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The emergence of an education policy dispositif in South Africa: An analysis of educational discourses associated with the fourth industrial revolution
Get PDFAbstract
The notion of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) has recently entered the public and policy domain in South Africa. It has rapidly found resonance in policy discourse and the popular media. It has also entered the language of educational policy and institutions. The impact of 4IR on educational thinking and practice has hitherto not featured in academic discussion on education in South Africa except for a keynote plenary session at the annual conference of the South African Education Research Association (SAERA) in Durban (October 2019). The South African Education Deans Forum recently published a call for the submission of chapters for a book on teacher education, 4IR and decolonisation.
This article is based on an address that I delivered at the SAERA 2019 conference as part of the plenary panel. The article consists of 4 sections. The first section offers a consideration of the entry of 4IR discourse into the educational imaginary. I suggest in this section that 4IR discourse has installed a socio-technical imaginary in South Africa’s unequal educational dispensation. The second section concentrates on the construction of educational governance. Based on research on 4IR-related policy making, I discuss the policy directions taken by the Department of Higher Education and Training and Department of Basic Education in giving effect to ways of engaging with 4IR in each of their domains. The third section features a discussion of the impact of technological disruption on society, the economy and education. The final section is a discussion of the emerging educational architectures in the 4IR and a critical consideration of the curriculum and pedagogical dimensions of 4IR, which, I argue, are informed by an orientation which prioritises the acquisition of generic skills. Sidelining knowledge and concepts as central to the structuring of the curriculum, a generic skills approach succumbs to a ‘knowledge blindness’ that holds pernicious consequences for epistemic access in South Africa.
Keywords: fourth industrial revolution, education in South Africa, policy dispositif, educational governance, genericism
 
Academic interaction with social partners in the case from the University of Limpopo
Get PDFThe purpose of this article is to describe the different dimensions of the community- universityinteractions that emanated from a Community Engagement Audit which was undertaken at theUniversity of Limpopo (UL) in 2014. The Audit methodology followed a quantitative surveyresearch approach. A sample of 278, out of a population of 559 academic staff at UL that included196 with PhDs and 363 without PhDs, participated in the study. SPSS was used to compute factoranalysis. The results indicated the dominant partners that faculties interact with across the spheresof engaged scholarship were multi-national companies, small, medium and micro-enterprises,national regulatory and advisory and sectorial organisations. The types of relationship with externalsocial actors were contract research, continuing education and collaborative research anddevelopment projects. Channels of information were popular publications, public conferences,seminars or workshops, oral or written testimony or advice prominent. The outputs were new orimproved products/processes, scientific discoveries and community infrastructure and facilities.The outcomes and benefits were regional development, improved quality of life for individuals andcommunities and research focus and research projects, theoretical and methodological developmentin an academic field, academic and institutional reputation. The main constrains experienced duringengagement are lack of academic resources and institutional support and relationships with externalsocial partners. The results provide guiding parameters to improve the scale and reach of CE at theUL and a snapshot of the architecture and terrain of engaged scholarship at a rural-based HEI inSouth Africa
Using legimation code theory to track pedagogic practice in a South African English home language poetry lesson
Get PDFAbstractThis paper utilises two dimensions of Legitimation Code Theory, Specialisation andSemantics, to describe and analyse aspects of the poetry pedagogy of a South African homelanguage subject English teacher. The Specialisation analysis illuminates how, while thelesson is oriented towards social relations in its focus on cultivating learners’ literary gaze,the teacher’s pedagogy exhibits varying emphases on epistemic relations and socialrelations in different phases of the lesson. These concepts facilitate more precise descriptionof the pedagogy, which assists in clarifying and explicating the nature of the pedagogy of ateacher working with a cultural heritage orientation to literary instruction. Analysis withinthe Semantic dimension enables the tracking of pulses of shifts in abstraction andparticularity through the lesson. This highlights the ways in which the teacher movesbetween more and less abstract and concrete forms of knowledge, which implicitly modelsideational networks required for higher levels of close textual analysis
Skilled reading in isiZulu: what can we learn from it?
Get PDFResearch on reading in African languages is particularly pertinent in South Africa now, inview of the poor reading performance in many South African schools. This paper is basedon a study of competent adult readers of isiZulu that analysed what its orthography (the wayit is written) requires of readers. As an agglutinative language with a conjoined writingsystem, isiZulu carries meaning not only in separate words, but also in morphemes thatcluster together, forming long complex words. Eye tracking data shows that competentreaders of isiZulu move their eyes across text in saccades (shifts of the point of focus) thatare short in comparison with the saccades of efficient reading of English. It also shows thatreaders of isiZulu fixate on points of text for longer periods than do readers of English.The study links eye movement data to information gained from a stimulated recall process,to discover strategies consciously used by competent readers of isiZulu. Some of thesestrategies, such as visualisation, are common to efficient readers of all languages, whileothers might be peculiar to agglutinating and/or tonal languages. These strategies informsuggestions for the development of effective reading skills in isiZulu.The key argument of the paper is that the orthography of isiZulu has features that requireattention by teachers of reading if their learners are to benefit from the advantages thatreading in their first language should bring
Creating my academic self and space: autoethnographic reflections on transcending barriers in higher education
Get PDFAbstractThis article focuses on my ethnographic self-reconstruction in order to explore myacademic journey, by critically evaluating the influence of professional academic cultureson my teaching practice, with a view to understanding my professional identity. I makevisible to the reader and myself my suppressed feelings, emotions and ambitions byanalysing learning opportunities that facilitate my ‘being’ an academic. Drawing ontheoretical frames from autoethnography, I engage in personal epistemological vigilance bydirecting my sociological gaze inwards. I retroactively and selectively draw on diaryrecordings of my own micro-ethnographies, and my teaching portfolio statement as the datasets. My entry into this slippery, treacherous space evokes feelings of vulnerability andhyper-visibility. It illuminates the struggle of being on the right-hand side of binaries suchas disciplinary specialist/ interdisciplinary researcher, experienced/novice academic, andscholar/teacher. This work has implications for other academics who feel undervalued,over-extended and trapped in the labour of teaching
Having fun seriously matters: A visual arts-based narrative of methodological inventiveness
Get PDFThe purpose of this article is to explore of what methodological inventiveness has made possible for me as a self-reflexive researcher. As South African educational researchers, we need to consider how a better understanding of our own experiences, identities and subjectivities correspond with a context of change and transformation. Within this understanding it is useful to think of methodological inventiveness as a form of post qualitative inquiry, which embraces the possibilities of different educational methodologies to open up and resists pre-determined and formulaic ways of doing and knowing. Through a playful engagement with the children’s book ‘Zog’ I create an arts-based narrative to show how my journey of becoming an educational researcher unfolds. I use playfulness and joy to show how methodological inventiveness makes it possible for me, as a self-reflexive researcher, to engage with fluid and complex identities and contextual realities
Fostering an integrated tourism education curriculum in Lesotho: A community participation approach
Get PDFThis paper reports on ways to foster an integrated tourism curriculum by employing a community participation approach. As a vocational subject, tourism is intended to provide learners with practical and entrepreneurial skills. However, tourism is largely taught as a theory-based subject, and not in accordance with the demands of an integrated curriculum, which aims to strengthen survival skills and self-reliance. A community participation approach was utilised to show the cultural wealth learners and their communities can bring to the learning environment, and the value that this might hold for enhancing their academic performance and empowering them with vital life skills. Participatory action research was employed as a research methodology to generate data. Content analysis was used to analyse and interpret data. Some of the findings were that tourism curriculum can be fostered through an improved understanding of tourism as a vocational subject, collaboration amongst the stakeholders, and availability and proper use of resources
Knowledge and knowers in teaching and learning: an enhanced approach to curriculum alignment
Get PDFJohn Biggs’ well-known curriculum design approach, constructive alignment, is widely used inhigher education in the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa. Developed with onedominant account of learning through curriculum, this approach has a gap in terms of accountingfor other kinds of knowledge building, and associated knower development. This paper proposes acomplementary approach that accounts for different kinds of knowledge and knower building.Using Legitimation Code Theory’s concept of Specialisation, the paper argues that accounting forwhat makes a discipline ‘special’ in terms of its basis for legitimate achievement can enablecurriculum writers to align curricula more effectively with that basis in different disciplines. Usinga case study approach, this paper shows how this tool can provide lecturers and academicdevelopment practitioners with a useful mode of analyzing curriculum alignment to more ablyaccount for differential development of disciplinary knowledges and knowers
"Doing something in life”: Rural youth reimagining technical vocational education and training
Get PDFRecent post-schooling policy continues to emphasise the importance of technical vocationaleducation and training (TVET) for employability in the workplace, thus largely reflecting theinterests of capital. However, the discourse of educating for employability is under increasingattack as unemployment levels rise; and recent policy has begun to argue for a consideration ofskills for livelihoods other than formal employment. Unemployment disproportionately affects theyouth and those living in rural areas, and TVET policy has begun to address this. However, suchpolicy remains firmly within neoliberalism, and does not address the interests or lived experienceof rural youth. A reimagining of TVET is required. In this, there is a need to understand what ruralyouth themselves consider to be most appropriate for local development needs. This article reportson a qualitative study done with ten youth from Limpopo Province to investigate what sort ofTVET out-of-school youth consider to be relevant in their context
Invoking learner voice and developing leadership: what matters to learners?
Get PDFAbstractEducational leadership and management (ELM) research overly focuses on adult leadershipdevelopment at the expense of leadership of learners. Framed by the concept of learnervoice, this article focuses on learner leadership and argues that learners should be treated aspeople whose ideas matter. It draws on a Bachelor of Education Honours (ELM) electivewhich required students (practicing teachers) to establish school leadership clubs andinvolve learners in a reform initiative in pursuit of leadership development. Thelongitudinal study which informed this article was designed as a multi-case study to explorelearner voice and the development of leadership across 44 leadership clubs drawing onthree data sources. The study found that while the phenomenon of learner leadership wasnot common across schools, leadership clubs offered a space for the development of learnervoice. Learner voice was generated in relation to the school physical environment, Englishproficiency amongst learners, improved learner conduct, developments pertaining to theextra-mural curriculum, and leadership training initiatives. In addition, the clubs affordedlearners the opportunity to initiate and lead a change project in their schools. However, thetake-up of learner leadership as a whole school initiative was problematic in the majority ofschools. The article concludes with some suggestions for a future research agenda emergingout of the first phase of the project