Abstract:

The combining effects of globalisation have the potential to set a new course for the academic project, more so in the context of competing demands of emerging markets against the available limited resources. That the historical, political and social factors influence the need for interventionist approaches and policies for change in the emerging organisations is not contestable, but that such interventions may surface new contestations of role playing and capacity building against the development imperatives of quality assurance and transformation is the main interest of an ongoing academic project at Walter Sisulu University (WSU) in South Africa. At WSU, a study is being undertaken to answer the question, whose responsibility is to monitor and improve the quality of teaching and learning, expressed as student academic success. This project seeks to explore how academic leadership and management (ALM) experiences the dilemma of monitoring and promoting student access for academic success. Four cases of academic programmes are undertaken in this project, focussing on further four levels of academic leadership and management in the form of module/course leader, programme coordinator, head of department and faculty dean. Data will be collected by means of survey questionnaires, organisational records and focus group interviews. Discourse analysis will be applied to identify the main text of quality improvement, that is the choices that ALM forms make from the quality monitoring data, as deliberate efforts to improve teaching and learning and thus facilitate student access for academic success. The paper will report specifically on the conceptual framework and the emerging research questions that inform this project. Discussion will contribute to the merging discourse about higher education studies, the dilemmatic and contested issues about the role of higher education in the context of the current efficiency measures and the enduring dysfunctional culture of low student success and graduation rates.

Keywords:

Academic leadership, quality management, student academic success.