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It is widely accepted in the higher education literature that a student-centred approach is pedagogically superior to a teacher-centred approach. In this paper, we explore the notion of student-centredness as a threshold concept and the implications this might have for academic staff development. We argue that the term student-centred in the Rogerian sense implies a focus on the person of the student and is deeply resonant with Barnett's assertion that the emergent being of the student is as important as the development of skills and knowledge. To facilitate transformative learning in higher education an academic must know how to value the person of the student in the learning process. Academic staff development initiatives need to work with the person of the academic and take into account the level of personal development required for each academic to be able to facilitate this kind of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the challenges of research into social practice is finding a way to take both the structural aspects of the social contexts and individual agency into account. This article describes the use of Bourdieu's social practice theory, together with Lave and Wenger's situated learning theory, to understand how the learning of practice takes place within the academic workplace. Drawing on interviews with academics across three departments at a research-intensive, historically white university in South Africa, the author explored how new academics engaged with the assessment practices in their departments, and developed their confidence to judge student performance of complex assessment tasks. The study provides a set of conceptual tools for academic staff development practitioners to use in supporting academics in their learning to teach. An argument is made for the process of learning in the workplace to be understood in terms of the harmonization of the individual habitus with the collective habitus in departmental communities of practice. Evidence is also provided of the importance of context in understanding how academics learn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose that learning in engineering involves taking on the discourse of an engineering community, which is intimately bound up with the identity of being a member of that community. This leads to the notion of discursive identity, which emphasises that students' identities are constituted through engaging in discourse. This view of learning implies that success in engineering studies needs to be defined with particular reference to the sorts of identities that students develop and how these relate to identities in the world of work. In order to achieve successful learning in engineering, we need to recognise the multiple identities held by our students, provide an authentic range of engineering-related activities through which students can develop engineering identities and make more explicit key aspects of the discourse of engineering of which lecturers are tacitly aware. We include three vignettes to illustrate how some of the authors of this paper (from across three different institutions) have applied this perspective of learning in their teaching practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the vacation work experiences of a group of final-year civil and chemical engineering students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Situated cognition theory, with its conceptualization of learning as induction into a community of practice through the activity of legitimate peripheral participation, was used to analyze focus group and interview data. Issues of race and gender appeared prominently and spontaneously in students' accounts of their experiences. Access to legitimate peripheral participation was associated with positive identity formation in the role of engineer-to-be, while denial of this access severely affected learning and feelings of selfworth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on using situated cognition theory in researching student experience of the workplace. The central focus of this article is well-known thinker N.W. Brickhouse's suggestion that researchers should look to situated cognition for a theory on learning that allows them to address issues of gender. In general, feminist writers have usually used constructivist views on learning, may serve to reproduce the status quo, as regards gender and science. Brickhouse suggested that a more suitable learning theory is offered by situated cognition primarily because of the importance placed on the role of identity formation by both situated cognition theory and feminist perspectives. Importantly, situated cognition can be applied to formal learning contexts, where the community of practice is not a group of professional practitioners but rather the community of educated adults. Learning involves increasing participation by the newcomers in communities of practice. The research presented in this article has shown that situated cognition offers an appropriate and productive theory of learning for researching race and gender in science and engineering education contexts.