In this article, I examine three claims that in some senses can hinder the supervisory process rather than facilitate it. These are the claims that the relationship between supervisor and student should be a friendship; that students writing their theses should demonstrate "own voice"; and that students should choose supervisors on the…

Students tend to learn in the way they know, or think, they will be assessed. Therefore, to ensure deep, meaningful learning, assessments must be geared to promote cognitive processing that requires complex, contextualised thinking to construct meaning and create knowledge. Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive levels is used worldwide to assist in…

Gross participation and throughput rates in higher education institutions in South Africa indicate an inequitable and poorly functioning system. This interpretive study argues for an approach that enhances epistemological and ontological access and examines how an intervention that includes an overt approach in dealing with the nature of science,…

The article focuses on the transfer of knowledge learnt by students in the classroom to their experiential learning contexts. It is argued that transfer is not a simple process of application but rather one of recontextualisation of previously learnt knowledge. In order for students to perform this recontextualisation, some form of reflection on…

The Centre for Science Access Foundation Programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal provides alternative access to tertiary science studies to educationally disadvantaged students. The philosophical basis for this Programme is that of constructivism, as adopted by the original Science Foundation Programme (SFP) which was initiated in 1991 on the…

One hundred and fifty-nine Grade 11 prospective disadvantaged students in the natural sciences at the University of Pretoria completed the Study Orientation Questionnaire in Mathematics and the Senior Aptitude Test (Advanced). Fifty-nine male students (M age = 16.05; SD = 0.57) and 100 females (M age = 16.02; SD = 0.512) scored significantly…

The purpose of the study was to compare the teaching efficacy beliefs of pre-service teachers before and after work-integrated learning (WIL) in a South African University of Technology. The comparison groups were formed based on the criterion of WIL. Pre-service teachers in their third year of the B.Ed. (FET) programme participated in the study…

The problem explored is the relatively low research output at a merged Higher Education Institution (HEI). The re-landscaping of how HEIs operate, has impacted on merged institutions, especially those of a comprehensive nature, that are facing the challenge of improving research output. This article is based on research conducted for a Master's…

This article deals with e-learning by focusing on the perceptible tension between ICT and Education. It calls for the implementation of a supple platform within higher education community in the new era of ICT. A personal experience and the analysis of different approaches are used in dealing with the issues. The choice of Moodle as a case study…

As the government seeks to foster a degree of self-sufficiency in terms of income generation through output, universities are forced to rely on performativity from staff to become more entrepreneurial. Following on the articles by Waghid (2009), Le Grange (2009), Reddy, Le Grange and Fataar (2010), and Smeyers and Waghid (2009) among others, this…

While South African higher education has, in many respects, achieved remarkable achievements since 1994, a series of serious problems continue to beset the system, and a low internal (high attrition rate) and external (alignment with the employment market) efficiency. There also exist the problems of large scale youth unemployment and the policy…

In this article we respond to the perceived crisis in humanities education in South Africa which posits firstly that large numbers of students are leaving this field and that secondly, the value of a humanities education has declined. To do this we track the enrolments and graduation rates in humanities at both undergraduate and postgraduate…

The University of KwaZulu-Natal is now six years post merger--time to reflect as the institution is now well settled. Modules are offered on multiple campuses, at various levels, ranging from entry level modules through to Ph.D. studies. This article attempts to identify the factors that lead to the successful progression of students to higher…

Stellenbosch University has gone through a serious engagement with the topic of a pedagogy of hope. The engagement included the initial proposal of Paulo Friere, the South American educationist, bearing the imprints of the twentieth century and the new ways in which intellectuals are revisiting the critical pedagogy of hope for the twenty first…

In this article we present a conceptual framework that we have found sufficiently robust and broad-based to offer a platform for engaging with social and educational challenges in collaboration with our students and research participants. In our framework we employ aspects of the work done by Engestrom (1987; 2001) in terms of cultural-historical…