Research Articles (Education Policy Studies)

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    Teaching as Epistemic Mistrust
    (Springer Nature, 2024-08-19) Davids, Nuraan
    Long portrayed as a virtuous profession, teaching has always been embedded in notions of trust and trustworthiness. Alongside expectations of epistemic cultivation and development, is an implicit handing over of discretionary powers to ‘the trusted teacher’. At the height of #blacklivesmatter protests in 2020, however, high school learners all over South Africa took to social media—@yousilenceweamplify—to express their hurt and anger at their dehumanising experiences at some of the country’s leading schools. Their accounts not only exposed some schools as intense sites of racial, religious, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic tension and conflict, but shattered presumptions about ‘the trusted teacher’. Following a consideration of what trust infers, and the potential harms that arise from epistemic mistrust, the paper considers what might be gained from philosophical engagements in the espousal of teaching as a relationship of epistemic trust, and which ensures the flourishing of both learner and teacher? How might philosophy of education assist teacher education programmes in attuning students to an understanding that being trustworthy as teachers resides in self-knowledge as well as knowledge of the differences of, and among others?
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    Knowledge-building and knowers in educational practices
    (University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2021) Rusznyak, Lee; Hlatshwayo, Mlamuli Nkosingphile; Fataar, Aslam; Blackie, Margaret
    The South African education system continues to be confronted with calls for free decolonial quality education. Sparked by the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student protests in 2015 and 2016, students pushed for the need to re-think and reimagine teaching and learning and the kinds of knowledge(s) that are valued and legitimated in curricula (Fataar, 2018; Heleta, 2018; Maxwele, 2016; Ngcobozi, 2015). Part of realising a more inclusive education system requires paying attention to knowledge-building in practices and intellectual fields.
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    Public-private partnerships in South African education : risky business or good governance?
    (Unisa Press, 2020-08-13) Feldman, Jennifer Ann
    This article discusses the globalised phenomenon of public-private partnerships, which involve the private and public sector collaborating to provide infrastructure and service delivery to public institutions. Within the education sector, the most commonly known public-private partnerships exist in the United States as charter schools and the United Kingdom as academies. Discussing this phenomenon in the South African context, this article draws on the Collaboration Schools Pilot Project as an example for understanding how the involvement of private partnerships within public schooling is being conceptualised by the Western Cape Education Department. Framed within the debate of public-private partnerships for the public good, the article provides a critical discussion on how these partnerships are enacted as a decentralisation of state involvement in the provision of public schooling by government. The article concludes by noting that the Collaboration Schools Pilot Project, which involves significant changes in policy regarding how schools are governed and managed, requires more rigorous and critical dialogue by all stakeholders as the model unfolds in schools in the Western Cape.
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    ‘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.
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    An educational opportunity for (re)-scripting gender justice as an imperative of faith and citizenship : a South African case
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2022-09-12) Davids, Nuraan, 1970-
    The centring of Muslim women in Islam resides in an intertwining historico-politico -theological narrative of gender reform, first promulgated in a seventh century revelation of the Qur’an. Significantly, the gains derived by the women of Islam’s first community, have become lost in the dominance of contemporary androcentric-patriarchal interpretations. The argument advanced by this paper is that Muslim educational institutions have a responsibility in (re)-scripting gender justice as an imperative of the scripture; and in establishing resonance between identities of faith and citizenship. I commence by looking at the disjuncture between what Islam says about gender equality, and how it unfolds under the predominant auspices of a patriarchal gaze. As an example of this disconnection, I focus on the trajectory of the ‘women in mosques’ campaigns in South Africa, spanning from an apartheid to a democratic context – noting that despite, or perhaps, because of far-reaching political change, the resistance encountered by Muslim women has remained the same. Thereafter, I turn my attention to an intertwining consideration: the responsibility of Muslim education in (re)-scripting gender justice as an imperative of the scripture; and the obligation of Muslim education in establishing resonance between identities of faith and citizenship.