Review of the IiNtetho zoBomi course Allan Gray Centre for Leadership Ethics

The reviewers would like to begin by thanking the staff at AGCLE (henceforth the Centre) and Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 for their hospitality and for designing a productive and comprehensive review programme for us to evaluate the IiNtetho zoBomi course (henceforth the course). We appreciated experiencing the different components of the course (lecture, movie, service learning site visit, and tutorial/ discussion group), and found our meetings with staff members of the Centre and other stakeholders to be enlightening.

 

Our review report consists of three sections. First, we address directly the terms of reference provided to us and provide brief responses to them. Second, we present some additional observations that exceed the terms of reference, but that we consider crucial to an understanding of the course and its future. Finally, in recognizing the value of the course, we conclude with a concrete set of recommendations designed to ensure its institutionalization and sustainability in the long-term.

 

Section One: Our Findings regarding the Terms of Reference

1. Consider the theoretical assumptions underpinning the course and consider their appropriateness in the i) context of academic philosophy and ii) the mission and vision of the AGCLE and iii) Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 more generally.

 

The course aims to develop students as ethically autonomous agents. It is grounded in an admirably clear and transparent set of theoretical assumptions that are shared by the instructors and tutors. Specifically, the course distinguishes sharply between knowledge of ethical theories and the capacities necessary for ethical action; and holds that, to the extent that the profession and discipline of philosophy has limited itself to the transferal of the former, it has neglected its responsibility to nurture the latter. In addition, the course is undergirded by a commitment to particular understandings of both the self (as relational, multi-faceted, embodied, and driven, although not exclusively, by ethical commitments) and ethics (as universal, at least in some relevant sense). The content of the course is framed by a singular insight: that barriers to acting ethically are not primarily a matter of a lack of ethical knowledge, but are rather functions of psychological, social, and political realities. Engaging honestly and proactively with those realities has the potential to overcome, at least in part, those barriers, thus enabling the ethical agent to more fully realize her potential.

            In terms of the missions of the Centre and the university, the course’s commitments are in remarkably clear alignment with both. The very first sentence of the university’s mission statement is as follows: “Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网’s vision is to be an outstanding internationally-respected academic institution which proudly affirms its African identity, and which is committed to democratic ideals, academic freedom, rigorous scholarship, sound moral values and social responsibility.” The course’s emphasis on self-reflection and ethical agency is directly related to all four of those commitments, with particular emphasis on democratic ideals, sound moral values, and social responsibility. The Centre’s mission statement clearly articulates the need to develop in individuals the capacities for ethical agency, which is at the heart of the course. In our interview with the Dean of Humanities and Head of Philosophy, both were agreed that the course offers students ‘personal and ethical awareness which is most important for the current South African context’. In addition, they observed that the course gives students ownership of key concepts in the Humanities that could be of benefit in majors such as Psychology, Sociology, Politics as well as an applied approach to Philosophy.

The relationship with contemporary academic philosophy is somewhat more complicated, as the course’s theoretical commitments are simultaneously cutting-edge and profoundly traditional. Much of academic philosophy shies away from the discipline’s potential for self-transformation and understands its teaching responsibilities as limited to the transferal of specific knowledge or skill sets (where the skills are more or less limited to close textual reading and analysis, argumentation, etc.). Thus, taking head-on the existential challenges that are at the Centre of this course remains highly unusual in the field of philosophy. Yet doing so harkens back to the most traditional forms of philosophical practice; to read the Greeks, or the existentialists, or the phenomenologists, without taking up questions of responsibility and lived experience is, in this reviewer’s opinion, to do very poor philosophy indeed. And so, it is perhaps not surprising to see within the discipline a resurgence of this very kind of focus, a return to questions of the good life, an urgency to do philosophy in an embodied key, and a revitalization of the practice of teaching philosophy by holding it accountable to our students’ existential possibilities. All of which is to say: this course is deeply creative and courageous, it is deeply philosophical, and while its instructors may sometimes feel as if they are struggling against the tide of dominant forms of philosophical instruction, they should take heart: there is a growing community of like-minded philosophers internationally, who are taking up similar questions in similar modes. In this regard the Head of Philosophy at Rhodes views the approach of this course to be complementary to the traditional content-based approach of the department. He also added that the IZ course should be viewed as an important contribution to the transformation of teaching Philosophy in South Africa, that is one way of ‘decolonizing’ the study of philosophy.

 

 

 

 

2. Evaluate the extent to which pedagogies used in the course support its goals and the intended learning outcomes.

 

The goals of the IiNtetho zoBomi course are ambitious; namely to promote students’ engagement with the ‘life of the mind’ and to develop an intrinsic motivation to learn. The pedagogy of the course is based on a view of learning as an existential, self-determined activity that relates to students’ inner drives, lived experiences and social contexts. This involves recognizing and building on students’ strengths. The course aims ultimately to lead to self-transformation and in this way to contribute to the transformation of institutional culture; this is both an ethical and an epistemic project. Based on the belief that a successful mind is a teleologically organized mind, the course aims to motivate students to intentionally construct a sense of self and thus mind - leading to more deliberate and responsible actions.

The course offers various forms of engaged and experiential learning experiences - each week students are expected to attend 4 double periods comprising a movie, a lecture, a tutorial and a service learning project. The latter two are compulsory DP requirements.  Students are also expected to read short extracts and write regularly in their reflective journals; it is here that they are expected to ‘join-up the dots’ through their reflections on the readings, movies, lectures, service learning experience and conversations in the tutorial. They submit weekly reflections (2-3 pages) to their tutors for marking and feedback. These weekly submissions comprise 25% of the final course mark with 75% awarded to the final submission of the reflective journal. The latter are also submitted mid-term for formative feedback. The reflective journals are marked by academics and not tutors. We noted that this is a heavy marking load for the two lecturers - i.e. 250 journals of 7,000 - 20,000 words, twice per semester i.e. four times per annum.

From our observations of teaching and learning activities during one week we noted the following: A great deal of careful research and thought goes into the selection and development of teaching materials. Further a great deal of effort goes into working with and developing the team of tutors on IZ2 to enable them to engage with and teach the material. In addition to running the tutorials, each tutor gives at least one lecture per semester, for which they are carefully mentored. This means that the tutors are the ‘face’ of the course. We noted how confidently they facilitated the tuts, mediating its content in ways that are highly contextualised in the culture and lived experiences of the majority of the students (black South Africans). In the tutorials we observed, the tutors created a nurturing space for their students in which there was a deep sharing of experience, suffering and mutual support; leading to personal engagement with the concepts taught on the course by the students.

From our observations of the pedagogy on this course we are confident that its unusual methods are highly conducive to achieving the aims of the course. The large responsibility given to the undergraduate tutors to run the course and carry most of its engagement with students means that the course resonates with the lifeworlds of the students leading to high levels of engagement, not normally seen in more traditional undergraduate courses. In addition, we are confident that the Reflective Journals are a creative and valid form of assessment that does test the intended outcomes of the course. It allows students to make connections across the various course activities and with their own lives and contexts. It also builds their capacities for autonomous ethical behaviour through self-reflection and self-writing.

We do have a minor concern that there may be a trade-off between student engagement and conceptual rigor. We know that the course conveners are aware of this and that they work hard with the tutors to achieve conceptual rigor in ways that the students can grasp. We make further suggestions in this regard in Section 2 below.

 

 

3. Critically evaluate the validity and reliability of the assessment of student learning in the course.

 

The primary form of assessment of student learning in the course occurs through the writing of a reflective journal, which is assessed twice (once at the midpoint of the course, and once at the end of the course). Students are required to share drafts of journal entries with their tutors prior to finalizing the entries; because the entries are submitted electronically, students must complete the journal over the entirety of the semester. This form of assessment is particularly well-suited to the learning goals of the course, for the following reasons:

1. Rather than assessing whether students can, say, accurately reproduce a philosophical idea or argument (which would be an appropriate learning goal of a more traditionally organized philosophy class), the reflective journal assesses the degree to which the students are engaging with the ideas presented in the class in an in-depth, and personal, way.
2. The students receive both formative and summative feedback on the quality of their work. The regular formative feedback emphasizes the course’s commitment to ongoing improvement rather than static achievement, and allows the student to focus on improving their reflections on a weekly basis
3. The temporality of the assignment – that the journal is developed over the entire semester – aligns well with the emphasis on self-transformation and development of ethical capacities. The use of electronic submissions ensures that students do not write multiple journal entries right before a deadline (which would undermine the pedagogical purposes of the journal entries).

It is crucial to note that when, due to staffing shortages, other philosophy faculty were asked to assist with the marking of the journals, they were, by and large, impressed with the quality of the reflection that those journals contained. Such favorable reactions are evidence that both the pedagogical approaches and the forms of assessment are aligned well with the learning goals of the course, and that those learning goals resonate with the academic and intellectual values of the philosophy department. The reviewers were pleased but not surprised, then, to learn that the philosophy department has recently provided a way for students who have excelled in IZ to proceed to second-year philosophy studies.

The main challenge to this form of assessment is how labor- and time-intensive it is. We agree with the requirement of having only full-time instructors in philosophy (and not, for example, the tutors) mark the journals. However, no fewer than 500 journals need to be marked in each semester of the class, which is clearly an untenable marking load. We recognize the generosity with which other philosophy faculty have assisted in this effort, but the staffing of the course must, as we recommend below, be improved to meet this marking demand. While the staffing challenges continue, and the Centre is relying on external faculty to mark portfolios, the staff of the Centre need to take steps to ensure inter-marker reliability and consistency.

 

 

4. Consider the staffing model for the course including the appointment of student leaders.

 

The current staffing model for the IZ course was developed when the course was still experimental and drew small numbers of students. It has since expanded, is in demand from students and we recommend below that it would be in the interest of Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 to expand both its numbers and its reach. Furthermore, the nature of the course makes it very labour-intensive to teach. This means that the current staffing model is not sustainable and the permanent and / or full-time staff currently working on the course are under considerable stress. We have identified 3 specific short-term staffing needs that the university should address:

1. Appoint two full-time, permanent lecturers capable of overseeing the course, including the training of tutors, redesigning and updating the course as necessary, marking the journals, and participating in the ongoing activities of the Centre. We understand that there is sufficient funding and support for two such posts (in addition to the Director post), and we recommend that they be filled as soon as possible. The Centre already has a contract staff member, Dr. Lindsay Kelland, who is exceedingly well qualified to do this work (as is obvious by the fact that she has done so with high levels of success since the pilot phase of the course), and we recommend that she be moved to a permanent 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 Council post as soon as possible.
2. Provide additional administrative support for the service learning component of the course. This component of the course is the largest (in terms of number of students) and most extensive (in terms of lasting throughout the whole semester, if not the whole year) service learning opportunity on campus. It is also central to the goals of the IZ course. The logistics involved in managing a weekly service learning experience for over 250 students requires additional staffing (in the form of a part-time administrative assistant).
3. Make the current administrative assistant post for the Centre permanent. The current administrative assistant is crucial to the work of the Centre and has developed specific skills and institutional memory that would be difficult if not impossible to replace. Moving her contract from a yearly contract dependent on soft funds to a permanent university post would safeguard the integrity of the Centre’s work, including the integrity of the course.
   
   

The selection, appointment and intensive training of undergraduate students to work as tutors on the IZ course is ambitious and labour-intensive. Our observations suggest that those past IZ1 students who tutor on the course both benefit enormously from the mentorship they receive from the two lecturers and have an excellent rapport with their students. They seem to believe in the purpose of the course and are committed to achieving its outcomes. The tutors we observed facilitated the conversations with confidence and enthusiasm. That said, the supervision work required to up-skill undergraduate students to this level of competence should not be under-estimated. Furthermore, it is our view that IZ tutors may need to spend even more time and effort working on course materials and preparation (e.g. be required to attend lectures and demonstrate an understanding of the readings - see No.6 below). A further consideration is that if more work and time is required, it may be only fair to pay the tutors for additional hours of labour per week.

 

Section Two: Additional Observations
(busy readers may skip to Section Three, p. 8)

 The reviewers wish to highlight several aspects of the course that do not fit neatly into any of the terms of reference, but that are nevertheless crucial to understanding its success and potential.

1. There is remarkable consistency of vision that exists across all members of the Centre, as well as the tutors. This is a programmatic strength that is the result of constant communication, democratic processes, and persistent reflection. Without such a consistency of vision, the course would easily and quickly lose its identity and integrity, and thus we encourage the Centre’s staff to continue the considerable commitments that they make to maintaining this consistency.
2. The learning goals of this course are, as mentioned above, consistent with the missions of both the Centre and the university. Yet this consistency does not exhaust their importance. It is the reviewers’ positions that the intellectual and existential virtues that the course focuses on, and its inherently anti-authoritarian, liberatory pedagogies, are of crucial importance to democratic political systems. If Hannah Arendt was correct about the banality of evil, they are also an important defense against the global threats of nationalist populism, fascism, and totalitarianism. We do not mean to overstate the case here: IZ is not capable, in and of itself, of transforming entire political discourses! Nevertheless, we do think it important to note that it is a particularly compelling and explicit expression of the intellectual and civic values that universities are responsible for propagating within democratic systems.
3. In a less grandiose vein, we believe that IZ is well-positioned to be a hallmark of a Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 education and could be branded successfully as a holistic approach to higher education that recognizes and nurtures the whole student. The uniqueness of IZ, combined with its obvious appeal to students, is an asset to Rhodes, and its institutional value should be highlighted more consistently and frequently.
4. The course has, in the past four years, established its credibility with both the philosophy department and with students. Moreover, the principles and approaches that are hallmarks of the course are present throughout the work of the Centre and have allowed the Centre’s director to make important contributions to international academic and political conversations. These accomplishments are evidence of the soundness of the Centre’s mission and the skill with which its staff are translating it into specific initiatives. The university should reward the work of the early years of the Centre by committing additional resources and support to its ongoing work.
5. A somewhat hidden aspect of the course’s success is its demanding nature. The instructors and tutors require strong engagement from the students and are willing to fail any student who is not taking the course seriously. In addition, the ongoing self-reflection that the journal requires is extremely challenging (as the students themselves consistently report). These demands not only bolster the course’s academic bona fides; they also are an important way in which the instructors and tutors express the responsibility that the students have for their own, and each other’s learning. The instructors and tutors are to be commended for challenging the students so consistently and effectively.
6. Related to the difficulty of the course is the requirement that first-year students engage with philosophically challenging concepts and readings. We made our observations in the 3rd week of the course and thus suspect that degrees of rigour are built up over subsequent weeks and through the journals and feedback on the journals. However, we did wonder whether it would be helpful for tutors to be trained to pull together the conversations at the end of the tutorials by relating the discussion to the ways the concept in question was dealt with in the lectures and readings. In this way they would be modelling the conceptual structuring and organization of the mind referred to in the aims of the course. To this end we wondered whether it may be necessary to require all tutors to attend the lectures and to also demonstrate an understanding of the reading by circulating summaries to the group before the weekly tutors’ meeting. This would enable the lecturers to comment on any misunderstandings of the reading in the tutors’ meeting.
7. We noted that while attendance at the weekly service learning and double period tutorials are DP requirements, this is not the case for the movies and lectures. We observed that at most 50% of the class attended the lecture (this is sadly an increasingly common phenomenon in undergraduate classes at SA universities), despite the fact that the lecture involved an extensive and clear exposition of the week’s reading and key concepts. Having noted fairly superficial engagement with the lecture and reading in the conversations in the tutorials, we suggest that the course conveners consider ways to incentivize lecture attendance and closer engagement with the reading material.
8. In a context of serious mental health issues on South African campuses and the nature of the material discussed in class, we noted that teaching and tutoring on this course, especially in the tutorials, requires high levels of personal vulnerability and pedagogic skill, not required in traditional classrooms. Thus, we consider it important that lecturers and tutors belong to a supportive pedagogic community that provides them with opportunities to debrief where necessary.
9. The IZ service learning projects aims to improve pupils’ reading in a local school. However, we noted that one of the problems the lecturers struggle with on the course is students’ inability or lack of interest to engage with a close reading of texts. To this end we suggest that the Centre call in a reading expert to train the students in readings techniques (e.g. the ‘Reading to Learn’ method) as part of their service learning training - for them to then use with pupils at the school. The process of teaching school pupils an explicit group-based method of close reading and writing composition will enhance the impact of the service learning project and may well improve the students’ own reading competence without forcing them to attend dreary reading skills lessons.

 

 

Section Three: Recommendations

In order to sustain and build upon the successes of the IZ course, we make the following recommendations:

 

1. Increase and institutionalize the staffing of the Centre as soon as possible to protect the integrity and short-term sustainability of the Centre and the IZ course. As noted above we recommend the permanent appointment of two lecturers/ senior lecturers to run the course (one of whom should be the current contract lecturer); additional administrative support for the Service Learning Coordinator; a permanent post for the Centre’s Administrative Assistant.  These urgent recommendations for staffing are necessary to make the Centre’s current obligations tenable. Any additional initiatives that the Centre may take on – and it is our belief that there are many viable, important initiatives that the Centre could develop both on campus and beyond – would require additional staffing.
   
   
2. Initiate strategic planning to institutionalize the IZ course and the work of the Centre on two distinct timeframes:

1. Short-term strategic planning to address the increased student interest in the course. It is our recommendation that both the Centre and the 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 commit to the goal of staffing IZ at sufficient levels such that every student who is interested in taking the course may do so. This would entail removing the 250 cap on the IZ course but retaining its voluntary nature. Given that approximately 20-50 students have been turned away in recent semesters, and that the course has grown dramatically since its pilot in 2015, it is reasonable to expect that student interest will continue to grow. Plans need to be put in place now in order to avoid turning away large numbers of in future years.
2. Long-term strategic planning needs to be undertaken for when the soft funding that has allowed IZ to be developed is no longer available (this will occur after 2024). It is our position that Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 has a responsibility to its students and its mission to ensure that the course continues to be available and supported. If the staffing challenges identified above are addressed, and additional staffing is secured, we strongly recommend that the Centre, in conjunction with the Philosophy department and the Faculty of Humanities, consider expanding the scope of the courses offered by the Centre to enhance their institutional impact. There are many ways to conceive of such expansions, and we offer here five recommendations:
3. We strongly recommend that IZ not be transformed into a compulsory course. While we believe that it has value for a wide range of students, making it compulsory would be at odds with its philosophical commitments, and would result in pedagogical challenges that could undermine its success. Instead, as mentioned above, we recommend that the Centre and the university commit to making the course available to every student who seeks to complete it. This would entail removing the cap of 250 on IZ1 student numbers.
4. We believe that the 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 should insist that IZ become an elective option for all students in the Faculty of Commerce.
5. We recommend that the Dean of Humanities lead a process to develop curricular pathways from IZ101 and IZ102 to a range of majors in the Humanities and Social Sciences such as Philosophy, Politics, Psychology and Sociology. This would require having conversations with the heads of departments and departments concerned about being more flexible with regard to the pre-requisites for entry into the 2nd-year courses of their majors.
6. We recommend that the HOD of Philosophy and Director of the Centre lead a process to develop advanced 2nd or 3rd-year course(s) housed in the Philosophy department but based on the IZ pedagogical model, that focuses on specific themes and requires completion of IZ101 and IZ102 as pre-requisites. Such courses would continue the pedagogical and philosophical commitments of IZ but would allow a deeper engagement with specific themes such as Conversations about Death, Conversations about Violence, Conversations about Economic Justice, and so on.
7. Develop an IZ major; while this option should be considered, it is the opinion of the reviewers that this is not an optimal way of growing the programme, as it would most likely lead to a silo-ization that is contrary to its fundamental commitments.

Expanding the Centre’s curricular offerings in these ways would require communicating to other stakeholders in the university the specific learning outcomes and value of IZ. It is our opinion that many majors would value the increased levels of self-motivation, self-awareness, engagement with ethical questions, and ownership over one’s educational process that the IZ course fosters in students.

 

3. The Centre is to be congratulated for developing a unique and powerful form of pedagogy that is clearly speaking to students’ interests and existential needs, and effectively providing students with capacities that allow them to author their own thoughts and lives. Such a pedagogy, of course, is dynamic, in that it must constantly respond to emerging questions and needs, and for this reason, we recommend that the Centre ensure that the Director and the full-time lecturers have the resources necessary (including time and travel funds) to engage with communities of practice that are developing similarly innovative pedagogies. In addition, the Centre must take steps to secure funding and staffing that allows the Centre’s Director and full-time lecturers to maintain active research agendas.

 

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is the reviewers’ position that AGCLE and Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 should do everything in their power to preserve, value, and expand the IZ course and its underlying philosophical and pedagogical models. It is clearly enormously valued by its students and staff- both academics and tutors - as well as by the HOD of Philosophy and the Dean of Humanities. It is a course that speaks to the context of Rhodes 老虎机游戏_pt老虎机-平台*官网 - one of poverty, exploitation and rurality - and thus to the lived experiences of the majority of its students.

Professors Ann Cahill and Kathy Luckett
August 2019