This article foregrounds the salience of "lived experience" in the mediation of unlearning racialized habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992), and in learning and relearning the "truth about reality," or the truth about others. This article emphasizes the value of positive "lived experience" for anti-racist and…

In this essay Michael Merry defends the following prima facie argument: that civic virtue is not dependent on integration and in fact may be best fostered under conditions of segregation. He demonstrates that civic virtue can and does take place under conditions of involuntary segregation, but that voluntary separation--as a response to…

Soudien (2009) states that affirmative action is not just about "inhabiting the university with people of colour; it is about appropriating the transcendence it makes possible as a consummately human and open-ended gift to humankind, and not, critically, a "white" gift". This engagement with Soudien's (2009) invitation to take…

The idea of charter schools arose as a means to allow for innovation by creating schools that were free from traditional regulations, but were held accountable for their performance. More recently, however, charter school advocates have suggested that increasing school choice options will create competition that improves the quality of education…

At the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA, 30 April to 4 May), the theme of re-imagining public education arose once again with the most compelling presentation from leading scholars in the field concerned with counter-hegemonic politics and democratic change. The session entitled "Re-imaging public…

Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute and the recognized leader of American black people from 1895 until his death in 1915, has been viewed as an accommodationist to segregation, an African-American leader who traded black equality and voting rights for his own influence among white bigots. Washington rose to national fame with a…

There is an abundance of literature on citizenship education. This essay is an attempt to show how deliberation is used in university classroom pedagogy, to engender in students a commitment to becoming responsible citizens of a post-apartheid South Africa. Firstly, I show that controversy can be attended to through deliberation, with specific…

Since 1994, education policy documents in South Africa have prioritised the goal of equity in education, understood as increased access to programmes, more equitable staff and student profiles, and curricula that are more responsive to the needs of all students. The challenge of effecting the goal of equity at levels of teaching and learning in…

At the heart of the discussion in this special issue on race and affirmative action is the issue of whether race should be used as a category in admissions policies of South African universities. In my contribution I shall argue that there are no races. By race I mean the idea that skin colour (or other phenotypical features) associated with…

The compelling essays in this issue of the journal take on the often contentious and complex issue of racial affirmative action. I do not wish to repeat the arguments authors offer either in defence or against student admissions to a university on the grounds of race, (dis)advantage, class, gender, and so on. Rather, I wish to respond to a…

In this article we draw on data from a two-cycle action research project, in which ways of teaching reconciliation in post-apartheid secondary school classrooms are explored. We undertake a detailed analysis of a selection of artefacts produced by South African students representing their understandings of reconciliation. Initially students' work…

In January 2010, the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project (CRP) released "Choice without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards." The study intended to report on, among other things, levels of racial segregation in charter schools across the United States. The authors use 2007-08 data from the U.S. Department of…

Almost everyone knows what the term "achievement gap" means, although the key to closing it remains elusive. Despite efforts spanning a decade or more, the disparity in test scores, graduation rates, and other indicators of academic success separating many students of color from many of their white and Asian peers has not been eliminated. In a…

The whole world was united in its condemnation of the pre-1994 apartheid regime in South Africa. Apartheid meant that many South Africans were robbed of their democratic voices and cultural identities. In this article, the authors pose the question: Are you guilty of "knowledge apartheid" in your biology classroom? Does every student have a voice…

People live in a time where neoliberal positions, with their assumption that private is good and public is bad, are dominant. Yet, as the author and others have demonstrated, such positions consistently privilege particular and identifiable classed and raced groups. This is not accidental. Society, like many others throughout the world, is…