Contact Information
Biography Information
Suellen Shay is Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED) at the University of Cape Town. She is also currently Deputy Dean of CHED. Her career in CHED since 1989 has included language development, curriculum development, and staff and institutional development. Her research attempts to bring the theoretical frameworks of sociology of education to an understanding of higher education as social practice, specifically focusing on assessment and more recently knowledge and curriculum. Her most recent research has been published in Teaching in Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education, British Journal of Educational Research and Harvard Educational Review.
Project Description
In post-apartheid South African there has been wide-ranging State policy intervention aimed at transforming higher education – its transformation from a system which systematically marginalized the majority of its population to one which ensures both equity of access and outcomes. The reality is that more than fifteen years later higher education in South African continues to fail the majority of its youth with only 5% of the Black South African university age cohort successfully graduating with a higher education qualification. In response to this failing, there has been a small but significant body of scholarship focusing on the effects of these policies on curriculum in higher education with a particular interest in the implications for educational knowledge. Drawing on sociologists of education Basil Bernstein and other Bernsteinian scholars, the focus of my current work is developing a theoretically and analytically robust conceptual framework which will enable the description of the forms of knowledge which constitute curriculum in higher education. Such a conceptual framework will enable the differentiation between different kinds of qualifications ranging from vocational to professional to more academically-oriented offerings. The second phase of this research is to develop a set of principles which will inform curriculum design with a particular focus on issues of access, placement, articulation and progression.