Browsing by Author "Feldman, Jennifer"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Costs and benefits : scholarship students’ reflective accounts of attending an elite secondary school
    (Elsevier, 2021) Feldman, Jennifer; Wallace, Jennifer
    Situated within the context of elite education, the empirical focus of this article is on the reflective accounts of former scholarship students from historically disadvantaged communities who attended elite secondary schools in South Africa. Drawing on studies of scholarship students in educational institutions, the article discusses the costs and benefits, as narrated by the students, of their experiences of elite schooling. While there exists a growing body of literature on elite education globally, there is limited research on elite schools in South Africa and scholarship students within these institutions. Thus, the key contribution of the article is the discussion provided on scholarship students in elite schools in South Africa and their experiences of assimilating into the incongruent terrain of the elite school context.
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    ‘Cultural capital in the wrong currency’: the reflective accounts of scholarship students attending elite secondary schools
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2021-07-21) Feldman, Jennifer; Wallace, Jennifer
    This article investigates the awarding of scholarships to students from historically disadvantaged communities to attend elite schools in South Africa. Specifically, the article analyses the narrated accounts of a sample of former scholarship recipients who reflect back on their experiences of entering an elite secondary school as scholarship students. Using Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital and symbolic violence to explain the interviewees’ experiences in the elite school space, the article shows that in the educational setting of post-apartheid South Africa, success in one part of an educational field does not necessarily equate to success in another. Further, providing students with the financial means to access elite education does not mean that they enter into the school contexts as ‘equal players’. As such, what the article highlights, is that the acceptance of a scholarship for students from historically disadvantaged communities, is far more complex and multi-layered than is anticipated by all stakeholders.
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    Eliciting pedagogical learning among teachers in a professional learning community
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-03) Feldman, Jennifer; Fataar, Aslam; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Education. Department of Education Policy Studies
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT : This thesis is about teachers’ learning in a professional learning community (PLC) and responds to the question: How do the dialogical processes of a professional learning community capacitate teachers’ pedagogical adaptation and change towards socially just pedagogical practices? My starting assumption is that teachers’ pedagogical learning requires a supportive and deliberative set of conversations about the intellectual terms and pedagogical capacitation needed for change. I argue that PLCs are able to provide a reflexive dialogical space for engaging in such pedagogical learning. This is a thesis presented in the form of three articles which is prefaced by an inter-leading piece that describes my positionality as a researcher and facilitator of the PLC process. The thesis contains three wraparound chapters, an introduction and conclusion. The introduction situates the context of this research study and PLC work and the conclusion draws together insights gained over the two-year PLC process and includes a summary of the intellectual contribution that this research work makes to the theorisation of teacher adaptation and change in consonance with a socially just teaching orientation. Drawing on Bourdieu’s thinking tools of practice, habitus, bodily hexis, field and doxa I provide a theorisation of teachers’ pedagogical habitus as a way to conceptualise teacher adaptation and change. I offer the view of PLCs as a form of ‘habitus engagement’ to describe the ways in which the on-going dialogical and reflexive PLC process challenges the teachers’ embodied pedagogical doxa to engender adaptation and change. The first article focuses on the conceptual bases that informed the establishment and functioning of the PLC which is central to this thesis. This article develops an argument for the use of the Funds of Knowledge approach as a way of engaging students meaningfully in their learning. The second article discusses the difficulty that the PLC encountered as it engaged with the ‘hardness’ of pedagogical change among the five teachers and discusses the twists and turns involved in the PLC’s struggle to deliberate productively about pedagogical change. The third article narrates the journey of pedagogical adaptation and change of one teacher who collaborated in the PLC over a two-year period. This article discusses the durability and malleability of this teacher’s pedagogical disposition by arguing for a conceptualisation of teacher change that moves beyond a cognitivist approach to one that engages the embodied practices of teachers. The thesis concludes by arguing that teacher adaptation and change, as capacitated through the on-going dialogical and reflexive PLC process, must engage with the teachers’ embodied dispositions, their pedagogical practices inscribed in their being, in order to effect sustained change in their pedagogical habitus and subsequently in their pedagogical practices.
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    Embodying pedagogical habitus change : a narrative-based account of a teacher’s pedagogical change within a professional learning community
    (University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2018) Feldman, Jennifer; Fataar, Aslam
    Situated in the context of teaching in South Africa, this article narrates the journey of pedagogical change and adaptation of one teacher who participated in a professional learning community (PLC). It discusses the durability and malleability of this teacher’s pedagogical disposition by arguing for a conceptualisation of teacher change that moves beyond a cognitivist approach, i.e. one that is driven primarily by knowledge acquisition, to one that engages the embodied practices of teachers in the light of the shifts and adaptations that they undergo when trying to establish augmented pedagogical approaches. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field, bodily hexis and doxa, this article argues that sustained pedagogical change involves an engagement with the teacher’s embodied pedagogical habitus which has formed over time given the educational spaces they have inhabited. The article is based on data collected over a two-year period from PLC transcripts, observational school visits and multiple in-depth interviews with the teacher. This article describes the constraints or ‘hardness’ of change as the teacher engages with his embodied pedagogical habitus which has developed over time. However, this article further argues that possibilities of embodied pedagogical adaptation and change exist in the reflexive, on-going dialogical space that a professional learning community offers.
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    An ethics of care : PGCE students’ experiences of online learning during Covid-19
    (University of the Western Cape, 2020) Feldman, Jennifer
    The article discusses the online teaching and learning experiences of university students during the recent countrywide lockdown and higher education institutional shutdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on philosopher Joan Tronto’s phases of care and associated moral elements, the article reports on survey data from a large cohort of students in the Post Graduate Certificate of Education programme at Stellenbosch University and seeks to analyse the students’ care needs and experiences of care during this period. The aim of the article discussion is not to answer the question whether the university institution offered the students good care during the campus shutdown and remote teaching and learning, but rather to understand the experiences of the students of online teaching and learning during this time.
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    Pedagogical habitus engagement : teacher learning and adaptation in a professional learning community
    (Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, 2016) Feldman, Jennifer
    Situated within the context of teaching in post apartheid South Africa, this article discusses the establishment and functioning of a professional learning community (PLC) that was constituted to generate pedagogical learning and adaptation among practicing teachers in consonance with a socially just teaching orientation. Drawing on the thinking tools of Bourdieu, the article offers a view of PLCs as a form of “habitus engagement” that engages with teachers’ firmly established pedagogical identities, their “pedagogical habitus,” to effect adaptation and change in their classroom pedagogy. The exemplifying basis of this article is empirical data drawn from a 2-year PLC process where teachers from different school contexts collaborated to find ways to conceptually and pragmatically shift and change their pedagogy. The article highlights both the limits and possibilities of teachers’ pedagogical change and concludes by arguing that the ongoing, reflexive, and dialogical PLC process, as a form of habitus engagement, holds the potential to challenge, adapt, and shift teachers’ pedagogical habitus to conceptually and pragmatically include a more socially just teaching orientation in their classroom pedagogy.
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    The role of professional learning communities in facilitating teachers’ pedagogical adaptation and change
    (University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2017) Feldman, Jennifer
    The role of professional learning communities in facilitating teachers’ pedagogical adaptation and change Jennifer Feldman (Received 9 March 2016; accepted 7 December 2016) Abstract This article draws on a two-year PLC process to explore the role of professional learning communities (PLCs) in facilitating teachers’ pedagogical adaptation and change. Situated within the context of the current South African Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS), which is described as tightly scripted and regulated, this article argues, drawing on Nancy Fraser’s conceptualisation of justice, that there is a need for teachers to dialogue about ways in which the pedagogical process can include ethical concerns of recognition of student cultural knowledge and a representation of diverse social-cultural groups in the process of knowledge redistribution, and suggests that PLCs hold the potential to mediate this process. Drawing on Bourdieu’s thinking tools, this article conceptualises teachers’ pedagogical adaptation and change via the PLC process, as a form of ‘habitus engagement’ that engages with the teachers’ firmly held pedagogical dispositions, their ‘pedagogical habitus’ which over time has acquired a depth of complexity that is difficult to shift.