Well, this is exciting! It’s Accelerating Achievement’s first international guest blogger. Today’s post comes from Dr. Chrissie Boughey of Rhodes University in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape province, South Africa. Dr. Boughey attended the 2011 Achieving the Dream Strategy Institute and after hearing some of her reflections on the event and, in particular, her perspective on colleges’ approaches to remediation and developmental education, we asked her to tell us—and you—more about the South African approach. The end of apartheid necessitated a different approach to higher education in South Africa and there are some striking similarities in the challenges we face in this country when it comes to serving underprepared students. The Extended Programme, described below, is an interesting approach to contextualizing and blending the entire remedial sequence into college-level study.
In South Africa, access to and success in higher education have long been critical issues because of the effects of apartheid on black students’ chances of gaining admittance to a university and succeeding once they are there. Early access initiatives tended to focus on stand-alone remedial courses in study skills, language, and numeracy. Analysis of the impact of this sort of work showed that students often felt marginalized and stigmatized and that learning did not often transfer to mainstream study.
In the early 2000s, thanks to “redress funding” from the South African Department of Education, “Extended Programmes with an Integrated Foundation Phase” began to be developed. “Extended Programmes,” as they are now known, admit students who do not meet usual university entrance requirements to accredited programs of study leading to degree- or diploma-level qualifications. An Extended Programme prolongs the period of study needed for the completion of a qualification by up to one year. This additional year’s worth of instruction is used to provide learning opportunities that either lay a foundation for “mainstream” learning or support it in some way. Importantly, not all the additional instruction needs to be located in the first year of study since funding rules allow it to be provided throughout the curriculum.
In the years since the introduction of Extended Programmes, a number of different ways of providing the additional instruction have been identified. “Augmented” courses see students registered in normal courses but having the instructional time for those courses doubled with the additional instruction offered by specialists. A typical augmented course might thus offer eight classes per week instead of the four offered normally. “Extended” courses (not to be confused with Extended Programmes) offer a semester’s worth of learning over an entire year. This means that the pace of learning is slowed and more time is available for foundations to be built and for language and literacy to be developed in relation to authentic learning tasks. Funding for Extended Programmes allows a mix of different kinds of courses providing this additional instruction.
One of the advantages of Extended Programmes is that students begin earning credits towards a qualification immediately. The impact of this on motivation is enormous. In addition, the integration of developmental work with mainstream learning means that it can be authentic and support students as they engage with academic discourse communities.
While Extended Programmes benefit students enormously, the integration of support and development with mainstream teaching is challenging for faculty involved. At the core of these challenges is the need for academic teachers to adopt teaching approaches and assessment methods that are inclusive, rather than exclusive, of the diversity black working class students bring to learning. Extended Programmes thus provide a rich site for research associated with the scholarship of teaching and with academic life in general.
Initially, only a small number of universities offered Extended Programmes. Now all public universities offer a number of these valuable learning opportunities to students who were previously excluded from or marginalized in South African higher education.
Dr. Chrissie Boughey is Dean of Teaching and Learning at Rhodes University.
No comments:
Post a Comment