Abstract
South Africa’s higher education system requires systemic mechanisms to respond to the urgent, complex, and often competing urgent calls to transform. The New Generation of Academics Programme (nGAP) is an example of a systemic response to the challenges related to the composition and capacity of academic staff to adequately respond to the competing demands placed on higher education. The programme is designed to support public institutions’ recruitment, development and retention of early career academics (DHET, 2016). The programme allows appointees who have limited formal teaching experience access into an academic career. Questions have arisen, though, regarding the development of nGAP appointees as teachers that can contribute to institutional changes in pedagogical approaches and to curriculum development more generally. This study investigates how dominant discursive constructions of teaching, emerging from induction programmes in four institutions, may contribute to shaping a new generation of university teachers.
Highlights
South Africa’s higher education transformation agenda is broad with multiple demands pulling it in various directions, at the centre of which is an urgent call for change in institutional culture
This study extends the focus by focusing on teaching induction, rather than research development of early- career academics
This study examines discourses emerging from the interplay between the New Generation of Academics Programme (nGAP) Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), the enculturation of the lecturers into the values of the institution through teaching induction strategies, and the lecturers’ descriptions of their own teaching practices
Summary
South Africa’s higher education transformation agenda is broad with multiple demands pulling it in various directions, at the centre of which is an urgent call for change in institutional culture. Lecturers are afforded the opportunity to participate in a range of teaching and learning related activities such as registering for modules in formal accredited qualifications such as the Post Graduate Diploma in Higher Education offered either in-house or by other South African institutions. Participation in the Cape Higher Education Consortium regional staff development programme, as well as in-house teaching and learning related workshops, seminars, and short courses These affordances rub against existing institutional structures and cultural constraints, limiting the opportunities for lecturers engaging in quality teaching development. My position as nGAP co-ordinator for one of the participating institutions has made me acutely aware of the complex ethical and methodological challenges of ‘researching my own backyard’ (Williams, 2009) This has heightened my vigilance in acknowledging my privileged insights into the inception of the Programme, based on the prominent role my home institution played in that process, as well as potential biases and sets of assumptions I hold regarding the implementation of nGAP in various contexts. These practices were evident in the identifiable discourses expressed as statements, indicating the meanings and values (Kress, 1989) attached to teaching
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