Johan Muller

Forms of knowledge and curriculum coherence

This paper examines what is entailed by taking a socio‐epistemic or ‘knowledge‐based’ approach to considerations of curriculum and qualifications. The paper begins by examining the roots of diciplinary difference in the medieval universities and their treatment in contemporary scholarly work; discusses implications for curriculum and qualification differentiation; and shows how social, disciplinary and qualification organisation are aligned in the specialisation of consciousness.

Reclaiming Knowledge : Social Theory, Curriculum and Education Policy

Introduction 1.The First and Last Interpretters 2. Globalization, Innovation and Knowledge 3.What Knowledge is of Most Worth for the Millennial Citizen? 4.Schooling and Everyday Life 5.Intimations of Boundlessness 6.The Well-tempered Learner 7.Critics and Reconstructors 8. Beyond Unkept Promises 9.Reason, Reality and Public Trust

The growth of knowledge and the discursive gap

This article raises the question of the character of Bernsteins theory. It draws upon a set of key concepts elaborated in some of his later papers, although we suggest that it is possible to discern the origins of these ideas in much earlier work. In the first section, Bernsteins diagnosis of the sociology of education as a horizontal knowledge structure with a weak grammar is discussed and an apparent paradox identified: if the sociology of education has this form, how can we account for Bernsteins own theory? The remainder of the paper uses the case of Bernsteins own work as a way of exploring the conditions for knowledge growth in sociology as a vertical knowledge structure with a strong grammar.

What Knowledge is Needed in the New Millennium

Identifying what kind of knowledge is appropriate for the citizen of the new millennium is of special concern in developing countries. They face two simultaneous challenges: carving out niche areas of innovation within the competitive global arena while meeting the basic development needs of the majority of their increasingly marginalized and impoverished populations. Against this background, our article examines the question of appropriate knowledge in the globalizing world of the new millennium. We analyse some of the risks for teaching and learning entailed by recent assumptions regarding the changing social nature, production and dissemination of knowledge. In the final section, we critically examine one of these new knowledge production practices—community-based academic service learning—in light of these risks.

Every picture tells a story: Epistemological access and knowledge

AbstractThe term ‘epistemological access’ has been increasingly used in scholarly publications on higher education learning in South Africa and elsewhere recently. This paper reviews the context and lineaments of the term in the work of philosopher Wally Morrow and its take-up by other scholars, and sets out to elaborate the conceptual underpinnings of the notion, outlining three possible answers to the question, ‘what is epistemological access affording access to?’ and proposing a fourth as a fruitful way to deploy the term in future scholarly work on higher education learning which seeks to stipulate what graduates should learn, know and be able to do.

Towards New Forms of Regulation in Higher Education: The Case of South Africa.

The paper reflects on the prospects for higher education reform in a country - South Africa - lodged within a sub-continent not noted for successful reform. The argument is that much of the policy debate is conducted in a way that dichotomises the issues: control versus autonomy; freedom versus regulation; state versus civil society. This dichotomous construal is unable to deal adequately with recent work on the changing forms of the state and changing state-higher education relations. The paper develops a distinction between administrative and political forms of control; and broadens the state control-state supervision distinction from one based solely on models to one based on the specific quality of inter-organisational coordination, connectivity and regulation. The paper concludes by spelling out what such a connective conception of organisation and regulation could mean for South African higher education.

Instructional technologies in social science instruction in South Africa

This study describes the results of a survey and a description of instructional technologies in place in the social sciences in South African Universities. Lecturers in the social sciences reported a well-established practice of information and communication technologies (ICTs) use for general purposes (although frequent use tended to be for email and searching the Internet). They had a high self-efficacy in terms of using ICTs both generally and for teaching and learning, and a high enthusiasm for the use of ICTs for teaching and learning. Half the lecturers had started using ICTs recently with the introduction of learning management systems (LMSs) whereas the other half had established practices that preceded the mainstreaming of LMSs across universities. Only about a quarter of the respondents felt able to develop and update ICTs themselves which indicates that support is a necessary part of teaching with technology. In terms of different types of use the focus was on putting content on the web and course administration. Use of ICTs for teaching of skills (whether information literacy, problem solving or critical thinking) was infrequent. There were different types of ICT use across the different sub-disciplines. Lecturers reported factors which constrained their use of ICTs for teaching and learning, such as inadequate technology, pedagogical issues (e.g. plagiarism), and students opting out of lectures when materials were available online. It is argued that user studies in are relevant to the future delivery of educational material, in terms of removing barriers to use and targeting training and supportive activities.

Dreams of Wholeness and Loss: critical sociology of education in South Africa

Abstract South African sociologists of education are living through a momentous and highly particular transition at the same time as they participate in global trends and debates. This paper reviews changes in their framing concerns as they move from an oppositional positionality to afar more ambiguous space that seems to require of them to choose between critique and reconstruction. The resultant re‐positioning and the changing forms of appropriation of international themes as local priorities shift is the central concern of this review.

Modes of Governance and the Limits of Policy

The preceding chapters describe the various efforts, initiatives and policy attempts to realise transformation in the South African higher education system from 1994 up to 2000. Chapter 12 (New South African Realities) is to some extent a summary assessment of the findings and discussions of chapters 4 to 11. As these chapters show, and as we will argue here, transformation in higher education was seen by politicians and laymen, policy specialists and ordinary people as an indissoluble part of moving away from apartheid as a state form to a more open, inclusive, equitable and democratic society. This book describes how the transformation project was launched, with great acclaim, consensus and fanfare – through a series of founding documents such as the National Education Policy Initiative (NEPI, 1993), the ANC Policy Document (Centre for Education Policy Development, 1994), the report of the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE, 1996), and even the first Higher Education White Paper of 1997 – only to seem to veer off track. A loss of course was detected in at least three areas. First, it seemed as if, after 1997, the policy process gradually became less participatory and democratic, and it even seemed to some that we were returning to something of a top-down style of policy imposition reminiscent of an earlier era. Secondly, it seemed as if the state was forsaking the values of equity and social justice in favour of the values of efficiency, effectiveness and responsiveness. Thirdly, even where policy had been implemented as intended (in the National Student Financial Aid Scheme [NSFAS], for example), it was producing effects different from the ones expected and desired. What was producing these contrary effects? Why had the transformation project in higher education come to be so widely seen as an unpleasant surprise and distasteful disappointment?

SOUTH AFRICAN HIGHER EDUCATION REFORM: WHAT COMES AFTER POST-COLONIALISM?

Since the fall of the apartheid regime South African higher education has begun to undergo a process of fundamental transformation. First-world universities, which were beneficiaries (however unwilling) of past racial inequalities, have had to adapt to the urgent needs of what is a post-colonial and, for the majority of its citizens, a third-world society. South Africa, therefore, provides a particularly sharp example of the encounter between a higher education system established within the European tradition, in terms of both its institutional and its academic culture, and a society in the process of radical change. This encounter has been mediated through the work of the National Commission on Higher Education which attempted to produce a compromise that would enable South African higher education to be both ‘Western’ (in terms of academic values and scientific standards) and also ‘African’ (in terms of its contribution to building the capacities of all the people of South Africa). The tension between the universitys claims to represent universal knowledge and the counter-claims that ‘local’ knowledge traditions should be accorded greater respect, therefore, is much sharper than in Europe.