Abstract:
This article reports on an action research project being conducted at the University of
Pretoria. The study focuses on the idea that I, as an academic specialising in higher
education, monitor and gather data about my practice, alongside colleagues enrolled
for a formal professional qualification in higher education, with a view to sustaining
scholarly and professional development. I am doing this in order to improve my practice
in an innovative and accountable way, which includes constructing new meaning and
contributing to the production of knowledge in the fields of facilitating learning in
higher education and academic staff development. The illustrative case study is the
Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education (PGCHE). Cultivating scholarly higher
education practitioners is viewed as an important aim of the programme. The focus
is on constructing one’s own understanding of one’s higher education practice in a
scholarly way. Learning theories, including self-regulated professional learning and
constructivist learning, as are found in the principles of action research, form an
integral theoretical underpinning for scholarly development. Action research is used as
a means of sustained professional learning for all participants. This study investigates
how professional learning can be encouraged and sustained through the development
and assessment of professional portfolios. The portfolios came to represent the living
theories (McNiff 2002) of practice of all participants, substantiating educational values
and claims of improved practice in a scholarly way. The process of compiling the
portfolios, called professional portfolios, is based on the principles of action research.
This process is in stark contrast with the notion that a portfolio is ‘a file of evidence’;
rather, these professional portfolios represent evidence of new knowledge produced/
constructed. A mix of research methods is used to obtain quantitative and qualitative
data – gathered, inter alia, by means of a learning style questionnaire, text analysis and
photo evidence. Other methods such as observation, student feedback questionnaires
and interviews are not reported on in this article.
