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Changing curriculum and teaching practice A practical theory for academic staff development

- Clarence, Sherran, van Heerden, Martina

Authors: Clarence, Sherran , van Heerden, Martina
Date: 2020
Subjects: To be catalogued
Language: English
Type: text , book chapter
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/445770 , vital:74428 , ISBN 9781003028215 , https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003028215-9/changing-curriculum-teaching-practice-sherran-clarence-martina-van-heerden
Description: An underdeveloped aspect of academic staff development research in higher education is using theory to help academic lecturers to understand and inform their practices, so as to better enable student development and learning. This chapter illustrates how a theorized way of talking about teaching and learning, specifically using the LCT dimension of Semantics, both semantic waves and the semantic plane, may create exciting and productive conversations with academic lecturers. Using two ‘vignettes’ drawn from English Studies and Political Studies, the chapter illustrates how teaching practice and curriculum design can be enhanced by using LCT in academic staff development work, and by extension in curriculum design, teaching and assessment practice.
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Date Issued: 2020

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Making visible the affective dimensions of scholarship in postgraduate writing development work

- Clarence, Sherran

Authors: Clarence, Sherran
Date: 2020
Subjects: To be catalogued
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/439495 , vital:73601 , https://doi.org/10.47989/kpdc63
Description: Many university writing and student academic development centres serve both under-and postgraduate student-writers. However, it is not always clear that the training and development of those who work with writers accounts fully for the affective dimensions of postgraduate writing, specifically. Especially at the doctoral level, where an original contribution to knowledge is required, writers need to take on a confident authorial voice in their work, both written and in conversation with others. Research, however, shows that many doctoral students struggle with this. This paper argues that, to be truly successful and fit for purpose, peer writing development work needs to understand the nature of postgraduate learning and writing from more than just the technical perspective of writing a successful thesis. Writer-focused work at this level needs to account for the affective dimensions of writing and research as well, to engage students in more holistic, critical, and forward-looking conversations about their writing, and their own developing scholarly identity. The paper offers insights into the different affective dimensions of postgraduate writing, especially those under-considered in much practical work with postgraduate writers, and offers suggestions for a whole-student tutoring approach at this level.
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Date Issued: 2020

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Developing academic literacies through understanding the nature of disciplinary knowledge

- Clarence, Sherran, McKenna, Sioux

Authors: Clarence, Sherran , McKenna, Sioux
Date: 2017
Language: English
Type: article , text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/61062 , vital:27942 , https://doi.org/10.18546/LRE.15.1.04
Description: Much academic development work that is framed by academic literacies, especially that focused on writing, is concerned with disciplinary conventions and knowledges: conceptual, practical, and procedural. This paper argues, however, that academic literacies work tends to conflate literacy practices with disciplinary knowledge structures, thus obscuring the structures from which these practices emanate. This paper demonstrates how theoretical and analytical tools for conceptualizing disciplinary knowledge structures can connect these with academic literacies development work. Using recent studies that combine academic literacies and theories of knowledge in novel ways, this paper will show that understanding the knowledge structures of different disciplines can enable academic developers to build a stronger body of practice. This will enable academic developers working within disciplinary contexts to more ably speak to the nature of coming to know in higher education.
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Date Issued: 2017

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Knowledge and knowers in teaching and learning: an enhanced approach to curriculum alignment

- Clarence, Sherran

Authors: Clarence, Sherran
Date: 2016
Language: English
Type: article , text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/59823 , vital:27655 , http://www.legitimationcodetheory.com/pdf/2016Clarence-c.pdf
Description: John Biggs’ well-known curriculum design approach, constructive alignment, is widely used in higher education in the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa. Developed with one dominant account of learning through curriculum, this approach has a gap in terms of accounting for other kinds of knowledge building, and associated knower development. This paper proposes a complementary approach that accounts for different kinds of knowledge and knower building. Using Legitimation Code Theory’s concept of Specialisation, the paper argues that accounting for what makes a discipline ‘special’ in terms of its basis for legitimate achievement can enable curriculum writers to align curricula more effectively with that basis in different disciplines. Using a case study approach, this paper shows how this tool can provide lecturers and academic development practitioners with a useful mode of analysing curriculum alignment to more ably account for differential development of disciplinary knowledges and knowers.
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Date Issued: 2016

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Knowledge-building: educational studies in Legitimation Code Theory

- Clarence, Sherran

Authors: Clarence, Sherran
Date: 2016
Language: English
Type: book review , text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/61300 , vital:28013 , http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2016.1231751
Description: A challenge facing higher education researchers, especially those new to the craft of research, is that of moving between theory and data effectively in order to mediate research findings clearly to readers. For postgraduate students and academics publishing their research, working with data and designing effective and fit-for-purpose methodologies can be a challenge. Moreover, this is not necessarily an easy area for supervisors and research mentors to assist with. In addition to researchers, practitioners working in academic development also need ways of using research – either empirical or conceptual – to augment their work with lecturers to improve teaching and learning. There are many handbooks that detail the differences between qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods research. There are many theoretical texts to choose from. But there are few texts that offer researchers and those mentoring researchers insight into how methodology and theory connect in research studies, as well as practical tools to navigate the chaos of research, bringing theory and data into conversation in relevant and problem-oriented ways that can influence practice effectively. Karl Maton, in his introduction to this edited collection, argues that in spite of many claims within educational and social research for the need to connect research with theory more effectively, ‘the two frequently remain divorced or, at best, not on speaking terms’ (p. 1). The central premise of the book flows from this: we need to move beyond calls for more theory-informed research into education and society towards generating ways of demonstrating enactments of research that bring theory and research together meaningfully. The need for the research we publish to make clear its theoretical and methodological underpinning and enactments is crucial for effecting sustainable and meaningful change in practice within the field. This text, located within the growing field of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) research, within the broader field of sociology of education, takes a generous step in that direction. Building on Maton’s 2014 text, Knowledge and knowers. Towards a realist sociology of education, this text delves into how LCT concepts – particularly in the dimensions of Specialisation and Semantics – can be enacted within educational research and practice.
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Date Issued: 2016

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Peer tutors as learning and teaching partners: a cumulative approach to building peer tutoring capacity in higher education

- Clarence, Sherran

Authors: Clarence, Sherran
Date: 2016
Language: English
Type: article , text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/61335 , vital:28016 , http://cristal.epubs.ac.za/index.php/cristal/article/view/69
Description: Peer tutors in higher education are frequently given vital teaching and learning work to do, but the training or professional development and support opportunities they are offered vary, and more often than not peer tutors are under-supported. In order to create and sustain teaching and learning environments that are better able to facilitate students’ engagement with knowledge and learning, the role of peer tutors needs to be recognised differently, as that of learning and teaching partners to both lecturers and students. Tutors then need to be offered opportunities for more in-depth professional academic development in order to fully realise this role. This paper explores a tutor development programme within a South African writing centre that aimed at offering tutors such ongoing and cumulative opportunities for learning and growth using a balanced approach, which included scholarly research and practice-based training. Using narrative data tutors provided in reflective written reports, the paper explores the kinds of development in tutors’ thinking and action that are possible when training and development is theoretically informed, coherent, and oriented towards improving practice.
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Date Issued: 2016

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Seeing yourself in a new light: crossing the threshold to “researcher"

- Clarence, Sherran

Authors: Clarence, Sherran
Date: 2016
Language: English
Type: book chapter , text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/61390 , vital:28021 , http://www.africansunmedia.co.za/Sun-e-Shop/tabid/78/ProductId/385/Default.aspx , http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6WW52
Description: Writing, and the thinking, reading and analytical process that writers engage with to make writing possible, is transformative, and doctoral students in the social sciences especially tend to write themselves into their new identities as ‘doctors’ and recognised researchers. Much has been written in recent years about doctoral writing, including many advice books on how to write a ‘big-book’ or similar doctoral thesis into being. While some of the journal articles and books are helpful, and provide useful accounts of the complex challenges of writing a doctoral thesis, many of the advice books in particular focus more on the text itself, with the writer oddly under-accounted for. Recent research on, for example, doctoral writing groups and doctoral identity speaks into this gap helpfully, but much of it is written in contexts other than South Africa, and much of it is written for rather than by students going through or having recently completed a PhD process. This chapter contributes to a growing body of research and reflection on the role of writing itself in the process of becoming a ‘doctor’. Building on relevant blog posts and critical reflection through a research journal on my own transformative doctoral writing process at a South African university, this chapter will reflect on how challenging yet also potentially thrilling the writing process can be during a PhD. Readers will hopefully find in this chapter useful insights into their own process of becoming a doctor, and ideas for making their own ‘writing and becoming’ process more engaging and rewarding.
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Date Issued: 2016

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Surfing the waves of learning: enacting a Semantics analysis of teaching in a first-year Law course

- Clarence, Sherran

Authors: Clarence, Sherran
Date: 2016
Language: English
Type: article , text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/59816 , vital:27654 , https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2016.1263831
Description: Students’ ability to build knowledge, and transfer it within and between contexts is crucial to cumulative learning and to academic success. This has long been a concern of higher education research and practice. A central part of this concern for educators is creating the conditions that enable their students' deep learning, as this is an area of significant struggle for many students. Legitimation Code Theory, in particular the dimension of Semantics, is proving useful in examining the kinds of conditions that may be necessary for students to build disciplinary knowledge cumulatively over time. Using illustrative data from one case study, this paper suggests that the conceptual tools offered by Semantics can provide academic lecturers and academic development staff with a set of conceptual and analytical tools which can enable them to ‘see’ and understand the ways in which knowledge can be cumulatively acquired and used, as well as the possible gaps between what they are teaching and what their students may be learning. The hope is that these new insights will provide new directions for change in teaching and learning where these may be needed.
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Date Issued: 2016

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What lies beneath: exploring the deeper purposes of feedback on student writing through considering disciplinary knowledge and knowers

- Van Heerden, Martina, Clarence, Sherran, Bharuthram, Sharita

Authors: Van Heerden, Martina , Clarence, Sherran , Bharuthram, Sharita
Date: 2016
Language: English
Type: article , text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/59856 , vital:27669 , https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2016.1212985
Description: Feedback plays an integral role in students’ learning and development, as it is often the only personal communication that students have with tutors or lecturers about their own work. Yet, in spite of its integral role in student learning, there is disagreement between how students and tutors or lecturers perceive the pedagogic purpose of feedback. Central to this disagreement is the role that feedback has to play in ensuring that students produce the ‘right’ kinds of knowledge, and become the ‘right’ kinds of knowers within their disciplines. This paper argues that, in order to find common ground between students and tutors or lecturers on what feedback is for, and how to both give and use it effectively, we need to conceptualise disciplinary knowledge and knowers anew. We offer, as a useful starting point, the Specialisation dimension of Legitimation Code Theory as both practical theory and methodological tool for exploring knowledge and knowers in English Studies and Law as two illustrative cases. The paper concludes that this analysis offers lecturers and tutors a fresh understanding of the disciplinary knowledge and knower structures they work within and, relatedly, a clearer view of the work their feedback needs to do within these.
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Date Issued: 2016

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Assessment in higher education: reframing traditional understandings and practices

- Clarence, Sherran, Quinn, Lynn, Vorster, Jo-Anne E

Authors: Clarence, Sherran , Quinn, Lynn , Vorster, Jo-Anne E
Date: 2015
Language: English
Type: Book , text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/59534 , vital:27624
Description: The case studies in this publication provide examples of lecturers who have considered the role of assessment in their courses carefully. All of them have engaged with matters related to assessment as part of the formal courses or qualifications offered by staff of the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) at Rhodes University. In these courses lecturers are encouraged to reflect critically on their current assessment practices, engage with some of the literature and research on assessment in higher education, and then re-conceptualise their assessment methods and approaches. These case studies were drawn from the assignments and portfolios that they completed as part of the summative assessment for the courses they attended. The purpose of the case studies is pedagogic and to illustrate a range of assessment practices and principles. For the sake of clarity some of the details have been omitted or slightly changed.
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Date Issued: 2015

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Enabling cumulative knowledge-building through teaching: a legitimation code theory analysis of pedagogic practice in law and political science

- Clarence, Sherran

Authors: Clarence, Sherran
Date: 2014
Subjects: Law -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- South Africa Political science -- Study and teaching (Higher) -- South Africa Education, Higher -- South Africa College teaching -- South Africa Knowledge, Theory of Social realism
Language: English
Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
Identifier: vital:1966 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1011763
Description: Much current research and practice in teaching and learning in higher education tends to overfocus on social aspects of education; on how rather than what students are learning. Much of this research and practice is influenced by constructivism, which has a relativist stance on knowledge, generally arguing, contra positivism, that knowledge is constructed in socio-historical contexts and largely inseparable from those who construct it and from issues of power. This leads to a confusion of knowledge with knowing, and knowledge is thus obscured as an object of study because it is only seen or understood as knowing or as a subject of learning and teaching. This ‘knowledge-blindness’ (Maton 2013a: 4) is problematic in higher education because knowledge and knowing are two separate parts of educational fields, and while they need to be brought together to provide a whole account of these fields, they also need to be analysed and understood separately to avoid blurring necessary boundaries and to avoid confusing knowledge itself with how it can be known. Being able to see and analyse knowledge as an object with its own properties and powers is crucial for both epistemological access and social inclusion and justice, because knowledge and knowledge practices are at the heart of academic disciplines in universities. Social realism offers an alternative to the dilemma brought about by constructivism’s tendency towards knowledge-blindness. Social realism argues that it is possible to see and analyse both actors within social fields of practice as well as knowledge as something that is produced by these actors but also about more than just these actors and their practices; thus knowledge can be understood as emergent from these practices and fields but not reducible to them (Maton & Moore 2010). Social realism, drawing from Roy Bhaskar’s critical realist philosophy (1975, 2008), is intent on looking at the real structures and mechanisms that lie beneath appearances and practices in order to understand the ways in which these practices are shaped, and change over time. Legitimation Code Theory is a realist conceptual framework that has, as its central aim, the uncovering and analysis of organising principles that shape and change intellectual and education fields of production and reproduction of knowledge. In other words, the conceptual tools Legitimation Code Theory offers can enable an analysis of both knowledge and knowers within relational social fields of practice by enabling the analysis of the ways in which these fields, such as academic disciplines, are organised and how knowledge and knowing are understood in educational practice. This study draws on social realism more broadly and Legitimation Code Theory specifically to develop a relatively novel conceptual and explanatory framework within which to analyse and answer its central question regarding how to enable cumulative knowledge building through pedagogic practice. Using qualitative data from two academic disciplines, Law and Political Science, which was analysed using a set of conceptual and analytical tools drawn from Legitimation Code Theory, this study shows that the more nuanced and layered accounts of pedagogy that have been generated are able to provide valuable insights into what lecturers are doing as they teach in terms of helping students to acquire, use and produce disciplinary and ‘powerful’ knowledge (Young 2008b). Further, the study demonstrates that the organising principles underlying academic disciplines have a profound effect on how the role of the knower and the place or purpose of knowledge is understood in pedagogy and this affects how the pedagogy is designed and enacted. This study has argued that if we can research pedagogy rigorously using tools that allow us to see the real mechanisms and principles influencing and shaping it, and if we can reclaim the role of disciplinary knowledge as a central part of the pedagogic relationship between lecturer and students, then we can begin to see how teaching both enables and constrains cumulative learning. Further, we can change pedagogy to better enable cumulative learning and greater epistemological access to disciplinary knowledge and related practices for greater numbers of students. The study concludes by suggesting that the conceptual tools offered by Legitimation Code Theory can provide academic lecturers with a set of tools that can begin to enable them to 'see' and understand their own teaching more clearly, as well as the possible gaps between what they are teaching and what their students are learning. This study argues that a social realist approach to the study of pedagogy such as the one used here can begin not only to enable changes in pedagogy aimed at filling these gaps but also begin to provide a more rigorous theoretical and practical approach to analysing, understanding and enacting pedagogic practice. This, in turn, can lead to more socially just and inclusive student learning and epistemic and social access to the powerful knowledge and ways of knowing in their disciplines.
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Date Issued: 2014

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