Browsing by Author "Richards, Rose"

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    Celebrities and spiritual gurus : comparing two biographical accounts of kidney transplantation and recovery
    (AOSIS Publishing, 2015-05) Richards, Rose
    Background: As a kidney transplant recipient I have long been exposed to a shortage of renal narratives and to a dominant theme in those that exist: transplant as restitution or redemption. My lived experience has, however, shown me that post-transplant life is more complex. Even after transplantation, chronic kidney disease requires lifelong health care with varying degrees of impairment, resulting in ongoing liminality for those who experience it. Nonetheless, as a transplant recipient I find the restitution or redemptive narrative pervasive and difficult to escape. Objective: I examined two seemingly very dissimilar insider renal biographies, Janet Hermans’s Perfect match: A kidney transplant reveals the ultimate second chance, and Steven Cojocaru’s Glamour, interrupted: How I became the best-dressed patient in Hollywood, to explore how the narrators treat chronic kidney disease and transplantation. Methods: In addition to a close textual reading of the biographies, I used my own experience of meaning-making to problematize concepts around restitution or redemptive narratives. Results: I found that the two biographies are, despite appearances and despite the attempts of one author to escape the redemptive form, very much the same type of narrative. The accounts end with the transplant, as is common, but the recipients’ lives continue after this, as they learn to live with their transplants, and this is not addressed. Conclusions: Emphasising restitution or redemption might prevent an understanding of post-transplant liminality that has unique characteristics. The narrator evading this narrative form must come to terms with a changed identity and, sometimes, fight to evade the pervasive narratives others impose.
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    Evaluating four readability formulas for Afrikaans
    (University of Stellenbosch, Department of General Linguistics, 2017) Jansen, Carel; Richards, Rose; Van Zyl, Liezl
    For almost a hundred years now, readability formulas have been used to measure how difficult it is to comprehend a given text. To date, four readability formulas have been developed for Afrikaans. Two such formulas were published by Van Rooyen (1986), one formula by McDermid Heyns (2007) and one formula by McKellar (2008). In our quantitative study the validity of these four formulas was tested. We selected 10 texts written in Afrikaans – five articles from a popular magazine and five documents used in government communications. All characteristics included in the four readability formulas were first measured for each text. We then developed five different cloze tests for each text to assess actual text comprehension. Thereafter, 149 Afrikaans-speaking participants with varying levels of education each completed a set of two of the resulting 50 cloze tests. On comparing the data on text characteristics to the cloze test scores from the participants, the accuracy of the predictions from the four existing formulas for Afrikaans could be determined. Both Van Rooyen formulas produced readability scores that were not significantly correlated with actual comprehension scores as measured with the cloze tests. For the McKellar formula, however, this correlation was significant and for the McDermid Heyns formula the correlation with the cloze test scores almost reached significance. From the outcomes of each of these last two formulas, about 40% of the variance in cloze scores could be predicted. Readability predictions based only on the average number of characters per word, however, performed considerably better: about 65% of the variance in the cloze scores could be predicted just from the average number of characters per word.
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    From autopsy to autonomy in writing centres : postgraduate students' response to two forms of feedback in a health professions education module
    (Stellenbosch University, 2016) Daniels, Sharifa; Richards, Rose
    In post-apartheid South Africa, writing centres exist in almost every university to address the academic writing needs of students. At Stellenbosch University Writing Lab, writing consultants use collaborative learning and peer feedback in their work with writers in one-to-one consultations. As part of a larger research project about how students in a Health Professions Education Master’s degree responded to different types of feedback, our study focuses on whether the feedback received in a writing consultation compares to, or differs from, the feedback from the class group members. Our findings suggest that in general the students were open to interventions such as writing consultations. Furthermore, peer feedback from both a class group member as well as a writing consultant was experienced as useful. The study further shows that the consultants’ approach to giving feedback was in line with the pedagogy practised in writing centres. The article concludes with measures that were implemented to address uncertainties identified in the study. We recommend that the purpose of consultations be clarified to lecturers, that consultations be integrated in the writing process before the assignment is marked and, to minimise role confusion, that consultants describe to students the way consultations work at the beginning of the consultation.
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    Saying the word : voice and silence in an autoethnography about chronic illness
    (Stellenbosch University, Department of General Linguistics, 2016) Richards, Rose
    People living with chronic illness experience impairment in various ways, not the least of which is how they are sometimes marginalised by the people with whom they interact. Over the last few decades, as social science research has moved away from the biomedical model, research methodologies have been developed to allow the voices of people with illness or disabilities to be heard and not only to be represented by others. However, these methodologies may not go as far in redressing power imbalances as was hoped, and participants’ voices are often still mediated and subjugated to the researcher’s requirements. As a person who has lived with a chronic condition all my life, I am concerned about how I am heard and by whom, as this has often affected my self-perception and sometimes even my safety. I am also concerned about doing violence to those about whom I speak and disempowering them further. My doctoral research concerned the problematic of writing about my own experience of a chronic illness. I chose a methodology, autoethnography, that allowed me to write solely about my own experience. In so doing, I was able to consider the complexity of my own academic and narrative voices, individually and in combination. In this paper I explore the methodological and epistemological concerns around my decision to use autoethnography, as well as the sometimes surprising issues I navigated when doing so. One of these issues was the juxtapositioning of different types of texts I had written. In isolation, some of the texts show a clear influence of the very discourses to which I was trying to provide counter-narratives. When read together with other texts, they reveal a complex web of paradoxes, tensions, and silences, which allowed me to generate new narratives and to question assumptions – my own and other people’s.
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    Space, place, and power in South African writing centres : special issue in honour of Sharifa Daniels
    (University of Stellenbosch, Department of General Linguistics, 2019) Richards, Rose; Lackay, Anne-Mari; Delport, Selene
    A writing center cannot define itself as a space—we’re often kicked out of our spaces. It’s not a pedagogy. We’re always re-articulating our pedagogy. It’s certainly not an academic department. It crosses all disciplines. A writing center does not produce a text—the texts in writing centers are unfinished. And we don’t own the texts our students create; those texts are cross-curricular, cross-linguistic, cross-discursive.
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    We object to bad science : poor research practices should be discouraged
    (ASSAf, 2020-07-10) Mothapo, Palesa N.; Phiri, Ethel E.; Maduna, Tando L.; Malgas, Rhoda; Richards, Rose; Sylvester, Taime T.; Nsikani, Mlungele; Boonzaaier-Davids, Melissa K.; Moshobane, Moleseng C.
    On 8 June 2020, we, a diverse group of African emerging researchers, published a response to the commentary titled ‘Why are black South African students less likely to consider studying biological sciences?’ (1)published in the South Africa Journal of Science (SAJS). There aremounting arguments, in both print and social media, regarding themerits of the Nattrass (2020) commentary, particularly around itsstrong racial undertones as well as poor and unethical researchpractices. Nattrass’ commentary has been intensely divisive, managingto engender stereotypes, anger, and disappointment. Conflictingarguments have emerged, which involve responses by otheracademics, politicians, and the public, but much of the furore has beenstrongly biased towards and along racial lines, with very little attentiondirected at the flawed nature of the research.