Disparities emanating from South Africa's apartheid history still pose a number of challenges to the country, especially in education. Since the transition to democracy in 1994, the prescribed government school curriculum has undergone several revisions in an endeavour to set standards and provide instruction of a high quality. On the language…

Educational policy and practice has resided and continues to reside at the vortex of social and political strife in South Africa, as in the United States. Although school poverty and inequities among schools in the U.S. pale in comparison to conditions in South Africa, the two nations have much in common, including histories of state-sanctioned…

As part of a global movement, South Africa is embracing political and academic change designed to enhance the lives of all students. Small, gradual courses of actions serve to level the educational playing field for students with and without disabilities. Kliptown Youth Project by design serves as evidence of a small, but persistent transforming…

In 2009 and 2010, the author was involved in two University of Botswana initiatives on graduate employability. The first was a university-wide task force exploring the attitudes of students and staff and recommending reforms both in learning and teaching and in support services for students. The second was a Faculty of Humanities tracer study, in…

In South Africa the arts and culture educational curriculum has undergone immense change and continues to impact and influence the role of musical arts practices in children's lives throughout the country. In specific districts of the Limpopo province in particular, musical practices of the Venda culture are being integrated into the school…

Against the background of vast changes in doctoral education and the emergence of non-traditional doctoral programmes, this paper investigates the habitus of non-traditional PhD students at a South African university. Bourdieu's conceptual tool of habitus informed the study. In-depth and open-ended interviews were conducted with 10 non-traditional…

The chapter on special education in South Africa initiates with a very comprehensive historical account of the origins of special education making reference to the inequalities linked to its colonial and racist past to a democratic society. This intriguing section ends with the most recent development in the new democracy form special needs…

While South African higher education has, in many respects, achieved remarkable achievements since 1994, a series of serious problems continue to beset the system, and a low internal (high attrition rate) and external (alignment with the employment market) efficiency. There also exist the problems of large scale youth unemployment and the policy…

This article examines the implications of the rise of managerialism for student participation in university governance. It explores this theoretically by proposing a matrix of ideal-type regimes of student governance based on the work of Hyden, Olsen and others. The working of this typology is illustrated in a case study of the student political…

We document the efforts of the faculty of education of a large research-oriented university in supporting doctoral learning. The development of a space for doctoral learning is in line with the need to develop a community of researchers in South Africa. We describe the historical origins of this cohort model of doctoral supervision and support,…

The past few years have witnessed new interest in doctoral production in South Africa. In the first section of the article, it is argued that this new interest has its roots in various higher education policy documents over the past decade. The second part of the article presents some of the most recent statistics on various aspects of doctoral…

This article presents a case study aimed at describing and exploring the needs for--and provision of--formal support in South African primary schools, examining, in particular, the significance of organisational development in addressing the needs of teachers. Educational projects are often focused on the needs of learners and learner well-being…

Historically disadvantaged schools are mostly in a position where they cannot easily practise entrepreneurial customs like innovation, proactiveness and risk-taking. However, some of these schools perform well under similar circumstances and show strong entrepreneurial inclinations. In fact, in research conducted in 2006, Lebusa and Xaba found…

There is a great deal of talk about a crisis in teaching across the English-speaking world, about the quality of teachers leaving much to be desired, and about the quality of student outcomes dropping. This, in turn, has resulted in various aspects of teacher preparation coming under severe scrutiny. In general, disquiet has been voiced about the…

This volume contains selected papers submitted to the 17th Annual International Conference of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society (BCES) held in June 2019 in Pomorie, Bulgaria. The 17th BCES Conference theme is "Glocal Education in Practice: Teaching, Researching, and Citizenship." Some selected papers submitted to the…