Search

This article is a response to Haggis's injunction to "know differently" if we are to grow our understandings of student learning. It identifies concerns that have arisen in the course of research into engagement (conceived of as "ideological becoming") in first year lectures in the humanities at a South African university. These issues include: (a) how the co-presence of students and lecturer challenges conventional notions of "student learning" as other; (b) the theoretical and practical challenges related to identifying fleeting "liminal moments" in situations in which students and lecturers are co-present; and (c) what we can learn from a view of academic engagement as distributed across time and place. The tool of entextualisation is used to track participants' "interest" across sites. The article offers a view of learning as embodied, emergent and contested, rather than neatly packaged and predictable.

Academics without PhDs are common in developing countries and among lecturers from marginalised communities, yet the literature on doctoral education largely ignores them. This qualitative study aimed to address that gap by interviewing academics without PhDs in South Africa and Australia. Their narratives of betwixt and betweenness contribute to theories of liminality as well as doctoral education. Liminality is traditionally conceptualised as a linear, vertical process with clear rites of passage. However, in our study, the interviewees were not only facing a vertical trajectory between non-PhD and post-PhD status but also a lateral trajectory between staff and student identity. The research confirms the importance of distinguishing between transient and permanent liminality in an occupational context. For those who had given up studying, liminality was permanent. Liminality was also affected by dynamically interconnecting factors including age, gender, race, ethnicity, relations with supervisors, time and location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of social practice, the author challenges common-sense notions of objectivity and subjectivity which inform assessment practice, and argues for assessment as a socially situated interpretive act. A case study of an engineering community of practice at a South African university illustrates the multiple subjectivities that shape assessors’ interpretations of student performance. This case study contributes to an understanding of academic professional judgment as a ‘double reading’ – an iterative movement between different modes of knowledge which comprise the objective and the subjective. The author concludes with a brief discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of this for how academic communities of practice come to judge and how these judgments are validated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]