Perspective Chapter: Reflections from the Field – The Struggles of a Senior Manager in Pursuit of Social Justice and Equity, the Case of Walter Sisulu University in South Africa (original) (raw)
Related papers
DECOLONISING THE SOUTH AFRICAN UNIVERSITY: A SOCIAL REALIST STUDY
Thesis, 2020
This research is a case study that investigates the demand for decolonisation at the University of Cape Town (UCT). UCT is an institution that was reserved for white South Africans under the Apartheid system, until the formal abolition of Apartheid in 1994. Between 2015 and 2017 the university faced disruptive and violent student protests which halted the academic programme on several occasions. The demands of black students were centered on the legacy of economic and cultural exclusion which they still felt at UCT, 20 years after Apartheid. These charges of exclusion eventually became bundled within the general demand for the total decolonisation of UCT. The aim of this research was to understand the charge that UCT remained colonial, for the purpose of helping the institution chart an emancipatory course of action. The research therefore sought to investigate the exact nature of coloniality at UCT, as well as offer some practical suggestions for it to overcome the problem. In contrast to many research projects in this field, this investigation was conducted from the paradigm of critical realism, meaning that an objective and holistic problem analysis was attempted, with the hope of it leading to a more coherent and unifying change strategy. The research was designed as a single organisational case study, with data for the research coming mainly from open source documentary data. To augment the documentary data, a series of interviews with members of the university community was also conducted. Documentary data included official university publications, video and audio material, minutes of meetings and other material which related to the protests and to the call for decolonisation. The interviews comprised seven unstructured interviews; two with senior executives, one with a recently retired professor and four with students. The qualitative data analysis drew on recognised methods of documentary analysis, including textual analysis and critical discourse analysis. Using the lens of social realism, the central focus of the analysis was reaching an understanding of the dynamics between Structure and Agency, where Structure refers to the historically established cultural and material structure and Agency the actions of the people in response to it. The first of two key findings that were made was that the legacy of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past persists on campus, in the form of the cognitive and emotional pressure that it places on black students, thereby adversely affecting the exercise of Agency. Whereas social and economic deprivation can be quantified, and structurally addressed, the research found that the emotional and cognitive effects on Agency remain more complex and worthy of greater attention. Theorising such complexity as Student Secureness, the research goes on to identify practical approaches to ameliorate the effects of this form of coloniality. The second important outcome of the study was confirming that coloniality continued to be felt in the cultural and intellectual plane - which manifested in the form of Eurocentrism in the curriculum, the domain of research as well as in the classroom and campus milieu. Going beyond this however, and in applying a social realism lens, the study infers a further and novel causal structure termed Intellectual and Cultural Solipsism (ICS). ICS is theorised as a more complex and broader explanation of coloniality, which transcends race and nationality. It is theorised as a condition in which the agents, being colonially conditioned, are unable to make sense of knowledge that emanates from epistemic pathways outside of their ingrained sensemaking faculties, thereby resulting in a constricted reflexivity and the formulation of an unproductive agentic stance and leading eventually to organisational stasis and socio-cultural schism. In addressing the problem of ICS, the thesis argues for the conceptualisation of an expanded institutional identity that can generate broad commitment and institutional cohesion. A transcendent, globally relevant African identity is proposed, built on the common legacy of colonialism and the goal of an emancipated Africa, to which the entire university community can commit to, and to which the entire academic project can be directed.
Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, 2022
In this commentary, the author presents an argument for embracing a critical southern paradigm and framework for a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) that advances decoloniality, social justice, and conscientisation. The kind of scholarship that is argued for in this paper proposes a SoTL that goes beyond the recognition of classrooms as sites of inquiry and teaching, but a SoTL that is generative, context responsive, carries moral and pedagogical imperatives, and can influence institutional and societal change. This commentary draws on the experiences of a Dean of Faculty through self-reflexive qualitative impressions. She frames her personal experience of implementing a School-Based Learning placement approach within a theoretical discussion of agency, conscientisation, and transformative learning. Freire (1990), assist us to meaningfully and actively participate in changing the reality by problematising and contextualising the social and political locations in which teaching and learning occur. Research in transformative educational experiences and critical pedagogical theory has been rehearsed in literature over the years. In particular, Freirean pedagogies have been documented by educational scholars as they have been concerned with pedagogical practices that promote banking and systemic constrictions that limit the development of humanistic approaches (Salazar, 2013). Freire (1990) argued that people are in the world, with the world, and with each other, while contemplating restlessly and impatiently the contradictions, ambiguities, and inequalities in society. Therefore, education must assist in enabling inquiry and thinking that is critical in the quest for problem posing and problem solving.
Doing justice to social justice in South African higher education
Perspectives in Education, 2011
This paper attempts to develop a conceptualisation of social justice in higher education based on a close reading of the current literature in the field. An important assumption we make is that higher education is a valuable mechanism for social justice. We set the literature against policy documents that detail South African aspirations with regard to the achievement of social justice goals. Our aim is to stimulate debate on and engagement with issues of social justice in the local and global context that continues to manifest increasing socio-economic injustices. We argue that human liberation from global social injustice is intertwined at the individual and collective level and that it requires a collective human agency inherent in the radical tradition of social justice, which exhibits impressive credentials for facilitating the achievement of social justice.
Education in post-apartheid South Africa - A limited approach to social justice and redress
The issue of social justice, with Rawls (1971) theory of justice in particular, underlies this thesis. It is introduced and illustrated within the context of education in post-apartheid South Africa, together with aspects such as Bourdieu’s (1997) social and cultural capital, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses and the anti-colonial framework. Through the findings collected in five South African high schools of various socioeconomic, cultural and racial background, located in the province KwaZulu-Natal, this thesis focus on the ways in which South African schools have addressed issues of difference and inequality inherited from their apartheid past. Moreover, the thesis looks into the value of various cultures and knowledge traditions as perceived by the learners, teachers and principals participating in this study. The research employs a mixed-method research strategy, which has integrated both qualitative and quantitative research methods through interviews, focus groups, observations and questionnaires. It examines the extent to which there is an acknowledgement of different knowledge and cultural backgrounds within current educational policy and practice. The thesis argues that the current approach to social justice and redress is limited by a narrow interpretation of the country’s social inequalities.
This article concerns itself with socially just pedagogies in South African higher education. It outlines key elements of new materialist and socio-materialist views on education, and how these views portray knowledge and learning. It briefly outlines what socially just pedagogies in higher education might mean within this worldview. The data on which the study is based comprise interview transcripts with ten lecturers at each of two higher education institutions one historically advantaged and one historically disadvantaged, in the South African historical and political context. The transcripts are discussed as an encounter between the author and the data, with an emphasis on those elements that produce and affective reaction. Institutional influence is discussed in relation to assemblages including: dimensions of space, time, discourse on teaching and learning, and material artefacts. The article concludes with a consideration of what agency, responsibility and freedom might entail under these conditions.
International Journal of Educational Development, 2009
The research team is developing case studies at three South African universities selected for their diverse historical trajectories of apartheid dis/advantage, to include an historically white, A B S T R A C T This paper reports on a research project investigating the role of universities in South Africa in contributing to poverty reduction through the quality of their professional education programmes. The focus here is on theorising and the early operationalisation of multi-layered, multi-dimensional transformation based on ideas from Amartya Sen's capability approach. Key features of a professionalism oriented to public service, which in South Africa must mean the needs and lives of the poor, are outlined. These features include: the demand from justice; the expansion of the comprehensive capabilities both of the poor and professional capability formation to be able to act in 'pro-poor' ways; and, praxis pedagogies which shape this connected process. This theorisation is then tentatively operationalised in a process of selecting transformation dimensions. ß
THE EDUCATION CRISIS AND THE STRUGGLE TO ACHIEVE QUALITY PUBLIC EDUCATION IN SOUTH AFRICA
This is a transcript of the Strini Moodley Memorial Lecture organised by the Umtapo Centre and delivered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on the 22nd of May, 2015. I was asked to speak to the theme of education and to acknowledge the prodigious legacy to educational praxis of two other close comrades who passed away recently, Professor Mbulelo Mzamane, an Umtapo Board member, and Professor Neville Alexander, an Umtapo patron. The lecture begins by addressing the appalling xenophobic violence that occurred in the city of Durban before discussing some of the egregious problems in education, youth struggles and what matters toward changing the education system. It is easy to become despondent about the state of education when we read about practices such as unions selling teacher and principal posts, rampant cronyism, the dismal state of infrastructure and facilities in our schools and the abysmal performance of our learners in international benchmark tests. Over two decades since the first democratic elections in South Africa, the combined weight of apartheid’s legacy exacerbated by neo-liberal policies over the past twenty years has meant that the promise of a quality public education system remains a chimera. While a mélange of new official policies on every conceivable aspect of education exists and racially based laws have been removed from the statutes, the education system as a whole reflects and reproduces the wider inequalities in society. Above all we need to understand that education is embedded in social class relations and largely reflects, reinforces and reproduces the inequalities in a racial capitalist society. This does not mean that resistance and counter-hegemonic efforts are fruitless, but that in doing so we must be cognisant of the combined impact of social class, gender and a racist history. A bland consensus-seeking constitutionalism often serves as a barrier to social analysis and the assumptions it makes about rights. Sixteen campaigning issues to turn public education around are identified, necessary to revive the ideas, strategies and passions that informed the struggles against apartheid education in line with Alexander’s view as expressed in his essay, ‘Some are more equal than others’, that “it is no longer disputed that in education, as in every other major sphere of society, the interests and the ideas of the ruling class(es) and ruling strata are the dominant ones. They tend to shape and to limit the processes and practices that are possible at any given time. Of course, we know, from both theory and practice, that particularly in the sphere of education, the control of the rulers is not absolute: counter-hegemonic practices and mobilisations are possible. They are the lifeblood of struggle …”