The co-curriculum: Re-defining boundaries of academic spaces

Abstract

The University of the Western Cape, South Africa, invited two renowned speakers to address issues concerning the co-curriculum in a colloquium on 14 May 2014 entitled “The co-curriculum: An integrated practice or fragments at the fringes of university experience?”. Impetus for this colloquium came from the emergent policies at various universities in South Africa, such as the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the University of the Western Cape, which aim to promote and regulate the co-curricular spaces. Debates surrounding the co-curriculum raise issues of boundaries and roles, not only traditional boundaries of what constitutes academic spaces, but also who teaches and what is learnt. Notions of the co-curriculum challenge the very raison d’etre of traditional higher education. Education is re-contextualised and includes the intersection of the curriculum with student life. The notion of the co-curriculum encompasses issues of student engagement, lifelong and life-wide learning (Jackson, 2010), student development and support, authentic learning and graduate attributes, the uncommon–traditional and the ubiquitous–non-traditional student and how these issues relate to student success. Student affairs is a key role-player in shaping and enabling complex learning within the many explicit and invisible curricula in higher education that are contributors to student success. The understanding of learning, on the one hand, as a segmented and boundaried event, or on the other, as a seamless experience of inand out-of-classroom development, impacts on the conceptualisation of higher education learning and development. The co-curriculum and engagement are such a catch-all and “loose concept that both those who advocate neoliberal reforms in higher education and those who oppose them tend to agree that it is a good thing” (Klemencic, 2013) – so no one is really sure what it is and what it entails. While South Africa is asking questions about the co-curriculum, it seems the higher education sector across the globe is also grappling with it. This is evident in some of the definitions, which include terms like customer satisfaction, holistic development, citizenship, skills development and have slogans such as “shape your own future” and