Examining the efficacy of professionalising university teaching through formal teaching qualifications at a historically disadvantaged university in South Africa

Lecturers in higher education normally come into teaching with little, if any, formal professional training in teaching. The changing higher education landscape, for example, the increased student diversity, has begun to put pressure on academics to get solid grounding in pedagogical training. Many universities across the globe have now put systems in place to professionalise their teaching. This article reports on an initiative by a South African university to foreground the importance of professionalising teaching and learning among current and future university lecturers as a strategy to improve student success. The article discusses impressions of university lecturers enrolled on a formal higher education teaching qualification; the Post Graduate Diploma in Higher Education (PGDHE) on the usefulness of the qualification. Grounded in the interpretivist paradigm and premised on the qualitative research approach, this case study focuses on only one university. The research was conducted as part of a large National Research Foundation (NRF) research project on the enabling and constraining conditions in the uptake of professional development opportunities in teaching by lecturers, involving eight South African universities. A purposive sample of sixteen academics who had applied for and received funding support to enrol for a post graduate diploma in higher education was used for data collection. The lecturers responded to an open-ended questionnaire on their experiences of the first year of the two-year post graduate diploma and how their teaching practices had been affected by the attendance of that year’s sessions. Content analysis was used to identify emerging themes from the data. Findings from the study revealed that new ways of understanding teaching and learning and relating to students had emerged as a result of attending the first-year sessions and that the participants were developing an identity as university teachers. Based on the findings of the study, it is concluded that professional training in pedagogy is essential for university teaching; disciplinary expertise alone does not necessarily make one a good teacher. Based on the conclusions of the study, it is recommended that academics should undergo training to get solid grounding in pedagogical content knowledge before assuming duties as lecturers at university.