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In this Point of Departure, we build on the scholarship of Suellen Shay. Shay explored the nature of higher education, examining assessment and the relation between curriculum and knowledge structures across several disciplines. She drew on the work of Bernstein and in her later work responded to the calls for decolonisation. We first contextualise the work of Basil Bernstein and explain its attraction for scholars of education development in the South African HE context. We then provide a brief summary of recent decolonial scholarship. On this basis, we speculate what a critique and caricature of the Bernsteinian tradition by the decolonial school might look like. In turn we offer a caricatured rebuttal by the Bernsteinian school to the decolonial critique. Finally, we pull our argument together and, by drawing on Bhaskar's critical realism, assert the importance of an adequate theorisation of ontology.

This is a theoretical paper that addresses the challenge of educational access to the Humanities and Social Sciences. It plots a theoretical quest to develop an explicit pedagogy to give "disadvantaged" students in the Humanities ways of working successfully with texts. In doing so it draws on Bernstein, Moore and Maton's work to theorize the nature of knowledge in the Humanities, and also on Brandom's analysis of inferential reasoning. It uses elements of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to analyse student texts. The empirical work reported on here is work-in-progress and represents no more than an indication of the approach advocated. The approach is illustrated by examples from comprehension exercises designed to promote students' inferential reasoning. Selected findings are presented to illustrate the extent of the challenge entailed in facilitating access to Humanities texts. The paper concludes by suggesting that mastery of ways of working with texts in the Humanities entails attending to the acquisition of both recognition and realization rules for reading and writing.

While acknowledging higher education's complicity in inequality, the premise of this paper is that curriculum transformation can be one means of challenging and dismantling structural injustices towards the goal of equity of access and outcomes. Fraser's multi-dimensional framework for social justice is drawn upon to explore what this transformation requires. The framework is used to critique a particular case of curriculum intervention, Education Development in South Africa. In Fraser's terms, the interventions have been largely affirmative, not transformative. In addition, they have focused on only the first dimension of justice, redistribution, and have generally failed to attend to misrecognition and representation. Overall, we argue that the responses of higher education institutions in South Africa to the challenges of a globalised, pluralist world have been affirmative, not transformative. A transformative approach demands a 'reframing' of the curriculum. This involves adjusting the scale of the problem, interrogating assumptions informing the norms of the curriculum, questioning current boundaries between 'mainstream' and 'other' students and reviewing the fitness of the curriculum for a pluralist society. The paper concludes with recommendations for what such a reframing of the curriculum might entail.

This article reports on an analysis undertaken in the field of African philosophies using selected conceptual tools from Maton's Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). In response to calls by South African students for 'decolonising' the Humanities curriculum, the practical purpose of the analysis was to generate theoretically-informed guidelines for developing a curriculum for an undergraduate course in a new African Studies major. The field of African philosophies is of theoretical interest because historically it has been premised on responding to and challenging dominant, Western ideas imposed on African intellectuals through processes of colonization and modernization. LCT was employed to uncover principles that legitimate knowledge claims in this field -- with a view to determining what content should be selected, recontextualized and pedagogized for the new curriculum. The analysis includes the author's meta-reflections on the affordances and limitations of LCT for working with knowledge in the South.

This article addresses the challenge of reclaiming higher education (HE) as a public good for building effective democracies. We use Bernstein's model of pedagogic rights and Fraser's model of social justice to develop a normative framework for discussing how universities in unequal societies might mitigate social injustice. Referring to recent student protests in South Africa, we show the extent of student anger and frustration at the misrecognition they experience due to the reproduction of colonial hierarchies at postcolonial universities. The article is an attempt to respond to students' calls about 'black pain', 'black debt' and for the 'decolonisation' of South African universities. In particular, we focus on theories of recognition and how these are being played out in the current South African HE context. Our aim is not to critique student politics, but to understand the position and heed the cry of the subaltern student. We deliberate on what an adequate response, framed within a model of pedagogic rights, might be from those who teach in and manage universities. We note some impediments to implementing this response and conclude by asserting the importance of working with a politics of recognition and representation as well as redistribution.

This paper was motivated by student protests at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where the Rhodes Must Fall collective called for the "decolonisation" of the university's curriculum. I deliberately adopt a "decolonial gaze" to re-describe the structural and cultural conditioning of the post-colonial university and the contradictions it sets up for black students. Using Archer's morphogenetic cycle and Bernsteins's pedagogic device I tease out what contestation for control of the curriculum entails, with a particular focus on the Humanities and Social Sciences. I identify three groups of students for whom the situational logic of the post-colonial university offers very different opportunities for agential development and therefore academic success. At the level of pedagogy, I suggest there may be a "collective hermeneutic gap" between some academics and their students. Finally the paper makes some suggestions for what curriculum reform in a post-colonial Humanities and Social Sciences might involve.

Despite doing well in biology at high school, some students struggle with the same subject at university level. This can have implications for epistemological access--access to knowledge that allows students to remain at university. Therefore, it is important to identify factors that may be causing this problem. We propose that one such factor may be differences in the structure of knowledge between the two levels. Therefore, this paper will assess some of the differences in the structuring of knowledge that exist between a high school and a university biology curriculum. To do this, a section of a high school and a university textbook which cover the same topic will be analysed using one aspect of Legitimation Code Theory called Semantics. Our findings suggest that there is a mismatch between the semantic range students are expected to navigate at university and that demanded by high school biology, and that this may pose a stumbling block to students gaining epistemological access to first-year study at university. If this is indeed the case, then pedagogic interventions which explicitly address this may contribute to improving undergraduate student retention and throughput rates at university.

This paper addresses the problem of curriculum design in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and more specifically the challenge of designing foundation courses for first-generation or "disadvantaged" learners. Located in the social realist school of the sociology of education studies that builds on the legacy of Basil Bernstein, we emphasise the importance of knowledge and understanding the principles that generate "what counts" in particular courses and disciplines. In order to operationalise this, we used Maton's Legitimation Code Theory to uncover the knowledge/knower structures in eight first year courses in four of the most popular majors in a Faculty of Humanities. Our data sources were curriculum documents and exam papers in particular. The findings are presented and the "codes," "gazes" and "lenses" for each set of courses delineated. The findings are being used to inform the design of a set of curriculum and pedagogic interventions that aim to offer powerful ways of knowing to novices in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

In order to design two distinct engineering qualification levels for an existing University of Technology programme, empirical evidence based on the current diploma is necessary to illuminate the nature of and the relationship between the "contextual" and "conceptual" elements underpinning a multidisciplinary engineering curriculum. The increasing focus on contextual application could result in decreasing opportunities to develop the conceptual disciplinary grasp required for a dynamic, emerging region at the forefront of technological innovation. Using the theoretical tools of Bernstein and Maton to analyse final year student practice, the research addresses the question of how multidisciplinary knowledge is integrated by students, and what this reveals about the nature of such knowledge. The paper presents a conceptualisation of multidisciplinary knowledge integration practices as a dynamic process along two axes simultaneously, shifting between different forms and levels of conceptual and contextual knowledge. (Contains 3 tables, 7 figures, and 2 notes.)

This article addresses the problem of making programme evaluation sufficiently meaningful and cognisant of context such that practitioners, in this case of academic development, can gain new understandings of their situation in order to improve their practice. In order to do this, the paper uses Archer's morphogenetic framework to deepen the methodology of academic review on an academic development programme. The theory enables a richer understanding of how the programme developed within particular national and institutional situational logics and of the relationships between structure, culture and agency. (Contains 3 notes and 2 tables.)

This paper contributes to understanding why curriculum design in a discipline with a horizontal knowledge structure is difficult, time-consuming and contested. A previous paper on the same case study in one sociology department reported that students who had completed the general sociology major found it lacking in coherence. To illustrate the problem, I selected two third-year sociology courses, Urban Studies and Diversity Studies, and set out to compare and contrast how knowledge claims are made and legitimated in these two discourses. The paper also has a methodological focus--to demonstrate the potential of systemic functional linguistics as a method of discourse analysis that can complement and deepen a sociological analysis--Bernstein's sociology of education and in particular his concept of "grammaticality". I seek to make explicit the basis for knowledge claims in these two sub-disciplines and then to investigate how this "grammar" is built into criteria for assessing students. The long-term goal of this project is pedagogic--to understand how academic discourses work, in order to contribute to the development of more coherent curricula and visible pedagogies with explicit assessment criteria, for the enhancement of teaching and learning. The analysis shows that the "grammars" of these two academic discourses (in the same discipline, sociology) are based on different ordering principles; they are based on different ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions. The analysis also shows that the respective "grammars" do "get into" the assessment criteria, although in a contextually contingent manner. The paper concludes by suggesting that the use of SFL as a method of discourse analysis within a social realist sociology of education framework proved to be fruitful and worthy of further development, particularly for education development work where the quest to make explicit the criteria for producing a "legitimate text" is critical. (Contains 2 notes and 3 tables.)

This paper attempts a brief meta-reflection on quality assurance policy and practice in South African higher education, with a focus on methodology. More specifically it seeks to answer the question "What are the effects of the Higher Education Quality Committee's (HEQC) quality assurance technologies on institutional practice and how could they be more effective in achieving its mandate?" This question is pursued with regard to the failure of the quality assurance system to impact significantly on the graduation rates of African South African students, despite the South African government's (and thus the HEQC's) explicit "transformation agenda" for higher education.

This paper reports on the findings of a formative evaluation of the mentorship support programme run by the Maskh'iSizwe Centre of Excellence for recipients of its bursaries. Learning theory traditions have typically been divided into those that prioritise individual cognition versus those that prioritise the context in which learning occurs. In both these traditions, the individual agent is dissolved. This paper interrogates the ontological assumptions held by dominant learning theories regarding relations between individual and society that neglect agency in the learning process. Archer's social realist ontology offers a way forward by reinstating the full properties and powers of learners as agents. Archer's social theory supports theories of learning that emphasise ontology and practice, as well as epistemology. It is therefore suggested that support programmes for undergraduate financially disadvantaged learners ensure that they first develop a sense of personal identity and social agency as a pre-condition for succeeding academically and developing a professional identity. (Contains 1 figure.)

This article aims to address a theoretical question, "what is the relationship between knowledge structure and curriculum structure?", by answering an empirical, context-specific question, "what drives and legitimates the curriculum in one sociology department?", with an emphasis on surfacing the "recontextualising rules" at work in this particular institutional context. These questions were explored by conducting a case study in the wake of a departmental review. The conceptual framework for the article is based on Bernstein's sociology of education and on those who have developed his work further. The findings support Bernstein's characterisation of sociology as a discipline with weak external boundaries, a horizontal segmental structure and a "weak grammar", and, it is suggested, with knowledge claims that tend to be legitimated by social rather than epistemic relations. In this particular case study, the horizontal, segmental structure of the discipline was seen to be reflected in a curriculum that currently lacks coherence and cohesion.

This article discusses methodological issues in relation to models of quality assurance for higher education. It first traces the historical development of the widely adopted pragmatic model and shows how this model has been adapted by the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC) for the South African context. It then sets out some basic tenets of critical realism in order to critique the pragmatic model from a critical realist perspective. Finally it proposes a theory-based approach to evaluation located in a critical realist paradigm as an approach that has the potential to effect the improvement or even transformation of educational practice as a possible outcome of quality assurance.

This paper analyses the take-up of proposals for a national quality assurance system in South Africa using different approaches to quality assurance to classify stakeholder responses to survey and interview questions. The context of the study was the introduction of an external quality assurance system for South African higher education by an agency of the Department of Education, the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC) in 2004. A conceptual framework using Habermas' distinctions between system and strategic action on the one hand and lifeworld and communicative action on the other was set up to map different approaches to quality assurance and to analyse the data. Stakeholder opinion on the HEQC's proposals for institutional audit and programme accreditation was gathered using survey questionnaire and depth-interview instruments. Given that quality assurance in South Africa has been conceived as a means of furthering the state's "transformation agenda" for higher education, different and sometimes conflicting approaches to quality assurance exist in the higher education community--underpinned by different values, discourses and purposes for higher education. The study shows that these differences of opinion were shaped more strongly by the respondents' position in the social structure (apartheid defined class and race position) than by their social role (academic, manager, quality assurance manager) in the policy-making process. The paper concludes by suggesting that this finding may be explained if one understands the adoption and intended implementation of quality assurance policy to be a lifeworld matter. The contribution of Habermas' notions of lifeworld and system to conceptualising and understanding quality assurance systems is put forward. Interview schedules used in the empirical study are appended. (Contains 1 figure and 4 notes.)

Examines the relationship between the dual goals of equity and development for public higher education (HE) in post-apartheid South Africa. Without state intervention, globalization of the South African economy and HE provision may result in increased inequality in access to HE, information, and technology (and thus, productivity and income). Presents suggestions for reforming the public HE undergraduate curriculum. (SM)

While acknowledging higher education's complicity in inequality, the premise of this paper is that curriculum transformation can be one means of challenging and dismantling structural injustices towards the goal of equity of access and outcomes. Fraser's multi-dimensional framework for social justice is drawn upon to explore what this transformation requires. The framework is used to critique a particular case of curriculum intervention, Education Development in South Africa. In Fraser's terms, the interventions have been largely affirmative, not transformative. In addition, they have focused on only the first dimension of justice, redistribution, and have generally failed to attend to misrecognition and representation. Overall, we argue that the responses of higher education institutions in South Africa to the challenges of a globalised, pluralist world have been affirmative, not transformative. A transformative approach demands a 'reframing' of the curriculum. This involves adjusting the scale of the problem, interrogating assumptions informing the norms of the curriculum, questioning current boundaries between 'mainstream' and 'other' students and reviewing the fitness of the curriculum for a pluralist society. The paper concludes with recommendations for what such a reframing of the curriculum might entail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the challenge of reclaiming higher education (HE) as a public good for building effective democracies. We use Bernstein's model of pedagogic rights and Fraser's model of social justice to develop a normative framework for discussing how universities in unequal societies might mitigate social injustice. Referring to recent student protests in South Africa, we show the extent of student anger and frustration at the misrecognition they experience due to the reproduction of colonial hierarchies at postcolonial universities. The article is an attempt to respond to students' calls about 'black pain', 'black debt' and for the 'decolonisation' of South African universities. In particular, we focus on theories of recognition and how these are being played out in the current South African HE context. Our aim is not to critique student politics, but to understand the position and heed the cry of the subaltern student. We deliberate on what an adequate response, framed within a model of pedagogic rights, might be from those who teach in and manage universities. We note some impediments to implementing this response and conclude by asserting the importance of working with a politics of recognition and representation as well as redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on an analysis undertaken in the field of African philosophies using selected conceptual tools from Maton's Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). In response to calls by South African students for 'decolonising' the Humanities curriculum, the practical purpose of the analysis was to generate theoretically-informed guidelines for developing a curriculum for an undergraduate course in a new African Studies major. The field of African philosophies is of theoretical interest because historically it has been premised on responding to and challenging dominant, Western ideas imposed on African intellectuals through processes of colonization and modernization. LCT was employed to uncover principles that legitimate knowledge claims in this field - with a view to determining what content should be selected, recontextualized and pedagogized for the new curriculum. The analysis includes the author's meta-reflections on the affordances and limitations of LCT for working with knowledge in the South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]