Students’ perspective on aspects of their lecturers’ teaching in a South African rural university: Unpacking students’ mute voices

Abstract

Lecturing has always been perceived as a traditional top-down communication from lecturers to students without providing students with an opportunity to provide constructive feedback to their lecturers concerning their teaching practices. This has prompted the need to develop evaluation tools with which students can express their viewpoints on their lecturers’ teaching approaches. Hence, the appropriateness of this study which sought to unpack students’ mute voices in relation to various aspects of their lecturers’ teaching. With a distinct focus on a rural South African University, the purpose of this study was to explore students’ perspectives on aspects of their lecturers teaching. Flanagan (1954) Critical
Incident Technique (CIT) is utilised as a theoretical framework to reflect students’ views about their lecturers teaching. Exploratory qualitative research design was used as an approach for this study. A simple random sampling was used to select forty (40) lecturers’ evaluation questionnaires completed by students across eight (8) Schools of the rural university. From each evaluated lecturer, five questionnaires were randomly selected. Thematic and content analysis was used for data analysis purposes which specifically looked at the section in which students were requested to comment on any aspects of their lecturer teaching that they would like to see improvements. The findings of this paper have
implications for both higher education, lecturers and academic development (AD) practitioners as they highlights aspects such as lack of time management, provision of learning material, and relation between lectures and students as latent constraints to teaching and learning.

Key words: students’ perspectives; lecturers’ teaching; rural university student evaluation