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Decoloniality, Inclusivity And Autonomy In Reimagining Cities Of The Future
Get PDFAfrican Union has hope for a vision of an Africa that is thriving by 2063 (UNDP Africa, 2017). Historically Africa was under the gaze and submissive to the imaginings of western vision. Africans as drivers of development prove to be difficult as global coloniality continues to shape inclusivity, autonomy, and spatial activities. Reimagining the future of cities is aligned with the way global coloniality unpacks how modernisation takes place. Decoloniality becomes important in that it gives Africans the space to think about autonomy to plan how can issues of inclusivity be addressed in the context of providing sustainable cities in line with spatial justice. The main drivers of reimagining the cities of the future are environmental sustainability and disruptive technology. Environmental sustainability and technological vision/disruptive technology are very problematic in the African context. In the African context, environmental issues are secondary as social inequalities and political issues are at the forefront of African lived experiences. Technology although present continues to exacerbate the gap between the “haves and the have nots”. This paper critically explores the future of cities concerning decoloniality, inclusivity and autonomy. It highlights key discussions about decoloniality and helps to unpack an African perspective towards reimagining future cities. The purpose of this paper is to bring to the forefront what sustainability means for smart cities in Africa, and if they are ready to take on an autonomous role in defining the future of cities
Counting the costs: Exploring the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic in rural schools in Lesotho
Get PDFPandemics, even long forgotten ones, are identified with leaving long-term consequences in their wake. The COVID-19 pandemic reached catastrophic levels in Africa, the same way that it has thrown the economic and social wheels of China, the United States, and part of Europe off the rails. The chaos in Africa is being felt more on education especially in rural Southern Africa. Schools in rural areas, already reeling from extreme poverty, economic vulnerability and crisis have to bear the most severe brunt from the epidemic. This study seeks to explore the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on rural education and uses data from online interviews with 10 rural-based teachers on the effects of the COVID-19 in rural schools in Lesotho. The study strives to address two questions: what are the effects of COVID-19 on education in rural schools and what steps have been taken to mitigate the effects of COVID-19-induced school closures? Findings from this study show that enforced school closures in an attempt to contain the spread of COVID-19, though temporary, are disrupting the lives of learners especially rural learners. Where school closures were meant to be short term, their impact on learners, families and educators, particularly for those in the most marginalized locations such as rural areas cannot be mitigated. Nonetheless, there has been some considerable innovation in an attempt to mitigate the effects of the pandemic through bridging the gap between the classroom and an entirely remote setting by the introduction of different forms of online and/or distance education which has led to the initiation of novel forms of learning which however still remain elusive for most rural learners.
Key words: COVID-19; Coronavirus; pandemic; epidemic; school closures; rural schools; online educatio
The digital divide at three disadvantaged secondary schools in Gauteng, South Africa
Get PDFThe study aimed at exploring the extent of the deepening digital divide at some disadvantaged secondary schools in Sedibeng West, Gauteng Province of South Africa propelled by the Covid-19 pandemic. The rapid diffusion of the information and communication technology (ICT) has changed societies around the globe, including the education sector. Not only technology has affected, for instance, the way teachers and students communicate, learn and work but also the outbreak of Covid-19 across the globe. With the advent of the internet, teaching and learning is no longer confined to classroom walls. However, the reality of the digital divide exists, more especially now, exposed by the presence of Covid-19. Data were collected from 48 teachers and three school principals, through focus group discussions and in-depth face-to-face interviews, respectively. This study concludes that inadequate ICT to some teachers and learners creates digital, information and knowledge divides at schools. Furthermore, these schools cannot run online classes during this wave of the Covid-19 as reported on the media that teaching and learning will resume online. The paper recommends training of teachers and learners on how to use technology in teaching as this would help in uncertain times like the Covid-19 period
Conceptualising work-integrated learning: Supporting pre-service teachers’ capacity for pedagogic reasoning
No full textTo enable pre-service teachers to develop more specialised teaching practices, work-integrated learning (WIL) sessions need to provide student teachers with more than opportunities to accumulate time in school-based placements and mimic prevalent practices. Research about WIL in South Africa shows that there is a stronger focus on student teachers’ experiences and perceptions than about the substantive practices that they engage in. Research also shows that there many tensions as around the conceptualisation of WIL and its contribution to a process of ‘learning to teach’. Some teaching programmes focus strongly on the personal identity of the student teacher and minimise their socialisation into a knowledge-based practice. Some focus primarily on the uniqueness of the teaching context and less on the essence of pedagogy, while some emphasise learning by reflection on experience rather than reflection on principled knowledge. We argue that to build cumulative knowledge in the field of learning to teach, we need consider these tensions and bring them into dialogue with each other. In this paper, we draw on concepts from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) to consider how three tensions in conceptualising WIL support or constrain students’ capacity to make appropriate choices in their developing classroom practices. We suggest that approaches to WIL that develop students’ specialised gaze on practice enables them to recognise and enact pedagogic reasoning in their developing teaching practices. We argue that this approach provides a good way forward to conceptualise WIL as a process of learning to teach and support cumulative learning in teacher education
Exploring how the national COVID-19 pandemic policy and its application exposed the fault lines of educational inequality
Get PDFIn the wake of Covid-19, a flurry of surveys in education were conducted. These revealed alarming statistics about most learners losing half of the academic year, parents’ angst about sending children to school, and a small fraction of higher education institutions being able to leverage affordances of technology for effective online teaching and learning. As our right to breathe, eat and learn became suffocated, we were urged to re-imagine possibilities for resurrection, for mitigating current and future education “losses”. Deafened by the varied cacophony from teacher and student unions, school governing body representatives, scientists and education experts, the government with its departments of education decided to close education institutions and this coincided with the hard lockdown. Against this background, we use the lens of critical policy analysis (CPA), to explore the decision-making of education departments. In this qualitative study, a critical lens was used to reveal the magnification of the fault lines of educational iniquity and inequity as departments of education made decisions to close and reopen institutions. Multiple data generation methods included a key informant interview with a senior official from the Department of Education, a survey among school personnel, and document analysis. The findings revealed a tension between expectations of producers of policy and recipients of policy, within unequal school settings. A repositioning, by peering through the lens of the dispossessed to inform future policy, is recommended
Crossing from violence to nonviolence: pedagogy and memory
Get PDFThis qualitative case study addresses the use of memories of violence in a workshop withten young student leaders in Durban. The pedagogy included the use of guidelines andgender-based groups as ways of enabling safety. A particularly direct discussion of genderand its relationship to violence followed, though violence in relation to other socialidentities was also explored. Walkerdine’s work (2006) on border crossing is used toanalyse the data from the records of discussion and evaluation comments. The argument isthat such a pedagogy enabled participants to address some of the sedimented connectionsthat held them to relationships based on violence. Generally, if we understand violence ascaught up in social identities, work on memories of violence will require attention todynamics related to the identities present. While gender’s relation to violence is central inthis context, further cases in which the pedagogy is structured around other social identitieswould extend our understanding
Strutting and fretting, a drama education retrospective
Get PDFThis article views through memory work my own practice as a Drama Education lecturerand how it has come into being and evolved through the impact of influential teachers,events and processes. The theoretical basis is an existential one as I interrogate what itmeans to be – to be who I am, to be a teacher educator and to be a teacher educator indrama. I use a narrative inquiry approach, drawing on constructs of narratology in mymethodology. A narrative approach recognises that identity is not constructedautonomously, but in relation to others (Nicholson, 2005). Now on the brink of retirement,I look back at my career and bring memory forward to try to arrive at an understanding ofthe forces that shaped my work and how the critical emancipatory pedagogy that I nowespouse was an unforeseen yet logical outcome of my life’s influences and my constantyearning towards self-improvement and self-awareness. I make use of a self-interview as ameans of shaping memories into a story that captures significant periods and people in myeducation. Elements of critical events theory are employed to ask what I did, why I did itand what the implications of those actions are for my current and future practice and fordrama pedagogy in general.We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.(T S Eliot
Corporal punishment and the achievement of educational success: perceptions of learners in the South African school context
Get PDFThis article examines students’ responses to corporal punishment and their perceptions ofcorporal punishment as a necessary form of discipline that brings benefit to individuals intheir pursuit of success. By focussing on the notion of ‘success’ as a dominant marketdiscourse, I describe how this rhetoric is reinforced through the disciplinary practice ofcorporal punishment – and how learners on the whole regard this form of punishment asbeneficial in achieving their educational aspirations. Foucault’s notion of discipline offers auseful conceptual framework in understanding how corporal punishment operates toregulate conduct and codify behaviour according to what is regarded as acceptable anddesirable. Research findings suggest that most students who are recipients of corporalpunishment display limited capacity for resistance and that students’ perceptions of theeffectiveness of corporal punishment, function to reinforce their construction as disciplined,hard-working and ‘docile’ subjects
Challenges and Survival Strategies of Vulnerable Groups Under covid-19 Induced Lockdown: The Case of Durban Waste Pickers
Get PDFDespite the notion that waste pickers are amongst the economically excluded groups in urban South Africa, little is known about their lockdown experience. This study explores the survival strategies of waste pickers in Durban during the COVID-19 induced level 5 lockdown. It employs a case study to illuminate the challenges and various survival strategies adopted by the waste pickers in response to harsh living conditions imposed by the lockdown measures. Two empirical questions are asked in this study- what are the challenges faced by the waste pickers? and what were the surviving strategies employed by waste pickers? Data for this study were collected using semi-structured interviews with pickers. Using a convenience sampling technique, n=15 waste pickers from the South Beach area were interviewed. The study revealed that the pickers lost income and their assets. As a means of survival, the pickers resorted to drugs, crime, and moved to shelters
Domestic Space As a Survival Strategy for Low-income Women
Get PDFLow-income government provided housing has been continually transformed by its beneficiaries, especially women. The transformations are a major sign that there is discontentment about the houses since low-income households are excluded from the design process of these houses. By transforming the houses, the low-income households are trying to fit their houses or environments to their ways of living. This paper intends to review the housing transformations at the Masese Women’s Self-Help Housing Project at Masese, Jinja, in Uganda to understand how women practice space. Studying the spatial alterations can help guide architects towards finding inclusive housing design approaches that can benefit the low-income households and prevent governments and donors from spending finances on futile housing prototypes that get eventually abandoned. The paper adopts a qualitative methodology comprising of precedent studies at Masese, and a literature review to analyse the various housing transformations in an attempt to address the problem of inadequate housing for low-income households.