Becoming an academic : a study of learning to judge student performance in three disciplines at a South African university

Abstract

This study seeks to understand how new academics learn to judge student performance in complex assessment tasks, i.e. tasks that allow students substantial initiative and latitude in their response. It was conducted at a research intensive historically white university in South Africa and involved case studies in three academic departments. Thirty one academics were interviewed across the three departments. The analysis of these cases was conducted in two parts, using a framework developed from Bourdieu's theory of practice and Lave and Wenger's situated learning theory. In the first part, I analysed the academic workplace in each case and identified three different configurations of communities of practice that formed key dimensions of the fields within which these departments were situated. In the second part, I applied the concepts of habitus and legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) to understand how new academics engaged with the communities of practice in their departments and learnt how to judge student performance of complex assessment tasks. The study revealed limitations in the explanatory power of social learning theory in contexts where the stability of communities of practice was uncertain, where there were no opportunities for LPP and where knowledge was deemed to reside in the individual rather than to be distributed in the community. In contrast to the view that learning in the workplace is informal and unstructured, in each of the case studies it was possible to identify a learning to judge trajectory, which, in some cases more than others, provided a structured "learning curriculum" (Wenger, 1998) for new academic staff. Learning to judge student performance happened through participation in a series of assessment practices along this trajectory. The experience of following a learning to judge trajectory was closely associated with the identity trajectory of each individual academic and depended on three factors: the particular configuration of communities of practice within each field, the capital valued within this configuration, and the nature of the capital that the newcomer brings into the department. However, the existence of these trajectories did not mean that learning was unproblematic, as they appeared to support the dominant relationships of power within each field and posed particular challenges for those individuals who embarked on alternative trajectories.