Legitimation Code Theory as a Lens for Students’ Academic Support at Mangosuthu University of Technology

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-006-0_7How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Academic literacies; Legitimation Code Theory; Academic student support

Abstract

This paper argues that there is likely confinement of most of us in academia in dominant understandings associated with teaching, learning and language to the extent that the practices, beliefs, and values that underpin those practices, privileged in these discourses become ‘normalised’ and ‘naturalised’. What seems obvious and becomes normalised is the idea that when students fail is because they have an English language problem and so, the students’ support programmes are likely to be conceptualised on the basis of ‘fixing’ students language problem. We argue in this paper that when academic support adepts provide students support should see beyond what seems normal, the idea of ‘fixing’ students language problems. This could be realized when academic support adepts work collaboratively with disciplinary experts as they provide student academic support. To do this work, we argue for Legitimation Code Theory and Academic Literacies Approach to students’ academic support at Mangosuthu University of Technology. The theoretical framework helps us realise that disciplines are structured and specialised differently. When offering students’ academic support, it is possible to see that we need to draw on the structural knowledge of the discipline. We refer to data that was generated through email correspondences between academic support staff and disciplinary experts. Data show enablements and constraints in drawing on the structure of knowledge of the discipline when providing student support initiatives, thus, enabling or constraining epistemological access. The current data is related to the disciplines of chemistry and business administration, both in level 1.

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  - N. E. Madondo
AU  - L. Khumalo
AU  - Z. Mbili
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/02/07
TI  - Legitimation Code Theory as a Lens for Students’ Academic Support at Mangosuthu University of Technology
BT  - Proceedings of The Focus Conference (TFC 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 72
EP  - 86
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-006-0_7
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-006-0_7
ID  - Madondo2023
ER  -