A meta-Analysis of Teaching and Learning

5The Five Cases

5.1The University of Pretoria

5.2Rhodes University

5.2.1The Actual

In 1996, 35% of students enrolled at Rhodes University were African, 3.3% Coloured and 8.7% Indian. The majority of white students therefore stood at 53.1%. By 2003, the situation had changed to the extent that black students constituted more than half of all enrolments in a context of overall growth at an institutional level (IP:10).

This apparently favourable demographic profile has to be interrogated, however, in the context of the loss of Rhodes University’s East London campus to the University of Fort Hare in the 2003 restructuring of the South African higher education system. Of the 3286 African students enrolled at Rhodes University in 2003, 1250 were studying on the East London campus (IP:12). An understanding of the University’s current demographics therefore has to taken into account the loss of the East London campus. When the number of African students who were not South African born is deducted from the total number of students studying on the Grahamstown campus, then the proportion of South African students stood at only 29% of the total enrolment in 2003 (IP:12).

In 1996, white students constituted the largest group of enrolments across all CESM categories. African enrolments were concentrated in ranked order from highest to lowest in the i) Humanities and Social Sciences, ii) Education iii) Science Engineering and Technology and iv) Business and Commerce (IP:17).

Graduation and success rates at the University are relatively favourable when compared with figures at a national level. This apparent success needs. to be contextualised against the high admissions requirements for the institution overall.

5.2.2The Real

The following analysis of mechanisms emerging from the domains of culture, structure and agency at the level of the real attempts to account for events at the level of the actual and for the institution’s own account of itself provided in the Self Evaluation Portfolio submitted to the HEQC as part of the audit process.

5.2.2.1Culture

The fact that Rhodes is the smallest university in South Africa impacts heavily on the institution’s construction of itself and particularly on the construction of its relationship to students. The favourable staff/student ratio is claimed to be critical to the student experience which is constructed as one of offering ‘all round’ development. This offering of a different, ‘whole’ student experience is what, it is claimed, makes the institution different to all other universities in South Africa.

Embedded in this construction of difference are claims of ‘excellence’ which, like at other universities in the study, is understood to relate to an international reputation and to ‘gold’ standards (Harvey & Green, 1993). The claim that the university has an international reputation is bolstered by its demographic profile which consists of 25% of international students, another factor which is claimed adds to the experience offered by the institution.

Smallness also impacts on the relationship the senior management has with its staff and on the way the university is run. Senior management, according to the Self Evaluation Policy, have an ‘open door policy’ which provides access to even the most junior staff member in a short period of time. Key to the institutional account of itself is then the discourse of ‘collegiality’ – a discourse which is used to substantiate the lack of what are termed ‘bureaucratic’ and ‘managerial’ structures. If colleagues work well together, sharing information and a common understanding of goals, then there is no need for structures and mechanisms which will facilitate the attainment of those goals. The discourse of collegiality also has obvious implications for the assurance of quality. According to the Self Evaluation Portfolio, the QA system at the University is characterised by ‘minimum bureaucracy and maximum effectiveness’. What this effectively means is that the assurance of quality rests on a trust that ‘colleagues’, who share the same values, will do what is needed to ensure that the ‘excellence’ prized by the institution is maintained.

The ‘collegiality’ privileged in the institution’s account of itself, is linked to what is identified in the Self Evaluation Portfolio as the dominant ‘white middle-class’ culture. Senior black staff members, readers are informed, have noted that this culture is not an obstacle to the inclusivity prized in institutional discourse. The University is open to all regardless of the social spaces from which they come. Given the dominance of the white middle class culture, questions about the extent to which the inclusivity is based on assimilation or on the celebration of difference obviously arise. In the context of the assurance of quality of teaching and learning, questions also arise about the way the values underpinning the collegiality impact on the learning experiences of diverse groups of students. While a trust in collegiality based on shared values might be sufficient to assure the quality of the learning experiences for students whose ‘culture’ is also white and middle class, the extent to which this process will assure that all students are provided with what they need to be able to learn is questionable.

Also key to the institution’s construction of itself is a discourse centring on a claim that the University is a ‘liberal arts’ institution, a claim which rests on the fact that it within the curriculum of the undergraduate degree it is possible to include subjects from a number of different faculties. Linked to this is the idea of the ‘total student experience’ – that the University will provide its students with what they need to develop as ‘well rounded’ individuals. Arguably also linked to the institutional understanding of what is meant by the term ‘liberal arts’ is the rejection of what is termed in the Self Evaluation Portfolio the ‘programme route’ in favour of the decision to retain the double major disciplinary degree structure which is understood to provide students with the sort of ‘broad’ education much prized in institutional discourse.

If this is the way the institution constructs itself, what are the implications for the way it constructs students, teachers and of teaching and learning more generally? As at other institutions in the study, the notion of ‘potential’ is key to the construction of the student. According to the Self Evaluation portfolio, students need to be provided with an environment which will allow them to reach their ‘full potential’. The idea of full potential then implies that potential is an inherent characteristic ready to be nurtured. This is also the case for disadvantaged students as, according to the Self Evaluation Portfolio, ‘educational disadvantage’ needs. to be engaged with so that all students can ‘develop’ their full potential. Related to the identification of a factor inherent to the individual as key to academic success is a second discourse attributing agency to students. Students need to be ‘active participants’ in an education process which ‘aims to add value to their personal educational experience’. This educational process then involves ‘connecting’ intellectual and social lives to produce excellent graduates. Given the dominant institutional culture of white middle ‘classness’, the implications for students from backgrounds which are other than white and middle class and who have to exercise the agency needed to ‘connect’ intellectual and social lines are not difficult to identify.

In the Self Evaluation Portfolio, one construction of teaching centres on the provision of an environment which allows students to connect their social and intellectual lives in a way which will allow them to become the well-rounded individuals characterised as ‘excellent’ graduates. This construction places enormous responsibility on the students and requires the exercise of considerable agency. This is in contrast to the role of the institution which is merely to ‘provide’ the environment. Clearly the institutional slogan of ‘Where leaders learn’ can be linked to this point since the leaders much prized by the institution can presumably muster the ability to exercise the agency the University requires of them.

In the Self Evaluation Portfolio, a second construction of teaching emerges however in contrast to this dominant institutional discourse. This second discourse constructs teaching as an intellectual activity which has to be learned – as something other than commonsense. The co-existence of these two discourses in the Self Evaluation Portfolio is an indication of clashes and contestations in an institution which prizes its research activities.

5.2.2.2Structure

Key to the institutional account of teaching is the identification of Heads of Departments (HoDs) as ‘implementers of institutional strategy’. The trust placed in colleagues to ‘do the right thing’ because of the assumption of a shared set of values has already been noted. This discourse of trust then results in the HoD structure not contributing to the achievement of strategic goals as well as it could.

This is especially the case for teaching and learning. Another structure at the University, the Teaching and Learning Committee, is identified as being responsible for the promotion of quality in teaching and learning and is noted as having been responsible for the development of a number of policies intended to assure the quality of teaching and learning. Each of these policies then requires HoDs to report on the way they have been implemented at a department level on an annual basis. As the Audit Report notes, however, monitoring of policy implementation by calling for reports from HoDs at an institutional level is weak – a manifestation of the trust placed in HoDs to ensure that their departments run as they should because of the sharing of a common set of values at institutional, departmental and individual levels. Mechanisms in the form of policies developed by one structure, the Teaching and Learning Committee, are then countered by mechanisms in the form of discourses emerging from the domain of culture. That this is the case is substantiated by the identification, in the Self Evaluation Portfolio, of a degree of ‘cynicism’ on the part of HoDs to the need to report on policy implementation and to manage teaching and learning more generally.

The interplay between structure and culture also manifests itself in relation to teaching in another way. The construction of the University’s role in relation to teaching and learning as the provision of an environment which allows intellectual and social spheres to be ‘connected’ in order to produce ‘excellent’ graduates has already been noted in Section 5.3.1 above. The Self Evaluation Portfolio then privileges the structure of the residence system as being key to this process constructing it as ‘the heart of the University (SEP:30). The Audit Report, however, notes that the Panel found little evidence of the conscious use of the residence system to integrate students’ intellectual and social lives. An set of overall observations in the Audit Report, moreover, relate to the apparent inability or reluctance on the part of the institution to draw on available resources in the domains of structure and agency to drive its aspirations expressed at the level of culture because of the discourse privileging collegiality and which relies on the trust that colleagues will ‘do the right thing’ because they share a common set of values. What appears to be happening, therefore, is that overall there is an inability to align the mechanisms emerging from the three domains of structure, culture and agency.

5.2.2.3Agency

As already noted, the institutional discourse privileges agency on the part of students who are constructed as needing to be active in an educational process which brings together the social and the intellectual. The dominance of white middle class assumptions at the level of culture has also been noted. The Audit Report notes the concern of the Panel that ‘not all students have the same kind of experience at Rhodes’ (AR:104) picking up on a statement in the Self Evaluation Portfolio that class increasingly plays a role in relation to social integration (SEP: Appendix 39:2). It is arguably the case, therefore, that mechanisms emerging from the domain of culture and which are related to whiteness and being middle class can work to counter agency exercised by some groups of students or some individual students. This is but one more example of the interplay between the three domains.

Yet another example relates to the discourse of collegiality which places trust in the HoD structure. It is, however, highly likely that as individual actors, HoDs can choose to exercise their agency either to assure quality in relation to teaching and learning by implementing policies or to ignore the monitoring of the implementation of those policies. As collective actors, HoDs can also contribute to the dominance of a discourse which is cynical towards the need to monitor policy implementation and, thus, contribute to the assurance of quality in teaching and learning.

5.2.3Conclusion

The overall picture of Rhodes University is of an elite institution where size contributes significantly to discourses of institutional identity. The construction of the institutional identity as inclusive does not acknowledge the existence of a covert value system which influences who might and who might not be included. This observation applies to both staff and students.

culture, however, that change is most difficult to achieve.