Purpose: This qualitative study discusses the importance of effective leadership practices in connecting the macro-, meso-, and micro-contexts in which school leaders operate, considering the colonial and apartheid history of South Africa and the current era of neoliberal philosophies by exploring the degree to which school leaders in historically…

Following the end of apartheid in 1994, the ANC government placed education at the centre of its plans to build a nonracial and more equitable society. Yet, by the 2010s a wave of student protests voiced demands for decolonised and affordable education. By following families and schools in Durban for nearly a decade, Mark Hunter sheds new light on…

Poetry informed by indigenous knowledge systems, whether written, spoken or heard, offers ideal pathways for healing and transformation. Being "medicine" in the broadest non-clinical sense, it is deeply restorative as activism, as caregiving practice and as balm in the face of relentless assaults on our bodies and beings. This I…

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…

The article explores the multifaceted process of creating the large-scale annual public puppetry event, The Barrydale Giant Puppet Parade, in the rural town of Barrydale, South Africa. It unpacks the complex layers of meaning and making arising through a co-creative puppetry project in a region of South Africa marked by poverty and the on-going…

The authors bring together decolonial, place attuned, and critical posthumanist orientations to analyze an event during a residential workshop organized as part of a state-funded research project on decolonizing early childhood discourses in South Africa. An invitation during the workshop to grapple with what might be unsettling by attending to…

The 1994 democratic government of South Africa brought greater responsibility and growth of school-based management in schools which impacted on the role and workload of school leaders (Rosenfeld, Ehrich & Cranston, 2009). Principals of public secondary schools delegated greater responsibility to Heads of Departments who had to ensure that…

The topic of this longitudinal study was reading promotion and its perceived benefits. The aim was to determine if reading promotion can lead to reader development and if reader development can lead to self-development, as is often claimed in the literature. A reading promotion project in the Northern Cape, South Africa, was monitored over a…

This paper explores the profound connection between race, gender, and culture in post-apartheid education at a public Afrikaans dual-language school in South Africa. Illustrating how the residues and remnants of apartheid legacies propagate arcane constructions of whiteness through interwoven racial and gendered stereotypes, this research maps the…

Whereas members of high-status racial groups show ingroup preference when attitudes are measured implicitly, members of low-status racial groups--both adults and children--typically show no bias, potentially reflecting awareness of the ingroup's low status. We hypothesized that when status differences are especially pronounced, children from…

The South African coloured identity is a profoundly complex construction that, on the one hand, is interpreted as an ambiguous and "in-between" identity and, on the other hand, its own ambiguity and complexity provides multiple means and strategies of production and articulation within various contexts. This dissertation seeks to examine…

Localized understandings of adolescent romantic relationships are needed to expand our knowledge of the diversity of adolescent romantic experiences and to challenge negative discourses of adolescent heterosexual relationships. This study explored the constructions of intimacy of 20 adolescent men and women in romantic relationships from one…

This study explored how people perceive the causes of poverty. Literature revealed that there are three broad theoretical explanations of perceptions of the causes of poverty, namely individualistic explanations, where blame is placed squarely on the poor themselves; structural explanations, where poverty is blamed on external social and economic…

This study examined the understanding of children's rights in 63 (9-, 11-, and 13-year-olds) mixed-race South African children and their mothers. In individual semi-structured interviews participants responded to hypothetical vignettes in which children's nurturance and self-determination rights conflicted with parental authority in the home.…

This article reports on a critical meta-analysis of empirical studies done by human sciences researchers on the initial multicultural teacher education (IMTE) models in multicultural post-colonial transitional societies with reference to sub-Saharan African states in general and South Africa in particular. Using a critical post-positivist…