Browsing by Author "Thesen, Lucia"

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    An investigation into the relationship between student identity and academic literacy at a private higher education institution
    (2018) Pearton, Nicola; Thesen, Lucia
    Although academic development programmes have been well researched in the South African context, much of the research has focused on programmes at mainstream public universities and less is known about the programmes run by smaller private institutions. This research aims to identify and discuss themes around student identity and how these themes relate to academic literacy acquisition for students on a one-year bridging course programme at a private university. Gee’s (2001) identity framework is used to explore and compare how students on a bridging course were viewed by the institution, and how these students saw themselves. An analysis of data gathered through interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, and course-related materials revealed a strong deficit discourse around students on the bridging course. The institution’s view of literacy as autonomous, the deficit discourse surrounding the students, and the way these students were positioned in the institution, meant that students, although highly motivated to achieve a degree qualification, had not begun to develop the beginning of either an academic or a vocational identity. The institution did not successfully enable students to view academic practice and discourse as part of their identity, and as a result bridging course students did not adopt the practices and discourses around academic literacy as they were not convinced of their validity and legitimacy. Given that academic literacy is central to success on a degree programme, these students were not adequately prepared for their first year of degree study. The findings from this research show the need for wider research into whether academic development programmes at private institutions are really meeting the needs of the students who enrol onto these programmes.
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    A classroom of life : a qualitative analysis of the reflections of medical students on their entry into an obstetric community of practice
    (2006) Draper, George; Thesen, Lucia; Case, Jenni
    This study looks at how students describe their entry into an Obstetric community of practice.In common with other Health Science Faculties in South Africa the MBChB curriculum offered by the University of Cape Town is in a state of transition with the last final year class of the outgoing curriculum graduating at the end of 2006. The Obstetric programme in the outgoing curriculum provided courses in the fourth and sixth years of study. The fourth year rotation provided students with their first contact with childbirth and the related service I learning environment. The final year programme prepared students for internship and subsequent independent practice. The overall theoretical framework for this study is the situated learning theory of Lave and Wenger (1992), particularly its notions of community of practice and legitimate peripheral participation. Additional insights are provided by ritual theory, with its notions of separation,transition and integration. Other important concepts include the role of reflection in learning and critical discourse analysis as a means of analyzing textual data. Students' descriptions of their entry into an obstetric community of practice in reflective commentaries and a focus group interview provide the data set on which the analysis is based. Specific aspects considered are identities, roles, relationships and issues of power. Shifts in these aspects over time and the implications of these issues for curriculum change are explored. Within a qualitative research framework a case study strategy is employed. The 'case' consists of a 'focal group' of five students purposively selected from the group of students who had voluntarily submitted reflective commentaries. Their commentaries written in their fourth year and the transcription of a focus group interview conducted at the end of their final year provide the data for the analysis. The research process involves a layered, sequential approach. A limited quantitative analysis of demographic data compares the students who submitted commentaries with those who did not. Using a content analysis of all the student commentaries common themes are identified. These inform the more detailed discourse analysis of a sample of textual material derived from the reflective writing and the transcriptions of the focus group interview. The results overall indicate that the spheres of practice for the two years are related but differ in key areas.
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    Coming to voice : identity and change in the teaching of writing to women
    (1997) Schuster, Anne; Thesen, Lucia
    As a teacher of creative writing, the researcher is interested in the most effective and appropriate approach to the teaching of writing to women. This study considers two approaches to the teaching of writing - writing as self expression, and writing as social practice. It outlines the theoretical framework of these two approaches, in terms of three key concepts - self, language and change. It looks at the implications of these approaches in terms of their approach to autobiography and in terms of 'the writing scene' - the context for women writers - and in particular, it looks at how women are affected by the approaches. The study then explores the implications of a feminist poststructuralist approach to the teaching of writing. The theoretical framework of this approach is discussed, again in terms of the three key concepts of self, language and change; and the approach is then 'translated' into the practical research of the study. Positioning itself as feminist advocacy research, it takes the form of an action research study where a series of writing workshops is designed and then facilitated in a selected group of women participants. The study analyses the process, the writing produced in the workshops, and the interviews with the participants after the workshops, in terms of how they reflect the central concepts, self, language and change of the feminist poststructuralist approach. The study concludes with a summary of the essential ingredients of a poststructuralist approach, it comments on the generalisability of the research to other groups, and comments on the research process in terms of the researcher's intentions as a piece of feminist advocacy research. In line with feminist research, the researcher is concerned that this dissertation is written in such a way as to be of practical use to a teacher of writing who might like to adopt a feminist poststructuralist approach. With this in mind, a complete set of workshop outlines is given in Appendix A, a complete set of handouts in Appendix B, and some resource material for teachers in Appendix C. Bibliography: pages 121-129.
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    Designing social identities : a case study of a primary school theatrical performance by Zulu children in an English ex-model C school
    (2004) Alborough, Clare Louise; Thesen, Lucia
    This multimodal case study investigates the discourses that emerge in a theatrical performance, constructed and performed by a group of grade seven, Zulu speaking students as a representation of themselves. The performance was set in an ex-model C primary school in Kwa-Zulu Natal and reflects the tensions between the students' identities that are located in the different fields of home, school, traditional settings and urban settings. The study is qualitative in nature, with the performance text being a participatory, creative, multi modal, joint-construction involving the participants and the researcher. The performance was structured so that each scene represents one of the participants' social fields. The analysis of the performance follows this structure and explores the way discourses and identities emerge from the Traditional, Home, School and Urban scenes of the performance. The study draws on the New London Group's Multiliteracies theory, using the concepts of discourse, identity, interest and design, as well as drawing on Bourdieu's notions of field and capital. The study makes use of social semiotic analysis, drawing particularly from Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammar, to explore the multi modal nature of the performance, analysing the linguistic mode alongside those of the visual, the gestural and the spatial. The study attempts to be consistent with the multimodal nature of the performance and so presents the data through photographs, sketches and video clips integrated with the written text. The study alms to amplify the participants' voice through the richness of their representation. It attempts to contest the notion that marginalised people are powerless in the face of hegemonic discourses, asserting rather that there is always agency.
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    Envisaging the postgraduate journey
    (2012) Thesen, Lucia; Chetty, Rulisha
    This video aims to provide a reassuring 'voice in the head' for the extended, often isolated experience of doing research. It can be used as a resource to stimulate discussion at postgraduate orientation events and can be distributed to postgraduate students (Masters & PhDs), transferring students, adult learners and international students.
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    The exploration of a performative space to nurture EAL international students' writer identities at a South African university
    (2012) Hunma, Aditi; Thesen, Lucia
    This study is located within the internalisation context at the University of Cape Town (UCT). As an internationalising university, UCT aims among other things to promote the ideals of 'Equity and Institutional culture' for all its students (UCT policy on internationalisation, 2009). The reality on the ground suggests that this may unwittingly reproduce the centre-periphery divide which characterises global knowledge transactions, within UCT's own institutional structures especially for students from developing African nations, the focus here being on Southern African Development Community (SADC) nations. The tension brought about at the institutional level may be partly due to the lack of specific support structures for international students, and partly due to the latter's misguided perceptions of the faculties' expectations. I argue that gradually, this tension begins to permeate students' texts, their production strategies and motivations.
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    From art to artefact: meaning-making processes across the three major subjects in a Diploma in Fashion
    (2011) Grasser, Hildegard Irene; Thesen, Lucia
    Investigations in the field of Fashion design education have not taken into account that students need to negotiate three very different subjects. In particular the technical side, namely pattern making and garment construction have not received enough attention. Over the years I have found the same difficulties among students as they negotiate the three main subjects. Their encounter with the technical subjects, presents particular difficulties. In order to explore these difficulties, this study investigates the meaning-making processes of beginner students as they move from drawing and designing to production of a garment. By identifying and analysing the practices of a beginner, I examine how students become multimodally literate across the three subjects.
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    How international students navigate the social and academic practices of a South African university
    (2009) Gieser, James D; Thesen, Lucia
    The aim of this thesis is to qualitatively explore how international students navigated the social and academic practices of a South African university. A sample of thirteen students was selected from the Humanities faculty at the University of Cape Town, each of whom was a visiting student for either one semester or a full academic year. Participants volunteered for one-hour, face-to-face interviews which were tape-recorded for later analysis. The interviews were semi-structured, as the author hoped to elicit particular critical moments in the student's study-abroad journey. Two groups of students were sought for purposes of validation and comparison: Group 1 consisted of nine American students; Group 2 consisted of four students from other countries. The focus, however, was primarily upon the experiences of the students from the U.S. The theoretical framework for the study was drawn from the work of social theorists James Gee and Pierre Bourdieu. Their interest in the differential distribution of power in the social world - particularly within academia - and in how the individual gains or loses power as s/he moves in that world provided helpful frames for exploring how international students negotiated often unfamiliar contexts encountered while studying abroad. To operationalize the theoretical framework, Anthony Giddens' concept of "fateful moments" was utilized. Following other researchers, the concept was altered to "critical moments." Critical moments are moments in a subject's narrative which cause disjunctures to arise in the life journey; they are moments of crisis which demand navigational choices to be made. In analysis of the data, these moments were located either by the interviewee's identification or the author's interpretation. In order to aid analysis practices were split into two domains: social and academic. Data was then clustered according to themes which arose in the interviews. In relation to social practices, common themes were related to "with whom to socialize" and to national and racial identities. American students in particular were deliberate in stating their intent to meet "local" students and to create distance from other Americans. Issues related to national and racial identity arose strongly across all of the interviews and influenced both their practices as well as those of "local" students. In relation to academic practices, themes related to academic support, academic expectations, and tacit academic procedures were predominant. When faced with unknown practices students often engaged in a compare-and-contrast activity, drawing upon known practices from their home institutions to serve as the standard by vhich ncv practiccs were judged. However, although splitting practices into two domains was helpful for analysis, students' practices often cut across them. For example, issues related to national and racial identity often occurred both in and out of the classroom. Based on the findings of this thesis as well as the literature, the author concludes with suggestions for future study-abroad programmes. Specifically, hc focuses upon the pre-orientation component of such programmes, suggesting that students may be more fully prepared to engage their study-abroad experience by being introduced to a particular perspective of the social world based on the social theories of Gee and Bourdieu.
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    Identity and coping strategies in academic writing : a study of first year Mauritian students at a South African university
    (2009) Hunma, Aditi; Thesen, Lucia
    This study situates itself at the intersection between internationalization issues and students' experiences in academic writing at the University of Cape Town. What the study attempts to do is to place the two issues in a constructive dialogue and tease out how the one informs the other. Throughout, the student is viewed as the focal point of research and the study assesses how the student responds to this dialogue. His/her writing becomes an index of an internalized dialogue between institution, writing, self and community. It informs the researcher of the implications of the internationalization policy and developments in the pedagogy of academic writing on the ground.
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    In search of the generative question : a hermeneutic approach to pedagogy
    (2005) Graaff, Johann; Thesen, Lucia
    This dissertation investigates, first, the kinds of transformation that have occurred in the perceptions and identities of a first year sociology class at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and, second, the learning experiences that have led to, or been associated with, those changes. It does that through Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics. On the first issue, Gadamer proposes that the social sciences brings individuals to a meeting with the alien, and that this meeting effects a transformation of the self. This means both (following Jardine) to 'return life to its original difficulty', and (following Kerdeman) to be 'pulled up short'.
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    Language attitudes, genre and culture capital : a case study of EAL students' access to a foundation course in the Humanities at UCT
    (2001) Bangeni, Abongwe; Thesen, Lucia
    This dissertation explores the extent to which language and genre can be used to facilitate access for a group of first year students who have English as an additional language in the Humanities at the University of Cape Town enrolled in a foundation course. The use of the genre of the praise poem in the curriculum is used as a case study to address how the cultural capital that this group of students bring with them can be validated, the main aim being to facilitate access to the curriculum. In exploring students' attitudes to language and genre, data were collected mainly through the use of two questionnaires and interviews, where a qualitative analysis was done by drawing up the main themes which emerged and exploring the implications of these themes for the research question. The questionnaires aimed at identifying students' language preferences for academic writing (the choice being between their respective primary languages and English). The second questionnaire addresses the genre issue more closely by extending the question to include students' attitudes towards praise poetry while the first questionnaire asks about language preference in general. The second part of the research process deals with interviews, which I conducted with three of the students. The interviews were conducted with the aim of addressing the issues that emerged from the questionnaires; issues that I felt needed to be explored further in an interview context.
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    Recontextualisation in museum displays: refracting discourses over time
    (2018) Rall, Medee; Archer, Arlene; Thesen, Lucia
    This research investigates the representation of people in museums, focusing on the San, South Africa’s first nation. Using a multimodal social semiotic framework, it analyses three exhibitions of the San that were mounted over a period of a hundred years in a natural history museum from 1911 to the present. The research takes into consideration the socio-political background in which the exhibitions were designed, and examines how this manifests in the ways in which the San were represented. The analysis surfaces three dominant discourses, namely evolutionary, ecological as well as a discourse of transformation. These discourses are complex and always in dialogue with one another. The research entailed working with and analysing photographs and drawing on secondary texts of two exhibitions that are no longer open to the public, and analysing an existing exhibition. The data analysis was framed by the semiotic principles of recontextualisation as posited by Bezemer and Kress (2008): selection, social relations and arrangement. Selection refers to the choice of meaning materials for an exhibition. Arrangement refers to the decisions made in the display of the meaning materials (including layout, framing, and foregrounding), and social relations pertain to the social repositioning that takes place in the process of recontextualisation. The research showed how discourses shifted across time, but that dominant discourses such as an evolutionary discourse persisted through the ages and the various exhibitions. By analysing exhibitions of the San against the political backdrop of colonialism, apartheid and post-apartheid this research contributes to an understanding of colonial museums and their exhibitions. It provides suggestions to South African museum practitioners dealing with colonial collections on how to bring a decolonial perspective to exhibitions. The insights gained through this research may enable museum professionals to better understand meaning making and representation in museum display and to contribute to current debates on representation, including ways in which dominant discourses are reflected and refracted in museums. The dialogue between discourses and traces of discourse is of interest within the museum context as well as other contexts of transformation. The research shows that it is possible to map a re-imagining of museum display on the three principles of recontextualisation – selection, arrangement and social relations – in order to see what forms transformation in museum display could take.
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    Researching 'ideological becoming' in lectures: challenges for knowing differently
    (Taylor & Francis, 2009) Thesen, Lucia
    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.
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    Risk in Postgraduate writing: voice discourse and edgework
    (University of the Western Cape, 2013) Thesen, Lucia
    This paper brings writing into the contested space of research and knowledge-making in South Africa. An often hidden dimension of research is that it has to find expression in a written product, increasingly in English. This creates challenges for both students, who have developed writing identities in other domains, disciplines and languages, and also supervisors and journal editors who are gatekeepers for the making of new knowledge. In a competitive and uncertain climate where discourses of risk management play an increasingly important part, people tend to play it safe when it comes to writing, conforming to a narrow image of scientific writing. This has consequences for knowledge-making as students often set aside the experiences, allegiances and styles they have developed along the way. Drawing on data from an international publishing project on risk in academic writing, the paper explores dilemmas around the process of research writing. These instances make the contradictions and tensions faced by writers and gatekeepers central, highlighting the importance of voice and risk. Both voice and risk are explored experientially and theoretically, with the emphasis on the potentials of risk. The concept of risk, not as risk management, but as risk-taking, offers new ways of thinking about writing that brings the decisions that writers and readers make to the fore. A focus on risk has the potential to offer new understandings about the changing landscapes in which writers and readers weigh up their options against notions of what is 'normal'. Finally I suggest edgework as a productive concept that can take work on risk forward in both research and pedagogy.
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    Taking ownership : the relationship between self-representation and writing development in a science extended curriculum programme at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology
    (2009) Reiners, Ayesha; Thesen, Lucia
    This study challenges the prevalence of the literacy deficit views of student writing at Cape Peninsula University of Technology where I teach. The study is located in an Extended Curriculum Programme in the Applied Sciences and stretches across the Analytical Chemistry and Horticulture disciplines. It argues that writing is an act of identity and thus it is imperative to engage with the nuances of identity in text. I focus on the notion of the self and how this is represented in student writing. Students often view writing as difficult because they do not identify with the 'me' in their writing as dominant university discourses and practices often overpower them. The theoretical resources drawn on are situated in the academic literacies field which emphasizes the contested nature of academic meaning making practices (Lea and Street 1998, Lillis and Scott 2007). In particular, I use Clark and Ivanic's 'clover-leaf model (1997) that identifies three aspects to research writer identity in a text: the autobiographical self which writers bring with them to the act of writing. This is shaped by their life histories and the social group with which they identify; the discoursal self, which is how writers represent themselves in the text, based on the discourse choices they make as they write, and the authorial self, which is how writers assert themselves in their writing. In addition, the three aspects above are all affected by the socio-culturally available subject-positions and patterns of privileging among them that exist in the sociocultural context. My research extends Ivanic's research on the contested nature of writing by shifting the focus from academic writing of mature students in higher education, to explore academic and journal writing of first year students in an extended programme at a University of Technology in South Africa in a time of rapid transition. In order to explore these aspects of identity in student text in the Applied Sciences, I ask how students represent themselves in a text and whether there are any shifts or changes within an academic year. I also ask what these self-representations mean for teaching in an extended curriculum programme. Includes bibliographical references (pages 74-78).
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    Talking democracy in Grade 7 : a discourse analysis of SRC practice in a primary school
    (2001) Proctor, Elspeth; Young, Douglas; Thesen, Lucia
    My research set out to clarify to what extent democracy education is an identifiable and teachable concept in Curriculum 2005 and to find pedagogically useful ways of conceptualising and teaching active democratic participation. I chose a two-staged explorative qualitative research framework, informed by the New Literacy Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, with Grade 7 learners in a primary school. I identified school Student Representative Councils (SRC's) as a potential site for 'democracy education-in-action'.
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    Using clickers in an isiXhosa Communication Course: A case study on implementation of Interactive Student Response Systems (clickers) for learning isiXhosa as an Additional Language in Higher Education clinical settings
    Mhlabeni, Linda; Thesen, Lucia
    In multilingual countries, proficiency in more than one language can benefit individuals and society. For this reason, many universities, especially those with medical faculties, promote the learning of additional languages. Stellenbosch University's Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (SUFMHS) offers an isiXhosa Clinical Communication (XCC) course as part of some undergraduate courses. This study explores the use of clickers, a student response system (SRS). The study aims to answer the following research questions: How do students engage with the Student Response System (clickers) in an isiXhosa Clinical Communication course in Higher Education settings? This core question is followed by this subsidiary research question: To what extent can the use of clickers enhance students' clinical communicative competence in isiXhosa as a second additional language? The participants were 51 female first year Occupational Therapy (OT) students. They answered multiple choice questions (MCQs) using their mobile phones as clickers as a formative assessment procedure. The researcher observed the students from the moment they started answering the MCQs until the post-test classroom discussions had ended. The students' MCQ responses were polled and then displayed in the form of histograms. Additional data were collected by means of a post-intervention questionnaire, from focus group discussions and with informal staff interviews. The immediate feedback seemed to enhance content consolidation, student self-assessment and constructive peer comparison. For these reasons the study found that the use of clickers could enhance student-lecturer and student-student engagement. An important additional finding is that the use of students' personal mobile devices, rather than commercial clickers, contributed to the success of the intervention. It does seem though that, in order to be used maximally, clickers should be incorporated in the teaching pedagogy from the onset, rather than being primarily utilised as a resource to enhance teaching interventions.
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    Voices in discourse: Re-thinking shared meaning in academic writing
    (1994) Thesen, Lucia
    As a teacher of academic literacy, the researcher is involved in initiating non-traditional students into academic language practices--the academic 'conversation'. This study approaches mediation in a way that takes student diversity into account. This is done through an exploration of the relationship between the biographies of speakers of English as an additional language and their experience of writing academic essays in the faculties of Arts and Social Science at the University of Cape Town. In order to explore this relationship, the research draws on ethnographic methodology, and takes place in different locations. The first is in the curriculum in the form of a discourse analysis of an assignment which required personal writing in an introductory course to English I. The focus is on meaning exchange in context (discourse). The second involves biographical interviews with 13 students on the same course. Here the focus is on the transitions in their lives, and on their views on academic writing and identity. The emphasis is on the voice of the individual. The third area involves bringing voice and discourse together in interviews with three students about their assignments on the introductory course. Students were asked about the influences visible in the linguistic surface of their writing. The study concludes that if the academic conversation is to be open to a full exchange of meaning which includes the participation of voices traditionally excluded, there need to be new ways of thinking about discourse while emphasising the importance of voice and agency. The consequences of this are examined in three areas: a) research, b) research-as-curriculum and c) curriculum in the areas of task design, referencing and evaluation.
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    Web design discourse and access : a case study of student entry into a web design Discourse in the Multimedia Technology programme at CPUT
    (2006) Coleman, Lynn; Thesen, Lucia
    This thesis represents an instance of my engagement as a reflective practitioner to explore how access opportunities into a web design Discourse can be enhanced. The study is located in the Multimedia Skills subject which is part of the Certificate in Multimedia Technology at Cape Peninsula University of Technology. In describing student entry into a web design environment, insights into academic literacy practices within the multimedia and web design environment are provided. The theoretical concepts of Discourse, interest, intertextuality, literacy, acquisition and learning are used to ground the conceptual framework of the study, while an interpretative case study is utilized as research methodology. Using the notion of recontextualisation, how the professional Discourse of web design was appropriate into the curriculum of the Multimedia Skills subject and the Multimedia Technology programme is described. This analysis identifies a core identity distinction between web designers (who have a strong visual focus) and web developers (who foreground technical competencies) which is supported by the subject focus in the programme. The research considers two key data sources, personal websites and semi-structured interviews. These account for student performances in and meta-knowledge of the web design Discourse and reveal evidence of how Discourses were reflected in student design decision-making in their personal websites. The differential experiences of student access to the web design Discourse prompt the consideration of how learning and acquisition activities could be used in the classroom to facilitate more balanced performance and meta-knowledge expression.