Academic Support Programmes

Academic support programmes may be seen as an interim strategy to help students from a disadvantaged school system to make the transition to higher education effectively. At a university such as Wits, this takes place in a context of multi-faceted debate and action concerning the kinds of changes in the university required by the changing demography of student intake and by the wider imperatives and priorities of South African society. The word interim is used because what is being worked towards, over the years, is a situation in which the appropriate pedagogical action is the responsibility not of a separate support structure but of the respective mainstream faculties and departments. (These latter may come to discharge some of their responsibilities in this respect through an intra-university pre- degree college.) But when the academic support moment was initiated in the early eighties, it was necessary to develop an inter-faculty team of specialists who could concentrate upon helping the students concerned, could develop the appropriate expertise and then in due course could meet requests from mainstream staff members and university committees for assistance in responding to the pedagogical and contextual problems of the students in question. At Wits this last process of response to the wide