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Design Considerations for a Disaster eHealth Appliance
Get PDFDisaster eHealth is a new area of research and endeavour. In order to make a practical contribution Disaster eHealth approaches should consider the role of a Disaster eHealth appliance. Both disaster management and disaster medicine may find that such approaches allow critical information to be gathered and situational awareness improved. This paper proposes the development of a Disaster eHealth appliance to support self-care of chronic disease and caregiving by others. Injuries and disease caused by the disaster may be also supported by this approach. It also attempts to address some of the potential problems and suggest some solutions for the use of such appliances. Re-using existing devices may offer a relatively low-cost and sustainable approach to providing such devices, and infrastructure to use them.
 
Using a Vygotskian sociocultural approach to pedagogy: Insights from some teachers in South Africa
Get PDFThe goal of the study on which this article is based was to examine teachers’ perspectives on the effectiveness of adopting a Vygotskian sociocultural approach to teaching and learning in the classrooms. The study used focus group interview discussions to gather views from 20 classroom practitioners who had completed a BEd Hons in Education Psychology. The teachers were from five secondary schools in the Gauteng region. Among the key concepts explored in the focus group discussions (FGDs) were the role of scaffolding when linked to mediated learning experiences (MLEs), the use of situated learning experiences in the learners’ zones of proximal development (ZPD), and how the approach helped transform the learners’ skills from lower to higher psychological functions through the use of material, psychological and semiotic tools in the classroom. The analysis of the data followed a thematic approach, with emerging codes being clustered into code families. Among the key findings of the study was the view of teachers that adopting a multipronged strategy that includes the use of authentic learning conversations, learning tools (material, psychological, and semiotic) and situated learning experiences goes a long way towards fostering useful teaching and learning. The study illustrated that classroom practitioners do need to take into account and adopt the many and varied benefits that can be derived from an authentic sociocultural approach to teaching and learning
Working toward a socially just curriculum in South Africa: a collaborative autobiographical narrative inquiry
Get PDFIn this article we foreground the lived experiences of a group of post-graduate education students at the University of the Free State as they explore issues of social justice in the curriculum. Our contextual and local experiences are situated within a call for decolonisation of the curriculum. Within this context we view curriculum as an autobiographical, lived and storied practice (Pinar 2012). Through our creative collaborative narrative, we focus on teacher identity and experience as this has been shown to have a major impact on the curriculum (Clandinin & Connelly 2000). We believe that, “[s]ocial justice practices at their best should also awaken our senses and the ability to imagine alternatives that can sustain the collective work necessary to challenge entrenched patterns and institutions and build a different world” (Bell & Desai 2011, p.287). Therefore, we use Kumashiro’s (2002) conceptualisation of anti-oppressive education to highlight the messiness and discomfort of our experiences as we re-learn and unlearn and trouble oppressive knowledge in order to imagine alternatives. As such, our article contributes to an existing body of work that use collaborative and narrative methods to research issues of social justice. However, as much of the international literature on social justice education and curriculum is written in contexts far removed from our everyday experiences we wish to make a unique contribution that is rooted in our local context and highlight the unique experiences of South African teachers in relation to issues of social justice in the curriculum
Voices of Grade Four teachers in response to Mazibuye Izilimi Zomdabu! (Bring Back African Languages!): A decolonising approach
Get PDFThe language of learning and teaching (LoLT) poses a threat to the quality of teaching and learning of most learners who speak African languages in Africa and particularly in South Africa. In this study, I explore language attitudes and the lived experiences of 400 Grade Four teachers in Pinetown and UMgungundlovu districts teaching African learners using English as LoLT. The study challenges Anglonormative language ideologies (Mckinney, Carrim, Layton, & Marshall, 2015) and the coloniality of dominant discourses about LoLT in South Africa. Calling on the voices of the teachers, I argue for the use of African languages to teach African learners as a powerful measure to regain African identity and to delink from Eurocentric knowledge and cultures. I compared results from quantitative and qualitative data to arrive at the overall finding that most Grade Four teacher participants prefer the use of African languages to teach African learners and that these teachers are experiencing difficulty in using English as LoLT to teach most of them. Drawing from teachers’ responses, I conclude that the use of African languages in education connects learners’ worldviews and ways of knowing to the curriculum and provides access to knowledge
Towards decolonising a module in the pre-service science teacher education curriculum: The role of IKS in creating spaces for transforming the curriculum
No full textPost-apartheid South Africa has witnessed many changes in a quest for social justice. However, these changes have not infiltrated the South African higher education landscape, which continues to privilege epistemic traditions that are embedded in western frameworks. The science curriculum had been instrumental in promoting western worldviews as universal. This has resulted in normalising the subordination of non-western people and their knowledge systems. In seeking a change in the tenor of science education, this paper reports on a qualitative study that explored the intersecting influence of the pre-service science teacher curriculum and indigenous knowledge systems. In reconceptualising a part of one science module, the curriculum is used as a vehicle to depart from western epistemic canons, by reframing who teaches, what is taught and how it is taught. A purposively selected sample of 224 pre-service teachers engaged in a field trip and a gardening project that was facilitated in part, by an indigenous knowledge expert. Pre-service teachers planted a vegetable garden using indigenous methods, and cultivated indigenous and non-indigenous plants. Pre-service teachers captured the processes of planting and growing the gardens in their portfolios and reflected on their learning by responding to questionnaires. Data drawn from the portfolios and questionnaires were analysed thematically. Findings revealed a consciousness-raising of pre-service teachers about the value of indigenous knowledge and their endorsement of an indigenous knowledge expert as a legitimate teacher in higher education. Insights into using IKS to create spaces for transforming and decolonising the curriculum by engaging an IK expert to teach, bringing previously marginalised IK to the centre, and finally, teaching and learning in contexts which maximised interaction between the pre-service teachers and the materials being studied in their natural setting, were also revealed
Countering testimonial injustice: the spatial practices of school administrative clerks
Get PDFThis article discusses the phenomenon of how people’s voices or opinions are taken up in relation to their professional status. We focus on administrative clerks in school contexts, people who occupy a professional category that is regarded as one of voicelessness and therefore easily ignored. Their low occupational role and status mean that their testimonies are deemed less credible than the testimonies of school principals and teachers. We refer to this situation as a form of ‘testimonial injustice’ that is visited daily on these clerks. This article illustrates how selected administrative clerks go about exercising their agency in the light of their experiences of such testimonial injustice and go on to establish a range of spatial practices that confer on them a credible professional status.
Methodologically, this article is based on a qualitative study of three administrative clerks in selected South African public schools undertaken over a 12-week period, followed up by further interviews and site observations. Combining the theoretical constructs ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘rhetorical space’, we argue that the administrative clerks we studied engendered transformed rhetorical spaces – which are negotiated social spaces – that allowed for their voices and opinions to challenge the testimonial injustice they experience. We suggest that these rhetorical spaces are achieved by them through their continuous and active presence in their work environments. They engender rhetorical spaces in which their voices are deemed legitimate by forming close relationships with others in their work environments, enhancing their professional capacity by furthering their educational qualifications, and the successful accomplishment of additional role tasks. Our main argument is that these clerks, despite occupying a marginalised occupational status and suffering testimonial injustice, are able to exercise their reflexive agency to improve their credibility and thereby resist the testimonial injustice visited upon them.
This article contributes to nascent scholarship on school administrative clerks’ contributions to their professional environments at their schools. We argue that their contribution is undergirded by spatial practices that can partly be understood as a type of resistance to their negative status and position at their respective schools. We suggest that while they are discursively projected as peripheral figures in their school environments, they nonetheless make valuable, yet under-valued, contributions to the functioning of their school.
Key words: epistemic injustice, testimonial injustice, spatial practice, social justice, rhetorical spaces, school administrative clerk
23/ 25 Years of Alternation, and the African Digital Humanities: Capacity, Communication, and Knowledge-Power1
Get PDFThis article condenses the presentation by Prof J.A. Smit, as the International Open Access keynote lecture, of 23 October 2017. It forms the first of a double-barrel article that seeks to open up some research possibilities with regard to the subject and knowledge-power2. Drawing on Foucault, it firstly provides a theoretical framework that may assist in assessing the significance of Alternation, followed by a positioning of the questions Foucault raised through his nearly twenty years of research on this matter, in the digital, or electronic age, specifically with regard to the African Digital Humanities. It then briefly reflects on some of the founding ideas and provides a sample of the historical events in the history of Alternation (1994 – 1996), followed, by positioning it in the international dynamics of the digital age, and the move from Humanities Computing in Alternation, to the Digital Humanities. The fifth focus, and as part of the Conclusion, briefly reflects on Berners-Lee’s pioneering vision, as well as the most basic definition of the Digital Humanities, which provides a broad framework of both the past and future research of Alternation
Perceived Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction – Employees’ Perspectives of Kenyan Private Universities
Get PDFThis paper reports on an empirical study conducted among a sample 133 employees of private higher education institution in Kenya, to examine the relationship between perceived service quality (SQ) and customer satisfaction (CS), using the HEdPERF instrument. Although service quality was measured using six dimensions namely: academic, non-academic, reputation, access, programmes and understanding, by using structural equation modelling (SEM), the six SQ dimensions needed to be collapsed into four, since these were significant to the employees of private universities. The employee is viewed as a ‘customer’ of the private higher education institution, thus service quality refers to the employee-customers’ perceptions. The results partially support the proposed conceptual model that non-academic, access, academic and reputation dimensions have a positive and significant influence on the employees’ SQ perceptions, and in turn influences their satisfaction. It can be inferred from the findings that university quality should not only be looked at in terms of academic activities alone, as non-academic aspects also need to be considered since they are deemed important to the employees. Since universities are in both national and international competition, they (management) should aim at ensuring that all services related to organizational life like physical, implicit and explicit are delivered to acceptable standards to realize increased satisfaction
Managing and Valuing Diversity in the South African Public Healthcare System
Get PDFHuman capital remains a critical component of healthcare, particularly in low and middle-income countries where there is a dire shortage of professionals. Recruiting and retaining health professionals has become a key strategic focus in South Africa. Innovative recruitment strategies coupled with increasing access to higher education and training has resulted in an increasingly diverse workforce. Identifying, appreciating, and managing this diversity across all diversity dimensions is important for both social and economic reasons. These efforts are likely to provide an opportunity for optimizing productivity while building a cohesive workforce. This paper explores the impetus and possible methods for effective diversity management in the South African public healthcare environment