In recent years there has been growing awareness about teenage motherhood, a phenomenon constructed as an economic and social concern in South Africa. This article presents a narrative inquiry undertaken with seven teenage mothers on their experiences of schooling and motherhood at a rural secondary school in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The study…

In the study reported on here, we investigated the effects of the use of dynamic geometry software (DGS) (i.e., GeoGebra) on learners' learning and a teacher's beliefs. The learners and teacher involved in the study were from a high-poverty, rural high school in South Africa. We compared grade 11 learners (N = 56) who used GeoGebra in the context…

Poverty is rife in many African countries and this has serious implications for the provision of quality education. Rural schools face severe challenges that are unique to their environment. A lack of parental interest in children's education, insufficient funding from the state, a lack of resources, underqualified teachers, and multi-grade…

Children learning to read and write in rural areas in Southern Africa perform poorly compared to children in urban schools. The poor results of rural schools in national assessments of reading literacy are explained by the deficits of rural areas: poverty, under-resourced schools and under-qualified teachers. Children in rural areas are frequently…

A one-size-fits-all curriculum cannot address the issues faced by rural multigrade teachers and learners. In South Africa, despite government efforts to relieve adversity, poverty in rural areas is still rife and poor education still fails to lift people out of it (Joubert 2010). Equality is essential in ensuring that all South African children…

This study seeks to understand the reasons that allow a parent, a principal and a teacher to maintain silence when young girls under their care are sexually abused. Put another way, it attempts to explain what it is about sexual abuse that makes these parties relinquish their role as protectors of innocent children. This paper, based on a larger…

In this article, I hope to provide some novel insights into teacher resilience and poverty on the basis of ten-year long-term ethnographic participatory reflection and action data obtained from teachers (n?=?87) in rural (n?=?6) and urban (n?=?8) schools (n?=?14, high schools?=?4, primary schools?=?10) in three South African provinces. In…

This study examined secondary school teachers' perceptions of their school-level environment and its influence on implementation of outcomes-based education (OBE). Participating schools were in South Africa's Limpopo Province (one of its poorest rural provinces) and were implementing Curriculum 2005, a new outcomes-based approach to teaching and…