A meta-Analysis of Teaching and Learning

6.4Structure

This section of the Report identifies and analyses two broad sets of structures. For the purposes of the Report, the sets termed ‘traditional structures’ and ‘new structures’.

6.4.1Traditional structures

‘Traditional structures’ relate to the traditional functioning of the university and include, inter alia, faculties, departments, the head of department system, the external examining system, courses, modules and so on. A number of observations can be made regarding these structures:

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  They are sustained by a set of discourses (which are value driven and, thus, essentially ideological) regarding the function of the university in society, what a university should be like, what should be taught in it, how it should be taught and so on. These discourses have been challenged over time not least by the processes of restructuring in South African higher education which have taken place since the early 1990s.
  
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  They have long been involved in the ‘assurance of quality’ where the term, again, is used in its traditional sense. The external examining system, for example, requires that a peer from another institution of a similar standing should scrutinise students’ work in order to ensure that it is of an ‘appropriate’ standard and in order to ensure that the courses, from which the work scrutinised emanates, contain ‘appropriate material’. The faculty system is used in a similar way. Typically, new courses are submitted to the faculty board for peer review and approval. Marks many also be scrutinised by the faculty board at the end of the semester or year. The faculty also serves to regulate the behaviour of its members though, as they share many of the same values (in discourse), the likelihood of such regulation being necessary is rare.
  
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  The sharing of values and participation within dominant discourses within the institution means that a large degree of trust is vested in these traditional structures and, as a result, they are granted substantial autonomy to run their affairs.
  

Dominant discourses (mechanisms) emerging from the domain of culture in the have already been identified at institutional levels in the case studies and more generally in Section 6.3 above. From a critical/social realist perspective, the interplay between these mechanisms and the traditional structures discussed in this section (and, indeed the discourses form part of the value system on which the structures are based) will work to produce the effects noted at the level of the actual.

6.4.2New structures

What have been termed ‘new structures’ can again be divided into two categories: those related to programmes and those related to quality management.

6.4.2.1Programme structures

The restructuring of the South African higher education system following the shift to democracy resulted in a number of new constructs being developed to guide teaching and learning in higher education. The establishment of the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) and the National Qualifications Framework (NQF), for example, resulted in the development of the construct of a ‘programme’ which is broadly defined as a planned series of learning opportunities leading to a qualification. A programme is thus distinct from the qualification to which it leads. Qualifications are then registered on the NQF and described by i) a purpose statement and ii) a series of learning outcomes. At the same time as SAQA and the NQF were emerging, a series of discourses at national level (see Kraak, 1999) began to privilege the need for more vocational programmes in the context of the need to deal with globalisation as well as because of the availability of Gibbons’ ‘Mode 2 Knowledge’ thesis (Gibbons et al., 1994). As a result, institutions increasingly began to develop programmes which were interdisciplinary in nature. This was then often accompanied with the wholesale reorganisation of academic departments into schools. All but one of the institutions in the study developed programmes in this way although not all of the programmes which were developed were ‘vocational’ with the result that the reorganisation of academic departments into schools is not a uniform phenomenon.

The development of programmes (which are themselves structures) led to the development of other structures in the form of programme committees and programme convenor/co-coordinator systems. In an institution which relies on programmes, clearly programme committee structures and programme convenor systems are critical to the management of quality in teaching and learning. What appears to have happened in the case of the four of the five institutions in the study which have moved to the offering of programmes is that no overall management of the programme structures takes place because of i) the granting of trust to traditional structures such as faculties in which programmes are located ii) the granting of large degrees of autonomy to those same structures iii) the ‘light touch’ applied to the management of teaching more generally.

Given the need for the overall management of teaching and learning in complex structures such as programmes, the role of the programme convenor/co-coordinator is crucial. There is no evidence in the documentation studied, however, of institutions identifying the need for the development of staff who step into programme convenor/co-coordinator positions. What could then be the case, is that a programme, a construct which is often underpinned by an entirely different set of assumptions about knowledge and learning (since learning is outcomes based), is managed by an individual who has not engaged with these assumptions in any serious way.

One obvious place to look for evidence of such engagement would be assessment at programme level. The use of the learning outcome as a guiding principle in curriculum design requires that assessment should be ‘aligned’ with learning outcomes (see Luckett & Sutherland, 2000). ‘Alignment’ then involves assuring that assessment (which is understood to drive learning) does indeed measure what the outcomes state learners should be able to do in order to achieve the qualification. In most cases, this would involve moving away from traditional ‘essay’ type assignments towards a range of assessment tasks requiring more practical application. At the same time, alignment with learning outcomes would also require learners to be provided with formative (developmental) assessment opportunities in order to receive feedback on their learning and improve performance. The extent to which the principles of outcomes based assessment guides assessment practice at South African universities including the universities in this study is highly questionable in spite of the existence of other structures such as assessment policies and assessor training programmes.

Given the shifts in theoretical assumptions underpinning programmes and the changes in practice these assumptions imply, programme committees and programme convenor/co-coordinator systems are clearly key to the management of quality in teaching and learning. Given the autonomy granted to faculties and the light touch applied to the management of teaching and learning in all the institutions in the study, however, it is highly unlikely that these key structures are functioning in ways which will enhance quality.

6.4.2.2 Quality management structures

The introduction of quality assurance at a national level in the South African higher education system has led to the establishment of a second set of structures related to quality management in the institutions in the study. These include teaching and learning committees, quality assurance committees, quality units, and centres/units focusing on teaching and learning development/higher education development.

Once again, observations about dominant discourses and the resultant light touch applied to the management of teaching and learning apply in relation to the structures identified in each section. At some institutions in the study, teaching and learning committees have not been established at senate level. At other institutions, teaching and learning committees have been established at faculty and even at programme level. In the context of the autonomy granted to faculties, however, the establishment of teaching and learning committees at this level would appear to relate to the exercise of agency on the part of Deans or, possibly, programme convenors/co-coordinators. The extent to which issues related to teaching and learning are discussed and managed is therefore unreliable across institutions. When the dominant discourses related to teaching and learning identified in this study are considered, then the quality of the discussion and management of those issues would also call for further questioning.

With the notable exception of one institution in the study, significant is are the ‘low key’ nature of the structures established in relation to quality assurance. At the University of Pretoria, the work of the Quality Unit is privileged in institutional discourse although arguably this is the case because of the institution’s own construction of itself within discourses related to globalisation. Elsewhere, the management of quality is often related to ‘managerialism’ and ‘bureaucracy’ and this then results in phenomena such as the existence of a ‘Quality Assurance Working Group’ (my emphasis) at the University of Cape Town and of the location of much quality management work in Institutional Planning Offices where, arguably, it is less overt.

One significant effect of the establishment of structures related to quality management has been the introduction of programme review systems. Although the institutions in the study all use some sort of review system, there is no coherent evidence in the documentation studied regarding the extent to which the reviews incorporate questions about teaching and learning. There is evidence in the documentation (REF) of reviews being used for rationalisation and for pursuing an efficiency agenda at least one institution. Even when reviews might incorporate questions about teaching and learning, however, dominant discourses related to teaching, teachers and students identified in this study would mean that questions would need to be raised about the assumptions on which that questioning was based.

The final set of structures related to the management of quality in teaching and learning which merit discussion in this report are centres focusing on teaching and learning. All the institutions in the study have established or have redeveloped such centres although all have different strengths and capacities and all tend to work in different ways. Arguably the most well positioned structure of the five in the study is the Department of Education Innovation at the University of Pretoria given the correlation between the idea of ‘education innovation’ and the institutional goal of producing an ‘innovation generation’. As the Audit Report points out, however, the guiding documents produced by the Department do not realise this potential given their focus on a set of general educational principles which could have been taken from the plethora of handbooks on teaching and learning in higher education. Other centres at institutions in the study have the capacity to produce high level research which has the potential to guide the institution towards the goals it has set for itself. Leibowitz et al.’s (2005a,b) work on identity in relation to language has enormous potential to guide work on teaching and learning at the University of Stellenbosch, for example. So too does the high level of research produced at the Centre for Higher Education Development at the University of Cape Town. The extent to which the work emanating from structures such as centres for teaching and learning is taken up at an institutional level is dependent on the interplay between mechanisms emerging from the domains of culture and agency, however. The ‘commonsense’ assumptions about teaching, teachers and students identified in dominant discourses along with the availability of ‘methods’ type approaches to the improvement of teaching (for example, active learning, problem based learning and so on) work against research of this kind being used productively to drive teaching and learning.

At this point, it is worth returning to Haggis (2008) work to locate the observations made above in an international context. According to Haggis (ibid) much of the research on teaching and learning in higher education produced over the last forty years has focused on the student as a psychologised, autonomous individual and on teaching as a neutral activity. Haggis then goes on to identify work located in more ‘social’ understandings as cutting edge and offering the most promise for the future. As pointed out earlier in this Report, ‘social’ understandings of teaching and learning have been available in South Africa since the late 1980s. That they are only now emerging in the international literature attests to the quality of some of the thinking which has been available to South African higher education in the past. What needs. to be examined is why those ‘social’ understandings have not been taken up in ways which can bring about improvement. One response to this question lies in the identification of dominant discourses. Another lies in the lack of national structures to build capacity in teaching and learning development following the demise of the South African Association for Academic Development (SAAAD) in 2008. Yet another response lies in the work produced by national structures in other countries, most notably the United Kingdom, and which has influenced much of the international literature on teaching and learning. Regardless of the reasons for the lack of take up on work which first began to be produced nearly two decades ago, attention to the development of capacity in the field is clearly called for.

Research on what are termed ‘academic development units’ as ‘organisational units’ is currently being conducted and is available as work in progress (Gosling & Leibowitz, 2008). This work investigates the staffing, funding, remits and institutional location of centres such as those in this study at a national level. Clearly this work will be of interest to the HEQC once it has been completed.

6.4.3Conclusion

The analysis of the working of structure at the five universities in the study presented in this section has attempted to illustrate the interplay of structure with culture and the way culture serves to work against newly established structures to improve quality in teaching and learning. It has also attempted to show how mechanisms emerging from the domain of culture have served to privilege the working of more traditional structures. The overall result of this interplay is a tendency towards what social realist Margaret Archer ( 1995, 1996, 1998) would term ‘morphostasis’ (or reproduction) rather than ‘morphogenesis’ (transformation or change). What does emerge as significant in the analysis, however, is the awareness on the part of the institutions in the study to establish structures intended to assure quality. The challenge is not to use those structures to bring about quality improvement.