Masters Degrees (Education Policy Studies)

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Exploring notions of assessment through three vocational education sites in the Western Cape
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014-04) Arnold, Mogammat Adiel; Badroodien, Azeem; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Education. Dept. of Education Policy Studies.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: With the coming of a new education and training dispensation in 1994 came the idea that equal opportunities for all learners could be created within different learning institutions - via the creation of new institutional and qualifications framework - and in so doing encourage equal opportunities through proper articulation, portability, and mobility within the different phases of the various education bands. As education and training provision and learning is complexly intertwined with its appraisal, assessment was regarded as one of the main processes to find out whether learning had taken place, on the goal and quality of that learning, as well as pointing to the kinds of ways in which teaching and learning could be further improved. In my study I focused on how educators and trainers within the differentiated Further Education and Training (FET) Band spoke about and understood assessment, with the aim of the study being to analyse how assessment is understood in three different sites of provision within the FET band. The main goal was to better understand challenges at the ground level of policy implementation. A further goal was to explore some of the ways in which the role and function of assessment in our contemporary society was understood, and whether, in its present formulation, it served the purposes that much of the policies and reform statements claimed. The study’s main claim is that educators and trainers in the FET Band in South Africa mainly experience assessment processes, criteria, and frameworks as a form of jargon, and that they translate ‘the jargon’ into ‘judgements of value’ about learning and knowledge that lead to quite different approaches being followed at different sites. It is argued that this scenario would be acceptable in terms of different work settings - producing different kinds of skills for the economy- were it not that the education and training infrastructure in South Africa remains perhaps too preoccupied with achieving a principle of similarity across the FET Band.
Focus schools and vocational education in the Western Cape
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2012-03) Larey, Desiree Pearl; Badroodien, Azeem; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Education. Dept. of Education Policy Studies.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The main goal of this thesis was to better understand the role and function of the focus schools project in the Western Cape, to explore the reasons for their emergence in 2006, and to locate the policy initiative within historical and policy developments around vocationalism in the province. The study focused in particular on how one focus school experienced the roll-out of this policy decision, what the impressions of the learners and educators at a case study school were, and also how officials attached to the Western Cape Education Department described the emergence and implementation of the policy. Further goals of the study were to contextualize the policy process that led to this form of provision, and to conceptualise how this fitted in with educational development issues in the province. A brief backdrop of historical developments and its role in the education of communities in the Western Cape, particularly the coloured community, was provided to contextualize the policy initiative. The main contribution of the thesis is its description and analysis of policy documents and the viewpoints of a range of people connected to a new provincial initiative, focus schools, with regard to what a focus school is meant to achieve and how it is experienced. Data was collected by studying a range of unpublished policy documents, and to link these to interviews conducted with departmental and district officials, educators, learners, and one principal in relation to one case study school. The study showed that focus schools were regarded mainly as a form of vocational education provision to accommodate the desire of the Western Cape economy for intermediate skills in the mid-2000s. It illustrated how the focus school band has run its own unique course within educational structures since 2006, and highlighted how they have fulfilled their goal of getting more learners from historically disadvantaged communities into further study or into positions that better serve the needs of the local economy. The thesis suggested that the policy focus of getting learners into higher education seemed misguided and contrary to the goals of vocational education provision. This policy confusion was further highlighted by learners interviewed in the study who noted that they would have preferred to follow a more academically-based path. Few believed they could either get to university (as claimed by policy officials) or into a viable employment poisition by following a vocational route at school.
Navigating their way : African migrant youth and their experiences of schooling in Cape Town
(Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2011-03) Foubister, Caroline Ann; Badroodien, Azeem; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Education. Dept. of Education Policy Studies.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Migration has been described as “the quintessential experience” of the contemporary period (Berger, 1984). Across the world this global phenomenon has been chiefly driven by conflict, persecution and poverty resulting from destabilisation in the various home countries of millions of individuals. Within the process of worldwide migration, South Africa receives perhaps the largest number of asylum seekers in the world and according to the UNHCR (2010) the majority of migrants entering South Africa are children or youth. Crucially, this increased migration into South Africa is occurring at a time when the majority of South Africa's general populace is still struggling with the aftermath of apartheid and increased levels of poverty and unemployment. In this qualitative, interpretative study I focus on how a group of 20 African migrant youth that live in Cape Town and attend one local school engage with the migratory experience and navigate their way through local receiving spaces. I assert that these spaces, which include both home and school, mark the youth in very particular ways and bring into focus key aspects of identity, culture, social worlds, imagination and aspiration. The main conceptual contribution of the thesis is the idea that we are all migrants in the current world, whether we physically move or whether our lives are moved by the impact of increasing global flows. Consequently, we need to develop, it is argued, a frame of thinking that makes the migrant central, not ancillary, to historical process. For that purpose I utilise the theoretical lenses of Pierre Bourdieu, Arjun Appadurai, and Tara Yosso to argue that the African migrant youth in the study are not passive recipients bombarded by the forces of globalization and migration, but are active agents in the shaping of their local realities. By linking individual biographies to the questions they raise about larger global, social and historical forces I attempt to offer a temporalized account of late-modern life that incorporates the contemporary conditions that the African migrant youth face as they navigate urban social arrangements, and the daily educational challenges of their local school. A further contribution of the thesis is the documenting of the particular internal and external resources that the 20 African migrant youth drew on to motivate and assist them to navigate their schooling and social lives, as they faced up to the growing uncertainties of their new "foreign‟ spaces.
Youth culture and discipline at a school in the Western Cape
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-03) Carstens, Carin; Badroodien, Azeem; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Education. Dept. of Education Policy Studies.
Internationally, contemporary youth struggle to make sense or meaning of their lives. That is so because they live in a world where they daily witness unsolvable problems of struggling economies, poverty, HIV, and religious and national conflict, and where they are generally treated with ambivalence and a threat to the existing social order. Youth also struggle because within the public imagination they exist on the fringe of society. Giroux (2012: 2) argues that youth are given few spaces where “they can recognise themselves outside of the needs, values, and desires preferred by the marketplace” and are mostly subjected to punitive and zero tolerance approaches when they behave in unacceptable ways. In South Africa presently, it is generally claimed that “discipline problems” amongst youth have become the most endemic problem in South African schools, with policy makers and educators daily complaining about the disciplinary problems within schools that affect how learners engage with learning. Equally, discipline as punitive coercion has been shown to be an unsuccessful educational method in dealing with youth (Porteus & Vally 1999). With the above schooling challenge in mind, this qualitative study explored the views of thirteen young learners at Avondale High School in the Western Cape on school discipline. Via semi-structured interviews, the youth were asked about their understandings of the rules, disciplinary structures, forms of authority and order at the school, how they interpreted the role of discipline, and how they thought this would influence the futures awaiting them. The goal of the study was to provide a multi-dimensional view of what youth regarded as discipline at one school, and to explore whether different learners adopted different meanings of ‘discipline’ according to the context of their individual lives. I show in the study - utilising the views of Emile Durkheim, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu - that school discipline needs to be thought of as more than punishment or structures of ordering per se if it is to play a productive role in the functioning of schools. Along with Yang (2009: 49) I suggest that only when schools recognise that discipline has multiple meanings and (limited) roles within their daily functioning, will the emancipatory and transformative possibilities of school discipline be unlocked. For that to happen, the voices and views of youth in schools have to be taken account of, and meaningful relationships developed between learners, educators, and school management.
Youth discourses of achievement at a school in Cape Town
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2012-03) Matope, Jasmine; Badroodien, Azeem; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Education. Dept. of Education Policy Studies.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study explored the views of thirteen youth at Victoria High School about what they regarded as achievement and how this influenced their lives and what they thought about their futures. The starting premise of the study was that all learners think about achievement. The goal of the study was thus to show how different learners connect this understanding of achievement with their respective aspirations and the kinds of social and schooling worlds they inhabit. The key contribution of the study is the ways it links the social, cultural, and economic worlds of each of the thirteen learners to what they say about what they do and what they want to do, who they are and who they want to be, and what they think they do and what they think they want to do. The study shows that the life-worlds of each of the learners are significantly different yet the ways they go about making sense of that world are fairly similar. In that regard it is shown that the school, and what learners, parents and educators think it is and does, plays a crucial role in the sense-making process. As Berkhout (2008) notes, the different contexts that shape the lives of individuals are not simply external forces but rather are integral parts of their identity-making process. The study used the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Arjun Appadurai to bring together a framework by which to understand what learners said about their worlds and their aspirations, as well to develop a narrative that showed the rich and complex ways in which learners engaged with their realities. The study followed an interpretive qualitative approach to explore the issue of achievement and based its arguments on interviews conducted with thirteen youth between the ages of fifteen and seventeen years old. In this regard, a key finding was that learners approached the notion of achievement in developmental, cumulative, and progressive ways. These views included wanting to be popular, gaining new knowledge, preparing for future material acquisition, developing skills to lead decent lives, acquiring happiness, developing the ability to overcome their challenges and circumstances, and gaining skills and recognition that set up their futures. Five staff members at Victoria High school were also interviewed for their views of the schooling context and the kinds of cultures and legacies that framed their practice.
Youth understandings of a sex education programme
(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013-12) Jefthas, Wilna Desiree; Badroodien, Azeem; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Education. Dept. of Education Policy Studies.
The problem of youth has been a key issue in South Africa since 1994, with youth seen as needing extra guidance and leadership if they are to bring about the country that many hope for. The interest in youth is also spurred on by recent studies that claim that once adolescents establish certain behavioural patterns that it becomes difficult to modify these patterns. Little research exists that describes the ordinary sociological experiences of youth, especially on sensitive issues that attract a lot of public attention- such as teenage sex and pregnancies, and what is perceived as the ‘slipping of youth morals’. There is great concern that youth are experimenting with sex at too early an age in their social and political development (Frimpong 2010: 27). In my thesis I focus on the thinking, choices and decisions that learners at one high school in Cape Town seem to make with regard to sex and sexuality, and how their choices seem to be influenced by a variety of discourses attached to the provision of a sex education programme at the school; discourses that organise their everyday thinking and actions in very concrete ways. A key goal of the study was to disarticulate and re-articulate the deficit mentality that shapes discourses of sexuality in South Africa, and to develop ‘sexual’ stories and strategies of story-telling that allow the voices of learners to be heard (Pillow 2004). My focus in this study is mainly to explore how the sex education programme reconstitutes youth’s sexual identity. In my qualitative study I challenge the tendency to view youth participation in teen sex using mainly an abstinence-only discourse, and suggest that sex education programmes ‘contaminate’ and ‘mutilate’ youth understandings of sex and sexuality in quite complex ways.

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Browsing Masters Degrees (Education Policy Studies) by browse.metadata.advisor "Badroodien, Azeem"

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