Faculty of Education
School of Educational Studies
Department of Education Management and Policy Studies
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
The institutional culture of an organisation may be defined as the set of formal and informal norms, values, beliefs and traditions that determine what is acceptable or unacceptable, who is included or excluded and, broadly, “how things are done” within that organisation.
Former white universities in South Africa are under pressure to change the institutional cultures that evolved within them during the apartheid era. This pressure stems not only from the changing profile of their clientele, but also from several national policy imperatives issued after 1994.
A collaborative research effort between the University of Pretoria and the University of the Western Cape aims to assess the manner in which these universities have responded to such pressure.
The project, which concentrates on five institutions, has adopted a three-pronged approach to data collection. First, extensive interviews are conducted with the leadership of each institution, including academic, student and administrative leaders at all levels.
The central aim of these interviews is to determine how university leaders understand the mission and culture of their respective institutions, as well as the characteristics that distinguish them from other universities.
Additional insight into the various institutional cultures is sought by subjecting key policy documents of each university to intensive content analysis.
The third component involves critical incidents – that is, events that “throw a spanner in the works of orderliness”. In-depth case analyses are conducted of such incidents to ascertain how a university’s institutional culture actually functions.
Emerging research findings indicate that the dominant institutional culture in each participating university continues to enforce criteria of inclusion and exclusion – although it often does so in unintended ways.
Despite the fact that some progress has been made toward greater inclusiveness, the typical response to new identities and values still appears to involve “accommodation at the margins.”
The study also suggests that, while each of the five universities has a distinct institutional identity, few of them have the kind of leadership required to understand and actively foster the creation of new, inclusive cultures.
Prof JD Jansen
Dean
+27 (0) 12 420 2321
jonathan.jansen@up.ac.za
Effective teaching and learning cannot be separated from effective discipline. However, schools with multicultural learner and staff profiles often experience difficulties in terms of maintaining acceptable standards of discipline.
Research was conducted to determine how the subject of discipline is approached in diverse classrooms and to identify factors that impede effective school management in multicultural contexts.
By accessing learners’ and teachers’ first-hand experiences through individual and focus group interviews, it was determined that standards of acceptable behaviour differ between schools and even between individual classrooms.
It was also found that cultural diversity is not a direct cause of disciplinary problems. Instead, it plays an indirect role: because it reflects people’s history and values, it is instrumental in shaping their attitudes.
In one school, for instance, teachers strove to maintain norms of classroom behaviour that conform to the old English tradition, even though the school’s learner composition had departed dramatically from that of a traditional English school.
Many learners, not accepting the rules being imposed on them, openly rebelled. The teachers, in turn, responded to this situation by resigning themselves to the view that they were simply “the right people in the wrong place”.
Dr J Heystek
Education Management and Policy Studies
+27 (0) 12 420 2766
jheystek@up.ac.za
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