Research Articles (Education Policy Studies)

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Are doctoral studies in South Africa higher education being put at risk?
(UNISA Press, 2015) Waghid, Yusef
Inasmuch as many attempts are being made in South Africa to increase the doctoral throughput rate, it appears as if the rush to produce doctoral (PhD) qualifications might just be the biggest risk that confronts the pursuit of doctoral studies. The author argues that, in the quest to accelerate the number of doctorates produced in the country, higher education institutions (HEIs), in particular administrators and – to a lesser extent – supervisors, run the risk of trivialising doctoral education: because of an over-emphasis on throughput rates alone, the purpose of the doctorate is assigned to a mere exercise of technical compliance and completion. In this article, the author offers a word of caution as to what the doctorate should not be subjected to if such a highlevel achievement is to remain an aspiration of those serious about knowledge construction, reconstruction and deconstruction.
Die behoefte aan ’n multidimensionele benadering tot dissiplineprobleme op skool
(Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns, 2008-12) Van Louw, Trevor; Waghid, Yusef
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie artikel beklemtoon die belangrikheid van behoorlike sosiohistoriese kontekstualisering van dissipline in skole. Die argument wat deur die skrywers ontwikkel is, is dat skole ’n spieëlbeeld is van die samelewings waarin dit voorkom en dat hierdie feit in ag geneem moet word wanneer strategieë vir die hantering van die probleem gekontekstualiseer word. In the Suid-Afrikaanse konteks vra dit vir die erkenning van die impak van eeue van onderdrukking in die koloniale en apartheidsera soos wat dit verband hou met die huidige probleme in die breër samelewing en in skole. Die argument wat deur die skrywers ontwikkel word, hou rekening met die belangrikheid van die sosiohistoriese kontekstualisering van dissiplinêre probleme in skole as ’n sosiale werklikheid en die noodsaak om probleme in die samelewing met dié in skole in verband te bring. Dit word voorts geargumenteer dat die komplekse aard van die probleem wat op hierdie wyse blootgelê word, ’n veelfasettige benadering verg waar alle rolspelers (ook dié buite die skool, op ’n geïntegreerde wyse met die skool saamwerk om gepaste strategieë te ontwikkel, implementeer, moniteer en evalueer en om dit na kritiese refl eksie aan te pas, sou die omstandighede dit vereis.
Black lesbian identities in South Africa : confronting a history of denial
(Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, University of the Western Cape, 2018-07) Carlse, Janine E.
Much of the existing literature on South African black lesbian identities has focussed on the prejudice and victimisation that they endure as subjects of homophobia in the form of hate speech and hate crimes, most notably brutal murders and corrective rape. However, not much has been written about the creative ways that black lesbians are fighting against these injustices that are built upon the historical erasure and denial of their very existence in Africa. By outlining three ‘denials’ of African female same-sex intimacy namely: the imperial denial and subsequent apartheid policing of same-sex intimacy, the denial of female same-sex intimacy through proclaiming it as un-African, and the conceptual denial through the lens of Euro-American feminist lesbian discourse; this article aims to show how black lesbians in South Africa are finding ways to confront these denials. In particular, some aspects of lives and work of selfidentified lesbian activist photographer Zanele Muholi and lesbian sangoma Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde will be analysed. Muholi and Nkabinde work hard to locate themselves within the public sphere, and engage in projects that aim to educate and build black lesbian communities, in an effort to encourage open dialogue of what it means to be an African lesbian. It can be argued that the voices of South African black lesbians are not only becoming more audible but also more nuanced, where imported notions of sexual identity are being questioned and adapted to their lived realities. Ultimately, this article aims to show how Muholi and Nkabinde provide examples of how reimaginings and negotiations of lesbian identities in (South) Africa are at once complex and essential, and this echoes Msibi’s (2014) call for “greater voices from Africa in theorising sexuality – a terrain long ignored in African scholarship.”
The blame game : mechanistic conceptions of teacher education and its impact on schooling
(HESA, 2015) Isaacs, Tracey.; Waghid, Yusef
With all the policy directives and reform initiatives post-democracy, education in South Africa is seemingly mechanistic and prodigiously carries productive logic: to produce students, to advance economic development, and so on. The active language of official educational policies is riddled with words such as assessment, efficient, high skills and progression that speaks to a technical rationality bent on turning everything into science to obscure the general meaning. In this way the process of education is comparable to a sophisticated, intellectual machine the more complex the machine becomes, the less control and understanding the teachers have of it (Braverman, 1974). In this article, we consider the ways classroom and university teachers have been brutalized through bureaucratic processes and an allegiance to technical rationality, even while we imagine hermeneutic rationality and emancipatory rationality as radical alternatives to recovering the subject in a bureaucratic tangle of educational control.
Can MOOCs contribute towards enhancing disruptive pedagogic encounters in higher education
(HESA, 2017) Waghid, Y.; Waghid, F.
In this article, we argue that MOOCs (massive open online courses) have the potential to enhance disruptive pedagogic encounters in higher education, especially in relation to a philosophy of African education. In the first part of the article, we expound on MOOCs as an initiative in higher education that grew out of a concern to advance access to higher education. Paradoxically, we show that MOOCs might not strictly advance equal access and inclusion but have the potential to cultivate student capacities of a critically transformative kind, more specifically, rhizomatic thinking, criticism and recognition of others. In the second part of the article, we show, in reference to an emerging MOOC, how an African philosophy of education should be considered as apposite to advance disruptive pedagogic encounters in higher education.
Can postpositivist research in environmental education engender ethical notions within higher education?
(Higher Education South Africa, 2001) Waghid, Y.; Le Grange, L. L. L.
In this article we contend that postpositivist research in environmental education can contribute towards promoting ethical activity within higher education. We argue that postpositivist inquiry breaks with utilitarian and uncritical assumptions about research in environmental education and also creates unconfined spaces for ethical notions such as truth-telling and sincerity, freedom of thought, clarity of meaning, non-arbitrariness, a sense of relevance and respect for people and evidence. Drawing on recent case study research in environmental education involving higher education institutions, we show that ethical notions of postpositivist research can engender self-determination, trust and respectful collaboration among diverse people.
Chartered accountancy and resistance in South Africa
(HESA, 2021) Terblanche, J.; Waghid, Y.
In recent times, the chartered accountant profession was regularly in the news for reasons pertaining to the unethical and unprofessional behaviour of members. The profession has an important role to play in the South African economy, as members will often fulfil important decision-making roles in business. In a response to the dilemmas the profession is facing, we analysed the implications for the profession and society due to a resistance to include research as a pedagogical activity in the chartered accountancy educational landscape. Through deliberative research activities, students have the opportunity to engage with community members and with societal challenges that could foster reflexivity and humaneness in students. In addition, critical and problem-solving skills are cultivated. These are skills that are difficult to assess in the form of an examination, and the absence of research as pedagogical activity in this particular educational landscape, impacts the cultivation of these skills in future chartered accountants. This is so, as the chartered accountancy educational landscape is significantly influenced by the power that resonates within the profession and culminates into the disciplinary power mechanism of the examination. The South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) set an external examination, called the Initial test of Competence (ITC), which graduates need to write upon leaving institutes of higher learning. Success in this SAICA-examination therefore impacts on the teaching and learning pedagogy adopted by chartered accountants in academe. If chartered accounting students were instead primarily being exposed to technical content assessed via an examination, also being exposed and introduced to deliberative research, the possibility exists that students, through critical reflexivity, could move beyond the constraints of the self to that of the communal other in line with the African notion of ubuntu can be enhanced.
Coda: Beyond Critical Citizenship Education
(AFRICAN SUN MeDIA, 2015) Waghid, Yusef
Undoubtedly, this volume offers a cogent and coherent account of citizenship education commensurate with critical curriculum inquiry at universities. Using social transformation in South Africa as a backdrop, Costandius and Bitzer posit that university education ought to be framed according to theories and practices of critical citizenship education that can hopefully engender more inclusive pedagogical practices, in reference to teaching, learning, policy changes and research. Their understanding of critical citizenship education, as aptly articulated in the first chapter, is couched within the parameters of a transformative pedagogy that accentuates the importance of critical reflection, imagination, human co-existence in the face of diversity and the cultivation of social justice. Moreover, in Chapter 2, by drawing on the seminal thoughts of an illustrious scholar of critical pedagogy, Henry Giroux, they contend that the domination, exclusion and marginalisation of students in and through university curricula should be counteracted, and that appropriate epistemological, conceptual, structural, narratival and paradigmatic changes should be enacted so that higher education discourses might be attenuated more towards spaces of democratic action.
A collaborative auto-ethnographic exploration of socially just practices by new academics in two South African higher education institutions
(HESA, 2018) Collett, K. S.; Von Der Heyden, B.; Pott, R. W. M.; Stander, J.
Challenges experienced in the higher education context require new academics to engage with issues of social justice in their pedagogical practices. This article focuses on such challenges and how these are met by the authors, who are new academics from two higher education institutions in South Africa. Using a collaborative auto-ethnographic approach to analyse and interpret practices from different disciplines and higher education institutions, critical insights into ‘response-able pedagogies’ are highlighted. ‘Response-able pedagogies’ may be described as those which foreground attentiveness, responsibility, curiosity and capability, are used as a lens to examine the pedagogical practices of the authors, as new academics. This lens is useful in that it illuminates ethical dimensions of how a socially just pedagogy might be enacted in disparate South African higher education contexts. Issues of language, academic literacies, resources, employability, cultural diversity, large classes, and student abilities are reflected upon in relation to new academics’ engagement with socially just pedagogies. The paper is intended to be a useful resource specifically, but not exclusively for, new academics entering the field of higher education in South Africa.
Compassionate citizenship and higher education re-imagining : perspectives on higher education
(Higher Education South Africa, 2003) Waghid, Y.
Higher education re-imagining in South Africa primarily focuses on educating students to be responsible citizens. The National Plan for Higher Education (2001) aims in the first instance at cultivating in students the capacity to deliberate respectfully with one another in order to become responsible citizens. This article argues that deliberation and respect are necessary but not sufficient conditions to foster a sense of responsible citizenship. Students also need to be taught to develop the quality that Nussbaum (2001) refers to as "compassionate citizenship".
A conceptual exploration of values education in the context of schooling in South Africa
(Education Association of South Africa, 2011) Solomons, Inez; Fataar, Aslam
This article is based on the assumption that values education has much to offer to a country that is struggling to overcome a fractured moral landscape. Pursuing a modest agenda, the focus of the article is on values and values education in the context of schooling in South Africa. We suggest that debates about what constitutes values and values education raise important philosophical and pedagogical questions about what values are and which values should be prioritized. We contend that it is unlikely that values education will in any significant way meet the expectations of South Africa's Constitution and its national school curriculum intentions, if it is not underpinned by conceptual clarification of what values are in relation to the role that values education is expected to fulfil in South Africa's schools. Intended as a conceptual investigation, the article explores different interpretations, tensions and assumptions that confront the notions of values and values education. We suggest that the insights from such a conceptual clarification could provide an appropriate platform not only for a coherent approach to values education, but also for the more effectual transfer and take up of values in schools. We favour a pragmatist conception based on the notion 'shared goods' in terms of which values education in schools can lay the basis for dialogical encounters necessary for addressing our country's diverse and even divergent values orientations. © 2011 EASA.
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.
Countering testimonial injustice : the spatial practices of school administrative clerks
(University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2018) Bayat, Abdullah; Fataar, Aslam
This 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.
Covid-19 : undoing our "normal" to find our humanity
(HESA, 2021) Davids, Nuraan, 1970-
At the time of writing this article South Africa has entered yet another hard lockdown, casting darkening shadows over, if not a hopeful return to “normal”, then at least to the establishment of a “new normal”. Clearly, even amid the unpredictability and trauma of a virus which strikes in an undifferentiated way across race, class, age, and geopolitical contexts, there should be nagging suspicions about a forward-looking narrative which relies on a repeated reference to “a normal”. In the case of the educational institutions, a “new normal” is embodied in virtual spaces of teaching and learning. Seemingly, objectives of embarking on a “new normal” have scant regard for the myriad existing inequities, which continue to render South African educational institutions into categories of either historical advantage, or historical disadvantage. Seemingly too, a “new normal” chooses to disregard the reality that if educational institutions are not on an equal footing, then why is there an uncritical presumption that learners and students, or teachers, for that matter, are able to access and participate in virtual learning in parity? It is a big enough challenge for most learners and students to actively participate in educational settings, when one considers the dismal living conditions of the majority of South Africans. For many of these learners and students, educational settings, even in their poor infrastructural states, represent an escape and haven from the hardships of a life entrenched in poverty. What happens when the expectation of learning shifts entirely to the capacity of the home to become a space of learning? Can we, therefore, continue to speak of a “new normal” when it is evident that there is no “normal”, not in our educational institutions, and not in our citizenship?
Creative agency in the colonial encounter: foundations for a decolonial pedagogy
(Taylor & Francis, 2024-12-10) Fataar, A.
This essay emphasises the imperative to move from discussions about decolonising education to the practical implementation of a decolonial pedagogy. This task necessitates challenging Eurocentric perspectives and incorporating diverse insights into curriculum design and pedagogical processes. By drawing on Edward Said’s concepts of democratic humanism, worldliness, and contrapuntal, the essay argues for an expanded understanding of colonial and postcolonial contexts that highlight the agency of colonised peoples. It underscores the significance of acknowledging cultural connections and interactions as vital components of human formation. The essay explores how enslaved people at the Cape of Good Hope navigated their circumstances, establishing creative agency to shape their worlds. Briefly discussing the literacy practices of enslaved people and the literary portrayals of enslaved women, the essay illustrates how a decolonial pedagogy can offer a more inclusive and critical perspective on historical cultural formations.
Critical human agency in Africa as a knowledge culture : towards critical student agency
(Addleton Academic Publishers, 2016) Isaacs, Tracey
In the post-colonial era it is not an anomaly for serious scholars to consider the weighty question of whether there is a defensible African philosophy. In the space of arrested development due to colonial expansion and conquest, some scholars argue that the African subject has not yet rescued an account of a plausible philosophy. This is in part due to the fact that the African subject is schizoid – that is, trapped between the nascent colonial identity and the arrested pre-colonial African identity. As such, any attempt at resuscitating an African identity inevitably bears trace of the colonial ideology superimposed on the emerging African subject. On the basis of African gnosis (or deep, secret knowledge) and a call for indigenous knowledge systems to be held up by Africans for scrutiny – as the foundational focus – the core of this article focuses on critical agency and, more specifically, on how critical student agency might be imagined within the conceptual frame of critical pedagogy. By using the methodological approach of discourse analysis I aim to investigate not only how the physical, human and spiritual aspects of critical agency are revealed in African discourse and agency but, more appreciably, how they work and how this might inform education for the post-colonial subject in the local and universal space.
‘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.
Decolonising education in South Africa : perspectives and debates
(Faculty of Education, Nelson Mandela University, 2018-06) Fataar, Aslam
The politics of knowledge in South African universities has recently witnessed a radical discursive rupture. The call for decolonising education was a cornerstone of students’ recognition struggles at universities. Mobilising on the basis of their demand for free education, students across the university sector expressed the need for change in university knowledge and curricula in the light of what they described as their exposure to Eurocentric, racist, and sexist knowledge at untransformed institutions. They argued that such a knowledge orientation is at the heart of their experience of alienation at the university. They suggested that only the complete overhaul of the curriculum on the basis of a decolonising education approach would provide them the type of educational access that addresses their emerging African-centred humanness.
Decolonising the African university again
(HESA, 2021) Waghid, Y.
The notion of the African university ought to be decolonised on the grounds that decolonisation enhances humanisation and rehumanisation, as well as cosmopolitan pluriversalism. This article argues that unless the university takes its task to liberate, resist, and advance cosmopolitan ideals seriously, the decolonisation of the African university will remain elusive.
Decolonization in South African universities: storytelling as subversion and reclamation
(Oxford University Press, 2024-06) Davids, Nuraan, 1970-
Underscoring recurrent calls for the decolonization of university curricula in South Africa are underexplored presumptions that by only disrupting theoretical content, universities might release themselves from a colonialist grasp, that continues to dominate and distort higher education discourse. While it might be the case that certain theories hold enormous authoritative, ‘truthful’ sway, as propagated through Western interpretations and norms, there are inherent problems in exclusively approaching the decolonization project as a content-based hurdle, removed from the subjectivities of students’ social, lived, and learning realities. The argument advanced in this article is that until the epistemic harm of colonialism and apartheid are afforded careful recognition and attention—as in focusing on the lived experiences, realities, and stories of individuals—the hard work of delegitimizing coloniality, and its implicit structures of hegemonies and binaries cannot unfold. In addressing these harms, I commence by describing some of the contexts of epistemic harm, promulgated through colonialism and apartheid. This is followed by a consideration of decolonization, both as theory and practice-within-context. Here, I also foreground the #Rhodesmustfall campaign, as a particular moment of painful clarity about why decolonization, as well as transformation, has faltered in higher education in South Africa. In the second half, I focus on the necessity of prioritizing storytelling as a deep manifestation of decolonization. Stories, I maintain, provide access into unknown lives, and can subvert the invisible, normative framings, which dictate how we live in this world. As a manifestation of decolonization, students’ stories hold profound implications for the recognition and affirmation of pluralist identities, histories, knowledge, values, and world-views.

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