“This book is especially timely and will be very influential in the acknowledgment of the importance of institutional transformation in the context of heritage in postcolonial universities in South ...Africa, Africa, and globally." Dr Mathias Alubafi Fubah Human Sciences Research Council “This book is a significant contribution to Higher Education globally in doing Transformation and doing change in Institutional Culture. It is a powerful reference point and resource for transformation offices/social justice units in South Africa and globally as we continue to engage with the Hard Science of Change. Visual Redress provides insight into the specific choices made by Stellenbosch University in relation to its location and healing institutionally harmed communities. We must learn from this as we continuously engage with our praxis." Dr Bernadette Judith Johnson Director: Transformation and Employment Equity Office University of the Witwatersrand
Hierdie boek dien as ’n hulpbron of roetekaart vir enige student, opvoeder, onderwysdistrikspersoneel of enige ander persoon wat by die onderrig en opvoeding van mense betrokke is en na verbeterde ...leeruitkomste streef. Leer- en onderrigprosesse vind binne bepaalde leerruimtes of leeromgewings plaas, en elk van hierdie ruimtes het ’n unieke karakter asook potensiaal wat wag om ontsluit te word. Onderrig of die oordrag van kennis kan in byna enige ruimte soos ’n klaskamer, laboratorium, tuin of onder ’n boom plaasvind. Ongeag op watter ruimte daar vir leer en onderrig besluit word, daar moet deurgaans fyn besin word oor hoe om die potensiaal wat in die verskillende leerruimtes opgesluit lê in die beste belang van die leerders of studente te ontsluit aangesien dit ’n direkte invloed op die leeruitkomste en akademiese prestasies kan uitoefen.
The lived experiences of students’ educational practices are analysed and explained in terms of the book’s plea for the recognition of the ‘multi-dimentionality’ of students as educational beings ...with unexplored cultural wealth and hidden capitals. The book presents an argument that student lives are entangled in complex social-spatial relations and processes that extend across family, neighbourhood and peer associations, which are largely misrecognised in educational policy and practice. The book is relevant to understanding the role of policy, curriculum and pedagogy in addressing the educational performance of working-class youth.
This article offers an account of the development of student leaders’ agency within the institutional culture of their residences at Stellenbosch University (SU). Residences at formerly white ...universities such as SU are struggling to align their welcoming practices and cultures to the requirements for immersion of the diverse students who now live in them. This article focuses on student experiences of alienation in SU residences with a particular interest in how they develop adaptative responses to establish a place for themselves in them. It is based on focus group discussions with student leaders which provided insights into their perceptions of their residence cultures and how they established their agency in this environment. The analysis presented in the article is based on Archer’s theoretical approach to morphogenesis. The first data section of the article discusses the interaction between the students’ immersion in the institutional culture of their residences, on the one hand, and the acquisition of their initial identifications in response to the environmental cues of their residences, on the other. The second data section discusses the students’ active acquisition of their social identities, which allowed them to establish their aspirant pathways at the residence and the university. Overall, the article offers an account of morphogenesis at work at the institutional level of SU’s residences with a specific focus on the adaptive behaviour of student leadership in this university context.
This article is a conceptual consideration of what could be regarded as pedagogical justice for disadvantaged students in South African schools. Combining Bourdieu's social reproduction account of ...education with elements of Bernstein's consideration of the internal dynamics that constitute the pedagogic relay, the article considers the pedagogical terms upon which these students can meaningfully be engaged in their school going. Such engagement, I argue, has to contend with the cultural resistance displayed by disadvantaged students towards their schooling which they view as being against their class cultural interests. The article suggests that teachers' pedagogical practices at the site of the school present one key space to leverage the socially just pedagogies necessary for productive school engagement. I consider the conceptual bases upon which such a pedagogical approach can proceed. I advance the argument that student engagement ought to proceed on the basis of a combination of a 'social relations of pedagogies' orientation, on the one hand, and what I refer to as an 'explicit pedagogies' approach to recontextualisation of work, on the other. It is the main argument of this article that pedagogical justice for disadvantaged students lies in providing a pedagogical scaffold between their life world knowledge's and accessing the school knowledge codes. Such an approach supports induction into the vertical logic of the school code as central to students' school success, but it argues for pedagogical incorporation of horizontal knowledge's central to securing active engagement with their schooling.
Popular conceptions of school administrative clerks and school secretaries imply that they have little agency because they are deemed as subordinate support staff. However, the literature across a ...range of fields suggests that these subordinates exercise agency. We set out in this article to explore the workings of subordinate agency. The article suggests that it is through their involvement and interaction in the socio-cultural context of the school that school administrative clerks are able to expand the range of their agency and thereby reposition themselves at school. We employ the analytical construct “participatory capital” to analyse how these clerks establish their agency and renegotiate their roles and places in the school. Based on a qualitative research study, we interviewed and observed three purposively selected administrative clerks in three primary schools in Cape Town. This article argues that, while the occupational identity of administrative clerks remains one of subordination within the bureaucratic discourse and their places of work, the selected school administrative clerks were able to extend the scope of their agency through their participatory capital.
Aslam Fataar, one of South Africa’s few educational sociologists working with ethnographic methods, captures the complex interactions and dynamics between social life, school processes and youth ...subjectivity in townships in the Western Cape. His work with concepts of mobilities and space is enormously generative, providing a way for teachers, principals, communities and policy makers to engage with the ‘complex ecologies’ of young people’s learning in urban schools. As an astute policy analyst, he also well knows the systemic barriers in the way of achieving this. The last chapter, on possibilities for pedagogical justice at the site of the school, considers how disengaged students might re-engage through leveraging explicit pedagogic connections between their lifeworlds and school practices. Acknowledging that pedagogy cannot be the only means for revitalising schooling, the author nevertheless insists that marginalised young people’s consent needs to be won by schools that make use of, rather than ignore, their strengths, knowledges and aspirations. The approach to the troubled question of youth and subjectivity is enlightening, and vital to understanding the post-apartheid city and school. The book fills a much-needed gap in educational sociology in South Africa.
This article explores the place-making and identifications practices of two high school girls in the out-of-classroom spaces of their school. We employ Henri Lefebvre's spatial triad, consisting of ...the interaction between the physical, social and mental dimensions of space, as the conceptual foundation for understanding how these girls turn space into place at their school. The article is based on an ethnographic study in which we utilised a range of methods, including unstructured, semi-structured and photo-elicitation interviews; participant observation; focus group discussions; student-produced photography and photo-diaries. We found that the ways in which the girls inhabited and ‘made place’ in the school's out-of-classroom spaces are determined by their unique biographies, interactions with the school's expressive culture, and the subsequent social networks, movements and practices that they mobilise in these out-of-classroom spaces. Via these daily practices, they turn their school spaces into a place which, in their unique ways, they are able to call home.
This article focuses on the way in which the school management teams (SMTs) of three selected working-class schools have developed and implemented a range of leadership practices within their schools ...in order to provide a platform for optimal teaching and learning. The article is based on qualitative research conducted in schools on the outskirts of Cape Town. Employing the policy enactment theory advanced by Ball, Maguire and Braun (2012), the article illustrates the way in which the context of these working-class schools impacts on the type of leadership practices that are employed; these practices, in turn, have an impact on the type of curriculum policy platform established in these schools. The article elucidates how governmental curriculum policy reform is ‘received’ by the SMTs, which are the schools’ formal leadership structures, and implemented in the ‘messy’ reality of the selected schools. We present the argument that the leadership practices of the selected schools’ SMTs are determined by the schools’ ‘materiality,’ in reference to the impact of the schools’ contextual circumstances on their curriculum processes and leadership practices. The findings show that the schools’ leadership practices are based on a narrow and one-dimensional enactment of the curriculum policy, which has negative consequences for teaching and learning in the schools. This article contributes to an understanding of the challenges of leadership practices in working-class schools and the enactment of curriculum policy reform in them.
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