Doctoral Degrees (Psychology)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Psychology) by Subject "Africa -- Race identity"

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    Social representations of the burning of Boys Secondary Schools in Kenya in 2016
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University., 2020-03) Oburu, Hildah Bochere; Swartz, Leslie; Coetzee, Bronwyne; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Psychology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: School arson, predominantly the burning of dormitories in boarding secondary schools in Kenya, is a recurrent problem. In 2016, the school fires crisis seemed to reach a new height. A total of 239 schools experienced arson. Most of these schools were boys’ secondary schools. Discussions on school fires are often carried out in the print media, and the fires have been a subject of four government taskforce investigations, with little or no effect on the recurrence. Most of what is written about school fires in Kenya, through government reports, print media, and (for the 2016 school fires) social media, is based on the views of people outside the school system and whose views are not based on lived experiences. Using social representations theory, the aim of this exploratory, inductive study was to explore understandings of school arson in government reports, print and social media, and also by investigating the views of insiders to the school system (students, parents and teachers). A library search was used to source documents (government reports and newspaper articles) and simple search and real-time tracking for social media posts. Extreme case sampling was used to select four boys’ schools and purposive sampling to select focus group participants (32 teachers, 32 students and 32 parents) from the four schools. A thematic analysis of secondary data and focus group discussions revealed that school arson is a complex phenomenon with multiple understandings and that, so far, the discourse had been dominated by the ‘outsider’ views. However, the discourse across data sets extended beyond the specifics of school arson and revealed an overarching underlying concern: the loss of African culture due to Western influences and international conventions that clash with the reality of the cultural context, and a quest for a constructed authentic Kenyan identity in the postcolonial context. I discuss the implications of these understandings both for further work on school fires and for broader considerations regarding the future of education in Kenya.