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ACADEMIC LITERACY CHALLENGES A CONCERN

ACADEMIC LITERACY CHALLENGES A CONCERN

Academic literacy has become a major concern in the South African higher education landscape and engagements, workshops as well as staff and student development seeking to tackle this issue must take place.

This was the advice of Shoba Rathilal, Teaching and Learning Practitioner at the DUT Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) during her introductory address at the Academic Literacies: From Tacit to Conscious Awareness and Practice workshop.

According to Rathilal, there is an enormous amount of misconception around the concept of academic literacies. “I hope through our engagements through this workshop, we would become more conscious of the kinds of adaptations we want to exercise,” she said.
The workshop was aimed at providing an opportunity to explore the different academic literacies theoretical frameworks and practical strategies for implementation in the classroom. It also provided an opportunity to interrogate the delegates’ practice of academic literacies that will facilitate student success at DUT. It was attended by lecturers, tutors and staff from the University’s Writing Centres.

The workshop was a follow-up of CELT’s First Year Experience Workshop that took place earlier this year (2015). The workshop gave an insight to the various struggles first year students endure which often lead to them dropping out of their studies.

Professor Cecilia Jacobs, Director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Stellenbosch said academic literacies were dependent on the discipline (of study). Her current work and research focuses on the teaching of disciplinary literacies within disciplinary domains and its implications for academic developers and disciplinary specialists in education.

Prof Jacobs gave tasks to each of the groups at the workshop, every task had a discipline ranging from Engineering, Arts and Design, Management Sciences, to name but a few, in order to get a sense of what was happening at each delegates’ space. “Developing an identity of literacy is a process; students need to be made aware of how things work. They need to be developed and as a specialist or lecturer of that discipline, you must understand that students don’t understand how things work; they don’t carry the knowledge that is embedded in you as the expert so you need to open it up and make it explicit to them,” said Prof Jacobs.

– Noxolo Memela

Pictured: Professor Cecilia Jacobs, Director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Stellenbosch during her keynote address at the workshop.

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