This paper explores the role English and isiZulu play in the identity construction of a group of black South African university students from disadvantaged backgrounds enrolled in a bridge programme at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. I will discuss how, in post-apartheid South Africa, language practices continue to foster inequality, despite a…

Global childhood as a concept privileges western ideals of how young children experience growing up, how adults educate them, and how priorities are set for them. Ways of knowing and doing early childhood are backed by Euro-American knowledge, international conventions and scientific evidence which gives a semblance of the truths for intervening…

This article advances the notion of a "scholarship of hope" in order to signpost one route into a generative approach to academic work. Such an approach has to proceed on the basis of a defamiliarising type of inquiry meant to challenge dominant understandings of our social world. I suggest that a defamiliarising scholarship of hope…

Socio-economic and vocational needs of communities, governments and individuals change over the years and these discourses served as a compass for restructuring of higher institutions in South Africa from 1994. Before 1994, the claim to legitimacy for government policies in higher education rested on meeting primarily the interests of the white…

This article discusses contributions of women to the emergence of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Using network analysis, the author studied affiliations between African American and White women who signed "The Call," a petition calling for a national conference to obtain civil rights for African…

The dismantling of apartheid in 1994 brought an array of democratic changes in South Africa, including changes in curriculum and educational policies. One of the most momentous changes was the desegregation of public schools. While this was significant in South African education politics, it presented some educational challenges, especially to…

Skills development is critical to South Africa's development. It has been argued that South Africa's twin post-Apartheid challenges, poverty and unemployment requires a level of skills development not undertaken before (RSA, 2008a; ANC, 2007). The creation of a separate ministry, the department of higher education and training (DHET), which has…

South Africa's attainment of democracy in 1994 culminated in an educational reform anchored on an outcomes-based curriculum which was initially labelled Curriculum 2005 (C2005). The reform process and ensuing policy was rooted in labour movement debates and informed by the outcomes-based education (OBE) experiences in Australia and New Zealand.…

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…

After the Civil War, schooling for African Americans was irregular and consisted mainly of elementary grades. Education was provided, primarily, by elite, private institutions and fewer than three percent of students aged 13-17 attended regularly. In 1896, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling in "Plessey v. Ferguson." Although…

This article examines the phenomenon of African migration to post-apartheid South Africa from a language-sociological perspective. Although the subject has been one largely neglected by language scholars, the handful of studies which have addressed the issue have yielded ethnographic data and raised questions of considerable significance for the…

Indigenous cultural and language negotiations ongoing in the contexts of South Africa and Canada are documented in two studies, one sharing narratives from Black parents in South Africa and the other sharing narratives of Métis Elders in Canada. Black parents' perspectives on Indigenous language and cultures and the role of education in…

Neely sought to draw upon her experiences in teaching courses in children's literature, research on global/multicultural education, and her own beliefs in order to design and implement a course on literature written about and after the end of segregation in the United States and Apartheid in South Africa. The course included travel to some of the…

Disparities emanating from South Africa's apartheid history still pose a number of challenges to the country, especially in education. Since the transition to democracy in 1994, the prescribed government school curriculum has undergone several revisions in an endeavour to set standards and provide instruction of a high quality. On the language…

The slogan "no education without representation" symbolised a belief in the anti-apartheid movement that without a democratic government, South Africa's people could not receive an inclusive education. Since the end of official apartheid in 1994, the education system has faced new transformative aims focused on ending racial separation…