IntroductionThe first year is an important stepping-stone in the career of the undergraduate student. Lecturers of first-year students play an important role in guiding students into this new phase of their lives. Much research has focused on the challenges facing new students, especially struggling, or non-traditional students. However, to our knowledge, little has been written about the attributes of the lecturers who actively promote student learning during this phase. The contribution of lecturers of first-year students has tended to be downplayed, especially at 'research-led' universities.Our work in Stellenbosch University's First-year Academy (FYA), an initiative to promote the holistic learning experience of all first-year students at the University, gave us an opportunity to explore this issue. The exploration was based on a subactivity of the FYA, which aimed to encourage the academic achievement of first-year students and to acknowledge the work of lecturers of first-year students. The activity involved inviting the 30 top-performing students across the University to a dinner hosted by the University's Rector. These students each nominated the lecturer who, in their view, made the most significant contribution to their academic success. The students were required to write a letter to the lecturer, explaining why he or she had had an impact on the student's academic performance. The lecturer, in turn, was required to write a letter of support and encouragement back to the student. These letters were then exchanged during the dinner. This initiative was extremely successful and well received, particularly among the academic community. The conversations that emerged during and after the event served as a catalyst for the study. These focused on the question 'what makes a good lecturer?' Our research, therefore, set out to explore the following questions: Leibowitz B, van der Merwe A, van Schalkwyk S (eds) Before describing the research that we undertook, we present some of the key findings from the literature that guided the study, and illuminated our own understanding of what emerged from the data gathered during the empirical phase of the research. Conceptualising 'good' lecturersWhat are the attributes of successful lecturers of academically successful students? What qualifies one lecturer to be categorised as 'good' and another perhaps not? The literature on this topic spans several decades, and provides interesting responses to these questions. Yet it would appear that clear consensus as to a suitable definition remains elusive (Trigwell, 2001:65). Schön's seminal work on teachers suggests that '[A]s we consider the artistry of extraordinary practitioners and explore the ways they actually acquire it, we are led inevitably to certain deviant traditions of education for practice -traditions that stand outside or alongside the normative curricula of the schools' (Schön, 1987:15). Importantly, Elton (1998:3) suggests that '[T]eaching excellence is not a simple concept and, as a concept, lacks precisi...
The discipline of Classics, like most other disciplines in Higher Education contexts, faces numerous challenges related to changed national and international expectations. This article argues that in order to meet these challenges the discipline needs to reflect on its activities and teaching practices in a structured and deliberate way. Such reflection can be facilitated by theoretical frameworks designed in education research. We present one such framework, the "Communities of practice" as designed by Wenger (1998) and show how the framework can be employed, at a theoretical level, to conceptualise the challenges facing the discipline as well as to enhance teaching practices in an undergraduate Greek class, through an institutionally supported project. By applying this framework educators can assist students both in preparing for their careers as well as in engaging with their studies. IntroductionThe status of Classics in higher education elicits a diverse array of opinions. These range from views that Classics are under threat as a discipline (Culham & Edmunds 1989) or that Classics are in need of radical change in order to survive as a "viable subject" (Demos 1995:321) to more positive expositions of the discipline's state of affairs. The latter are embodied in the arguments of Galinsky, who holds that there are "various roads to classical salvation" (1991:449). By responding to Culham and Edmunds (1989), Galinsky (1991) not only shows how the discipline is continuously discovering its own strengths to meet these challenges but also argues that Classics should be looking ahead in order to keep on meeting these challenges. Yet despite his optimistic assessment, Galinsky does not deny that there are Herculean challenges facing Classics as a discipline in Higher Education contexts (1991:442). These concerns, although related, can be separated into two broad categories, namely teaching and learning concerns and contextual concerns. The former refers to questions such as those posed by Kitchell et al (1996:393). They state that questions such as "Why do so few students take Greek today?" and "Why, once we get students, is the retention rate so low?" are common concerns. These teaching and learning concerns should not be considered a recent development. Consider the following claim:If we judge by the results obtained, we are not teaching the students to translate the New Testament, to say nothing about appreciating the Greek. We are not training future Greek scholars nor fitting men to use the Greek New Testament in their own studies.While this probably resonates with practitioners today it is in fact a claim Pottle (1937) made over 70 years ago. The second kind of concern relates more to what
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