CHED Associate Professor Moragh Paxton has dedicated much of her research energy in the past decade to understand the experiences and practices of students from diverse social groups who have been historically excluded from higher education.
“My specialisation is in the area now described as academic literacies research, which is recognised internationally as a significant field of enquiry. My intellectual project has been to use critical discourse analysis alongside ethnographic methods to analyse students’ hybrid ‘interim literacies’,” she says.
Her work addresses CHED’s mission to promote equity of access, effectiveness of teaching and learning and the enhancement of the curriculum across UCT, and has provided a more multilayered understanding of the linguistic and cultural resources that South African students from rural and working-class backgrounds bring to their academic studies. It has brought to light the complex discursive processes by which students ”learn” their subject. Further, by focusing on the historical and social context of a particular discipline (economics, which is what her PhD focused on), a discipline that has been underrepresented in research, her work has made a significant contribution to the field.
“More recently, my research could be described as extending the theory and methods used in my doctoral research to other levels and other disciplines. My particular contribution has been to use theoretical perspectives on discourse, genre and voice to explore genre acquisition at the postgraduate level. During this period, I also developed an interest in the theory and methodology of academic literacies research.”
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