Epistemological access and authentic learning practice: a case study in hospitality financial management.

Abstract

The recent widespread Fallist student movement taking hold of South African Higher Education has raised debates and tensions relating to the economic and social transformation of academic institutions. Despite National Higher Education funding relief (NSFAS), relentless patterns of economic and social inequalities in South Africa perpetuate unequal access for many first year undergraduates that are working class, first generation and English second language students. Providing students with epistemological access is essentially the counterpart to physical and financial access. How students access these academic ways of knowing, is indeed a cause for concern. At the Durban University of Technology (DUT), compounding this precarious situation, most Hospitality Financial Management (HSFM101) students struggle to access a financial disciplinary identity. Students find engaging with complex assessment tasks, particularly challenging especially as it requires them to align abstract theory to practical contexts. In addition, many students often report that they struggle to understand the relevance of hospitality accounting and its potential contribution to their hospitality careers. Importantly, accessing the tenets of the discipline, its discourse and practice appears to remain elusive to many students. While Morrow (2009) argued that fostering epistemological access (EA) calls for carefully constructed pedagogical and curricula processes, he did not go on to identify the particular pedagogy that could be employed in higher education teaching. In this study, I recognise the different levels of preparedness of prospective university students, and their potential lack of efficacy in gaining access to the epistemologies of their chosen discipline (HSFM101). This study explores student experiences in an HSFM101 programme, carefully designed to integrate the principles of Authentic Assessment with the view to creating enabling conditions for student learning. In addition, this study is a response to a lacuna in South African Higher education scholarship on how students learn and are assessed in Hospitality programmes. The study was guided by the principles of social constructivism and subscribed to an interpretive paradigm. A qualitative, case study design served as the framework to underpin the research. A purposive sample of 20 participants was selected from a cohort of Hospitality Financial Management students at DUT. Due consideration was given to a balanced representation in relation to race and gender. The rigor offered by Interactive Qualitative Analysis (IQA) (Northcutt & McCoy, 2004) was particularly appealing as it provides a systematic protocol that makes explicit both data generation and analysis processes. Data was generated through individual in-depth interviews, student reflective online journals and IQA focus group interviews. The interpretive and qualitative lens adopted for this study enabled a rich contextual understanding of how students experienced learning and acquired epistemic access through an Authentic Assessment (AA) strategy. Following the IQA protocol, focus groups generated ten affinities or themes of their experiences of being assessed in an Authentic learning environment. The primary theme that drove students learning experiences was Life’s Contradictions, whilst the main outcome or primary outcome of the study was getting it right. Despite the tensions, struggles and contradictions that students experienced in authentic learning situations, it was recognised that a pedagogy of authentic learning (the AA strategy in this case) does have the propensity to afford many students EA. According to this study, an AA strategy further revealed that, by affording students scaffolding opportunities, they were able to seek solutions autonomously, share their ideas, or even take the lead in improving collaborative learning. In addition, students wanted to feel included and so by creating and nurturing learning spaces that value diversity in HEIs; does in fact promote cohesive learning which enables EA. The fact that AA allows for students to engage in different ways and challenge their prior beliefs and assumptions; implies that there is transformation in learning. The results of this study further suggest that learning tolerance and accepting diversity was able to advance epistemic growth and emotional intelligence. This fortifies the nexus between social participation and prosperity; hence enabling EA (Sen, 2001). Whilst this study explored the learning experiences of HSFM101 it certainly does have wider implications for curriculum planning and reform towards transformative assessment pedagogies in various Higher Education curricula.