The relationship between student engagement and student outcome achievement is well documented in the higher education literature for US students and has recently gained traction for students in other countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and England. Yet, few studies have examined this relationship in countries with evolving or…

This article provides an update on the Special Edition of the "Journal of Vocational Education and Training" 57, no. 3, 2005, which focused on the launch of the National Skills Development Strategy (NSDS) in South Africa. The analysis here evaluates the impact of the first phase of the NSDS, which ran between 1 April 2001 and 31 March…

The article reviews the roles played by the Department of Education and the National Research Foundation in South Africa in defining the meaning of scholarship and in evaluating and funding it. The ideas that inform policy and practice include: the view that scholarship must serve the requirements of the national economy in becoming more globally…

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…

This article discusses practitioner inquiry in a South African context. It begins by outlining the changing policy context in the country, particularly since the advent of democracy in 1994. The implications of these changes for practitioner inquiry are then discussed. The article explores some issues and dilemmas arising from this context,…

Research and pedagogy in the field of morality and moral education has long been dominated by philosophical and psychological disciplines. Although sociological studies and theorising in the field have not been absent, it has been limited and non-systematic. Drawing on a study that investigated the lived morality of a group of young South Africans…

One of the priorities of societies emerging from identity-based conflict is to signal a new society, with new values that stand in stark contrast with the old. Education policy becomes a critical arena for highlighting these political values when schools, particularly teachers, are identified as key agents of social change. However, the legacy of…

Post-1994 South Africa adopted a new education system that would seemingly break with the past practices of the apartheid education system (Naicker, 1999) and produce citizens prepared for a democratic dispensation in South Africa. Accordingly, the new system of outcomes-based education was introduced in order to create the critical mass needed…

In 2005, a group of concerned parents who had arrived in the United States as refugees from war-torn Somalia received approval from their local school district to establish the Iftin Charter School (ICS). The K-8 school continues to engender hope and intellectual strength in its students and parents. ICS finds itself uniquely equipped to meet the…

There are still many South African teachers who are challenged by the implementation of the relatively new system of education. They have to explore a variety of strategies as they try to transform their pedagogy to enhance learning in their classrooms. This post-apartheid system also challenges educators to be transformative individuals who…

The paper interrogates the issue of language and social justice in South Africa's higher education using quantitative and qualitative data collected at the University of the Free State (UFS). Data were collected using questionnaires. Through purposive sampling based on South African and UFS demographics, 120 questionnaires were administered to UFS…

In a country in which, even after the economic crash, there are plenty of resources to go around, people need to think hard about why inequality persists so much more strongly in Britain than anywhere else in Europe. The cause, the author wants to suggest, is a set of deep-rooted, hidden and unacknowledged beliefs, each unjustified yet passed off…

This article discusses the denial of access to education to Ismaili Muslim women in colonial Kenya during the 1890s and the 1960s. The Ismailis were part of the "Asians" in Africa, a working class, religious, Muslim immigrant group from India, circumscribed by poverty and a traditional culture, the orthodox elements of which, with regard…

What happens when students holding rival though indirect memories of past conflicts confront each other in the same classroom? What are the kinds of political and pedagogical approaches necessary for mediating such "clashes of martyrological memories" in the same educational space? And why is critical theory inept at offering resolutions…

How can educators and their students interrogate the ethics and politics of suffering in ways that do not create fixed and totalized narratives from the past? In responding to this question, this essay draws on J. M. Coeetze's "Disgrace," and discusses how this novel constitutes a crucial site for bearing witness to the suffering…