Dear future readers of my academic writing

Dear student of 2033,

How are you?  I hope that wherever you are in the world, they’ve cured AIDS, the Middle East is peaceful,  and they’ve finally invented those hoverboards from Back To The Future 2.

I’m writing because by now you probably know me as a groundbreaking thinker in the field of Higher Education Studies but today, 17 March 2014, I am but a lowly PhD student trying to chart my course through the choppy sea of academic research.

I am writing to you to promise that no matter how smart I get, no matter the brilliant knowledge I create, no matter whether I’m a Master or a Doctor or a Professor, I will always write in way that you can understand. I will not subject you to the experience I had this morning, of opening a key text and, on the first few pages, encountering the following words:

predicates… reification… ineradicable… adduced… vexacious… subsumption…unreduced… heuristic… verifactory… incommensurability… hors textuelle…multifarious…corrigibly

Please know, dear student, that I am no dummy. The librarian in primary school thought I was a child genius because I read all the Dr Doolittle books in grade 2. I can “big word” it up with the best of them and I will, eventually, conquer the words above.

But know too that my many years of studying and teaching have taught me that the finest wordsmiths are those who can say what they need to say clearly and simply. They’re the ones who really impress me, making concepts come alive and helping me access new worlds of knowledge.

So before I let you return to your 3D hyper-virtual classroom (and I return to a world where it’s still possible to lose an aeroplane) let me once again pledge to keep my academic writing crisp and clear for the sake of you, my future reader.

Greetings and salutations,

G

What’s in a (lecturer’s) name? Awakening to cultural awareness in the classroom.

I was thrilled to be asked to chair a session at HAICU’s (UCT’s HIV/AIDS, Inclusivity and Change Unit, if you didn’t know) colloquium  on Reconciliation, Intergenerational Trauma and Higher Education last week. I  felt like the programme had been planned especially for me since it focussed on issues that occupy my mind a lot and spoke to my identities as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, a post-Apartheid South African and a higher education scholar. You can find out more about the colloquium here. 

During the day we were exposed to stories about the Nazi Holocaust, about the legacy of trauma and eventual forgiveness. We heard about how Rwandans grappled to come to terms with the 1994 genocide and about apartheid’s effect on the South Africa of today. My take-home from the day was that all South Africans – whether perpetrators, victims or bystanders of/to apartheid – are still trying to find ways to manage the trauma of that time, and that dialogue is such an important part of this process. 

I had an opportunity to reflect on this in class last week.  I always encourage my students to call my “Gabi”. In part, I think this was inspired by my father who, even when he was Dean of a university faculty, insisted that his students call him by his first name. I see it as a way to get the students to relate to me less as a teacher and more as a facilitator – a co-creator of learning in the classroom. 

However, in one of my classes I have a black student who insists on calling me “ma’am”. This makes me feel old, like when little Afrikaans kids call me “tannie” (auntie in Afrikaans), so I’ve tried to push him to call me by my name. However, on Thursday, he explained to me that he comes from a culture that places a lot of respect on elders and that he’d feel uncomfortable calling me “Gabi”.

I was glad he’d been brave enough to explain this to me because it reinforced what I’d learnt at the colloquium. In a country as diverse as South Africa we need to listen to each other and consider different experiences and cultures in the way we relate to one another. I’ll definitely get off this guy’s case from now on, although I’m still not sure I can stomach being a “tannie” quite yet. 

Loaded guns and hidden plug points: my 2014 teaching year kicks off

The 2014 academic year got off to a flying start at the University of Cape Town this week, with the same dire lack of parking and soul-destroying registration queues that UCT students and academics have come to know so well.

I taught my first Professional Communications lecture on Tuesday morning and had to have a giggle about the mixed bag of teaching venues. It’s really luck of the draw. One semester you’re teaching in a high-tech superspace, with control panels and light dimmers, surround sound options and bluetooth link-up. And the next you’re in a tiny room down the hall behind the door and under the stairs, where you need the students’ help to hunt down the plug point (which turns out to be at the furthest point possible from the data projector) and the chalk board keeps shooting up to the ceiling whenever you try to write on it.

Chalk board adventures aside, it was great to be back in the classroom and, for the millionth time, get inspired by these sparky students who have an answer for everything and challenge me with their unique perspectives. Teaching is the funnest thing I do, so it was a sobering reminder when I came across this quote by Gee in Social Linguistics and Learning: Ideology in Discourses (2008: 64):

A text, whether written on paper, or on the soul (Plato), or on the world (Freire), is a loaded weapon. The person, the educator, who hands over the gun hands over the bullets (the perspective) and must own up to the consequences.

Gee reminded me that none of the professional communication skills we teach are neutral. For example, even the fact that we’re prepping students to communicate in English in the workplace carries within it echoes of SA’s colonialist and apartheid legacy and a nod to globalisation.

So this year, my first goal as an educator is to be conscious of the consequences of what I say and do in the classroom. I’ll keep reflecting on the ideological undercurrents of what I teach and ensure that, in Gee’s terms, I own up to the consequences of these.

My second goal is to arrive early enough at campus to find a parking somewhere that ISN’T Rhodes Memorial.

My PhD in White Puffy Dresses and Bouquet Arrangements

I wonder whether any of my readers have ever suffered from split-academic/bride personality disorder, or whether this brand of crazy is 100% Gabi? It’s all-encompassing doing a PhD and it’s all-encompassing planning a wedding, and now that I’m doing the two at the same time, it’s making me a little loopy.

I lie in bed at night and my brain jumps between discourse and banquet courses, Bhaskar and bridesmaids, thesis proposals and proposing toasts, methodological maps and seating plans,  registries and realism. I picture crazy connections being made between the bride and student sides of my brain, thoughts zipping back and forth as my stream of consciousness whips me on a journey from my booth in the library to the beflowered Chuppah and back again. 

Perhaps I should mix it up a bit: instead of a speech thanking my new husband on the big night, I’ll take the opportunity to thank Joseph A. Maxwell for writing his very clear and concise book about critical realism. I can conduct semi-structured in-depth interviews with my guests in the build-up to the wedding to obtain their perspectives on marriage as a social construction. I could even ask our Rabbi for ethical clearance and triangulate any findings with my mother AND my new mother-in-law to ensure that the process is transparent.

In a couple of months I’ll be a married woman with my nose buried deep in my books. Until then, I remain a slightly scatty bride-on-a-mission: to grab a chapter of Maxwell’s book in between dress fittings, site visits and florist meetings, thereby keeping the PhD clock ticking (quietly) on in the background.

A shout out to the dreamers! (Yo yo yo!)

I read an article yesterday called “Getting to the Bottom of the Well: The Value of Qualitative Research into Teaching and Learning”. (You can access it HERE.) I thought this was aptly named since often, when I’m working on my research, I feel as if I’m stuck in the bottom of a deep, dark well.

But this, unsurprisingly, isn’t what the author is writing about. It’s actually about qualitative and quantitative research and how they need not be seen as contrasting opposites. She writes about the affinities between the two, and as I am a formerly tie-dye wearing BA student, one of her points really interested me:

“… science is indebted to the philosophical critique of theocracy for its repudiation of a settled God given world for a universe of puzzles to be solved through human inquiry.” (Cousin, 2013: 131)

Isn’t that cool? As I understand it, it means that that some crazy thinking on the part of philosophers laid the foundation all the scientific discoveries that have followed. Reconceptualising the nature of the universe created spaces for the most amazing discoveries about nature and science and bird migration, and desalination, and gravity, and so on.

I like this idea so much because it gives a big up to the dreamers who, in all their tie-dye splendour, dare to think of the world in a different way. They may not be scientists in labs with clipboards, but their ideas can fundamentally reshape the way we think about the world. That’s pretty sexy, me’thinks. 

Do the ends justify the means? Study and my six-pack

I’m feeling very self-righteous today because I did morning gym. I rode that bike and trod that treadmill and ellipticaled on the elliptical machine and you should know that right now, I’m pretty much better then everyone else.

The reason I’m so chuffed is because morning gym (not to mention afternoon and evening gym) is not something that comes naturally to me. I’m more of a sitter then a sweater. In fact, when a friend at a party asked what kind of animal I’d be I said a cow, because I appreciate the time they spend standing still and chewing the cud. That’s sort of my default too (not the cud part).

Now, I’m not the type that goes to gym for the crazy endorphin rush or because it makes me feel amazing. Running exacerbates my asthma and the gym is stinky. So, I often wonder whether I’d still bother going if I was as toned and glowing as the girls on the cover of Women’s Health.

I just read an article which said that the link between higher education qualifications and success in the labour market is a bit of a myth; these days, just because you have a degree doesn’t mean you’ll land your dream job. So this got me thinking:

If you could have walked into your current position without a tertiary qualification, would you have skipped your studies completely?

Just imagine that. No assignments, no tests, no three-hour exams, no signing the green sheet to go pee, no DPR, no referencing, no sucking up to lecturers, no due-dates, no mandatory attendance… If these things aren’t going to help you move forward in your careers, what’s the point of them at all?

Y’all know I’m a big romantic, and I love study for the sake of it, so I wouldn’t have missed out on my undergrad for anything. But does higher education have value if it’s not helping us survive and thrive in the labour market?

And, perhaps more pressingly, how many more gym sessions till my six-pack starts to show?

Invigilation considerations

How many of you have ever had the joy of invigilating an exam or test? Whenever I do, I find that time does the strangest thing. It seems to rush by as I amble up and down the aisles, watching students scrawl desperately in their blue UCT exam books. One would think that time would drag given that the most excitement one generally has is a student putting their hand up to ask for an extra book, but I find I quite like the tranquility I experience as 300 students write their hearts out in front of me.

As I looked over the group of students writing their exam last Thursday, I was struck by how docile they were. They sat quietly in their seats for three hours, focussed on their work. They didn’t communicate with each other in any way. Students who needed to pee even put their hands up and asked for permission.

This got me thinking about power relations in higher education, and the big divide between student and lecturer. There were only around five of us invigilating in the huge hall at any one time. The students could have easily stormed out the venue in revolt or torn up the question paper or pulled out their cellphones and started talking at the top of their voices, but… they didn’t.

I used to teach in a middle school, so in a way I’m in love with the kind of discipline my third-year students exhibit. But in another way, I wonder what this enforced power divide means. Are we teaching our students how to behave in the workplace, where they’ll have to follow “the man’s” rules, quietly and unquestioningly? Are they being taught to fear unknown consequences and to conform to seemingly arbitrary rules of how to behave? (I’ll never know why they have to sign the green sheet when they go to the toilet? What happens to the green sheet after the exam? Maybe there’s a toilet-going database somewhere.)

If this is what they learn in higher education, where do they learn to break the rules in the creation of something new and different and innovative? What we need to think about is how students  learn to discern who to listen to and when to forge their own path, and how  to find their power in their engagements with institutional structures (like a university). Maybe this will help develop graduates who are brave enough and strong enough to change the world for the better.

 

What of the Class of 2037?

Yesterday I presented at UCT’s Teaching and Learning Conference. I spoke about some key challenges about teaching workplace skills in an academic environment. My talk was followed by some great input from the audience, and it was exciting to see that what I spoke about resonated with many of my colleagues, leaving me quite refreshed and ready to get back into my research. (I’ve been a little distracted lately… Pesky engagements and whatnot…).

The final session was a panel discussion on the future of online education at UCT.  The three presenters approached the topic from different angles, but the general feeling was that it’s not a question of “will it happen?” but a question of “when will it happen?”

I remember my father telling me that when he was teaching a couple of decades ago, the students wore suits and ties to university everyday. And when he wrote his PhD, there were no computers, and theses had to be typed out on a typewriter. He used a giant box of index cards to organise his Reference lists.

These stories always captured my imagination, and yesterday’s panel got me thinking: will I one day tell my kids about “the good old days” when you actually went to a campus and sat in a classroom, with other students and a lecturer? Will they even believe the stories I tell them about the level of interaction that happens in class, the relationships made between students and lecturer and the time students spend traipsing between lecture venues? Will the universities my kids study at be so radically different to today’s that my experiences will seem like nostalgic yearnings when I relay the tales?

MOOCS abound! Classrooms flip! My students even sometimes check VULA! These are exciting times to be in higher education, and me and my unborns can’t wait to see what the future brings.

A key educational debate, still juicy a century on

I came across an article the other day about issues in the US education system in the first 20 years of the 1900s. The article outlined a debate at the time between a group of social efficiency philosophers and educational reformer John Dewey, who is, unfortunately, no relation to Melvil Dewey, the guy who in 1876 came up with the system we still use to classify libraries.

Anyhooooo, one of the key issues about which the two parties disagreed concerned the relationship between work and education. The social efficiency philosophers believed that the education system should look at the economy, assess where the gaps are, and then focus on ensuring that children are trained, from the youngest age, to fit into these. It was believed that this educational system would give children focus, purpose and motivation, and at the same time result in economic growth and an end to unemployment.

John Dewey, on the other hand, believed that rather then learning how to fit into the system, children should learn how they could use science, technology and corporatism to actually change the world around them. He believed that education should be about social reform. Only this way could it be truly democratic.

Reading about this debate got me thinking. A century on, it seems that we’re still faced with similar issues when grappling with how higher education should relate to the world at work. We try to equip students with all the tools and skills they’ll need in the workplace, but in doing so, are we just equipping them to slot into pre-determined roles? Where’s the education that stretches them to new ways of thinking about the world of work?

As a practical example, I was thinking about report writing, which is one of the core skills that we teach. Sure, many people in business write reports and it’s a useful skill to have. However, who’s to say that when our students are CEOs of their companies, they can’t use podcasts to record what’s happening in the business? Or maybe they’ll hire corporate theatre teams to enact their issues and use interactive methods to draw employees into developing communal solutions.

How will our students know that they have options to challenge what we teach them, that they can be more then what the system demands from them? I think the challenge of higher education is to teach our students to know that they can transform the world. How we do this is where it all gets juicy.

First on the list or rank outsider? Thinking about world ranking systems in HigherEd.

One of the most interesting conversations I witnessed at Doc Week at Rhodes was around the issue of world Higher Education (HE) rankings. There were four panelists sharing their views, including Dr. Badat, the Vice Chancellor of Rhodes, who was very vociferous in his belief of the evils of ranking systems like the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. He used words like “collude”, “dubious”, “insidious”, “poison” – strong and powerful language indeed. 

My initial response to this (being something of a  UCT snob) was, “Well… obviously you’re not going to like the ranking system if you don’t get onto it!” But this argument was blown out the water when Dr. Badat said that Rhodes has actively refused to be part of any world ranking system.

I do understand his concerns. Here are some of the points he raised as I understand them:

• International ranking systems reward certain aspects of HE, not others. There’s a disproportionate focus on research output in accredited journals (in English) and none on issues of social justice or values.
• Buying into a ranking system means participating in a competitive discourse with other universities, local and global. Is this a productive use of resources?
• Additionally, does South Africa need 23 “world class” universities? In this country we face a unique mix of educational challenges and finding a HE response to these requires a nuanced approach.
• Ranking systems don’t take any context (political, social, historical) into consideration. They’re fundamentally based on a mathematical equation. Does it make sense to compare universities in America with universities in South Africa?
• In striving to thrive on these world ranking lists, universities in South Africa are professing a desire to be like universities in the North and the West. There’s modeling, imitation and an “everything’s better overseas” attitude. What about our own local successes?

Dr. Badat’s arguments are valid and convincing. However, what wasn’t mentioned at all in his discussion is the student body.

There’s an undeniable advantage for students graduating from prestigious, world-renowned universities. It just sounds more impressive. Yes, this is a construct, but with competition for jobs and the current local/global workplace, students who’ve graduated from highly ranked universities will have an advantage when entering the workplace. 

We academics can complain about this, and moan about how this is driven by evil neo-liberal values, but are certain institutions doing a disservice to the people who are most affected by their decision whether to play the game or not – the students?

And while resistance to this system may be based on protest against an external ranking structure being imposed onto an institution, isn’t it similarly problematic to impose the refusal of this system on students? While Dr. Badat makes a powerful argument, when a Rhodes graduate applies for a job, will she have the language and the conviction to explain to a potential employer why she’s a better pick then the student from a highly ranked university? If so, then Rhodes is doing something very right.