Abstract
The purpose of this dialectic is to share intersections between academic, and disciplinary literacies with neoliberal ideologies in South Africa’s higher education system. Specifically, the dialectic elucidates neoliberal constraints on first-year students’ navigation of disciplinary epistemologies. Additionally, the dialectic aims to reveal neoliberal constraints on curricula innovation, academic freedom, and epistemic diversity. The methods underscoring the dialectical are twofold. Firstly, the researcher as a research instrument is activated. Thus, real insights into constraints, and threats circumventing development of first-year, Humanities scholars’ disciplinary, plurilingual, and multimodal literacies are disseminated. The second method is ontology building. Accordingly, the interlocutor shares a diagrammatic in which intersectionality of neoliberal structures, agency, and cultures with academic literacies is highlighted. Implications of intersections between neoliberal ideology and literacies are critical. For instance, neoliberalism inhibits staff’s, and students’ development. As illustration, staff’s roles in designing curricula are stripped, and outsourced to off-campus cooperates. As a result, students’ literacies are determined by market forces operating outside disciplines. Therefore, literacies facilitators require innovative methods to circumvent neoliberalism. This dialect advocates contextual, and textual features of literacies as tools for developing novice scholars as disciplinary members, and to circumvent neoliberalism. Thus, consideration of social, digital interactions, genres, and plurilingualism are incorporated into the paper.
Presenters
Oscar Oliver EybersLecturer, Unit for Academic Literacy, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
LITERACIES, STUDENTS, CURRICULUM, ACADEMIC FREEDOM, DISCIPLINES
