. The focus of the study is the way graduates understand and experience the phenomenon.
Credibility and trustworthiness in qualitative interpretive research
In the phenomenographic interviews, the same "cross-referencing" on various aspects of the data was possible between the data obtained from graduates and the data elicited from their employers. The sources of the data in the second phase were from interviews with graduates, as well as interviews with their employers.
Ethical considerations
Not only do these practices increase the reliability aspect, but they add to the depth, detail, credibility, and richness of the study. The benefit to this law school in obtaining the results of the study will be great from a quality assurance perspective.
Concluding remarks
In Chapter 5, the analysis of the basic curriculum comparison (Dataset 1) leads to the analysis of data from two sets of data obtained through a phenomenological approach (Dataset 2 and Dataset 3). The data analysis in Section 5.1 was developed through document analysis of official curriculum documents from law schools, from law school handbooks or from websites.
