Search

At South African universities, the role of academic advisors is not easily defined and there is limited literature about the attributes and characteristics required of those who occupy advising positions in the country. This article proposes a model for identifying academic advisors for South African higher education contexts. The authors adopt a phenomenological approach to construct this model. Based on existing literature and data collected from advising interactions with students, the authors share and explain their model for identifying suitable candidates for academic advisor roles in South African higher education contexts. The model consists of seven dimensions: cultural quotient, data analytics, personal/ emotional support, psychosocial and socioeconomic support, scholarly activities and networking, skills formation and support, and teaching and learning. The authors conclude by emphasising the importance of academic advising for South Africa, before making recommendations for using the model to identify suitable candidates for advisor roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many South African universities, full research students receive little support during the research conceptualisation stage of the research journey, other than that provided by their supervisors, who tend to have limited time to engage with their students. Furthermore, during the proposal phase, scant attention is paid to the role of writing in research conceptualisation and scholarly development. In an attempt to address this neglect, the authors of this article worked collaboratively with academic staff from two schools within the Faculty of Commerce, Law, and Management at the University of the Witwatersrand to pilot academic literacies-informed projects aimed at integrating writing in the first year of existing postgraduate research programmes. This article provides insight into factors that constrain and enable such an integration endeavour. Data was collected through focus group discussions with the project teams from the participating schools. Drawing on Margaret Archer's structure, culture, and agency as the analytical framework, five themes emerged from the data: leadership and oversight, supervision and postgraduate pedagogy, supervisor awareness and support, the postgraduate research education curriculum, and student engagement and commitment. The authors discuss these themes in terms of their enabling and constraining dimensions, and conclude with observations that could inform similar initiatives in other postgraduate research programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic advising remains an emerging practice and profession within the South African higher education sector. Although there has been an increase in literature about advising in South Africa recently, there remains a dearth of literature about the experiences of academic advisors working in this context. This article aims to make such a contribution, by focusing in particular on the experiences and insights from 15 South African advisors (from one university) about academic advising prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The data that informs this study was collected through semi-structured interviews. The focus in this article is on advisor responses to three of the interview questions, which proved sufficient because of the richness of the data. The study draws on elements of social realist Margaret Archer's (1995) morphogenetic framework to explicate why this perspective on advising within a South African higher education context is necessary. Archer's (1995, 2005) work on structure, culture, and agency is then used as analytic lenses with which to analyse the advisors' experiences and insights of advising prior to the pandemic. A phenomenographic approach (Marton 1981; Tight 2016) is adopted to explore the varying conceptions (Cibangu and Hepworth 2016) of advising offered by the academic advisors. Nine focal areas emerge from these insights, which are analysed and discussed using Archer's (1995, 2005) structure, culture, and agency. It becomes apparent that academic advising was complex even before the pandemic. The advisors express an urgency to help others, raise concerns about entrenched inequities and resource constraints, highlight the pitfalls of inadequate help-seeking among students, and emphasise the need for better institutional integration of academic advising at the advisors' university, among other things. It becomes clear that there are numerous structural and cultural tensions that constrain advisor and student agency, possibly to the detriment of student success. The article leaves the reader with insights into the experiences of academic advisors prior to the pandemic, thus providing a baseline against which to measure advising during and beyond the pandemic, at a time when advising in South African higher education is still being developed and defined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuous professional learning of academics as university teachers is a national imperative in South Africa. At our university, a Postgraduate Diploma in Education (Higher Education) was introduced in 2015 with the aim to professionalise university teaching through a formal qualification. Students (i.e., candidates) must transition in two ways: firstly, from being disciplinary specialists to being students again; and secondly, into the community of scholarly teaching in higher education. This article examines the liminality experienced by candidates as they navigate the programme and learn to belong to a new scholarly teaching community. Drawing on empirical data collected from graduates and programme coordinators, the authors track candidates’ shifting identities and showcase how, though initially turbulent and unsettling, the process of learning to belong to a new teaching identity can be rewarding and enriching. The authors conclude by discussing the conditions required to enable candidates to acquire a strong university-teacher identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South African (SA) higher education sector continues to battle high attrition rates. Helping students gain a sense of belonging while at university and creating an environment where students feel cared for can enhance their prospects of success. Academic advising is a high-impact practice with the potential to enhance student belonging and success. This article proposes intentionally linking Tronto’s Ethic of Care (EoC) and academic advising for SA higher education contexts. The author argues that the dimensions of Tronto’s EoC (attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness) are relevant to the work of SA advisors. These dimensions are used as a framework for analysing interview data collected from 15 academic advisors from one university. The findings suggest that elements of Tronto’s EoC are present in the advisors’ work, though not explicitly. The author argues that integrating EoC and advising more intentionally in SA higher education contexts, could enable a greater sense of belonging for students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has had previously unimaginable and far-reaching effects on higher education globally (Baker et al. 2022; Cranfield et al. 2021; Kara 2021; Le Grange 2020). On top of the widespread loss felt by students and teachers across the world, we have had to make rapid changes to previously taken-for-granted ways of doing, being, learning and teaching (Baker et al. 2022; Cranfield et al. 2021). Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning (ERTL) brought constraints and opportunities, challenges and innovations. This article gives form to the statement: "there is an opportunity in the moment for genuine equity-focused innovation in policy-making, provision and pedagogy" (Czerniewicz et al. 2020). We use a theoretical framework of structure, culture and agency through which to view possibilities for transformation of pedagogy, and a form of semi-autoethnography as methodology. Two lecturers, one in the Humanities (Education) and one in the Life Sciences, wrote extended narratives of their experiences of ERTL and the other authors then posed a series of questions to the story authors, which elicited a set of analytic descriptions and explanations. Through iterations of this analysis, we identified two important themes: attending to students' socio-emotional needs and developing students' engagement, selfregulation and reflexivity. The analysis identifies key opportunities and challenges that these required and how they were addressed by the lecturers concerned. Based on the analysis and drawing on Case's (2015b) argument for an expanded sense of agency for students, we argue that the lecture is a key structural and cultural element of the university space that was disrupted during the pandemic and can be transformed going forward. We thus argue for decentering the lecture. Furthermore, we argue that care and concern for students has not been a primary cultural element of teaching and learning in higher education, for structural reasons, and that it should be an integral part of pedagogies going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four decades after the development of the first dynamic substructuring techniques, there is a necessity to classify the different methods in a general framework that outlines the relations between them. In this paper, a certain vision on substructuring methods is proposed, by recalling important historical milestones that allow us to understand substructuring as a domain decomposition concept. Thereafter, based on the dual and primal assembly of substructures, a general framework for the classification of the methods is presented. This framework allows us to indicate how the various classes of methods, proposed along the years, can be derived from a clear mathematical description of substructured problems. Current bottlenecks in experimental dynamic substructuring, as well as solutions found in literature, will also be briefly discussed.

Abstract: The operational transfer path analysis (OTPA) method is the subject of research in this article, which starts with a discussion on it''s theory. Here clear similarities with the MIMO technique in experimental modal analysis are found. Based on the knowledge of MIMO, one finds that input signals are allowed to be coherent to a certain extend. As coherence can be larger in OTPA in practice, the method is extended with the singular value decomposition method to reduce influences of noise. The article proceeds with a discussion on points of attention, or boundary conditions, in practical applications. An analysis on tire noise is included to illustrate the points of attention and the methods strength in, for example, vehicle TPA on tires. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this article a component transfer path analysis (TPA) procedure is proposed. The method allows one to calculate the total system response resulting from a subcomponent''s source excitation. It is based on the knowledge of the frequency response functions (FRFs) of the total system and on a measurement of the stand-alone subcomponent on a test bench. As the true source excitation, for example an engines combustion, is not measurable, equivalent forces at the subcomponent interface are found. The equivalent forces are multiplied with the total system FRFs from the subcomponent interface to response nodes of interest. The resulting responses at and in front of the subcomponent interface are shown to be physically exact for linear, time invariant and stationary operating systems. However, for the method to succeed, the source forces will have to be independent of the global dynamics. In addition, the test bench needs to be rigid in the frequency range of interest. This is typically hard to achieve for analysis in the mid frequency range (100–1000Hz in vehicle acoustics). Therefore, a way to compensate for the test bench dynamics is also discussed. It is shown that one needs the receptance matrix of the free component at its interfaces and the operational motions of the interface on the test bench. Knowledge of the test bench dynamics is not needed. Measuring excitation and response at the source interface may not be feasible in practice due to space restrictions. In this case, the proposed TPA method can be extended with substitute nodes on the subsystem which are reachable on the test setup and the total system. With the knowledge of the free subcomponent FRFs, physically exact responses at and in front of the gearbox interface can also be calculated. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Numerical conditioning of the subsystems’ interface flexibility matrix is an important issue in experimental frequency based substructuring (FBS) methods. As this matrix needs to be inverted, it is believed that ill numerical conditioning could severely magnify even small random errors in experimentally obtained subsystems, yielding erroneous FRFs of the coupled system. In this paper a method is introduced with which the uncertainty of the coupled system''s FRFs can be quantified based on the uncertainties of the subsystem FRFs. This uncertainty propagation method is based on the statistical moment method and uses the measured (time) data of the subsystems as input. The method will be applied to a numerical example, where it is shown that the uncertainty on substructure FRFs can significantly influence the accuracy of the coupled system. Furthermore, the application shows that the method introduced is computationally efficient and highlights some interesting phenomena that can be encountered in experimental dynamic substructuring. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A child aged 2 is described with a giant blue naevus of the scalp, with underlying absence of skull bones and hyperpigmentation of the dura. Multiple small blue naevi were present over the rest of the body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]