Lorna Holtman

Research on Teaching and Learning in Access Courses

This chapter deals with research on teaching and learning in access courses. Teachers at the higher education level (and therefore on access programmes as well) face many challenges. They generally have had no teacher training, and hence very little preparation for teaching large classes. They also tend to focus on disciplinary content with little attention to the nature of the discipline. The chapter thus looks at the significance of this aspect in access programmes. As with the rest of the book, this chapter leans towards situated cognition as a theory of learning which supports another central concept, that of epistemological access. However, a broader theoretical lens is proposed here focusing on student learning experience. This is underpinned by several sociological approaches such as “identity development”, “communities of practice” and the understanding of the “ground rules” of the discipline.