Browsing by Author "Winberg, Christine"

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    Collaborative research in contexts of inequality: the role of social reflexivity
    (Springer Verlag, 2017) Leibowitz, Brenda; Bozalek, Vivienne; Farmer, Jean; Garraway, James; Herman, Nicoline; Jawitz, Jeff; McMillan, Wendy; Mistri, Gita; Ndebele, Clever; Nkonki, Vuyisile; Quinn, Lynn; van Schalkwyk, Susan; Vorster, Jo-Anne; Winberg, Christine
    This article reports on the role and value of social reflexivity in collaborative research in contexts of extreme inequality. Social reflexivity mediates the enablements and constraints generated by the internal and external contextual conditions impinging on the research collaboration. It fosters the ability of participants in a collaborative project to align their interests and collectively extend their agency towards a common purpose. It influences the productivity and quality of learning outcomes of the research collaboration. The article is written by fourteen members of a larger research team, which comprised 18 individuals working within the academic development environment in eight South African universities. The overarching research project investigated the participation of academics in professional development activities, and how contextual, i.e. structural and cultural, and agential conditions, influence this participation. For this sub-study on the experience of the collaboration by fourteen of the researchers, we wrote reflective pieces on our own experience of participating in the project towards the end of the third year of its duration. We discuss the structural and cultural conditions external to and internal to the project, and how the social reflexivity of the participants mediated these conditions. We conclude with the observation that policy injunctions and support from funding agencies for collaborative research, as well as support from participants' home institutions are necessary for the flourishing of collaborative research, but that the commitment by individual participants to participate, learn and share, is also necessary.
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    Collaborative research in contexts of inequality: the role of social reflexivity
    (Springer, 2016) Leibowitz, Brenda; Bozalek, Vivienne; Farmer, Jean; Garraway, James; Herman, Nicoline; Jawitz, Jeff; McMillan, Wendy; Mistri, Gita; Ndebele, Clever; Nkonki, Vuyisile; Quinn, Lynn; van Schalkwyk, Susan; Vorster, Jo-Anne; Winberg, Christine
    This article reports on the role and value of social reflexivity in collaborative research in contexts of extreme inequality. Social reflexivity mediates the enablements and constraints generated by the internal and external contextual conditions impinging on the research collaboration. It fosters the ability of participants in a collaborative project to align their interests and collectively extend their agency towards a common purpose. It influences the productivity and quality of learning outcomes of the research collaboration. The article is written by fourteen members of a larger research team, which comprised 18 individuals working within the academic development environment in eight South African universities. The overarching research project investigated the participation of academics in professional development activities, and how contextual, i.e. structural and cultural, and agential conditions, influence this participation. For this sub-study on the experience of the collaboration by fourteen of the researchers, we wrote reflective pieces on our own experience of participating in the project towards the end of the third year of its duration. We discuss the structural and cultural conditions external to and internal to the project, and how the social reflexivity of the participants mediated these conditions. We conclude with the observation that policy injunctions and support from funding agencies for collaborative research, as well as support from participants’ home institutions are necessary for the flourishing of collaborative research, but that the commitment by individual participants to participate, learn and share, is also necessary.
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    Critical interdisciplinary dialogues: Towards a pedagogy of well-being in stem disciplines and fields
    (South African Journal of Higher Education, 2018) Bozalek, Vivienne; Winberg, Christine; Conana, Honjiswa; Wright, J; Wolff, K; Pallit, N; Adendorff, H
    Students enrolled in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) globally and in South Africa are generally not in a state of well-being. International and South African research studies show that undergraduate STEM programmes pose significant challenges to students and that many STEM programmes are marked by high attrition rates and poor student success. There is growing recognition that STEM educators need to teach the “whole student” instead of focussing only on STEM knowledge and skills. In order to teach in a holistic way, university educators themselves need to understand and achieve their own well-being. The article argues that a pedagogy of well-being and its associated concepts of competence, self-efficacy, community and inter-relatedness are key to academic staff and student well-being in the STEM disciplines. The focus of this article is an inter-institution study on enhancing STEM educators’ capacity towards a pedagogy of well-being through teaching portfolio development in diverse institutional contexts. The research question guiding is the study is: How might academic development practitioners and STEM university educators successfully collaborate for the benefit of student well-being and success? Data for this study was obtained from “critical dialogues” between academic development practitioners and STEM university teachers, as well as an external evaluation of the project. The data comprise video-recordings of the critical dialogues and survey responses. The findings of the study indicate that there are barriers as well as productive spaces for interdisciplinary work towards well-being in STEM teaching and learning. The findings have implications for how STEM academics might engage in professional learning towards pedagogical competence, and offer suggestions for the ways in which academic developers might respectfully “transgress” into STEM disciplinary domains in support of a pedagogy of well-being in the STEM disciplines and fields.
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    Editorial: The ethics of care and academic development
    (South African Journal of Higher Education, 2018) Bozalek, Vivienne; Winberg, Christine
    Higher education institutions have commonly understood ethics and care as separate functions, rather than as an integrated practice, and have tended to delegate these responsibilities to research ethics committees, professional bodies or Human Resource departments as custodians of institutional codes of conduct. The ethics of care (Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984; Tronto 1993; 2010; 2013) provides an alternative normative framework to such principal ethics or codes of conduct. The current higher education context, both in South Africa, and internationally is in a state of turmoil, having to face many challenges in terms of access, available funding, casualisation of labour, demands to decolonise the curriculum, amongst others. This special issue considers some of these effects of colonisation and neoliberalism on the academy from a political ethics of care perspective.
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    An inter-institutional postgraduate diploma for university teachers: exploring formative feedback data from the position of socially just pedagogies
    (Central University of Technology, Free State, 2016) Winberg, Christine; Bozalek, Vivienne; Cattell, K.
    In January 2014, after many years of preparation, the Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education Teaching and Learning [PG Dip (HETL)] – a collaboration between the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, the University of Stellenbosch and the University of the Western Cape – was offered. The qualification is a two-year part-time course, and the first cohort of participants graduated in December 2015. The question that this paper seeks to address is whether a collaborative qualification, offered to academic staff across very different institutions, can make a contribution towards socially just teaching and learning in higher education. The study draws on Nancy Fraser's (2003) conceptualisation of social justice, with its three dimensions of redistribution, recognition and representation, as a framework for reflecting on the extent to which the programme contributed towards the development and understanding of socially just pedagogies in professional learning. This paper draws on data collected from participants' and facilitators' formative feedback on the postgraduate diploma over a two-year period (2014 – 2015). We conclude that offering a single PG Dip (HETL) collaboratively across three universities was socially just in that knowledge and resources were shared, differently placed institutions were brought together, with their different attributes being valued, and participants were given opportunities to interact with and learn from one another across differences. Applying the research findings to practice suggests that programmes in support of socially just professional learning should enhance alignment across the redistribution of facilitator and participant resources, recognise and address participants' concerns and build participants' academic voices – elements key to participatory parity.
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    Learning to teach STEM disciplines in higher education: a critical review of the literature
    (Taylor & Francis, 2018) Winberg, Christine; Adendorff, Hanelie; Bozalek, Vivienne; Conana, Honjiswa; Pallitt, Nicola; Wolff, Karin; Olsson, Thomas; Roxa, Torgny
    Enrolments in STEM disciplines at universities are increasing globally, attributed to the greater life opportunities open to students as a result of a STEM education. But while institutional access to STEM programmes is widening, the retention and success of STEM undergraduate students remains a challenge. Pedagogies that support student success are well known; what we know less about is how university teachers acquire pedagogical competence. This is the focus of this critical review of the literature that offers a theorised critique of educational development in STEM contexts. We studied the research literature with a view to uncovering the principles that inform professional development in STEM disciplines and fields. The key finding of this critical review is how little focus there is on the STEM disciplines. The majority of studies reviewed did not address the key issue of what makes the STEM disciplines difficult to learn and challenging to teach.