This article reports on how intervention research based on integrative career counselling enhanced the existential experience of a gifted learner. The participant of this study was a purposively selected gifted 17-year-old girl learner in search of a career that would help her experience meaning, purpose, and hope in and through her career-life.…

This article focuses on the navigation and negotiation of a Zulu student on a diverse university campus in South Africa. Students in higher education institutions bring their life stories, shaped by lived experiences, culture, history, and language, to the campus, while the interconnection between race, language, culture, and gender creates new…

Leadership is one of the critical drivers of educational institutions and has been overwhelmingly researched across countries. However, there is little with regards to early childhood development centers in the scholarship of educational leadership. South Africa has an assortment of early childhood development centers (ECD) ranging from fully…

We examine the benefits of developing critically reflexive learners through life story performance embedded in a Critical Reflexive Model. Students are invited to work with their life stories in a safe, dialogical space and to deconstruct various forms of power and its influence on their lives. Using a mix of creative and embodied methodologies,…

University campuses are spaces not only for self-reflection and critique but also where asymmetrical power relations create experiences of exclusion and marginalisation for many students. Within the complexity of such spaces, transformative opportunities are opened up for student agency and agentic actions. This qualitative article uses a…

This study set out to explore how Black immigrant academics (BIAs) reconstruct their identities within academe. Utilising the research methodology of narrative inquiry, this article explores how BIAs came to see themselves across those communities, which were of primary importance to them in the reformation of their identities. Through the…

Data suggest that having a positive, internalized racial identity is related to healthy outcomes. Although some scholars have highlighted the role of education in providing a context to develop such an identity, there is a dearth of research in this area. This study analyzed racial life narrative interviews with 15 Black South Africans to explore…

Going beyond the static, dangerous version of a single story about who an African child inmate is, is an ethical responsibility -- especially when we consider the structural and material forces that are tangled in this evil deed. Drawing on a sociological framing of self and Foucault's theory of ethics, we take a narrative inquiry stance to…

Purpose: This research is providing social workers with a deeper insight into the process of empowering people from disadvantaged communities with leadership abilities by applying a narrative approach in group work and to develop members' individual potential within their social construction of leaders and leadership. Method: This research was…

An earlier paper focused on how born-free learners constitute, negotiate and represent their identities after almost two and half decades of democracy in South Africa. Utilising the theoretical framework of subjective realities of educational change, in this article I set out to explore what implications teachers' beliefs hold for born-free…

This article explores the ways in which playback theatre was used to interrogate the views of adolescents on their social context(s) and establish what the personal and dominant discourses operating in their views were. Playback theatre, with its focus on reframing personal stories to generate new perspectives on these stories, was an appropriate…

The South African Council for Educators' Code of Professional Ethics requires teachers to help learners develop values consistent with the fundamental rights contained in the Constitution of South Africa. To engage with such rights, teachers need to have the agency to develop such values, and this article explores how teachers of English in South…

This qualitative study takes a narrative approach to inquiring into the lived experiences of linguistically diverse students. As students are often placed into developmental education courses due to factors that point back to their linguistic diversity, scholarly literature demonstrates a need for inquiry that informs both research and practice.…

Organisational change processes are by nature complex and often highly contested. This is particularly true of the transformation South African institutions of higher education have been going through since the end of the apartheid era. Using a narrative approach, this article presents a multi-faceted range of stories by the University of the Free…

Recent developments in digital scholarship point out that academic practices supported by technologies may not only be transformed through the obvious process of digitization, but also renovated through distributed knowledge networks that digital technologies enable, and the practices of openness that such networks develop. Yet, this apparent…