Browsing by Author "Williams, Kevin"

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    Intensive care nurses? experiences of death in the ICU and the implications for postgraduate nursing pedagogy: a Heideggerian phenomenological study
    (2014) Fouché, Nicola Anne; Williams, Kevin
    Intensive care nurses’ experiences of death in the ICU and the implications for a postgraduate nursing pedagogy: A Heideggerian phenomenological study.The study sought to understand the phenomenon of the experiences of ICU nurses dealing with the deaths of patients under their care who die in the ICU. Hedeggerian hermeneutic phenomenology was used as the philosophical underpinning of the study. Methodologically, van Manen’s (1990) six research stages in searching for the essence of a lived experience offered opportunities to inquire further about pedagogical issues. Information gathering was in the form of phenomenological conversations with a sample of ICU nurses and lived experience themes emerged during the unravelling of the ICU nurses’ narratives. Using Heidegger’s concept of the three modes of being: authenticity, inauthenticity and undifferentiatedness, five lived experience themes were recognised: 1. Care- authenticity ; 2. Suffering, Disenfranchisement and Cultural/religious unpreparedness-inauthenticity ; 3. Living with dying-undifferentiatedness Based on an analysis of the phenomenological conversations, motivation is made for the inclusion of death education into the current Postgraduate Critical Care Nursing curriculum to meet the need for improving, not only the professional nursing care for patients dying in the ICU, but also facilitating and supporting the self-care of the ICU student him/herself. Barnett and Coate’s (2005) concept of the ‘Engaged Curriculum in Higher Education’, utilising the schema of knowing, acting and being, was used as the educational framework within which to identify pedagogical offerings for introducing death education. Such pedagogical offerings would include the teaching and learning of the theories of death and dying; aspects of the dying process; cultural/spiritual/religious issues such as post-mortem care and bereavement self-care.The study contributes new knowledge about ICU nurses’ lived experiences of the deaths of patients under their care in the ICU resulting in the recognition of the need for the inclusion of death education into a Postgraduate Critical Care Nursing curriculum
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    The interplay between structure and agency: How academic development programme students 'make their way' through their undergraduate studies in engineering
    (2015) Mogashana, Disaapele Gleopadra; Case Jennifer; Williams, Kevin
    The interplay between structure and agency: How Academic Development Programme students 'make their way' through their undergraduate studies in engineering. This study explores and seeks to explain the ways in which a group of Academic Development Programme (ADP) students 'made their way' through their studies in engineering at the University of Cape Town. Underpinned by Bhaskar's realist philosophy of social science, the study uses Margaret Archer's morphogenetic realist social theory to explore the interaction between the university (social and cultural relations) and the students (agential relations). Data was generated through a series of three interviews with each of 12students in the fourth year of their studies and through an analysis of selected university documents. Margaret Archer's morphogenetic approach, which allows for the temporal analytical separation of structure, culture and agency, provides methodological and analytical tools to investigate interactions between their respective emergent properties. It posits that structure and culture predate the actions of agents who transform it. As such, structural and cultural emergent properties condition the situations in which agents find themselves. Furthermore, agents' personal emergent properties, such as corporate agency and reflexivity, allow them to deliberate on their courses of actions. Key to this theoretical approach is the notion that structure and culture do not act in a deterministic way; their properties can only become powers when they are activated by agents' projects. With regard to structure, it was found that the combination of a fragmented curriculum, a shortened examination period, and unfavourable examination timetables all served as potential constraints to students' projects. With regard to culture, it was found that the ideas of mainstream students and lecturers about ADP students exacerbated such ADP students' experiences of marginalisation and exception. Moreover, the study found that the mainly black student enrolment of the Academic Support Programme for Engineering in Cape Town (ASPECT) was experienced by students as racial prejudice. While the findings suggest that students thus found themselves in extremely constrained circumstances, they were also found to have exercised corporate agency and different modes of reflexivity to overcome some of their constraining circumstances. Following an analytical process of retroduction, the study suggests that the ADP, although it facilitated students' entry into the university, simultaneously positioned them within a situational logic of constraining contradiction and as such exacerbated their experiences of exception. Moreover, it is argued that, although the university has made major structural changes to accommodate students from disadvantaged educational backgrounds, the ideas that shape the ADP space perpetuate the view that these students have an educational' deficit'. In conclusion, the study suggests that higher education should reconsider the idea of separate programmes, as their inherent situational logic appears to work against some of their fundamental goals, which are to facilitate redress and to widen participation.
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    Presence and Absence: Looking for Teaching and Teaching Development in the Website of a 'Research-led' South African University
    (University of the Western Cape, 2015) Jawitz, Jeff; Williams, Kevin
    This article arises out of a broader study into the contextual influences on the professional development of academics as teachers in higher education in South Africa. Using Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis we examine the website of a ‘researchled’ South African university. We examine the choices made in the use of website space and the presence and absence of texts which refer to teaching or the development of teaching. We compare these choices with those made about portraying other aspects of the university’s self-described mission on the website as a proxy for the valuing of teaching. We recognise that marketing spaces cannot be seen to equate to the commitment of institutions, departments or individual academics, but our concern in this project was to understand what publicly accessible claims the university makes about teaching, and whether such claims are borne out by its own self-description. With regard to teaching we found that absences are more frequent than presences, especially in comparison with the way other ‘core functions’ of the university are presented. Taken together it is difficult to find support for the rhetoric of the valuing of teaching that is conveyed in the university’s self-description. We suggest that this lack of valuing of teaching may have an effect on the choices academics make in responding to calls to invest time in developing their teaching.
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    Students make a plan: understanding student agency in constraining conditions
    (Taylor & Francis, 2009) Czerniewicz, Laura; Williams, Kevin; Brown, Cheryl
    Drawing on Archer's perspectives on the agency/structure relationship, this paper explains situations where students in varied, challenging circumstances find ways to negotiate difficult conditions. It reports on a 2007 study undertaken through a survey at three quite different universities in three South African provinces, addressing inter-related questions on access and use. Our findings are that on-campus access is generally reported favourably, and off-campus access is problematic and uneven. There is a cluster of students using their cell phones to access the Internet, and using their cell phones for academic purposes, and this is true across socio-economic groups (SEGs). It is especially striking that students from low SEGs do so. The findings show the choices students are prepared to make and the strategies which they find in order to engage online or access the Internet to support their studies. Archer's nuanced approach to agency and structure helps us begin to make sense of the way that students exhibit a more complex and nuanced way of engaging with the availability of different kinds of technologies, as well as making considered decisions about using ubiquitous technologies in unexpected ways and for purposes for which they may not have been intended. Her concept of reflexivity provides a way of describing how those choices are made in relation to structural conditions and enables us to explain how students are 'persons' showing an inventive capacity to circumvent the constraints imposed by structures.
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    Troubling the concept of the 'academic profession' in 21st century higher education
    (Springer, 2008) Williams, Kevin
    Concern has been expressed about the vulnerability of the 'academic profession'as a consequence of threats from productivism, managerialism and the like (Beck and Young, Br J Sociol Educ 26(2):183–197, 2005). I question the apparent self-understanding of academe as a profession. Referring to thinking from higher education (Barnett, High Educ 40:409–422, 2000a; Educ Phil Theor 32(3):319–326, 2000b; Realizing the University in an age of supercomplexity, 2000c; Stud High Educ 25(3):255–265, 2000d; Lond Rev Educ 2(1):61–73, 2004a; Piper, Are professors professional? The organisation of University examinations, 1994; Taylor 1999), and from the sociology of the professions (in particular Evetts, Int J Sociol Soc Policy 23(4/5):22–35, 2003a; Int Sociol 18(2):395–415 2003b; Curr Sociol 54(1):133–143 2006a; Curr Sociol 54(4):515–531, 2006b), I propose that significant shifts in self-understanding and practice are needed for academe to claim a social role as a 'profession'.