Substance use is increasing among youth in South Africa, and may be contributing to transmission of HIV. As parental death often leaves youth with altered emotional and physical resources, substance use may be greater among orphaned adolescents. Utilizing data from a household survey of 15-24 year old South Africans (n = 11,904), multivariable…

Children's participation is a popular rallying cry among child rights activists and community development groups, backed by the recognition of children's participatory rights in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Participation is both a guiding principle of the UNCRC and an explicit right. Article 12 establishes the…

Technology facilitated teaching and learning can now influence the way both lecturers and students collaborate. The problem is that many of these interventions are conducted in a non-systematic ad-hoc way. There are concerns that merely adopting a traditional lecturing approach to a technology based environment provides little if any advantage to…

Students studying Civil Engineering (CE) at the Further Education and Training (FET) colleges spend periods of time in the classroom and workshop as well as in the workplace during experiential learning. The overall purpose of education and training in the college sector is generally understood as preparing students for employability, and…

The purpose of this study is to highlight the importance of reflection by a higher education institution on its engagement with the community. In this article the authors demonstrate how the Faculty of Education at the University of the Free State engaged with school educators in a module concerning teaching and learning styles. A quantitative…

Poor learner performance in South African schools raises concerns related to lack of commitment and accountability from school leaders and teachers with no common vision to promote a culture of high learner performance. This paper provides a literature overview of research available on the impact of professional learning communities (PLC) on…

There is a growing awareness of the need to move beyond generic approaches to teaching, learning and assessment (TLA) to consider the importance of context in shaping TLA practices. However, efforts to engage with context have focused primarily on disciplinary epistemologies and in particular the differences between hard, soft, pure and applied…

This paper looks into the importance of a responsible research community and how ethics can contribute towards the building of such a community. The paper starts off by outlining the many challenges facing a responsible research community. These challenges range from doing research, transferring the research results, commercialising the…

Social justice is undeniably grounded in efforts at circumventing provisions that seek to uphold ostracism and exclusionary practices which have permeated South Africa and many other societies worldwide for extensive periods of time. Vast incongruities and/or inequalities between better resourced urban communities and neglected rural areas impinge…

School going children have a broad range of needs at any given point in time. If these needs are not met, they may experience barriers to learning and development, which can result in the breakdown of the learning process or even total exclusion. Barriers to learning and development affect learners differently, but nothing threatens their…

The Collaborative Cohort Model (CCM) of higher degrees supervision is gaining increasing popularity internationally and, in some contexts, replacing the conventional Apprentice Master Model (AMM). Among the motivations advanced for this shift is that the CCM improves completion rates and enhances the quality of research supervision. This…

This article explores factors influencing values management and in particular the way in which teachers and principals perceive their role in the inculcation of democratic values and moral principles with a view to managing schools more effectively within a democratic dispensation. In a small scale qualitative study, it was found that educators…

The essentialist view that new technological innovations (especially Social Media) disrupt higher education delivery ride on educators' risk averse attitudes toward full scale adoption of unproven technologies. However, this unsubstantiated logic forecloses possibilities for embracing the constructive dimensions of disruptions, and grasping the…

The title of this presentation speaks to the contradictory notion of the "global village" and the great benefits associated with the sharing of knowledge--a key advantage to our shared globalized context. This "Commentary" seeks to articulate some of the lessons being discovered in South Africa related to children, families and…

This article investigates how school building design can support primary school feeding programmes in low- and middle-income countries. Furthermore it argues for schools to become community "development hubs"; incorporating both local access to education and also to programmes for nutrition, ICT, health education and other services,…