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Three critical areas for developmental work
(cont.)
3. Structural design: the curriculum framework
•
This is the area of the teaching-and-learning process where substantial
systemic obstacles to success and equity are mostly located
•
including the secondary-higher education articulation gap, failure to develop
language-related and other key academic literacies, and failure to provide
substantively for major transitions in knowledge domain within curricula
•
The curriculum framework
–
covering key parameters such as starting
level, duration, flexibility in pathways and modularity
–
has a major
influence on admissions and on which students succeed and fail
•
yet is widely but incorrectly taken as effectively immutable, even universal
•
In the SA context of extreme inequalities in educational background, not
possible for a single set of curriculum parameters to provide the full range
of the intake with any fair degree of equality of opportunity to succeed
•
one size cannot fit all, so who is benefiting from the status quo?
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