2. The programme itself
¨ The New Academic Practitioners’ Programme (NAPP) at
the University of Cape Town
¨ ”New”: New to Higher Education; new to the university;
new to teaching/lecturing
¨ An orientation to context; research; curriculum; teaching,
learning, assessment; an academic career
¨ Reflective practice underpinnings; together with critical
realist thinking; knowing/doing/being (Barnett)
¨ What does it mean to be a HE academic in the current
(and future) world?
3. Generic – discipline-specific continuum:
a Communities of Practice gaze
¨ Lave and Wenger (1991) and Storberg-Walker
(2008)
¨ The basic analytic components of the theory and
their application to this NAPP (Storberg-Walker,
2008: 564-565):
4. ¨ Meaning-making: Participation and reification
¤ Residential and on-campus forms of community-building
and networking
¤ Sense-making of HE context; meanings of curriculum
and teaching and learning; representation of
themselves as academics with multiple identities
¤ A community of academics/scholars connected by their
‘newness’ and their knowing/doing/being identities
¤ Reification: Shared pedagogical discourses; common
symbolic identity (struggle; enablement; empowerment)
5. ¨ Community: Joint enterprise; mutual engagement;
shared repertoire
¤ Learning to teach in HE / teaching to learn; learning to
be in HE – especially in a context of change; learning
about others in the community
¤ Mutuality here: Multi-disciplinary; expanding
awareness of context; finding a ‘voice’
¤ The teaching project; the symbolic and real resources
participants build
6. ¨ Identity: Negotiated experience; membership
through competence; lifelong learning; multi-
membership; a ‘glocal’ identity (global/local)
¤ Emergent identity along with established identities;
¤ Competence not only in the sense of being able to ‘do’;
¤ The start of a learning journey;
¤ Navigating multiple identities;
¤ ‘Glocal’ identity experienced as ambivalence
7. ¨ Learning: Evolving mutual engagement;
understanding and tuning their enterprise;
developing repertoire, styles and discourses
¤ Iterative and recursive nature of the programme
¤ Mix of theory, practice, reflection and peer
engagement
¤ Beginnings of engagement in educational and
academic fields, identity work, educational knowledge
engagement, navigating multiple representations
8. What does NAPP not (yet) enable?
¨ The bridge between the generic and the disciplinary
contexts, ways of being and the interplay between
these
¨ Ways in which power is vested, distributed, negotiated
and questioned in the academy
¨ How and why change occurs
¨ Understanding the sometimes arcane and impenetrable
structures and processes at local and wider levels
¨ The building of multiple communities of practice
¨ Understandings of marginality and assimilation and
when these can be good and not so good
9. Implications
¨ Follow-up work: NAPP II; NAPP extension; other models
¨ Customised NAPP; disciplinary/collegial NAPP – or
multi-disciplinary/transdisciplinary NAPP?
¨ ‘Tips-and-tricks’ – reflective practice - transformative
¨ Whose responsibility to take work further? Individuals;
departments; institution; etc.?
¨ Who ‘gets away with’ taking responsibility of building
communities?
¨ What is ‘peripheral’? Central? Why
10. References
¨ Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning:
Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, United
Kingdom: Cambridge University Press
¨ Storberg-Walker, J. (2008). Wenger's Communities of
Practice Revisited: A (Failed?) Exercise in Applied
Communities of Practice Theory-Building Research.
Advances in Developing Human Resources, 10, 555-
577.
¨ Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning,
meaning, and identity. Cambridge, United Kingdom:
Cambridge University Press.
