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in reply to: Module 4, Session 4: dive deeper #5745
In the spirit of diving deeper, please use this forum to tell us how an article, chapter of some other text you have read challenges, affirms or explains your own practice as a supervisor or what you have experienced as a student being supervised.
Hello everyone,
Odhiambo, G. 2016. ‘Higher education in Kenya: an assessment of current responses to the imperative of widening access’. Journal of Higher Education and Management, 38(2):196-211.
Sioux and I came across this paper recently when we were looking for evidence for a statement (a knowledge claim) we were trying to make in something we were writing together.
The paper provides some interesting data about participation in higher education in Kenya. In CPC we have looked at the idea of drawing on a humanising pedagogy in supervision. In the recent feedback on assignments, I noted that some participants appeared to understand humanising pedagogy as ‘being nice’ to students when practising one is much, much harder than this. Humanising pedagogy is essentially about the achievement of greater social justice and higher education is a profoundly socially unjust place as global data shows (Bathmaker et al., 2016; Reay & Vincent, 2016). Overwhelmingly, the people who gain most access to and success in higher education are the children of middle class educated parents. A lot of research shows us why this is the case (Heath, 1983; Scollon & Scollon, 1981). Some children are raised in homes where they are exposed to conversations drawing on abstract concepts and which challenge accepted ideas and present alternatives even if these conversations do not involved them directly. They watch adults reading books and writing and take on those practices for themselves as they have learned that they are enjoyable things to do. In comparison, children raised him homes where parents and caregivers have not had the advantages provided by high levels of education are not exposed to these kinds of practices. As a result, they are less prepared for schooling and not as prepared for it.
Many people think that it is the schools that are important – that it is the school that prepares for education. However, again research (Geisler, 1993) shows that schools are very different to universities. Schools consume knowledge (Bernstien, 2000). Knowledge in schools is often taught as if it is unchallenged fact. Universities make knowledge and those who work in them are aware of how contested this process can be. Reading and writing in schools differs from that in universities. In schools, writing that is valued and rewarded is that which repeats what learners have been taught accurately. In university, writing is more difficult. It’s about the writer saying what she believes to be true by drawing on contested evidence. Most learners are not taught to do this in schools. Reading is the same. In schools learners are taught to ‘believe’ the text book. In universities, critical reading involves coming to a text with the intention to ‘disbelieve’ it – to weigh it against other texts and other knowledge that the reader brings to bear.
Of course there are many exceptions to the ‘educated middle class parents’ observation. What these exceptions tend to show, however, is that caregivers in the home of origin drew on practices that prepared learners for higher education. In my own home, for example, my father bought a daily paper and read it in the evening. As he read, his voice would come from behind the paper telling the rest of the family about the stupidity of much of the so called ‘facts’ he was reading. In this example, he was demonstrating to my brother and me that it was possible to disagree with a text. Another example from the South African literature involves a student at Rhodes University who was interviewed about his literacy history. In the interview, he described how he was brought up by his grandmother in a rural area. His grandmother was very religious but she was also bedridden. As a result, she could not go to church on Sundays. She did insist that all the children in her care went to church however and, when they returned, they were made to tell her what the preacher had said. The grandmother then proceeded to disagree with his interpretation of the Bible. In this instance, the grandmother was preparing the children to listen to lectures and also giving them permission to disagree with what an authoritative figure (in this case the preacher) said.
Nonetheless, social class matters more than most of us want to think about as we want to believe that education is fair when, in fact, it is not.
Odhiambo (2016) looks at attempts to widen participation in higher education in Kenya. His observation (p.197) about access is that
In Kenya, it is mainly about being male, coming from a high socio-economic status (SES) background, living in an urban area or in particular regions/ethnic groups.
As attempts to widen higher education in Kenya proceed, increasing numbers of students from a more diverse array of social groups will enter the universities. In South Africa, more than twenty five years after the universities were opened up to all, performance is still fractured by social group.
In short, the Odhiambo paper is well worth reading to get some insights into the whole idea of widening participation in Kenya. Although most widening participation initiatives focus on undergraduate education, the more diverse an undergraduate system is the more diverse will be the postgraduate system. Already, and as many of you have pointed out in assignments, a more diverse group of students is trying to access postgraduate study. Often this is a result of ‘qualification inflation’ where the value attached to an undergraduate degree falls the more people attain them. This impacts on the expectations of the students we supervise in myriad ways and, also, on the way they will go about studying.Everyone should now have received back their draft assignments with feedback. We received 72 first drafts in total – a wonderful response to the course. We look forward to getting final drafts at the end of the month.
Keep well!
References
Bathmaker, A, Ingram, N., Abrahams, J., Hoare, A., Waller, R. & Bradley, H. 2016. Higher Education, Social Class and Social Mobility: The Degree Generation. Springer: New York.
Heath, S. 1983. Ways with Words. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Reay, D. &Vincent, C. 2016. Theorizing Social Class and Education. Routledge: Abingdon.
Scollon, R. & Scollon, S.B. 1981. Narrative, literacy and face in interethnic communication. Ablex: Norwood, NJ.Kefa, can you explain what you mean by ‘disciplinary grammar’?
Many of you have commented on the session on feedback with Shonisani noting that its important to think about what the supervisor ‘really wants the student to know’. One way I think it is useful to think about feedback is that it’s a means of ‘getting inside the supervisor’s head’. If you ‘think aloud’ in the margins of your student’s work by providing comments and, most importantly, asking questions you are letting them know what is inside your head as you read their work. In many respects then, giving feedback is about guiding them into ways of ‘academic’ thinking and therefore into the scholarly communities they need to access.
Morrow’s (1993) concept of ‘epistemological access’ works here. Epistemological access, which is contrasted with ‘formal access’ (to say a postgrad programme), is about giving students access to the ways of knowing, valuing, thinking and being that characterise academic communities. It’s been used a lot in South Africa to conceptualise student development and support.
So, one of the most interesting questions for me, is about what you aim to give students access to in your comments. One of the things (I suppose you could call it ‘rules’) that I find myself trying to guide my students towards is about who they reference. If they are using really ‘big’ theorists then it’s fine to get access to that theory by reading the work of other students (who can often explain that theory more simply than the big thinkers) but they have to signal that they know who the ‘owners’ or ‘originators’ of the theory are. They do this through the referencing. This is ultimately related to the need for a postgrad student to demonstrate mastery of a field – to know ‘who’s who’ on the academic landscape.
I’d be really interested in knowing which other ‘rules’ colleagues can identify. They will, of course, be some that are specific to particular disciplinary areas but this would be a very good conversation to have on the Forum.
Good morning everyone! This is Chrissie here. I’m glad that so many of you find the writing practices introduced in the materials helpful and even more glad that many of you use them already. Several people like Yacub and Moses mention ‘linguistic issues’. It’s really important to remember that learning to write and learning a language are different things. Many people who are home language speakers of English can’t write well and avoid writing at all costs – indeed, I remember struggling as an academic writer. There were times as a postgraduate student that I was scared to even sit down to write.
John K brings up the idea of the ‘second abstract’. I think abstracts are actually very difficult to write. Lecturers seem to try to get their students to write abstracts in the mistaken belief that they are easier than a more extended piece. All the research shows us, however, that the more you write the easier it is to find what you want to say and say it coherently.
Sukh mentions that some weaker students have difficulty in understanding what they need to do with comments and questions you provide in relation to their writing. When I used to teach in undergraduate classes, this was very common and I used to have to teach my students how to work with comments and questions. I used to type up a sample anonymous assignment with my comments and then go through it on the screen in class explaining the difficulties I was having as a reader and asking the students to tell me how they needed to change the writing in order to ‘silence’ me. This was time consuming but it worked well.
in reply to: Module 2, Session 4: EPE resources’ assessment #2476Lots of people appear to be appreciating the EPE website which is good news. Sandra, you mention the need for some ‘academic English’ resources. Next week, we will deal with writing in the CPC course. If you follow what is said you will see that writing is not so much a matter of commanding the actual language, English, and more about mastering the act of writing itself. There are lots of resources about the practices we need to master in order to be successful academic writers on EPE. We’d be very interested to hear more of your views on ‘academic English’ at the end of next week.
in reply to: Module 2, Session 1: Library resources and support #2161Lots of course participants have written very positively about the support available from the library at their university, with with Anna & Damiannah, for example, noting electronic resources in particular. Christopher raises the important point that many students and scholars are not fully aware of all the support and resources their institutional libraries offer – a point emphasised by Rox.
For me, though, the point raised by Susan about plagiarism (especially in relation to electronic resources) is particularly interesting. Frea responds to this by saying that, in her experience, a lot of plagiarism is not intentional – something I also experienced when I used to chair Rhodes University’s Senate Committee on Plagiarism and saw many postgraduate students appearing before it.
I believe that one of the most important things supervisors can teach their students is about their relationship with the literature, whatever form it takes. At undergraduate level, students are often required to summarise the literature, to demonstrate that they ‘know’ the facts, theories and so on. I don’t support this as a practice (and could write a lot more about this) but the point is that, as a result, many students come to postgraduate work with the understanding that this is what they need to continue doing.
In postgraduate work, we look for more than summaries of the literature. We expect students to be able to use the literature to argue, to make a case. One of the things I try to teach my students is that the thesis is a series of ‘knowledge claims’ (statements about what they believe to be true) each of which is supported by evidence. In an empirical study, the later sections of the thesis, the evidence comes from the data. In the early stages (the so called ‘literature review’ and, also, in the social sciences, the methodology section), the evidence comes from the literature. This means that references are the evidence for what writers believe to be the case.
If students get this point, their entire relationship to what they read shifts. They are not ‘summarisers’ but writers who need to take a position, build an argument of a series of knowledge claims each of which is supported by the literature.
I have found explaining this to be really useful when I work with my postgraduate students.
What does relying on merit to decide who gets in to postgraduate studies do in a system which is trying to achieve more equity (as in South Africa)? Many students from poor backgrounds who lack the social and cultural capital recognised and valued by the university take a long time to get into the swing of things at undergraduate level. They pass but they don’t get the firsts or upper seconds. We can see that very clearly in South African student performance data. Are they to be denied the chance of doing postgraduate work when there is every likelihood that their ‘catching up’ will also speed up the longer they are in the academic system? I’m supervising a student now for PhD who came into the university on an alternative entrance programme. This allowed her to do her first degree over four, rather than three years with substantial foundation provision in her curriculum. She got a bachelor’s degree – not a first class pass but a degree. She then went on to do honours and master’s because she was given a chance even though she was not at the top of the class. She will get a PhD – she has just taken longer to learn the ‘rules’ of academic working. If, as supervisors, we think that entrance to postgraduate work should be on academic ‘merit’ what will this say for who gets in and who is kept out of the postgraduate arena?
If you follow through on what we were talking about in relation to social inclusion, is it possible that sometimes exclusion manifests itself as jealousy amongst peers? To what extent are some social groups excluded in academia just as they are in learning? Women often complain about being excluded in departments which exhibit a heavy male ‘ethos’ and way of being. Can some of the feelings of exclusion actually be interpreted as jealousy?
One of our most common predilections is to attribute the ability to learn to factors inherent to the individual. Someone was talking yesterday about personality coming into the equation and extroverted students seemingly being able to do better in difficult circumstances. If we think about so called ‘extroversion’ though, how much is socially conditioned? Are women conditioned to be less assertive, less ‘out there’ than men? Are other social groups conditioned in the same way? Is it the individual characteristics of the student that make a difference or is it social context?
I think we should always be careful of attributing the ability to do something to factors inherent to the individual. If we say a student lacks ‘motivation’ or ‘drive’, for example, is it the case that something is missing from their individual make up or that we don’t recognise the way that the demonstrate their motivation because they are ‘different’?
If you say postgraduate studies ‘requires resilience and focus and so it is for those who are willing to walk the difficult path’ are you sure you are recognising the resilience that is being demonstrated, the focus that is there but which is different to what you are used to? Are you really sure that students aren’t ‘walking the difficult path’ even though they do not seem to be making progress?
The Powerpoint on social inclusion points to the need always to consider the social context, to consider which ‘ways of being’ are privileged in certain spaces and how others may not ‘fit in’ not because there is anything wrong with them but just because they are not familiar to us. The next step is to think about how we can make the space of postgraduate learning open to everyone.
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