This article is framed and inspired by Jacklyn Cock's Writing the Ancestral River (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2018), which traces the history of the Kowie river in the Eastern Cape and its significance both in her own life and in shaping a specific geographical area. We set out to "read" the Kromme river through the lens of Cock's "biography-of-a-river" approach, which is both an evocative personal account and a social and environmental history of a river. Like the Kowie, the story of the Kromme river raises issues of competing interests; environmental, economic, and social justice concerns; and the tension between a river viewed in instrumentalist terms or as a complex, precious wetland and estuary. We consider questions such as whether the natural world in itself has inalienable rights, and whether rivers—even minor ones such as the Kromme—should have the right to be protected.

The question of whether academic development and higher education research can be considered fields is one of ongoing significance, centred on debates about knowledge-building. This study analyses the published outputs of a highly influential South African scholar, Suellen Shay, to identify the characteristic modes of knowledge generation that she used. The analysis of a dataset of nine key articles shows how Shay's work arose from daily concerns in her work in academic development at the University of Cape Town, but was always located in the context of international debates, and intentionally recruited theoretical tools for defining and addressing research questions. Shay traversed departmental, institutional and national contexts with ease, and a narrative overview of these articles shows an intentional and forward-moving direction in her focus. Finally, we show how this analysis of her work maps onto changing modes in academic development over the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

The transition from first to second year is a challenge for many students in undergraduate programmes around the world. This chapter uses tools from the Semantics and Specialization dimensions of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) to characterize the difficulties that students experience in making the transition from first year to second year in the context of undergraduate Mathematics. Drawing on previous research on pedagogical practices in first- and second-year Physics and Mathematics courses, the first part of the chapter uses LCT Semantics and Specialization tools to develop insights into the challenges that students face in making the transition to second year. The second part of the chapter describes how the research findings from this LCT analysis were used to frame an educational intervention in second-year Mathematics. The chapter reports on the students' experiences of this intervention and how this intervention led to significant and unprecedented improvement in student learning of Mathematics at the second-year level.

Science disciplines are inherently multimodal, involving written and spoken language, bodily gestures, symbols, diagrams, sketches, simulation and mathematical formalism. Studies have shown that explicit multimodal teaching approaches foster enhanced access to science disciplines. We examine multimodal classroom practices in a physics extended curriculum programme (ECP) through the lens of new materialism. As De Freitas and Sinclair note in their book, Mathematics and the Body, there is growing research interest in embodiment in mathematics (and science) education-that is, the role played by students' bodies, in terms of gestures, verbalisation, diagrams and their relation to the physical objects with which they interact. Embodiment can be viewed from a range of theoretical perspectives (for example, cognitive, phenomemological, or social semiotic). However, they argue that their new materialist approach, which they term "inclusive materialism", has the potential for framing more socially just pedagogies. In this article, we discuss a multimodal and new materialist analysis of a lesson vignette from a first-year extended curriculum physics course. The analysis illuminates how an assemblage of bodily-paced steps-gestures-diagrams becomes entangled with mathematical concepts. Here, concepts arise through the interplay of modes of diagrams, gestures and bodily movements. The article explores how multimodal and new materialist perspectives might contribute to reconfiguring pedagogical practices in extended curriculum programmes in physics and mathematics.

2007 conducted by the Council on Higher Education (CHE).This audit recommended a number of changes regarding teaching and learning at UWC (see Council on Higher Education, 2008 for more details on these).In addition

In South Africa, foundational provision and extended curriculum programmes (ECPs) have become one means of widening epistemological access to higher education and addressing high attrition rates among undergraduate students.Despite the evidence that epistemological access to the science disciplines is an ongoing process which extends beyond the first year, there is a paucity of research on the 'epistemic transitions' throughout the undergraduate curriculum, and in particular, the transition to second year.In this paper, tools from the Semantics dimension of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) are used to analyse the pedagogical practices in ECP and second year physics and mathematics courses, as a means to develop insights into the challenges students face in making the transition to second year.Data is drawn from video-recordings and classroom observation notes, as well as from interviews with second year students.The LCT analysis highlights mismatches between the ECP and second year pedagogical practices, including increased pacing, a curtailed semantic range concentrated at an abstract level, less semantic waving, a narrower range of representations used (and less explicit unpacking of these), and less interactive engagement.Implications for second year pedagogical practices are discussed, in relation to normative and transformative approaches to foundational provision.

Around the world, more young people than ever before are attending university. Student numbers in South Africa have doubled since democracy and for many families, higher education is a route to a better future for their children. But alongside the overwhelming demand for higher education, questions about its purposes have intensified. Deliberations about the curriculum, culture and costing of public higher education abound from student activists, academics, parents, civil society and policy-makers. We know, from macro research, that South African graduates generally have good employment prospects. But little is known at a detailed level about how young people actually make use of their university experiences to craft their life courses. And even less is known about what happens to those who drop out. This accessible book brings together the rich life stories of 73 young people, six years after they began their university studies. It traces how going to university influences not only their employment options, but also nurtures the agency needed to chart their own way and to engage critically with the world around them. The book offers deep insights into the ways in which public higher education is both a private and public good, and it provides significant conclusions pertinent to anyone who works in and cares about universities.

In contemporary times of globalisation, massification of higher education and economic, social and environmental challenges, there has been renewed debate internationally on the purposes of higher education.In South Africa too, higher education's role in society has been thrown into sharp focus by the student protests of 2015-2016.Walker and Fongwa's well-timed book tackles this pressing question of higher education's role in society.

How can research on academic literacies throw light on the challenge to widen access to undergraduate science studies? This article explores what an academic literacies approach might mean in the context of undergraduate physics. The study examines the pedagogical practices and student learning in two undergraduate Physics courses, a mainstream and an extended course, with a particular focus on the disciplinary practice of problem-solving. Concepts from the sociology of knowledge, specifically Legitimation Code Theory, offer a useful analytical framework for characterising the movement between abstract principles and concrete contexts in problem-solving and understanding how meaning is encapsulated in the dense representations of physics. The study shows that with more time and careful pedagogical attention, the extended course was able to make more explicit the literacy practices and epistemological functioning of the discipline. The study found that the extended course adopted a more explicitly normative approach to academic literacy, i.e., inducting students into the disciplinary knowledge and norms of the discipline, but elements of a transformative approach were also evident, i.e., opening up opportunities for these norms to be critiqued and contested.

In contemporary times there is a renewed focus on the purposes of university education in science or engineering, especially in emerging economy contexts like South Africa where the massification of higher education is in its early stages. The contributions by Muller (High Educ 70(3):409–416, 2015 ) and Walker (High Educ 70(3):417–425, 2015 ) both recognise the crucial importance of expanding epistemological access for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, but their visions offer different emphases on how to proceed. Muller ( 2015 ) argues for the centring of disciplinary knowledge, while for Walker ( 2015 ) it is the concerns of society that should be central. In this article we argue that both of these are partial answers. We draw on a longitudinal study with ten South African engineering graduates, who were interviewed both in their third year and then approximately a decade later. Our analysis shows how the engagement with disciplinary knowledge is at the heart of the shaping of ‘graduateness’. Thus we argue for a coming together of the two perspectives in this issue towards a nuanced perspective on graduateness that recognises the significance of disciplinary knowledge but that also holds a space for the development of student agency in higher education.

Academic development is a recent project in the university, intended to enable the university to respond to the needs of a more diverse student body. In South Africa, such work arose during late apartheid, and has now moved to a more central institutional position advocating responsiveness in the light of the educational disparities that are the legacy of apartheid. The present study uses a social realist perspective to analyse the 25-year evolution of an academic development project within an engineering department at a South African university. The findings show that while academic development initially posed a contradictory logic to the department, the response was to reform the nature of this project into one that suited the other commitments of the department: a logic of complementarity. The department's relationships with industry were shown to have played a key role in fostering this form of change.

This paper uses Tronto's political ethics of care as a normative framework to evaluate a model of teaching and learning professional development. This framework identifies five integrated moral elements of care – attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and trust. This paper explicates on each of these elements to evaluate the piloting and implementation of a teaching and learning professional development model at a South African higher education institution. The political ethics of care was found to be a useful normative framework for a group of higher educators to reflect on the process of engaging in teaching and learning professional development in that it revealed the importance of differential power relations, the importance of working collaboratively and being attentive to the needs of both caregivers and care receivers.

In the South African higher education sector, there is increasing concern about the poor retention and throughput rates of undergraduate students. There is also concern that the participation rates in higher education, relative to population demographics, remain extremely racially skewed. With the quality of schooling unlikely to change dramatically in the short term, universities need to look for ways to improve student success, particularly in science and engineering, where graduates are needed for a range of key roles in society. Here we review the research presented at a forum held by the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2010, which sought to bring together the latest expert thinking in this area. The major focus of academic development to date has been the establishment of extended degree programmes. However, it is clear that this model has limited capacity to deal with what is, in fact, a much broader problem. We summarise existing interventions aimed at reducing the 'gap' between secondary and tertiary education, and describe key innovations in mainstream programmes that are possible at the levels of pedagogy, curriculum and institutional environment, some of which are also becoming established internationally in science and engineering. Driving such initiatives will demand visionary university leadership in order to effect the integrated and holistic change that is needed.