A multidisciplinary approach to teacher education involves drawing from multiple pedagogies within disciplines, in particular the use of aesthetic methods of teaching, to redefine teaching through continuous reflection. This article reports on the process of pre-service students' interpretation of the sensory contemplation of aesthetic perceptiveness within their academic programmes at a higher education institution and explores how students internalised and applied these aesthetic qualities in their practice. Using a qualitative approach, the findings indicate the positive influence of aesthetically enjoyable and engaging teaching strategies, such as group or whole class discussions that infused technology, on pre-service students' understanding of content knowledge taught in lectures. Reports regarding pre-service students' application of these very strategies at schools during their school experience were positive in terms of their ability to reflect critically before, during and after the lesson, made possible by personal first-hand experiences with the selected strategy. It was found that pre-service teachers believe that for effective teaching to take place, as practitioners, they need to take 'full account of the multi-dimensional cultural world of the learner' and therefore it is recommended that they adopt a multi-dimensional approach that is inclusive of aesthetics in their practice.
Recent literature suggests that art and aesthetics are evident in ancient times, as well as in Islamic, Indian, Chinese, African and Western medieval traditions. However, literature on the incorporation of art and aesthetics into economic and management sciences and social sciences is not so readily available. Using a narrative exploratory study, this article reported on two lecturers’ interpretation of the sensory contemplation or appreciation of aesthetic judgement within their academic programmes at a higher education institution. Stimulating creativity, passion and imagination is just part of an array of characteristics that prospective educators will need to develop in their teaching. Research has indicated that to become a reflective practitioner, educators should be able to assess and explore the success of their practices. It is this freedom to imagine, assess, explore and reflect continuously on new ways of doing things that leads ultimately to practical application. Teaching aesthetically also requires a strong grounding in pedagogical content knowledge, thereby allowing students to become transformers of society. The main thrust of this article was to determine how we develop and embody these qualities in ourselves and in the modules we teach. The results of the study indicated that whilst early socialisation processes did impact on how aesthetics was incorporated for one participant, culture did not play a very significant role for the other. The findings also indicated that students have a real appreciation of the incorporation of the aesthetic domain within the disciplines
In South Africa, the school textbook remains a powerful source of content knowledge to both teachers and learners. Such knowledge is often engaged uncritically by textbook users. As such, the worldviews and value systems in the knowledge selected for consumption remain embedded and are likely to do powerful ideological work. In this article, we present an account of the ideological orientations of knowledge in a corpus of school economics textbooks. We engage the tenets of critical discourse analysis to examine the representations of the construct “poverty” as a taught topic in the Further Education and Training Economics curriculum. Using Thompson’s legitimation as a strategy and form-function analysis as specific analytical tools, we unearth the subtext of curriculum content in a selection of Grade 12 Economics textbooks. The study reveals how power and domination are normalised through a strategy of economic legitimation, thereby offering a “legitimate” rationale for the existence of poverty in the world. The article concludes with implications for curriculum and a humanising pedagogy, and a call for embracing critical knowledge on poverty in the South African curriculum.
Higher education institutions recognize the importance of committing, assimilating, and applying education for sustainable development (ESD) into their curriculum to realize the Sustainable Development Goals. The intention of such a commitment assists in creating a culture of students who are actively engaged. Committed to the notion of teaching and teacher education for social change, in this article, I discuss my conceptualization of service-learning through my experience in higher education. Service-learning has been defined as a mode of "experiential education that integrates meaningful community service into the curriculum" (Nives 2015, 1). My perception is that by adopting service-learning for pre-service commerce teachers, there will be a shift in how social justice issues (Frederick, Cave, and Perencevich 2010) can be infused as a meaningful community service approach within the curriculum. In undertaking such steps, I highlight the nuances of power in these programs in this article. Service-learning is adopted through constructive and cooperative strategies to address the engagement questions that underpin the modules. In the academic and method module, these approaches allow pre-service students to be aware and reflect on their prior encounters and experiences of social justice issues, such as poverty, to mention but one. Drawing on both Dewey and Gwele, this article highlights the lecturer's experience of assisting students to deliberate service-learning and participate as democratic citizens. In this article, I unpack my notions of service-learning as a subjective experience of the processes and product of service-learning as a didactic approach. This article introduces a platform to re-think and reconnoitre service-learning in higher education through this complex story. The discussion and recommendations of engineering and reengineering the concept, process, and urgency of incorporating service-learning in Higher Education curricula are discussed, and recommendations for future research are made.
This article draws on the reflections of the pedagogical practice of service learning in higher education. Mahlomaholo (2010) described crisply the "context of educational dysfunctionality suffusing the country". The question often pondered about is: what skill and knowledge can be infused to make teaching at higher education institutions, to reflect the realities of society. Using critical reflection we asked: "[i]s your teaching worthy?"). The business management methods module allows for the pedagogical practice of service learning to be incorporated into the assessment. By adopting a constructivist approach to teaching business management method content means that the business management instructor is building on students' previous knowledge and allows the students to draw from their own experiences, thereby providing a scaffold for the students to develop an increased understanding of the business management pedagogical issues being discussed. As a business management method instructor choosing a pedagogical approach, that can address categories of significant learning, is an important step in developing learning that is durable. There are many views about how constructivist approaches to learning can or should, be aligned to constructivist approaches to teaching. The two pedagogical practices that can be effectively incorporated in business management education are: cooperative learning and service-learning. This paper uses auto ethnography to focus on the instructor's subjective experience of using service learning as a pedagogical approach.
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