ABSTRACT
By 1994 the legislative barriers that prevented access to higher education for the black majority of South Africa’s qualified school leavers had been dismantled. However, from the early days of political transformation it was clear that social and legislative access were necessary but not sufficient conditions for success. In addition success in higher education requires ‘epistemological access’ (Morrow 2009); that is, students need to gain access to and become participants in an academic practice with its requisite forms of knowledge and methods of inquiry. Thus epistemological access is fundamentally about giving students access to what Young (2008) refers to as ‘powerful knowledge’. The concern of this chapter is how vocational curricula can give access to powerful knowledge. The focus is on a Design Foundation Course (DFC) situated in the extended first year of a Diploma offered by the Faculty of Informatics and Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) in Cape Town, South Africa.1 The Diploma is a three-year, vocationally-oriented undergraduate qualification which sits at entry level of South Africa’s higher education qualification framework. This extended first year course offers foundations for students in Interior, Industrial, Graphic, Fashion, Surface, Jewellery Design and Architectural Technology. At the end of the course, students progress to the first year of one of these design disciplines. The official purpose of the DFC is redress; that is, widening access to talented and qualified school leavers who, due to the legacy of apartheid education, would have had limited, if any, exposure to design at school. This chapter discusses the studio-work component of the curriculum. This component has two aims: first, to introduce students to foundational or core design knowledge common to the different design disciplines it serves; and, second, to provide students with a clear, experienced-based understanding of disciplinary difference. In spite of its redress purpose, the tacit nature of design pedagogy may in fact disadvantage learners who have not been socialized into the particular forms of knowledge and dispositions required for design. Thus we set out to make more explicit this curriculum’s
basis of legitimation; in other words, we aim to explore the organizing principles constituting legitimate knowledge. We take as our starting point the principle that designing curricula which enable epistemological access requires an understanding not only of who students are, their levels of academic preparedness and the pedagogical interventions which facilitate learning but also of disciplinary knowledge and its recontextualization into curricula. In particular we are interested in the challenges of enabling epistemological access to vocational curricula that meet the external demands of vocational or professional practice. If students are to ‘crack the code’ to success, curriculum designers need to know what that code is. What makes this knowledge special? What is its basis of insight, status and identity? The studio work component of the DFC curriculum comprises several drawing projects and a series of 17 design projects which students work through over the course of a year. The analysis seeks to expose what principles underpin the selection and sequence of the written briefs of these design projects. For this purpose we construct an analytical framework by bringing together research into design expertise and Legitimation Code Theory. The result is a conceptual framework that accounts for progression in levels of expertise, forms of knowledge, and the cultivation of a designer gaze.
