First-Year Experience: Pedagogies of Care as an Enabler to Student Success

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-134-0_4How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Pedagogies of care; curriculum; Student’s Voice; First-year experience; Student Success; Third space

Abstract

This reflective paper aims to explore the need to embrace alternate pedagogical practices in the traditional curriculum. Being an academic who teaches first-year students and leads the First-year Experience Programme (FYE) at a university of technology has allowed me to reflect not only on my practice but the degree to which we integrate our student’s voices within our practice. Placing students’ perspectives and perceptions at the fore allows us to improve teaching and learning practices and allows students to become agents of change. This study draws on three surveys conducted by the First-Year Experience team and reflects on ways that we could develop more effective teaching and learning practices by embracing pedagogies of care. The national survey, the Beginning University Survey of Student Engagement highlights that the Mangosuthu University of Technology has over 80 per cent of first-generation students coming from low-quintile schools with limited exposure to new technology. The survey also shows that the majority of our students are Isizulu-speakers, with English as their second language. These surveys highlight foundational needs of our students which could affect their success at the university. We wish to offer an alternate view of thinking by exposing hegemonic practices and mindsets. This paper thus hopes to suggest alternate ways to address the needs of our students in a more inclusive, non-deficit manner by embracing the third space. We argue that by understanding our students and including their voices we would be able to better support their development and overall success.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Arthi Ramrung
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/11/06
TI  - First-Year Experience: Pedagogies of Care as an Enabler to Student Success
BT  - Proceedings of the 10th Focus Conference (TFC 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 39
EP  - 52
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-134-0_4
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-134-0_4
ID  - Ramrung2023
ER  -