Carol Bertram
University of KwaZulu-Natal, Education, Faculty Member
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Research Interests: Geography and Curriculum
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One of the major shifts in higher education over the past decade has been the move from elite systems to open, mass systems. Together with this shift has come an increased focus on the 'performativity' of knowledge and on... more
One of the major shifts in higher education over the past decade has been the move from elite systems to open, mass systems. Together with this shift has come an increased focus on the 'performativity' of knowledge and on vocationalism. This paper reflects on the shift towards massification in the Bachelor of Education Honours1 programme which is offered to in-service teachers by the School of Education, Training and Development at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (UNP). This article explores the implications of shifting towards massification for the curriculum, the learning experience of students, the University and the academic staff of a traditionally faceto- face institution. It also discusses two key issues which have emerged on the programme namely the distinction between access and success, and the depth of learning achieved by students. These implications have played themselves out in specific ways in the School's experience, but can probably be generalised to universities across South Africa.
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The School of Education, Training and Development at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg offers a Bachelor of Education (Honours) to practising teachers who already have a four year teaching diploma. The programme is delivered... more
The School of Education, Training and Development at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg offers a Bachelor of Education (Honours) to practising teachers who already have a four year teaching diploma. The programme is delivered through interactive learning materials and Saturday tutorial sessions. However, interviews and a student survey seem to indicate that informal study groups are as important, if not more important than the formal tutorial sessions for students. 70% of students surveyed are part of an informal study group and a quarter of these groups meet every weekday. Observations of three informal study groups give some insight into the way in which students learn together. The article concludes that while the informal study groups play a very important role in motivating and supporting students, they do not necessarily assist learners in developing a deep approach to learning. In fact for some students, the study groups mean that they in fact do not interact with the learning material at an individual level at all. South African Journal of Higher Education Vol.17(2) 2003: 218-225
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... History curriculum documents in South African have long come under fire for being content ... This paper compares the 'old' Interim Core Syllabus for History Standards 8 - 10 (1996 ... historical themes such as power... more
... History curriculum documents in South African have long come under fire for being content ... This paper compares the 'old' Interim Core Syllabus for History Standards 8 - 10 (1996 ... historical themes such as power alignments, human rights, issues of civil society and globalization. ...
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Academic development research supports embedding academic literacies development in disciplinary teaching. This enables students to experience reading and writing as disciplinary academic practices. However, few lecturers have the... more
Academic development research supports embedding academic literacies development in disciplinary teaching. This enables students to experience reading and writing as disciplinary academic practices. However, few lecturers have the language knowledge and the pedagogical expertise to do this. The Reading to Learn pedagogy provides a scaffolded methodology that lecturers in higher education can adapt. We reflect on our own experiences of using these scaffolded academic literacy practices in three cases: with first year biology students, biochemistry Honours students and Masters in Education students. We argue that scaffolded academic literacy practices are useful because they emphasise both the reading and writing of texts in the discipline, provide an educational approach to plagiarism by modelling how to meaningfully paraphrase academic text, and support learner engagement. Additionally, the professional learning opportunities help academics to develop both knowledge of language and a clear methodology which can be adapted to a range of disciplines and levels.
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Over the last five years we have been engaged with a highly theorized research project in South African curriculum reform that created an abstract holding space where very different communities, interest groups and specialist players... more
Over the last five years we have been engaged with a highly theorized research project in South African curriculum reform that created an abstract holding space where very different communities, interest groups and specialist players engaged in the process of curriculum reform were placed together. Theoretical and empirical research within the esoteric space of university practice constructed a playing field where all the major contributors to curriculum reform, ranging from those involved in conceptualization to those directly working on implementation, could come together under an overarching conceptual educational form called the Pedagogic Device. It was a curious space – the different strata worked with various and sometimes conflicting logics, each concentrating on fulfilling their own mandate, often not lifting their heads to see what those above and below them were doing. Using the Pedagogic Device as an orienting tool we were able to walk through the post apartheid education...
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The School of Education, Training and Development at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg offers a Bachelor of Education (Honours) to practising teachers who already have a four year teaching diploma. The programme is delivered... more
The School of Education, Training and Development at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg offers a Bachelor of Education (Honours) to practising teachers who already have a four year teaching diploma. The programme is delivered through interactive learning materials and Saturday tutorial sessions. However, interviews and a student survey seem to indicate that informal study groups are as important, if not more important than the formal tutorial sessions for students. 70% of students surveyed are part of an informal study group and a quarter of these groups meet every weekday. Observations of three informal study groups give some insight into the way in which students learn together. The article concludes that while the informal study groups play a very important role in motivating and supporting students, they do not necessarily assist learners in developing a deep approach to learning. In fact for some students, the study groups mean that they in fact do not interact with the learning material at an individual level at all. South African Journal of Higher Education Vol.17(2) 2003: 218-225
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Teaching practicum (TP) assessment instruments provide insight into the nature of the knowledge that the university expects university-appointed tutors and school-based supervising teachers to have in order to make fair judgements about a... more
Teaching practicum (TP) assessment instruments provide insight into the nature of the knowledge that the university expects university-appointed tutors and school-based supervising teachers to have in order to make fair judgements about a student's teaching competence. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the TP assessment instruments used during 2012 by five South African universities offering initial teacher education. It describes the grounds upon which the comparative analysis was done, and offers a qualitative analysis of the knowledge base that the assessors of student teaching are assumed to have. We find that the structure and criteria of some TP assessment instruments tend to construct the assessment of student teaching as straightforward exercise in verifying that certain technical requirements are met. In contrast, we show how others use structure and criteria potentially to enable a more professionally based judgement of the competence of student teaching.
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The purpose of this paper is to interrogate what makes history a specialised and particular discipline; to ask what does it mean to do history and to know history. I draw on the work of those working within the field of the sociology of... more
The purpose of this paper is to interrogate what makes history a specialised and particular discipline; to ask what does it mean to do history and to know history. I draw on the work of those working within the field of the sociology of knowledge, particularly the work of Dowling, to begin a discussion around the concept of an historical gaze. I argue that this concept may provide an analytic tool to help us to keep the inter� twined strands of procedural knowledge and substantive knowledge in history from unraveling and coming apart.
We report on survey data collected from 776 final-year student teachers from 11 higher edu-cation institutions in October 2004. The purpose of the survey was to find out how many newly qualified teachers were planning to teach abroad and... more
We report on survey data collected from 776 final-year student teachers from 11 higher edu-cation institutions in October 2004. The purpose of the survey was to find out how many newly qualified teachers were planning to teach abroad and how many were planning to teach in South Africa. Two issues formed the backdrop of the study: teacher migration and teacher shortages in South Africa. Key findings from the study showed that 27.4 % of the student teachers were planning to teach abroad in 2005, 63.3 % were planning to teach in South Africa, and the remainder (7.2%) were not planning to teach. However the vast majority of those planning to teach abroad indicated that they would be returning to South Africa within two years. Of the student teachers who were planning to teach in South Africa, only 33% indicated that they already had a job secured for 2005. Three-quarters of these posts were to be paid by school governing bodies in ex-Model C schools. We argue that teacher shortages are ...
Curriculum reform in South Africa has embraced outcomes-based education for a decade now. This paper examines curriculum reform in the subject of history. The new National Curriculum Statements for History (Grades 10-12) describe learning... more
Curriculum reform in South Africa has embraced outcomes-based education for a decade now. This paper examines curriculum reform in the subject of history. The new National Curriculum Statements for History (Grades 10-12) describe learning history as a process of enquiry where the emphasis is on doing history. The curriculum documents make it very clear that 'learners who study history use the insights and skills of historians'. This paper describes different approaches to history learning in schools, and asks what it means to 'do' history. Using an analysis of formal history assessment tasks in three high schools and the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education November exemplar exam for Grade 10 in 2006, I argue that learners are mostly required to extract information from sources rather than engaging with sources 'as historians would do'. It also appears that learners are not being required to demonstrate a strong and in-depth knowledge of history. The data we...
Abstract In South Africa, there is increasing state monitoring of curriculum coverage. This is a response both to classroom research which shows that teachers do not always cover the official curriculum in the specified year and to... more
Abstract In South Africa, there is increasing state monitoring of curriculum coverage. This is a response both to classroom research which shows that teachers do not always cover the official curriculum in the specified year and to learners’ poor achievement in international tests. In the province of KwaZulu-Natal from 2013 to 2016, the provincial department of education embarked on a systemic reform programme called Jika iMfundo in 1200 schools, which is focused on improving curriculum management and coverage. We interviewed 29 Heads of Department (who are also teachers) in fifteen schools who had participated in the Jika iMfundo programme for these three years, asking them about their experiences. The findings show that teachers experience tension between the fast pace required by the curriculum trackers and slow pace of learners and they believe that increasing pacing to cover the curriculum hampers the quality of the learning. Teachers also said that the curriculum coverage trackers do not account for different school contexts. We argue that while the programme has provided clear curriculum guidance to teachers who need it, it has not sufficiently acknowledged the huge variation in learners’ competence. Nor has it yet enabled teachers to develop the content knowledge and the pedagogical content knowledge necessary to teach learners who are not at the same grade level (although they are in the same classroom). Curriculum coverage is a necessary, but not sufficient intervention, unless there is also a focus on pedagogy and teaching at the right level. We recommend an intervention that enables teachers to identify individual learner’s existing learning gaps, and equips them to teach at the right level in order to provide learners with opportunities to develop foundational knowledge and skills to succeed in further education, rather than one whose primary focus is only curriculum coverage.
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Teaching practicum (TP) assessment instruments provide insight into the nature of theknowledge that the university expects university-appointed tutors and school-basedsupervising teachers to have in order to make fair judgements about a... more
Teaching practicum (TP) assessment instruments provide insight into the nature of theknowledge that the university expects university-appointed tutors and school-basedsupervising teachers to have in order to make fair judgements about a student’s teachingcompetence. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the TP assessment instrumentsused during 2012 by five South African universities offering initial teacher education. Itdescribes the grounds upon which the comparative analysis was done, and offers aqualitative analysis of the knowledge base that the assessors of student teaching areassumed to have. We find that the structure and criteria of some TP assessment instrumentstend to construct the assessment of student teaching as straight-forward exercise inverifying that certain technical requirements are met. In contrast, we show how others usestructure and criteria potentially to enable a more professionally based judgement of thecompetence of student teaching.
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In an outcomes-based system, learning outcomes specify skills and not content. This paper addresses the issue of what happens to skills and content (or to procedural knowledge and substantive knowledge) as the curriculum unfolds. The case... more
In an outcomes-based system, learning outcomes specify skills and not content. This paper addresses the issue of what happens to skills and content (or to procedural knowledge and substantive knowledge) as the curriculum unfolds. The case here is the unfolding of the South African history curriculum (Grades 10-12), from the official curriculum documents to teacher training and textbooks, into three different Grade 10 classrooms. It describes how the official message of the history curriculum is recontextualised and reinterpreted by various actors at these different levels. What emerges is a story of the relationship between the procedural dimension and the knowledge dimension of history. There appears to be the danger that the logic of outcomes, the need to attain assessment standards and the strong focus on a skills-based history may lead to a focus on generic comprehension skills rather than a conceptual understanding of history and its constructed nature.