1

The significance of structure, culture and agency in supporting

and developing student learning at South African universities
Chrissie Boughey
Rhodes University
Introduction
The support and development of student learning in order to promote access
and success in higher education has long been the focus of those involved in the
South African Academic Development (AD) movement. In recent years, a
number of researchers (see, for example, Luckett (2010a, 2001b, 2009, 2007a,
2007b), Quinn (2007), Wright (2008), Vorster (2010), Quinn & Boughey (2008)
have turned to Roy Bhaskars (1978, 1979) critical realism and Margaret
Archers (1995, 1996, 1998) social realism as a means of better understanding
events and experiences related to higher education in South Africa and of
identifying the underlying structures and mechanisms from which those events
and experiences emerge. This chapter contributes to this vein of work by using
Bhaskars and Archers work to explore the potential of the AD movement to
contribute to the need to support and develop student learning as we move into
the second decade of the twenty first century.

The chapter begins by providing a brief outline of the theoretical positions
adopted by Bhaskar and Archer. It then moves on to reanalyze shifts within the
AD movement using Bhaskars and Archers work.
Bhaskars Critical Realism
Key to critical realism (Bhaskar, 1978, 1979) is the acknowledgment of an
objective reality external to humankind. However, unlike empiricists and
relativists, critical realists insist that this reality must not be conflated with our
experience of it. Conflation of an ultimate reality with our experiences of it, that
is, the conflation of what is with what can be known, is termed by Bhaskar
(1978:16) the epistemic fallacy. This separation of ontology (what is) from
epistemology (what can be known) leads Bhaskar (1978, 1979) to posit a world
consisting of three ontological strata: the empirical, the actual and the real.

The empirical stratum is that of experience and observation and is the layer from
which all our explorations of reality must begin. Since human beings experience
and observe the world in different ways, this layer is acknowledged to be ever
changing, constructed and relative. The second stratum in Bhaskars ontology,
the actual, consists of events which take place in the world. The actual and the
empirical co-exist since we experience events as they happen. The final stratum,
the real, consists of structures and mechanisms, both natural and social and
which have an objective existence, and from which events at the level of the
actual and observations and experiences at the level of the empirical emerge.
This stratum co-exists with the other two strata in other words, the strata
surround us continually.

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Although Bhaskar (ibid) insists on the intransitive nature of structures and
mechanisms at the level of the real, in a rejection of determinism, he argues that
they are tendential rather than causal. At any one time, structures and
mechanisms may be dormant or active and may come together to produce
unexpected effects in myriad ways.

Research located in a critical realist ontology attempts to reach beyond the
analysis of events and experiences in order to identify the structures and
mechanisms from which these emerge. Like other critical research, critical
realism is focused on a concern for social justice and equality. Although a critical
realist view of the world as an open system means that critical realists would
argue that outcomes cannot be predicted, they would argue that the
identification of structures and mechanisms at the level of the real can help us to
understand and explain tendencies and, importantly, through that
understanding, work to bring about change and social justice.

In the context of this chapter, social justice would involve improved learning for
the black students, long disadvantaged in gaining access to higher education
because of historically inequities and shown by Scott et al. (2007) to bear the
brunt of poor completion and graduation rates in a recent cohort study.
Archers social realism

For Archer (1995, 1996, 1998), the study of structure, culture and agency is key
to understanding the social world. Archer defines structure as relating to
material resources, to recurring patterns of social behaviour and the
interrelationship between different elements of society around the distribution
of these material resources. Structure would thus relate to concepts such as
social class, gender, race, marriage, education and so on. Culture, on the other
hand, is understood to concern ideas, beliefs, values and ideologies. Both
structure and culture are important aspects of social life. Agency refers to the
personal and psychological make up of individuals in relation to their social roles
and relates to the capacity people have to act in a voluntary way.

In sociology, there has long been a tendency to conflate the parts (systems) and
the people (agency). Archer critiques the conflation of structure and agency
and culture and agency and argues instead for structure, culture and agency to
be viewed as separate domains of reality, each with distinct properties and
powers. Importantly, she also argues that each should be analysed separately
although, in this analysis, the interplay of each with the other should be explored.
A framework for analysis

In this chapter, Bhaskars and Archers concepts are used as tools to analyse
work in teaching and learning by bringing them together in a common
framework.


Empirical
(Experiences



3
&
Observations)




Actual
(Events)


Real
(Unchanging
Structures &
Mechanisms)



Structure

Culture

Agency

Figure 1: A Framework of Analysis following Bhaskar (1978; 1979) & Archer
(1995; 1996)

In the framework, the experiences of students, academics and other stakeholders
as they engage with teaching and learning in higher education would be placed
at the level of the empirical. Since each individual would experience higher
education in different ways, these experiences would be understood to be
relative and constructed as a result of personal and social histories. The level of
the empirical would thus account for the difference in, for example, an academic
saying My teaching is good and students fail because they lack skills, cannot
speak English and are not motivated and for AD practitioners arguing The
problem is not with the students but rather with the curriculum and the
pedagogical approach used. A set of course marks would also be seen as an
empirical observation and would be located at the level of the empirical as would
observations made of those course marks.

The myriad events taking place on a daily basis would then be placed at the level
of the actual and would include an AD tutorial, a class in an Extended
Programme, a Teaching and Learning Committee meeting or a debate in a
Faculty Board or Senate about funding for student support/development
activities. The variety and specificity of events is explained as the effects of
different combinations of structural, cultural and agentic properties.

Both events and experiences/observations emerge as a result of structures and
mechanisms at the level of the real coming together to exert tendential
properties. Importantly, these structures and mechanisms, following Archer
(ibid) are seen to be located in the three domains of culture, structure and
agency and are analysed separately. This might mean, for example, that the
observation, on the part of a lecturer, that her/his students have failed because
they lack skills and cannot speak English could be analysed as emerging as a
result of a set of cultural conditions related to the lecturers own experience at
university, to structures such as social class and to students exercising agency in
ways that the lecturer cannot recognize. As already noted, the fact that
structures and mechanisms are tendential rather than causal is important given
Bhaskars view of the world as an open system rather than one characterized by
determinism i.e. in which structural mechanisms are activated only when certain
agents act in such as way as to trigger them.

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This chapter now moves on to an attempt to use the framework to analyse the
attempts of the AD movement over the years to support and develop student
learning in order to promote access and success.


Reanalysing the development and support of student learning

Volbrecht & Boughey (2005) identify three phases in the history of the AD
movement: Academic Support, Academic Development and Higher Education
Development. In identifying these phases, Volbrecht & Boughey (ibid) note that
this division is for convenience only, that the three phases should not be
understood as being distinct from each other or having any marked transitions
from one to the other. Significantly, they add that they are aware that practices
associated with the three phases have in some cases co-existed, and sometimes
continue to do so (p.59).

In other work (Boughey, 2005:1) I once again stress that the phases should not
be understood as distinct from each and argue that the phases are indicative
more of dominant discursive formulations than actual periods of time. Following
Chouliariki & Fairclough (1999), I then go on to note (ibid) that:

. . . these formulations are understood to give rise to conjunctures or
relatively stable sets of social practices around specific projects (in this
case student support). This is an important point as, in many respects, the
student support practices which have characterized each phase (or each
discursive formulation) have co-existed in many cases and, in some,
continue to do so alongside dominating practices.

In critical realist terms, what Volbrecht & Boughey (2005:58) identify as the
open sets of practices characterizing AD work can be seen to emerge from
different sets of conditions which, using the framework proposed in this chapter,
exist at the level of the real. In terms of the framework, therefore, the phases are
best understood as relatively stable sets of conditions from which practices and
experiences of practice emerge. Some conditions are more or less dominant at
any one time. This means that dominant sets of conditions can be related to time
and that changes in practice over time can be related to shifts in conditions. It is
in this context that the term phase needs to be understood as it is used in this
chapter.

I now turn to using the framework to analyse each of these sets of conditions
within the three phases identified by Volbrecht & Boughey (ibid).
The Academic Support phase

The domain of culture
The earliest programmes intended to support and develop students learning
began in the early 1980s as a small number of black students gained entrance to
the historically white liberal institutions as a result of relaxed state apartheid
policies (Pavlich & Orkin, 1993).
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Given this context, it is hardly surprising that a concern for equity dominated the
cultural conditions from which practices associated with the early initiatives
emerged. As will be seen, however, the extent to which these initiatives
sometimes marginalized and marked students as different raises questions
about the realization of this concern.

Torr (1991:624), gives an indication of the cultural assumptions dominating this
phase of the movements work when she notes that early Academic Support
Programmes (ASPs) were developed to assist students without the necessary
background to be able to benefit immediately from lectures and tutorials.
Alongside a concern for equity, then, was a deficit assumption about students in
the context of an assurance about the rightness of the practices which
characterized the institutions to which they had been admitted. The cultural
conditions from which practices characterizing the Academic Support phase can
be seen to emerge can thus be seen to fall within the ambit of what Knoblauch &
Brannon (1984) term a cultural literacy model focused on the inculcation of
western norms and values.

The practices arising from this set of conditions were therefore inherently liberal
in intent in that they focused on attempting to give black students equal
opportunity by filling the gap between their poor socio-economic and
educational backgrounds and university. Students underpreparedness for
tertiary study was seen to derive from apartheid which had structurally denied
them access to quality education. Academic support work was then
conceptualized as filling the gaps left by students impoverished educational
experiences. Significant here was the lack of acknowledgement of tertiary
learning as a socially constructed phenomenon underpinned by values about
what can count as knowledge and how that knowledge can be known. Rather,
learning, and achievement in learning, was viewed as dependent on factors
inherent to the individual such as intelligence and skills.
Many of the theories informing practice in the early Academic Support phase can
be seen to be consonant with the ideas above in that they view learning as
socially and culturally disembedded. The idea of learning as disembedded needs
to be contrasted with understandings of learning and teaching as social practices
as practices which are specific to times and places (see, for example, Gee,
1990). In the South African AD movement, it was only over time, however, that
understandings of learning and teaching as social practices become more
dominant.
A lot of early work focused on language and on students status as speakers of
English as an additional language. This early language work tended to be based
on what Christie (1985) terms a model of language as an instrument of
communication or on a model which understands language as a vehicle for
transmitting pre-formed ideas and concepts. This contrasts with a model of
language as a resource for making meanings (ibid) and which draws on social
context in order to make the choices necessary to make those meanings (see
also, Halliday, 1973; 1978; 1985). The early work thus tended to view language,
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like learning, as disembedded from social context and as consisting as a set of
neutral skills. As a result, language development practices tended to focus on
the form of the language and on the skills necessary to encode and decode
meanings into speech and writing.
An important step in this early language work (Starfield, 1990a; 1990b) involved
drawing on Cummins (1979) work on Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills
(BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). Cummins defines
BICS as involving language use which is rich in paralinguistic support derived
from the context in which it is used and which is also not cognitively demanding.
In contrast, CALP is understood as language use which is cognitively demanding
and which does not benefit from support from context. Although the BICS/CALP
distinction was important in that it allowed practitioners to understand that
students experiences with using language at tertiary level were not necessarily
language problems per se (in that many students had ample BICS but lacked
CALP) in both their home and additional languages, the early work still lacked
the sophisticated understandings of how social history and social context
impacted on language use.

Other significant early work focused on access and admissions and on the
development and on the identification of potential to succeed in higher
education in spite of poor scores on school leaving examinations. Many of these
initiatives involved the identification of elements of cognition and affect
impacting on academic success ( Potter & van der Merwe, 1993; van Dyk & van
Dyk, 1993) although there was also a major focus on correlating scores on the
Senior Certificate examination with performance at first year level (see, for
example, Badenhorst et al. 1990).

Although the findings of studies conducted in the earliest years of the AD
movement, along with the use of specific test batteries, might not have stood the
test of time particularly in terms of theoretical challenges to, for example, the use
of psychometric tests (with Wallace & Adams (1989), for example, making one of
the earliest challenges), they were important in initiating areas of endeavour
which remain significant in AD even today and which can be seen, for example, in
the work of Yeld & Haeck, 1997; Yeld, 2003). The difference, however, lies in the
availability of alternative understandings of what it means to succeed in higher
education.

The domain of structure
As will be seen from the brief analysis of the domain of culture offered above, in
the Academic Support phase, social group was clearly an important structure
affecting who would be present at any of the events intended to provide student
support and how those events might be experienced by students themselves. In
1984, for example, Scott (1984) was noting the resentment felt by many students
at having to complete ASP courses and linking this to black students sense of
being singled out from the mainstream.

It is interesting that social class was not directly identified as a social structure in
relation to the phenomenon of disadvantage in the early Academic Support
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phase in spite of the fact that the majority of black students were working class
because of the way apartheid had structured society. Arguably, this failure to
identify social class in relation to disadvantage can be attributed to the cultural
conditions of the struggle against apartheid which sought to elide difference. As
will be seen below in relation to the Academic Development phase, this was to
change arguably because of the theoretical positions which became available to
practitioners because of shifts in the domain of culture.

At an organizational level, another way structure impacted on events and
students experiences of those events involved the way early ASPs were located
in institutions. Early work tended to be adjunct to mainstream programmes in
that support/development was programmed in addition to mainstream
programmes and was offered by specially appointed staff members who were
often housed in units or centres. These centres then serviced the perceived
needs of students across the entire gamut of programmes offered by an
institution. It is not difficult to see how the interplay with ideas dominant in the
domain of culture led to the structure of the early programmes. If learning is
viewed as disembedded from disciplinary and other contexts, then student
development can also occur in isolation from those contexts. In practice,
however, early practitioners found themselves working with content even
though there is at least one report (Tisani, 1991) of practitioners being limited to
work with skills and being expressly forbidden to work with content.

Although many ASPs were located outside mainstream teaching and learning, in
a few institutions, most notably the University of the Witwatersrand, the
University of Cape Town and the University of Natal, faculty-based foundation
programmes providing access to specific mainstream programmes were
established. The embedding of development/support work in faculties was a
feature which was going to become increasingly dominant as time moved on. It
is important to note, however, that, even though this work was located in
faculties, it was not part of the mainstream programmes which had been
extended to incorporate it. This foundation work tended to be located in
Colleges or Programmes which were the responsibility of the Faculty
concerned but which still sat apart from the mainstream and continued to be
taught by educational specialists rather than academics.

The location of many early programmes as adjunct to the mainstream, also
impacted on the way practitioners were appointed as support rather than as
academic staff. This added to the fact that many early practitioners were
appointed on the basis of their expertise as school teachers a phenomenon
related to the construction of the difficulties black students faced as due to their
inadequate schooling in the apartheid system. Such practitioners were often
minimally qualified and this, in addition to their location in support services,
limited the way they were able to engage with academic organizational
structures such as faculty boards and senates and also on the way they were able
to engage with academics themselves. In many cases, this contributed to the
marginalized position of many of the early programmes and practitioners.

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Access to funding mechanisms located in material structures are obviously
crucial to development work. In the academic support phase, funding tended to
be donor based with institutions contributing in fairly minimal ways in the form
of established posts. Hunters (1985) survey of ASPs at the four historically white
liberal universities (Cape Town, the Witwatersrand, Rhodes & Natal) showed
that the majority of posts in the ASPs were donor funded. Over the years, the
South African Academic Development movement has consistently failed to
develop a strong cadre of practitioners and, to a large extent, this can be
attributed to the lack of permanent positions in the field or to a structural failure.

The domain of agency
Key to the set of conditions related to the Academic Support phase was the
assigning of agency to students who were deemed have the potential to succeed
in higher education provided gaps in skills and conceptual development were
filled as a result of support/development work. The assigning of agency to
students and to the practitioners expected to work with them in a remedial
fashion in this way takes no account of the alien nature of the system in which
students were expected to succeed and which was picked up in later work in the
Academic Development movement. Dominant assumptions in the domain of
culture tended to focus on the neutrality of learning and teaching without
questioning how, for example, ways of reading and writing (and, at tertiary level,
thus learning) worked to favour some and exclude others or how understandings
of knowledge itself might work to include some at the expense of others.

In assigning agency, some early development/support programmes did
acknowledge problems other than those related to cognition. Practitioners, for
example, recognized the enormous challenges students living in poor conditions
and with little money faced and acknowledged the way these challenges then
impacted on learning. Significantly, a common response to the acknowledgement
of these problems was for some programmes to appoint psychologists or social
workers (Donald & Rutherford, 1994). Potter & van der Merwe (1993) give
another indication of the role of counseling for disadvantaged students when
they refer to poor study habits as a cause of failure and the need for students
with such habits to be referred to counselors. Referral to counselors and
psychologists suggests that once the difficulties experienced by students had
been addressed in individual or group sessions, students would be able to
exercise agency to learn in environments which were very different to those
most had previously experienced. As will be seen later, this sort of assumption
was challenged as years wore on.

It is also possible to discern agency in the work of many early AD practitioners
who, in many respects, functioned as activists fighting for equity and for the
rights of black students to a quality education. Practitioners wrote funding
proposals, made arguments within institutional structures and undoubtedly did
a great deal to improve the chances of the black students who had gained
entrance to the historically white liberal universities. As will be seen in the
analysis of the next phase, however, the cultural system on which much of this
early work was based was to be challenged.

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A critical realist note
As already noted, critical realists reject determinist views of the world favouring
instead an understanding which perceives structures and mechanisms at the
level of the real as tendential. This means that although the structures and
mechanisms are enduring, the way they combine to produce events at the level
of the actual and experiences and observations at the level of the empirical,
where social interaction occurs, cannot always be predicted.

Earlier in this chapter, and following Volbrecht & Boughey (2005:58), AD was
defined as an open set of practices and it was pointed out that the practices
which have characterized each phase of the movement have co-existed and, in
some places, continue to co-exist, with other practices in different ways at
different institutions. Critical realism would explain this by noting that in any
institution the structures and mechanisms identified as part of the analysis are
available to come together so that events and experiences at the levels of the
actual and the empirical can emerge. This could mean that many of the
observations made in relation to what, in this chapter, is termed the Academic
Support phase can also be made alongside observations related to other, later,
phases of the movement. In offering this analysis, critical realism offers the
opportunity for those working in the AD movement to become more conscious of
the conditions from which the different practices they see and engage with
emerge and to begin to understand how they can make choices and try to make
the best of the conditions in which they work.

This chapter now moves to an analysis of the next phase of the movement,
Academic Development.
Academic Development
As already noted, the earliest development/support initiatives emerged in the
early 1980s. By the middle of the decade, the first challenges to the cultural and
structural conditions which had characterized what has been termed the
Academic Support phase began to emerge. It was not until the end of the decade
that these began to become more dominant, however, a phenomenon which
coincided with the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC.
Given the changes that occurred as apartheid was dismantled in the early to mid-
1990s, it is appropriate first to look at the domain of structure.

The domain of structure
According to Kraak (2001:87), the early 1990s can be identified as a pre-taking
of power era involving the mobilisation of the entire anti-apartheid movement
behind the task of forging new policy propositions across the entire gamut of
human existence. Given this background, equity, defined in National Education
Policy Investigations Report on Post-secondary Education as the improved
distribution of educational resources to disadvantaged communities (NEPI,
1992:11), was obviously a major issue. In the context of higher education, policy
documents therefore had the potential to work as mechanisms to promote
equity. The extent to which the potential of polices to work as mechanisms was
actualized, however, was dependent on the extent to which policies were
implemented and, thus, on resources available for implementation.
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In the face of this overwhelming demand for equity, the relatively small and
focused efforts which characterized earlier Academic Support work were clearly
going to be challenged and the realization slowly grew that future initiatives
would need to address disadvantage or underpreparedness as a majority
rather than a minority phenomenon, a point which was made in the literature by
Mehl as early as 1988 and Moulder in 1991. This realization represented a shift
in the domain of culture since it involved a reconceptualisation of the
phenomena of disadvantage and underpreparedness themselves.

The idea that underpreparedness would eventually be a majority phenomenon
was supported by the experiences of those working in ASPs which had been set
up on historically black campuses (such as the University of Bophuthatswana) as
the 1980s wore on. Partly as a result of the nature of South African society at that
time but also because of important theoretical differences, by 1986 those
working on historically black campuses had established a professional
organization named the South African Association of Academic Development
(SAAAD). SAAAD existed alongside a group of practitioners from the historically
white liberal campuses who ran an annual conference and who had published
proceedings from that conference as ASPects. Other practitioners had become
members of the South African Association for Research and Development in
Higher Education (SAARDHE) and had published in the Associations journal the
South African Journal of Higher Education (SAJHE). SAAAD became a rallying
point for what, at that time, emerged as a vociferous and apparently radical
opposition to dominant student support practices. Over time, a growing number
of practitioners working at the historically white institutions came to adopt
positions advocated by SAAAD and, eventually, to join the organization which
later became an overarching professional body for those working in the field of
Academic Development.

Over the years, and as will be shown later in this chapter, the existence of a
professional organization as a structure providing support and development for
practitioners as well as a space for the sharing of beliefs, values and theories
about the practices they engaged with was to be an ongoing issue. In the
Academic Development phase, the emergence of SAAAD was critical in serving
this function and bringing about shifts in events at the level of the actual and
experiences at the level of the empirical.

The shift to democracy also brought about changes in funding. In the early
1990s, approximately R70 million worth of public funding was made available
for Academic Development work via the Independent Development Trust (IDT).
This funding was grant based and required proposals for projects to be
developed and submitted. The availability of this funding led to a growth in AD
work but, as it was grant based, it did not necessarily lead to an increase in the
number of established posts in the institutions which used it. This then impacted
on the development of a cadre of highly qualified and experienced professionals
who could interact with academics as equals and who could find a way to argue
their case through institutional structures.

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In the realm of practice different kinds of organizational structures were also
developed. The existence of AD units and centres servicing a range of
programmes and initiatives across entire institutions has already been noted as
a characteristic of the Academic Support phase. In the Academic Development
phase, although central units and centres continued to exist, they were
accompanied by attempts to embed AD in faculties and departments in an
attempt to bring about change in mainstream practices related to teaching and
learning.

Projects typical of what became known as the infusion model (Walker &
Badsha, 1993) included attempts to embed tutorials in mainstream teaching so
that they became the responsibility of the department, a process which then
allowed AD practitioners to focus on tutor development rather than tutoring
themselves (see, for example, Davies & Tisani, 1993). Other projects centred on
introducing new forms of pedagogy and curriculum structure (see, for example,
Cornell, 1992; Cornell & Witz, 1993), on the development of language across the
curriculum (see, for example, Boughey & Van Rensburg, 1994; Coetzee &
Boughey, 1994; Motha & May, 1996).

Critical to the success of these projects was the willingness of mainstream
academic staff members to engage with the need for change as there was no
structural need for them to do so. The success of the projects, in other words,
was dependent on mainstream staff and institutional managers/leaders
subscribing to the values and beliefs which dominated the AD cultural system,
which were not the same as the dominant cultural systems of the institutions in
which they were based. As a result, work completed during this second phase
was patchy and had no guarantee that it would be sustained once individuals
engaged in the projects moved on or when soft funding was exhausted.

The domain of culture
Key to the domain of culture in the Academic Development phase were
challenges to the understandings of disadvantage which had sustained the
earlier academic support conjuncture. Mehl (1988:17) summarises these
understandings thus:

The questions which are being addressed have changed from how the
underdeveloped are developed, to examining the basic underpinning
of the institutions themselves. In the process it is becoming clearer that in
relation to the realities of present-day South Africa it is not simply a case
of students carrying various educational deficits onto the campus with
them because of the socio-economic and political dispensation, but rather
a case of the universities themselves, as represented by academic and
administrative staff, being deficient, if the vision of a non-racial,
democratic South Africa is to be realized.

This shift to locating disadvantage in the institution, and, later in the practices
which sustained it, led to developments at a theoretical level in the sense that
practitioners began to draw on a wider range of theories and more social theory
than before. Importantly, the shift also involved a questioning of the extent to
12
which students could exercise the agency needed for success. As Mehl (ibid:18)
himself points out, the idea that change should take place at institutional rather
than individual level is linked to Peoples Education, a radical reform movement
which aimed to use curricula
1
to bring about change in South African education.
For Mehl (ibid:18) this process had to be linked to that of Africanisation or of
bringing the university more into contact with the stark reality which the
colonized student represents.

The conceptual underpinnings of what might be termed the social turn in the
AD movement can be discerned in the work of a number of theorists including
James Paul Gee (1990) whose Social Linguistics and Literacies proved to be a
seminal text informing ideas related to learning and teaching. Gee uses the term
Discourse (intentionally capitalized) to refer to the notion of a way of being in
the world. The term literacy is then used to denote the ability to demonstrate
that way of being. Literacy is thus understood to be much wider than reading
and writing and to be more than a matter of acultural, asocial, apolitical skill
since the practices in which it is manifest result from the values and attitudes
which inform them. In Gees terms, academic Discourses can be seen to be
underpinned by values and attitudes relating to what can count as knowledge
and how that knowledge can be known. Thus, demonstrating literacy as a
scientist (by for example, speaking and writing in ways common to scientists,
wearing a white coat in a laboratory and so on) can be seen to relate to a valuing
of objectivity and, thus, to an ontological position which is inherently empiricist.

Key to gaining membership of a Discourse is access to the values and attitudes
which underpin it. Gee explicates this point by making a distinction between
acquisition and learning. Acquisition takes place over time through exposure
to a Discourse and through contact with those who are literate in it. Through this
exposure and contact, novices not only acquire the forms or literacy practices
which characterize, sustain and reproduce the Discourse but also the values
which underpin those practices. Learning, which occurs as a result of being
taught, is unlikely to enliterate novices in a Discourse. Learning is however
important as it is only through learning that critique of the Discourse and its
practices becomes possible as learning offers a meta-frame through which the
Discourse and its literacy can be analysed. By introducing the idea of critique,
Gee thus offers an alternative to the idea of assimilation into a community of
practice which is not always present in work which understands the university
from a socio-cultural perspective (see, for example, Bartholomae, 1985).

Underpinning the work of Gee (1990) and Taylor et al. (1988) is the idea of
literacy (in the sense of reading and writing related behaviours) as a social
practice. Although Gees construct of literacy is wider in that it encompasses
behaviours other than those related to printed text, Streets (1984, 1995, 1996)
ideological model of literacy can be viewed as related to Gees position. In
contrast to the autonomous model which constructs literacy as a neutral
technical skill involving the decoding and encoding of print, Streets ideological

1
The term curriculum is used in its widest sense here and is intended to embrace the how as well as
the what of teaching. Curriculum would therefore include teaching methodology and assessment
practices as well as a negotiated understanding of what should be taught.
13
model acknowledges that reading and writing involve values and attitudes to
printed text which then give rise to reading practices. The ability to read
critically, for example, is thus not only a matter of identifying arguments and
evaluating their validity but also involves a predisposition to challenge, rather
than revere, the word of the text. The idea of reading as a value-driven practice,
rather than a skill, also allows us to account for the setting aside of printed text
in favour of oral communication even when, technically, people have the ability
to read those texts (see Heath, 1983 on this point).

These sorts of understandings presented profound challenges to the practices
which had characterized the Academic Support phase. If literacy is acquired,
rather than learned, then the development of learning appropriate to academic
Discourses needs to be conceived as a process which takes place over time
through exposure to mainstream teaching, which attempts to make overt both
the practices and the values and attitudes which underpin them, rather than in
adjunct classes and tutorials. In critical realist terms, these sorts of theories in
the domain of culture at the level of the real thus give rise to attempts to infuse
development work into mainstream teaching at the level of the actual.

Other theory commonly cited during the Academic Development phase was
Bourdieus (2002) notion of cultural capital which offered an alternative
construction to the notion of disadvantage which had sustained the Academic
Support phase. Mandew (1993:622) summarises Bourdieu from his position
within AD thus:

[Bourdieu] asserts that it is through control of the education system and
by controlling the actual criteria of cultural selection that the dominant
class ensures the reproduction of its own culture. According to this view,
unlike working class parents, middle class parents pass on to their
children skills and knowledge with which to make the most of what
school has to offer. These skills and knowledge are what constitute
cultural capital.

The relevance of the notion of cultural capital to the position of black students
entering universities which were informed by western, masculine and essentially
middle class traditions is obvious. The use of Bourdieus work can thus be seen
to represent an attempt to understand the structural conditions on which
university entrance was dependent within the domain of culture.

The Academic Development phase also drew heavily on the work of theorists
such as Feuerstein (Feuerstein et al., 1980) and Vygotsky (1978, 1986) which
took account of society in explaining learning rather than merely locating it as an
individual phenomenon. Feuersteins (ibid) construct of the mediated learning
experience (MLE) defined as a special kind of interaction, involving a human
being who interposes himself between the learner and the world of stimuli in
order to mediate or give meaning to the stimuli (Mentis & Frelick, 1993:104)
was attractive to AD practitioners as it constructed a role for them and for
academic staff in the interposing position. The lack of mediated learning
experiences in students own learning histories also provided an explanation for
14
the problems they experienced upon entering tertiary education. Similarly,
Vygotskys (1978:86) notion of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
defined as the distance between the actual developmental level as determined
by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as
determined through problem solving under adult guidance or more capable
peers was also attractive to those working with the development of student
learning as it not only identified a teaching space which could be cognitively
substantiated but also a role for them and mainstream lecturers within that
space.

Also significant in the Academic Development phase was Geislers (1994) work
entitled Academic Literacy and the Nature of Expertise. In a wide review of
research, Geisler showed how i) school based reading and writing practices are
qualitatively different to practices within the university and ii) how school does
not necessarily prepare students for university study. An example of this
phenomenon is the reading comprehension which requires school students to
answer questions using only information contained in the text. Students thus
come to understand that the text is a source of knowledge. Higher education, on
the other hand, requires students to use information in the context (i.e. in other
texts) and information stored as prior knowledge to interrogate the text before
coming to any conclusions. This practice is widely referred to as reading
critically and is something prized in higher education circles yet school does not
prepare students to do this.

Common to all the theories outlined above was their ability to sustain an
infused approach to student support because of i) their acknowledgement of
academic ways of knowing and of the behaviours related to those ways of
knowing as social practices and ii) their shared understanding that these
practices are only developed over time and through contact with those who are
already literate in Gees (1990) terms. This meant that they were available to
challenge understandings of academic behaviours as asocial, acultural skills
which could be taught in special adjunct classes which had dominated the
Academic Support phase. The shifts in the domain of culture between the
Academic Support phase and the Academic Development phase were therefore
quite profound.

Agency

Given the strong focus on equity in the domain of culture and the argument for
institutions to be transformed to meet the needs of individual students in the
Academic Development phase, it is not surprising that much of the work related
to agency was activist in nature. Commonly, individuals who were heads of
Academic Development units or centres argued the case for the need for the
transformation of curricula and pedagogy as they engaged with institutional
structures such as faculty boards and senates. The potential of these arguments
to bring about change was, of course, compromised by status of the people
making them and their construction as other to the mainstream academy
thanks to dominant ideas in the domain of culture. The interplay of culture,
structure and agency can thus be seen to be critical to the emergence of change
15
in events at the level of the actual (an example of which might be the decision on
the part of a member of the academic staff to engage with curriculum review in
order to enhance student learning) and experiences at the level of the empirical
on the part of both students and staff.

One significant way in which agency was exercised during the Academic
Development phase, however, related to attempts to develop academic capacity
within the AD movement itself. Practitioners began to realize that, if they were to
be able to engage with mainstream academic staff members as equals, they
needed to upgrade their qualifications and begin to produce research. Capacity
building within the movement around research became key and SAAAD, the
professional organization described above, played an important role structurally
in doing this. Annual conferences provided spaces for practitioners to practise
being academics and regional workshops and meetings provided important
opportunities for members to learn about research. These observations
regarding the exercise of agency in relation to capacity building speak to Sewells
(1992) point that structures empower agents differentially and that agency can
be collective or individual. In this case, SAAAD appears to have acted as a
structure which empowered both individuals and the AD community as a
collective.

A critical/social realist overview of the first two phases of work with student
learning

As will be evident from the analysis so far, shifts in the domain of culture gave
rise to differences in the way attempts to develop and support student learning
were conceptualized in the Academic Support and Academic Development
phases. Although alternative understandings of the constructs of disadvantage
and underpreparedness became available to those involved in student support
and development work, other elements of the cultural system remained
unchanged. Discourses constructing students learning problems as a result of
the poor schooling system and their social and cultural histories remained
dominant in most universities. As a result, the practice of infusion, which
emerged from the alternative understandings, was challenged by dominant ideas
at the level of the real and this prevented the sustained emergence of events
related the transformation of curricula and pedagogy identified as critical by
those subscribing to these alternative understandings.

Although alternative understandings in the domain of culture did become
available to those involved in student support and development work, shifts in
the domain of structure lagged behind cultural change. The potential of change
in the domain of structure to work with understandings in the domain of culture
will be discussed as this chapter proceeds.

Higher Education Development

As already noted, the final phase in the history of the Academic Development
movement identified by Volbrecht & Boughey (2005) is Higher Education
16
Development. Critical to this phase is the construction of the work of the
Academic Development movement as a resource for institutional efficiency in
relation to teaching and learning. The final section of this chapter examines the
conditions from which practice aimed at higher education development emerge.

The domain of culture

As I have pointed out elsewhere (Boughey, 2007), shifts in the policy field have
been instrumental in the positioning of Academic Development work within
discourses related to efficiency rather than equity. Several writers (Kraak, 2001;
Oldfield, 2001) have pointed out that the negotiated settlement which led to the
first democratic election had profound implications for policy. The liberation
movement had been ideologically positioned in what Kraak (ibid:88) terms left
socialist formulations. As the ANC came to power, however, a shift from social
democratic to neo-liberal positions occurred and was manifest in the
development of stringent macro economic frameworks as the 1990s wore on
(Fataar, 2001). Shifts in the domain of culture were therefore accompanied by
structural adjustments.

At the level of the actual, the effects of the ideological shifts in the domain of
culture were experienced most painfully in the form of cuts for Academic
Development work located within equity frameworks as the century came to a
close. The reliance on soft funding in the Academic Development phase has been
noted earlier in this chapter. As soft funding came to an end, changes in the way
the public universities were funded meant that posts established to further
transformation and infusion were lost as institutions were unable to cover
their costs.

The interplay of culture with structure is also evident in other areas. As the
prospect of democracy became more and more possible, the idea of South Africa
needing to participate in a globalised economy began to influence thinking
around education in the form of the high skills discourse (Kraak, 2001). The
effects of globalization as a macro economic structure thus came to be
experienced in the way higher education came to be constructed as a provider of
a skilled workforce for a global economy. This then came to involve a focus on
the need for efficiency in the sector a discursive shift from which new forms of
student development/support practices, related to the need for universities to
improve graduation and throughput rates and decrease attrition, were to
emerge.

In the last section of this chapter, some of the theoretical positions in the domain
of culture out of which practices related to infusion and transformation
emerged were outlined. These positions continue to be available to the field and,
indeed, have been developed and expanded as practitioners have increasingly
drawn on social theory and on social theories of learning and language even
within dominant constructions of student development work as related to
efficiency. Key to this expansion has been thinking which draws on the work of
British Sociologist Basil Bernstein (see, for example, Shay, 2008(a), 2008(b);
Vorster, 2010) and work drawing on Activity Theory (see, for example,
17
Garraway, 2006, 2007, 2009a, 2009b). Much of this work has focused on the
curriculum and, as new forms of institutions have emerged in the universities of
technology and comprehensives, has included the need to integrate the world of
work in learning (see, for example, Garraway, 2006, 2007, 2009a, 2009b, 2010;
Winberg, 2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b. 2009).

The significance of theoretically based research in the South African Academic
Development movement needs to be appreciated. In a review of forty years
worth of research into student learning in higher education based on a content
analysis of three premier journals in the field, Haggis (2009:384) notes the
predominance of approaches which privilege what she terms individualised and
static aspects of cognitive psychology throughout the 1990s at the expense of a
more nuanced and critical approach to the theorization of the individual and
society (p.383). It will be apparent from the review of the literature related to
what has been termed the domain of culture in this chapter, that South African
Academic Development practitioners were, in many respects ahead of thinkers
elsewhere. The tradition of drawing on critical approaches has continued into
the third phase of AD work. Haggis concludes her review by noting that [i]f we
can begin to stand even further outside the results of our own enculturation
and start to see things differently, a further question is how it might be possible
to find productive and generative ways of challenging aspects of what we see
that we wish to change (p.288). I would argue that Haggis identification of the
need to stand outside the results of our own enculturation has long
characterized South African Academic Development work. What has happened,
however, is that contributions to the international literature are only now
beginning to be made in any number with the result that much of the rich work
which has characterized the movement is only available in the relatively fragile
forms of conference publications and in local journals.

However, it is also important to note that the sort of consolidation in the domain
of culture identified above has not been uniform, largely because of the large
turn over in practitioners thanks to the instability of funding and the resultant
lack of permanent positions and career progression. As a result, newcomers
need to build understandings and, in the meantime, often tend to draw on many
of the commonsense theories and approaches which sustained the Academic
Support phase and which are dominant outside Academic Development
communities.

The domain of structure

Although development did take place in the domain of culture, arguably
developments in the domain of structure have led to change in the way student
development/support work is practised.

One of the most important developments involved the establishment of a
National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and the concomitant introduction of
outcomes based education (OBE), as a result of the SAQA Act (Act 58 of 1995).
The NQF distinguishes between a qualification and a programme of study
leading to that qualification. Qualifications are described in terms of learning
18
outcomes and programmes then need to be designed in a way which allow
learners to attain those outcomes as efficiently as possible.

The need for programme design then leads to the possibility of aligning
entrance criteria, learning outcomes, associated assessment criteria, assessment
tasks, pedagogical approaches, learning resources, credit values and more direct
forms of student support in order to allow the programmeto fulfill its purpose
and produce the kind of graduates/diplomates/certificated individuals
described in its purpose statement and indicated by its location on the NQF.

Although OBE has been subject to strong critique because of its effect on what
Muller (2008) terms the conceptual coherence of some curricula, the construct
of curriculum alignment provides institutions with a tool which can be used to
ensure that students learning needs are met and standards are maintained.
Although this tool is available, it tends not to be used in institutions i) lacking
capacity in the management of teaching and learning and where structures to
manage teaching and learning are not in place, ii) lacking capacity in the field of
AD itself iii) where cultural conditions mean mainstream staff are not prepared
to engage with issues related to teaching and learning or iv) where mainstream
staff lack capacity to work with curricular and pedagogical issues. While the NQF
and the introduction of OBE have been significant developments in the domain of
structure, once again the interplay between culture and structure can be seen to
impact on the extent to which structural change at the level of the real can bring
about change at the levels of the actual and the empirical in the form of increased
success rates for students and enhanced experiences of both learning and
success.

A second major structural development occurred in the early 2000s as a result of
the National Plan for Higher Education (NPHE) (DoE, 2001) which provided for
the establishment of new institutions and new institutional types. The
emergence of Universities of Technology and Comprehensive Universities
2
then
opened the way for i) a wider range of qualifications to be offered by single
institutions and ii) specialization and focus according to institutional type
(traditional university, comprehensive university, university of technology).
Although the delay in the development of a new Higher Education Qualification
Framework (HEQF) impacted on the way comprehensive universities and
universities of technology in particular have been able to develop curricula
which are relevant to their new roles, the availability of a range of qualifications
from NQF Level 5 upwards in a single institution meant that students could be
placed in aprogramme which closely matched their learning needs and abilities.

The ability to place students accurately is, of course, dependent on information
about the students available on admission. If this information for placing were
available and, if programmes were well aligned, this would have the potential to
impact on success, throughput and graduation rates. Unfortunately, institutional

2
Comprehensive universities emerged as a result of the merger of former technikons with traditional
universities. Comprehensive universities offer a mix of vocationally oriented programmes and more
traditional programmes.
19
procedures for placing students along with the lack of programme alignment
mean that this potential is not always capitalized upon.

Specialisation and focus by institutional type has the potential to impact in
similar ways in that, for example, UoTs could be expected to develop the
expertise to identify the students who could benefit from the types of
programmes they offered and also to develop high quality specialized
programmes which would support students through to completion. As I have
shown elsewhere (Boughey, 2010) however, the specialization in teaching and
learning required by universities of technology has not always been developed.

Problems in finalizing a new Higher Education Qualifications Framework for the
South African system have been noted above. The new HEQF was published in
2007 (DoE 2007) and, although indications are that this will need further
refinement, many institutions have already begun to review qualifications and
the programmes leading to those qualifications in order to ensure they are
aligned with the framework.

Ideally reviewing qualifications and the programmes leading to those
qualifications should involve more than a paper exercise and should take into
consideration understandings of alignment outlined above. For this to happen a
number of things need to be in place at institutional level including the will (on
the part of management and mainstream staff) and capacity (on the part of AD
practitioners and mainstream staff) to drive and implement the review process.
Where will is concerned, once again the possibility of conditions in the domain of
culture to block the potential of a structural development to bring about change
can be discerned.

Yet another development relates to the establishment of the Higher Education
Quality Committee (HEQC) and the introduction of quality assurance to South
African higher education in 2001 (CHE, 2001). The HEQC is currently
completing its first round of institutional audits. These audits have attempted to
affirm an institutions own evaluation of the extent to which it has met audit
criteria in a number of areas including teaching and learning. As I have shown
(Boughey, 2009, 2010), at an institutional level this has resulted in the
development of quality assurance mechanisms including policies on teaching
and learning and attempts to use feedback from students to enhance teaching
and course design. Although quality assurance frameworks and mechanisms are
in place to a greater or lesser extent at most institutions, the extent to which they
are implemented in relation to teaching and learning varies enormously.

In addition to conducting institutional audits, the HEQC also works in the area of
programme accreditation. Institutions wishing to offer new programmes need
accreditation from the HEQC before students can be enrolled. Programme
accreditation processes require alignment of the curriculum described earlier.
As well as accrediting new programmes, the HEQC has also conducted a number
of national reviews of established programmes. Once again, the focus in the
review is alignment of all elements of the programme in order to ensure that the
programme is fit for the purpose it has identified for itself. A review of the work
20
of the HEQC conducted in 2008 (HEQC, 2008) identified national reviews as one
of the most successful mechanisms for enhancing quality in teaching and
learning. Since that time, no new national reviews have been conducted although
a review of LLB programmes now appears to be underway. National reviews,
like programme accreditation and institutional audit, depend on peer review and
on the capacity of mainstream academics to make judgments regarding the
quality. Although the HEQC has put a great deal of effort into the development of
this capacity, arguably it is still not in abundant supply.

Funding has been noted as an important mechanism throughout this chapter.
The new funding framework related to three year rolling plans (DoE, 2004)
allocates funding for teaching and learning on the basis of agreed enrolments
and the extent and rate at which enrolled students then pass through an
institution in order to graduate. Norms for success, throughput and graduation
rates have been established and institutions with graduate shortfalls (DoHET,
2009:11) became eligible for a Teaching Development Grant which replaces part
of the output subsidy. Until now, although these grants have been earmarked
and allocated to institutions for the development of teaching, but no
accountability mechanisms have been in place to ensure that this development
actually takes place. As a result, much of this funding has simply been used for
institutional running costs. The recommendations of a review of teaching
development grants in 2008 (DoE, 2008) have now been included in a recent
Ministerial Statement on Funding (DoE, 2009) and, from 2011 a new system will
be in place. This new system will make teaching development grants available to
all institutions, not only those with performance falling below national output
norms (DoE, 2009:12).

The Grants will be allocated on the basis of plans submitted by institutions
identifying i) programmes in which the graduation rates of disadvantaged
students are significantly lower than those of advantaged students ii) what the
DoE (ibid) terms killer courses within those programmes (i.e. those courses in
which large numbers of disadvantaged students fail) and iii) the interventions
they would make to improve success rates in those courses. Annual progress
reports would then be required on the way the grants have been used. This
represents a significant improvement on the way teaching development grants
have been allocated until now although the Ministerial Statement does not take
into account the ongoing need for development in all courses if curricula are to
remain relevant and if proactive measures are to be take to prevent students
failing. Most significantly, the change offers an important opportunity for student
development work linked to the motivator of funding provided i) the will and
capacity to manage grants at an institutional level and ii) the capacity on the part
of mainstream academic staff and AD practitioners is available to drive
curriculum development and the enhancement of pedagogy. Once again the
significance of conditions in the domain of culture needs to be considered.

Yet another funding mechanism impacting on Academic Development relates to
the introduction of Foundation Programme Grants in 2000 as a form of non-
recurrent funding. As noted in earlier in this chapter, bridging and foundation
courses were among some of the earliest forms of student support. As also
21
noted, one of the problems with the earliest forms of this intervention related to
the fact that these courses did not necessarily articulate with mainstream
programmes. The DoEs Foundation Programme Grants now require students to
be admitted to Extended Programmes or fully accredited programmes which
have been lengthened by up to a year of additional study in order to allow for the
inclusion of activities intended to support and develop students enrolled on
them. In principle, this is a significant advance as it i) requires institutions to
identify those students who could benefit from an Extended Programme and ii)
design and offer programmes which include an integrated foundation phase.

In practice, however, the potential of Extended Programmes is not always
capitalised upon because of i) poor placement procedures involving the
identification of students who are weaker than students admitted to regular
programmes when the success, throughput and graduation rates of the students
admitted to regular programmes already fall far below DoE norms ii) foundation
provision based on commonsense rather than theory and research generated in
the field of Academic Development over the last twenty five years and iii) the
failure of the foundation phase to articulate with mainstream provision with the
result that students continue to hit the wall and fail once they exit the
foundation phase. Once again, these issues relate to management and capacity at
institutional levels and, importantly, to conditions in the domain of culture.

Until now, the DoE has relied on the services of an expert group in order to
award funding on the basis of a set of strictly applied criteria for funding. These
criteria however only relate to the broad curriculum structure and not to course
design. In addition, although the DoE analyse students performance on
Extended Programmes, no mechanisms are in place to identify those
programmes where students still continue to fail. The CHE is currently exploring
the idea of the introduction of a four year extended programme more generally
in the form of a four year bachelors degree. Such an initiative would have
enormous implications for funding and other policies. A critical question,
however, relates to the extent the higher education system would have the
capacity to implement four year programmes given some of the problems
outlined above in relation to current extended programmes and especially given
conditions in the domain of culture.

Yet another mechanism emerging from the level of the real involves the
development of systems to track students performance. In recent years, terms
such as success rates, graduation rates and throughput have increasingly
become part of institutional discourse as institutional leadership and
management teams have tried to manage performance in order to maximize
subsidy income. One effect of the inclusion of these terms in institutional
discourse in the domain of culture is very evident in AD related discourses where
practitioners often construct their work within the need for improved efficiency
measured by increased throughput and success and graduation rates. Linked to
this phenomenon, and also to the work of the HEQC which has stressed the use of
institutional data in managing quality in its audit processes, is the idea of
tracking . This involves the use of a data base to i) track students performance
against the criteria used to admit them to the university in order to validate
22
those criteria and ii) to identify students at risk on the basis of their
performance on assessment tasks in the courses they take in order to offer
appropriate interventions and iii) to identify courses with high failure rates in
order to effect some sort of curricular or pedagogical intervention. Not all
institutions have tracking mechanisms in place and, even where systems have
developed, the structures which identify students as being at risk are not
always sufficient to provide the support and development required. Once again,
development in this area requires agency to be exercised to manage tracking
and to effect improvement at institutional levels.

The focus on admissions and placement testing in the earliest phase of student
development /support work has been noted earlier in this chapter. The
National Benchmark Tests (NBTs), developed under the auspices of Higher
Education South Africa (HESA) are the latest generation of a long line of tests
developed thanks to the expertise of the Alternative Admissions Research
Project at the University of Cape Town. The NBTs, which test students in the
domains of Academic Literacy, Quantitative Literacy and Cognitive Academic
Mathematical Proficiency, aim to identify three kinds of students: i) students
who can be admitted directly into a regular programme and be expected to
succeed without any additional form of support ii) students who can be admitted
into a regular programme and can be expected to succeed with support deemed
appropriate by the institution iii) students whose learning challenges are so
severe that they could not be expected to cope in regular programmes and would
need to be admitted to some form of non-credit bearing preparatory programme.
The NBTs have been piloted and are now offered at venues across the country in
the year prior to that in which students seek admission to institutions of higher
education.

Although the NBTs offer a powerful mechanism for placing students in
appropriate programmes, their administration at institutional level means that
the mechanism does not always live up to its promise. At many universities,
students walk in to campus in February having made no previous application.
This means that, if the tests were to be used, then they would need to be
administered in February as students were on the campus unless institutions
were willing to refuse all walk ins. Alternatively existing structures to prepare
students for university admission (career guidance, advice about applications,
advice about programmes etc) would need to be enhanced so that they
functioned effectively and students could be guided into taking the tests in the
year prior to their admission and counseled on results. For the tests to be used
optimally, there would also need to be a focus on the development of capacity in
managing and developing teaching and learning at institutional levels and
particularly on the ability to develop appropriate interventions at the level of
curriculum. Once again the importance of conditions in the domain of
institutional culture is apparent if admissions and placement testing is to be
realized as a mechanism with the potential to impact on student learning.

Agency

23
The last phase of work in student learning has been described as having been
characterized by a focus on efficiency and as being constructed within the need
for higher education development. This construction in the domain of culture
has resulted in the establishment of senior positions in institutional management
structures with responsibility for managing teaching and learning. The potential
of these individuals to act as social actors with the power to bring about
enhanced student learning is, however, related to the ideas they can draw on in
the cultural domain. All too often, however, the theoretical capital lies not with
these individuals but in individuals in teaching and learning centres or in the
centres as collective/ corporate agents.

At other institutions, there is very little theoretical capital on which to draw, a
phenomenon which relates to the historical failure of the field of Academic
Development to build a cadre of practitioners largely because of structural
conditions. The need for this cadre to be built from now on cannot be
overestimated.
The way forward?

This chapter has attempted to track shifts in structural, cultural and agential
conditions at the level of the real in relation to work intended to develop and
support student learning in the South African higher education system. In the
analysis, the interplay of culture with structure has emerged as critical.

In the earliest phase of student development work, arguably both structural and
cultural systems did not create the situational logics/ conditions conducive to AD
work. In the second Academic Development phase, cultural systems developed
to the extent that powerful theoretical understandings started to become
available to explain what was experienced and observed at the levels of the
empirical and the actual. The existence of dominant alternatives to these
theoretical positions in the form of commonsense and deficit discursive
constructions of students problems served to work against the potential of these
theoretical positions to bring about change. At the same time, conditions in the
domain of structure meant that gains which had been made in the domain of
culture could not be maximized through the conjunction of structure and culture.

In relation to the most recent phase of student development and support work, I
have attempted to show how the emergence of structural mechanisms have
opened the way for new forms of practice to emerge. Critical to the success of
these structural developments are, however, conditions in the domain of culture
which continue to have the potential to block emergent practices. Once again, the
domain of culture emerges as highly significant in the analysis.

In April 2010, the new Minister of Higher Education and Training, Dr Blade
Nzimande, convened a Stakeholder Summit on Higher Education
Transformation. The Declaration which emerged from the Summit (REF)
recommends the development of mechanisms to promote student-centredness
and caring universities and the development of a charter on teaching and
learning. Both of these recommendations emerged from an acknowledgement
24
that it was the universities which needed to transform rather than students
which needed to be fixed in order to to enter unchanged institutions an idea
which, as this chapter has shown, has informed student development and
support work since the mid 1980s. Critically, although the Summit Declaration
recognizes a number of challenges for the South African higher education
system, it does not overtly identify challenges in the domain of academic culture
which have worked to resist change over the years. If the analysis in this chapter
is correct, it is, however, in this area that most work remains to be done.
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