This research study explored how teachers differ in their views of cultural and linguistic diversity and the role of language learning in diverse classrooms. Beliefs about cultural diversity impact the strategies used to tackle language learning and how teachers from specific language-teaching classrooms understand language as a tool for…

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are either in the public domain or published on an open licence which permits various forms of redistribution, reuse and repurposing. Many organisations and higher education institutions around the world are using such resources, and anecdotally many believe this is…

Higher education institutions have been following the global trend of advocating open educational resources (OER) for tuition and learning. In the South African context of higher education, there is also an increasingly strong call for decolonisation in educational content. However, there is a lack of knowledge and theories for the decolonisation…

Unethical behaviour has become an increasingly controversial issue in Higher Education institutes. There have been debates about the reasons for the increase in unethical behaviour. But many of those debates contain problems. A key problem has been the lack of empirical results about faculty members' perceptions of their role in the phenomenon,…

South Africa requires an educated population to sustain her economic development. Higher education institutions are under pressure to produce graduates with skills and competencies to fulfil such an aspiration. Distance education is an essential avenue through which more South Africans can have the much-needed education without necessarily…

In diverse university contexts, students need to constantly navigate and negotiate their social identities. Students bring their unique embedded histories and cultures to the university context and position and reposition themselves to experience a sense of belonging. These experiences contribute to student self-formation and sense of being. This…

In the past decade concern about the mental health of university students has been growing worldwide. Yet epidemiological data and intervention research on student mental health comes predominantly from high income western countries in the Global North, with a relative scarcity of studies from sub-Saharan Africa and other countries in the Global…

Mathematical geometrical (MG) concept is often perceived as abstract and difficult to understand by students at the TVET College. Students are unable to perform well in Mathematic Assessments Tasks specifically on this concept. Drawing from this is the declining percentages of student enrolments in mathematics at National Qualification Framework…

The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic has been felt by both male and female students in Open and Distance e-Learning (ODeL) and contact-based learning institutions in South Africa. However, young female students have been the most affected group. Societal norms that reinforce cultural practices which favour male students hinder the academic…

There is currently a clarion call to address social injustice in South African higher education (HE) in order to achieve greater equity in access. Within this context, current social injustices pertain to financial exclusion as well as epistemic marginalisation and are embodied in the predominance of expensive textbooks which are authored in the…

The aim of this study is to examine the professional identities of the academic staff of the faculties of education in Turkey. The study employed the Q methodology, in which both quantitative and qualitative data can be used. The qualitative data were collected and analysed by interviewing seven academics working in the faculty of education in the…

Background: The presence of African women in mathematics has been nearly invisible. The underrepresentation of African women in this field is a result of their historical socio-political marginalisation. The mathematics discipline is politicised, racialised, and gendered to systematically oppress African women. The mathematics fields continue to…

Using Critical Realism, this article looks at articles from selected South African newspapers which reported on the #FeesMustFall protests. The study established that, arising from the protests, was a culture characteried by tensions and distrust amongst stakeholders such as students, university management and the government. This, the article…

New forms of classroom participation, envisioned as contributing to democracy, are advocated by the South African national curriculum. This paper investigates what form participatory science teaching can and should take in South Africa where the legacy of colonialism and apartheid remains and considers this question through the efforts of two…

The university period provides a critical developmental transition from adolescence to adulthood. During this period, young people establish patterns of behaviors and make lifestyle choices that affect their current and future health. Using the social constructionist paradigm that examines the development of masculinities as a mutual construct of…