Learning guides as contested terrain

who practice a politicising education, democracy and citizenship become dangerous in that the precondition for their realisation demands critical inquiry, taking risks, and the responsibility to resist and say “no” in the face of dominant forces of power.

2.5.4 Learning guides as contested terrain

Fairclough and Sayer’s (1994) concept of semiosis as part of discourse analysis, which means the making of meaning, is a crucial part of this study. Given that learning guides are both socially-structuring and socially-structured helps to generate not only how social structure should be determined, but also how the production of meaning is itself constrained by emergent, non-semiotic features of social structure. Firstly, for the purposes of this study, it is imperative to recognise that the university has a particular set of relations with the dominant society. These relations define the university as neither a locus of domination nor a locus of freedom. Instead, the university, with its relative autonomy, functions largely to produce and legitimate the knowledge skills and social relations that characterise the dominant power relations in society.

Universities, like any other public institution, contain points of resistance and struggle, and it is within these spaces that the ideological and material conditions exist to produce oppositional discourses and practice. Such recognition not only politicises the university and its relation to the dominant society, it also integrates the political nature of learning guides as both a sphere of critique and as a medium of social transformation. In this regard the semiosis of Fairclough, Pardo and Szerszynsky (2001) serves two purposes in the study: The making of meaning and as a self-regulating discourse. Self-regulating discourse means a discourse that contains a language of critique and a concomitant language of possibility. In the first instance, it must lay

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bare the historically specific interests that structure learning guides and the manner in which their form and content reproduce and legitimate the dominant culture.

Reacting to the response of HBIs to the government's call for restructuring of higher education, Hlwatika, Kgaphola, Seepe and Mkhize (2002) indicate that this evoked strong emotions and invited unprecedented levels of scorn, mainly from black academics and students. The HBIs have been, by choice, home to countless black students and intellectuals. These institutions carried the unenviable task of accommodating mainly poor and academically under-prepared black students. This status was essentially a logical outcome of apartheid engineering. Even the location of the HBIs was deliberately chosen to buttress and propagate the geopolitical grand design of apartheid. These were the dominated and subaltern groups, the marginalised and occupants of the periphery and margins in knowledge power relations in the centre of knowledge production in South Africa. This is the group that is now critically looking at learning guides as an instrument of oppression at the dominant discourse's disposal to maintain the status quo. The dominant discourse/culture has the privileged few and beneficiaries of apartheid education as its proponents. The university mergers have thrown these two groups into one pot, hence the ensuing competing discourses.

2.5.4.1 Importance of learning guides

Vista University has been using learning guides since its inception. This was due to the fact that Vista had seven campuses all over the country, and the study manuals/learning guides were an intervention for quality control and assurance with the intention of maintaining some form of uniformity in the seven campuses then. This model was meant to

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change teaching to students with manuals, amongst others, guiding student’s self-study by providing information not contained in the textbooks, being subdivided into separate study units with particular objectives and posing questions for self-evaluation.

2.5.4.2 Learning guides as a source of information and not knowledge

An important function of a learning guide is to serve as a preparatory instrument to enable the learner to take an active part in the teaching/learning situation. Learner guides eradicate the need for continuous dictation as a serious drawback. Dictation discourages learners from taking part in lectures, and is a highly uneconomic utilisation of lecturing time. It does not allow enough time for explanation and, especially, for penetrating discussion of subject matter. In addition, learner guides are instrumental in teaching the learner to make use of references independently. Relationships between different instructional offerings can be pointed out in learner guides.

Learner guides introduce learners to the discipline and formal requirement of instructional programs. Books are very expensive these days and a learning guide is helpful since it is more affordable and accessible than the real text. Searching for information from books can sometimes be time-consuming. A book may not have all the information needed at the time. A learning guide focuses only on important facts on a concept and thus minimises the time for searching information on the part of the students. In the context of merged HBIs and HWIs, the learning guide offers a solution on quality assurance and quality control to the fact that tests and memoranda are based on the guide. Lecturers find it easy to use a learning guide in their teaching, because it saves time on their side in that the learning is easy to follow by learners. Most

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university libraries are not well equipped, so the learning guide becomes a source of information.

2.5.4.3 Learning guides promoting convergent thinking

Having an imperfect textbook has certain advantages, as it gives the lecturer an opportunity to be creative and come up with an alternative intervention. Even the ideal textbook, however, must be complemented by a learning guide, since it trains the learner on the specific instructional of the offering with its own technical language and own reading technique. Learning guide references also serve as a supplement to the study sources. They provide supplementary information, correct mistakes, clarify obscurities, give alternative opinions, state the lecturer's viewpoint, etc. When no textbook is available, or if available textbooks are incomplete or useless, learning guides can give a concise summary of the learning matter. It is, however, important that such summaries are not so complete that the learner assumes that he can pass by merely memorising them. It is also a good idea to deliberately conceal certain facts, to leave certain structures incomplete so that learners are compelled to work on their own. It is thus clear that learning guides must be written carefully and with insight.

Maintenance of quality is in line with the Higher Education Act of 1997 which assigns responsibility for quality assurance in higher education in South Africa to the Council of Higher Education. This responsibility is discharged through its permanent sub-committee, the Higher Education Quality Council. In addition, the mandate of the HEQC includes quality promotion, institutional audit and program accreditation. Higher education institutions then employ learning guides as a means for ensuring quality control in their satellite campuses or extended campuses after the mergers. The importance of quality control in the

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development and delivery of teaching and research programmes is given prominence internationally (Smit, Wilkenson, Buchere, 2000).

2.5.5 A non-essential view of learning guides

Along with the changing modes of ideology and new demands facing higher education, the use of learning guides has surfaced as a contentious issue. In a study conducted by Smit et al. (2000), it was discovered that at Vista the study manual policy had been developed in various ways (as needs or circumstances of departments dictated and interpretations of individuals varied), with the result that study manuals (guides) sometimes no longer reflected the original aim. The opinion of the Heads of Department survey with relation to the quality of Vista University study guides was summarised as follows: Some students and lecturers regard learning guides as the source of information. Learning guides do not encourage independent thinking. Learning guides become outdated too easily. Learning guides cause some lecturers to become reluctant to prepare their own material. They have limited flexibility and limited scope.

The student/lecturer surveys indicated the following opinions regarding the quality of Vista University learning guides: It promotes rote learning. It is not always relevant, simple and understandable. The student's level of development is not always taken into account when study manuals/learning guides are developed. Learning guides do not always relate to the South African context. Respondents in the same study indicated that the quality of learning resources was regarded as an important aspect in the teaching /learning situation, and they put a good deal of time and effort into the preparation of their learning material. Some of the issues referring to quality that were mentioned by respondents were: They need to be interactive. They must promote

Comment [Hester24]: Spellin g? List of references?