"Stop Bombarding Us With Work We Don't Even Need": Reconceptualising a First-Year Course for Increased Relevance Through Action Learning

Abstract

South African lecturers and students often struggle to reconcile the demands of an increasingly globalised world with pedagogies that can be adapted to harness students' local contexts, and which can be used to draw on students' lived experiences in the African context. This paper explores how a first-year academic literacies course could be reconceptualised to become more relevant to education students' lived realities, while also preparing them for a competitive degree and a career with global relevance. The current iteration of this course can be described as mainly theoretical with a typical Western course structure. Student feedback indicates that students fail to see the relevance of the course to their degrees and future careers. This conceptual paper considers how the course could be reimagined within a paradigm of action learning that is centred around project-based, socially embedded community-based learning to firstly, encourage students to draw on deep approaches to learning (Biggs, 1999) and secondly, to counter the effects of alienation (Mann, 2001) experienced by students. Ultimately, the paper hopes to offer an example of innovate course design that could successfully be implemented in resource-poor contexts.