New article on access to higher education

For a new article using a social realist account, see Leibowitz, B. and Bozalek, V. 2014. Access to higher education in South Africa: A social realist account. Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning. 16 (1), pp 91 - 109. http://wpll-journal.metapress.com/link.asp?id=X7243U561274. This article is part of a special issue on widening participating in the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). The articles in this special issues cover the topic of access to higher education from a range of theoretical perspectives, including social realism and critical race theory.

An interesting take on realist social theory: The Reality of Social Construction by Dave Elder-Vass

The Reality of Social Construction, by Dave Elder-Vass was published in 2012 (Cambridge). Here Elder-Vass argues that social scientists should be "both realists and social constructionists" (p.3). He agrees that "our senses and/or concepts of ourselves are shaped by discursive forces as well as by other forms of experience" (p. 12). He further develops the concept of "norm circles", posited in his 2010 book, The Causal Power of Social Structures which he says regulate cultural, linguistic, discursive and epistemic practices. These circles influence our thinking and provide the resources for us to think and to challenge. These circles are, he argues, increasingly intersectional. Significantly, for the Structure, Culture and Agency project, although Elder-Vass stresses culture and norms, he makes provision for the influence of "practice" and "participation" - for those of us who feel very strongly about practice based perspectives on learning and development. He also affirms the importance of materiality: "material configurations of, for example, location or technology may also help to shape these practices" (p. 259). This is extremely helpful for the Structure, Culture and Agency research project's investigation of how context influences academics' participation in professional academic development activities, where we have found that geographic location of universities, for example, does have a potential impact on teaching quality. But in a more fundamental sense, the material world is the basis for much action and sensory activity: "our minds are material; our social world is material; neither is fundamentally divided from the rest of the world in a way that would prevent us from accessing that world" (p. 262). A point that Elder-Vass makes several times in the book, is that it is people, not language, that influence how we talk about the world. This should prevent us from reifying language the way many pro-multilingualism or pro-mother tongue activists do.

One of the joys of this book is that it traverses a huge body of theory on language, discourse, knowledge and agency. Elder-Vass gives his view on diverse writers including Durkheim, Foucault, Judith Butler, Saussure, Berger and Luckmann and Margaret Archer. He makes a successful attempt to write lucidly and fairly simply about a range of important ontological and epistemological issues and provides a very interesting account of critical realist thinking about how norms are generated. It is a valuable resources for investigating the influence of institutional contexts on the professional development of academics.

Presentation by Susan van Schalkwyk and Julia Blitz at Ottawa Conference, 25 - 29 April 2014

Julia Blitz and Susan van Schalkwyk, members of the Structure, Culture and Agency research project, made a presentation on data from the project at the 12th Canadian Conference on Medical Education in Ottawa, Ontario, on 25 - 29 April 2014. They used the work of Lieff to show that the qualitative data derived from the open ended responses to a survey conducted at participating universities could be analyzed in terms of four lenses: political, structural, symbolic and human resource. (See S Lieff 'Faculty development: Yesterday, today and tomorrow: Guide supplement'. 33.2-Viewpoint, Medical Teacher, 32, 429-431, 2010). Their conclusion is contained in the slide below.

Interplay of Structure, Culture and Agency: A study on Professional Development in Higher EducationAccessing 

development activiTheyteaching role

Interesting application of the work of social realist Margaret Archer to higher education and professional development

                                                (Picture of Peter Kahn, University of Liverpool)

I have found it quite frustrating to take critical realist writings and apply these to the setting of higher education and to the topic of professional development. One of the reasons for this is that the theory of critical realism is pitched at a meta-theoretical level. Furthermore, the work of social realistMargaret Archer targets social institutions and society more generally. I find the temptation to apply these theoretical writings to my work can become quite forced or pointless, and have been quite frustrated with the publications of several people who apply these theories to their work in higher education. Often they could made the same general level and common sense observations without referring to these theories at all. For this reason I would like to draw the attention of researchers wishing to apply critical and social realism to the field of education to the work of Peter Kahn from the University of Liverpool. He writes with others, but has a fairly consistent location of his work within the critical realist stable. Below is a list of a few papers which draw on the work of critical realism. The publication that I just read, and that I feel makes meaningful links with the professional development of academics in relation to reflective practice, is:

Kahn, P E, Qualter, A and Young, R (2012) ‘Structure and agency in learning: a critical realist theory of the development of capacity to reflect on academic practice’,Higher Education Research and Development 31(6) pp. 859-71.

It is a review article. Kahn et al write in favor of the view that "there is a need to consider both personal and socio-cultural factors in understanding student learning" (p. 859). Here are three general points from the conclusion (p. 868): 

Adapting perspectives from realist social theory, we contend that learning in our given context may be modelled as follows:

1. The situations that learners confront involuntarily are objective shaped by structural and cultural factors, including the programme itself and tasks incorporated into the programme, the knowledge structures involved and the context for professional practice.
2. Those factors possess generative powers of constraint and enablement in relation to learners' own configuration of concerns and foci for attention, as subjectively defined in relation to nature, practice and society. 
3. Projects of professional learning or educational compliance are produced through the reflexive deliberations of learners and their contemporaneous interactions with teachers and fellow students, allowing learners subjectively to determine these projects in relation to their own capacities and objective circumstances, resulting also in variation in the creation and application of resources for the adaptation of practice. 

Given the focus of the Structure, Culture and Agency research project on the institutions as contexts and the manner in which they can influence academics to participate in their professional development, the interplay between objective circumstances and individual reflexive deliberations and projects, becomes very important.

Here are a few other publications applying the writings of Margaret Archer to higher education: 

Kahn PE (2013) ‘The informal curriculum: a case study in tutor reflexivity, corporate agency and medical professionalism’, Teaching in Higher Education, 18(6), pp. 631-642.

Kahn, P E, Qualter, A and Young, R (2012) ‘Structure and agency in learning: a critical realist theory of the development of capacity to reflect on academic practice’,Higher Education Research and Development 31(6) pp. 859-71..

Kahn P.E. (2009) 'On establishing a modus vivendi: the exercise of agency in decisions to participate or not participate in higher educatiot', London Review of Education, 7(3) 261-70.

Kahn, P.E., Young, R., Grace, S., Pilkington, R., Rush, L., Tomkinson, C. B. and Willis, I. (2008) 'A practitioner review of reflective practice within programmes for new academic staff' International Journal for Academic Development, 13: 199–211.

An interesting article by Steve Walker and Linda Creanor titled 'Towards an ontology of networked learning'.

http://oro.open.ac.uk/33437/1/walker.pdf

In this article Steve Walker and Linda Creanor examine the effects of networked learning on the established pedagogical architecture and social processes.  They suggest a possible ‘ontology of elements of learning technology’ and propose a way of thinking about technology, which locates artefacts in networks of social relations and conceptions of technology, avoiding reductive technological determinism.

According to Fleetwood (2005) it is possible to identify at least four modes or reality (material, ideal, artefactual and social) and entities such as technology (in this case) can straddle two or more modes, e.g. the social and material  /  sociomateriality in the design and use of technology.  Walker and Creanor suggest a fifth mode of reality, the ‘computationally real’, comprised of ideally, socially, materially and computationally real dimensions and being causally efficacious.   

They explore the possible redesign of traditional ‘positioned practices’ in education, examining:

References

Fleetwood, S. (2005) Ontology in Organization and Management Studies: A Critical  Realist Perspective.Organization, 12, 197-222.

                                                         
                                                            (contribution by Gita )

Research Findings

The initial three year funding cycle for this project has come to an end. We are waiting to hear whether the application for a new round of funding has been successful. In the meantime we have reported on this first cycle to the National Research Foundation. While we were busy with this first cycle there were high points, when it felt like our collaboration was making a real difference to our working lives and we were really getting somewhere. (The photos below give a sense that working together is fun, as well as a lot of hard work.)  But there were other moments when it felt we were so busy with our personal and professional lives, or so mired in a morass of data, that we were merely treading water. Now that I complete this report, I realize we have really achieved a great deal. The synthesis of findings is in the page on Report to NRF 2014, and the conclusion is the following:"The requirement by the National Research Foundation that proposals on education research be based on a collaboration amongst at least three institutions, one of which is rural, has stimulated a valuable mode of inquiry, one which could not have yielded the richness and variety of data, had it been conducted in one institution, or similar institutions.  The key finding of this not-as-yet concluded research project, is that there is a great need for attention to the teaching role in South Africa, and for capacity building of the institutional role-players, both management and professional developers, to support this role. Change at the level of the system (structural and cultural) are required to effect this." 

New paper by team members on professional development - and the ethics of care

A new paper has been produced on professional development, by Vivienne Bozalek, Wendy McMillan, Delia Marshall, Melvyn November, Andre Daniels and Toni Sylvester. Just appearing in Teaching in Higher Education,  it is entitled: Analysing the professional development of teaching and learning from a political ethics of care perspective. This is very useful if you want to learn a bit more about the political ethics of care, and how it can be applied to the professional development of academics. It is also a very interesting paper in that it is written by a group who operated as a team, to lead professional development retreats. 

 To cite this article: Vivienne Grace Bozalek, Wendy McMillan, Delia E. Marshall, Melvyn November,
Andre Daniels & Toni Sylvester , Teaching in Higher Education (2014): Analysing the professional
development of teaching and learning from a political ethics of care perspective, Teaching in

Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2014.880681

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2014.880681

Here is the abstract: 

This paper uses Tronto’s political ethics of care as a normative framework to evaluate
a model of teaching and learning professional development. This framework identifies
five integrated moral elements of care – attentiveness, responsibility, competence,
responsiveness and trust. This paper explicates on each of these elements to evaluate
the piloting and implementation of a teaching and learning professional development
model at a South African higher education institution. The political ethics of care was
found to be a useful normative framework for a group of higher educators to reflect on
the process of engaging in teaching and learning professional development in that it
revealed the importance of differential power relations, the importance of working
collaboratively and being attentive to the needs of both caregivers and care receivers.
Keywords: political ethics of care; normative framework; professional development;

higher education; teaching and learning