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Global health inequities have created an urgency for health professions education to transition towards responsive and contextually relevant curricula. Such transformation and renewal processes hold significant implications for those educators responsible for implementing the curriculum. Currently little is known about how health professions educators across disciplines understand a responsive curriculum and how this understanding might influence their practice. We looked at curricula that aim to deliver future health care professionals who are not only clinically competent but also critically conscious of the contexts in which they serve and the health care systems within which they practice. We conducted a qualitative study across six institutions in South Africa, using focus group discussions and in-depth individual interviews to explore (i) how do health professions educators understand the principles that underpin their health professions education curriculum; and (ii) how do these understandings of health professions educators shape their teaching practices? The transcripts were analysed thematically following multiple iterations of critical engagement to identify patterns of meaning across the entire dataset. The results reflected a range of understandings related to knowing, doing, and being and becoming; and a range of teaching practices that are explicit, intentionally designed, take learning to the community, embrace a holistic approach, encourage safe dialogic encounters, and foster reflective practice through a complex manner of interacting. This study contributes to the literature on health professions education as a force for social justice. It highlights the implications of transformative curriculum renewal and offers insights on how health professions educators embrace notions of social responsiveness and health equity to engage with these underlying principles within their teaching.

Funding has become an established means of promoting the professionalisation of teaching and learning. Various funding schemes in Higher Education have incentivised innovation and research aimed at developing a scholarship of teaching. However, a causal relationship is impossible to prove and the underlying subjective processes of scholarly development are contested. It has been suggested that funding might become another instrument to achieve a neoliberal agenda of increased performativity. This paper explores the affordances generated at a particular institution in South Africa from the perspective of recipients of relatively small awards. Qualitative data were generated in face-to-face individual interviews and analysed thematically. Insight generated included how funding acted as a catalyst for further scholarly development of individuals, disciplines and project teams. A culture of flexibility, nurture and care-full operational management were considered enablers. Using 'slow scholarship' as a lens allowed understandings of developmental pathways and multiple contextual influences on scholarly trajectories.

What knowledge matters in health professions education is an issue of debate in the literature, foregrounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and informed by calls for students who are not only clinically competent, but also critically conscious of global health inequity. Building on this work, this paper explores what kinds of knowledge are legitimated in two health science programmes at a South African university. Thirty-four health professions teachers participated in the study. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) Specialisation was used as an analytical framework, with Epistemic and Social Relations as coding categories. Results revealed the dominance of a knowledge code, with the social dispositions and attributes relating to the development of critical consciousness often not considered knowledge at all. Our contention is that both knowledge and social dispositions are equally important in the development of future healthcare professionals and that collaborative curriculum conversations are needed to enable them being interwoven throughout curricula.

In this paper we study epistemological transitions across an intended engineering curriculum and recommend strategies to assist students in attaining the increasingly complex concepts and insights that are necessary for transition to advanced levels of study. We draw on Legitimation Code Theory [Maton, Karl. 2014, "Knowledge and Knowers: Towards a Realist Sociology of Education". Abingdon: Routledge], in particular the dimensions of sematic gravity and semantic density, to explain these transitions. Data for the study was obtained from a curriculum renewal project that reveals how engineers understand engineering knowledge. We find an interdependent relationship between semantic gravity and semantic density in the intended engineering curriculum. The complexity of the context and the problems that arise from it pose strong cognitive challenges. The semantic gravity wave rises and falls across the engineering curriculum s, enabling both abstraction and a focus on "real world" problems in specialised knowledge fields. Control of the semantic gravity wave is key to the provision of "epistemological access" [Morrow, Wally, ed. (2003) 2009. "Bounds of Democracy: Epistemological Access in Higher Education". Reprint, Pretoria: HSRC Press] to engineering knowledge.

Funding has become an established means of promoting the professionalisation of teaching and learning. Various funding schemes in Higher Education have incentivised innovation and research aimed at developing a scholarship of teaching. However, a causal relationship is impossible to prove and the underlying subjective processes of scholarly development are contested. It has been suggested that funding might become another instrument to achieve a neoliberal agenda of increased performativity. This paper explores the affordances generated at a particular institution in South Africa from the perspective of recipients of relatively small awards. Qualitative data were generated in face-to-face individual interviews and analysed thematically. Insight generated included how funding acted as a catalyst for further scholarly development of individuals, disciplines and project teams. A culture of flexibility, nurture and care-full operational management were considered enablers. Using 'slow scholarship' as a lens allowed understandings of developmental pathways and multiple contextual influences on scholarly trajectories. [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.

Much of the literature around the notions of discourse and identity explores how education (particularly higher education) might develop academic discourses and identities in students. There is however a dearth of work relating to what the development of academic discourses and identities in students might mean for the lecturers who teach them. The identities of lecturers, especially those in applied science/engineering fields, are generally framed in terms of their disciplinary affiliation rather than their role as professional educators. This construction of a science/engineering-based identity in many ways militates against the incorporation of an identity as a professional educator. Using narrative methodology, life history approaches and discourse analysis to trace twenty lecturers' perceptions of their changing roles and identities as academics, this paper argues that the incorporation of a professional educator identity would enable the explicit teaching of academic discourses. The findings show that the identity of professional educator can be developed in science/engineering lecturers through their interaction with academic developers from 'other' disciplines such as Education and Language/Linguistics. Bringing academic developers and science/engineering lecturers into dialogue with each other facilitated the development of an alternate identity, that of professional educator, in science/engineering lecturers. The paper concludes that academic developers, through the generic academic literacy courses offered at most tertiary institutions, occupy a space that science/engineering lecturers should be filling, that of inducting students into the discourses of science and engineering. Finally the paper recommends that sustained interaction between academic developers and science/engineering lecturers facilitates a shift in the academic identities of the science/engineering lecturers, towards incorporating an 'otherness' as discourse teachers.

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.

Currently most academic literacy (AL) courses in South Africa are decontextualized and generic, suggesting an autonomous view of literacy. This view is challenged by the new literacy studies, which see literacy as social practices embedded in context. Recent developments in AL research emphasize the need to focus on discipline-specific strategies that embed ALs in disciplines of study, rather than approaches which decontextualize AL. At a tertiary institution in SA, a literacy-as-social-practice approach to ALs was implemented through an institution-wide project focusing on integrating language and content in an attempt to transgress the narrow disciplinary boundaries that characterize the tertiary curriculum. This paper explores how 20 AL practitioners and disciplinary specialists integrated AL teaching into various disciplines. The findings suggest that higher education needs to create discursive spaces for the collaboration of AL practitioners and disciplinary specialists, to facilitate the embedding of AL teaching into disciplines of study.

Studied the effects of an acquaintance-rape prevention program on college students' attitudes (n=152) toward rape and attitudes toward women, perceptions of acquaintance rape scenarios, and rape empathy. Positive attitude change was stronger among men, who became more certain of rape definitions. Contains 53 references. (SLD)

Examines and critiques research that measures the effects of school sexuality education programs on adolescent sexual risk-taking behavior. Discusses common methodological problems and examines studies measuring program effectiveness. Research suggests participation in school sexuality education does not promote increased or earlier sexual activity. Not all programs effectively reduce sexual risk behavior. (SM)

The present study was designed to assess the effectiveness of a sexual assault prevention program on college students' rape-related attitudes and experiences with sexual aggression and victimization. Attitudes and sexual aggression and victimization experiences were assessed both prior to the program and 9 weeks following the program. Results suggested that program participants evidenced less rape myth acceptance at posttest than the comparison group. The program, however, did not have a significant effect on attitudes toward women, rape empathy, or rates of sexual aggression or victimization. Participants rated the program highly, although they did not find the information personally relevant. Implications of these findings for preventative efforts are discussed.

School sexuality education programs have been studied as a means to prevent sexual behavior that puts adolescents at risk for incurring an unwanted pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease. This review examines and critiques research that measures effects of school sexuality education programs on the sexual risk-taking behavior of adolescents. First, methodological problems common in the literature are discussed. Second, studies measuring effects of school sexuality education programs are examined. Finally, suggestions for future research are made. (J Sch Health. 1995;65(3):91-95), Costs and negative consequences associated with teen pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among adolescents spurred interest in studying and developing methods to prevent these problems. School [...]