In South Africa, the scholarship of epistemic justice has taken on an historical gaze with higher education framed as a social institution that might ameliorate the historical traumas of colonialism. Undoing the legacies of colonialism has been framed as the democratisation of the knowledge project. Using the White Paper 3 of 1997 that posits…

This dissertation retells the history of women's studies from a global perspective, challenging traditional U.S. and Eurocentric narratives about this emerging interdisciplinary field. Beginning with questions about why women's, gender, and sexuality studies has incited backlash across a range of cultural and geographic locations, this study draws…

The theme of the conference seems to assume that most countries had functional and well-performing education systems before the COVID-19 pandemic. All they need to do now is to recover and restore their systems to their former glory. Evaluations of the South African education system between 1994 and 2022 have been extremely negative. The question…

In many countries, the contours of skills formation systems are traced back to early struggles over control of apprenticeship. This paper uses a curriculum lens to examine two distinctive policy moments in the history of formal apprenticeships in South Africa and to trace the legacy imprint of direct and indirect race-based exclusion as well as…

In this paper, drawing on an extensive research project across three countries (VET Africa 4.0 Collective 2023), we produce an emerging argument that it is necessary to rethink and reframe VET logics and approaches in a warming future dominated by informality and mass unemployment. Currently, neither the formal VET college or workplace are…

The article tracks key moments in teacher education policy and curriculum in South Africa from the 1970s to the present day. Political and social features of education in each decade are outlined, from a racialised and fragmented system of teacher education, to the imagining of alternatives, and the imperative for educational transformation. The…

On 6 November 2020, the "Policy Framework for Internationalisation of Higher Education in South Africa" was promulgated. It provides high-level principles and guidelines for the internationalisation of higher education in South Africa, lays down specific rules for certain aspects of the process and aims to shape the process of…

Who we are and who we become as educators is intimately connected to the historical and socio-political milieus in which we, ourselves, were educated and continue to work as educators. In this article I demonstrate how conventional conceptual metaphors are effective analytical lenses, through which we can explore our personal educational…

Peer learning is a distinct category of student support gaining popularity globally and in South Africa, although these are typically informal approaches which have not been sufficiently researched to examine their influence and impact. Some scholars have criticised the available research as patchy, inconsistent, and methodologically weak.…

This article reflects on our participation in two efforts at education organising at the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic -- the national C19 People's Coalition, and the Progressive Organisations Formation (POF). We suggest our experiences as participants in these movements reflect a broader political climate in South Africa in which large-scale,…

Increasingly, novice teachers function in complex learning environments that require heightened resilience and making calculated, sometimes unexpected decisions. Undoubtedly, novice teachers in the African context must adapt to the persistent weaknesses of inadequate education systems, characterized by underperforming learners, high learner…

Technology education was introduced as a successor to various forms of craft or technical education in some parts of the world in the 1980s. In South Africa (SA) the implementation of technology education was in more than one sense unique. Not only was it a new subject within the South African educational context, but it coincided with the dawn of…

Inclusive education is a fundamental right of all students. Despite international policy initiatives, educational exclusion is pervasive, especially in the Global South, and disproportionately affects disabled students. Barriers to inclusive education have been itemised in the literature, but in this conceptual paper that offers a novel…

The pursuit of inclusive education in different countries is shaped by the extent and the nature of existing special educational provisions. We focus on two authoritarian regimes in the previous century: Soviet Russia (USSR) with its ideology of class (proletarian humanism and egalitarian universalism) and South Africa with its ideology of race…

Having reviewed several pieces of strategy documents, policy papers, and literature, we concluded that there is no uniform definition of either institutional autonomy or academic freedom (AF). Many different points of view determine the interpretation of these terms. Furthermore, the policymakers (e.g., governments, legislators) can ignore the…