Browsing by Author "Roets, Carla"

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    Racialised discourse in the former Model C School: Discourse of exclusion and inclusion
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-12) Roets, Carla; Oostendorp, Marcelyn; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis reports on racialised discourse in a former Model C school in the Northern Suburbs of the Western Cape. The primary areas of investigation were surrounding the discourses of inclusion and exclusion as perceived by the students in the school. The data was collected in a transformed school, in which the coloured students constitute the majority in terms of number, and the white and black students the minority. An ethnographic approach (Creese 2008) towards data collection was taken, where classroom interviews and focus group interviews were used. This allowed for multiple voices to be expressed in terms of different and contradicting discourses. The thesis uses Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis as applied to classroom discourse (Baxter 2008) as a main analytical tool. In this thesis, I argue that the biggest contributor towards the theorisation of „race‟ is one‟s social environment, as the issues experienced by the students in terms of „race‟ can all be attributed to dominating teachers‟ role definitions (Cummins 1997), parental influence and educational structures. The findings of this study suggest that the black and coloured students feel a strong sense of exclusion from the predominantly white Afrikaans staff of the school. The findings also show that students exclude themselves from one another by organising their social spaces around them in terms of „race‟, where language and culture stand proxy for this concept. The students also presented opinions on the need for transformation in terms of how „race‟ is incorporated into the curriculum and into educational structures such as language policies and tertiary education admission policies. The issue of „whiteness‟ in the new South Africa came forth, in which I noticed that white students are further subdividing themselves into „intra-white‟ groups, namely white Afrikaans and white English. I therefore call for more research to be carried out on the issue of changing white identity in the post-apartheid classroom.