Transcending the Econometric Discourse in Curriculum Design: Multi-trajectory Progression Planning

In 2014, Alternation carried an article by Rawatlal and Dhunpath (Special Edition 12) titled ‘Stretching the Undergraduate Curriculum: A Compensatory Response to Curriculum Modelling?’ In that article, the authors contended that the South African Council on Higher Education’s (CHE) proposal to the South African government to extend the undergraduate curriculum by an additional year does not make a sufficiently compelling case, primarily because the proposal is inherently conservative in failing to move beyond the remedial. Furthermore, in challenging the veracity of the modelling scenarios presented in the proposal, we argued that the proposal inappropriately seeks to advance an econometric model to solve a pedagogic problem. In 2015, the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) rejected the CHE proposal because the modelling on which the proposal was based failed to account for a key driver in curriculum reform: The Foundation/Access Programmes, which, the DHET argues, had impacted student progression over the interceding years. In this article 1 , the authors cautiously support the DHET decision to reject the CHE proposal, arguing that in the absence of radical curriculum transformation in structure, form and content, new possibilities do emerge from the now institutionalised Foundation/Access Programmes that support a MultiTrajectory Approach (MTA) to designing curricula. The MTA approach is a 1 This article is an extension of the arguments presented in one that appeared

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