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This introductory paper provides the background to the Cape Town Statement on Characteristic Elements of a Lifelong Learning Higher Education Institution that appears in this Journal. It describes the journey of a network of adult educators and academics from the North, South, East and West through contested terrain from Hamburg, to Paris, Mumbai and Cape Town in 2000. At a conference held in Cape Town in October 2000, the delegates concluded that there were six essential characteristics of a higher education lifelong learning institution. This paper reviews the essential elements of these characteristics and comments on the journey of their development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of educational mobilities on the lives of university students from an urban working-class township in South Africa. In highly unequal urban contexts, these mobilities provide access to valuable material resources and engender subjective transformations that facilitate access to higher education spaces. Based on fieldwork with students from Khayelitsha, a black urban township in Cape Town, it argues that these mobilities are shaped histories of racial segregation, demands of globalizing labour markets, and students' personal readings of changing urban environments. Drawing on the concept of mobility capital, the paper suggests that even as these movements enable access to educational opportunities, they do not automatically generate the forms of capital required for social mobility. While students used mobilities to access higher education, they struggled to develop the social networks, embodied dispositions, language skills and cultural competencies that would provide social advantage. Rather, their experiences on campus reveal how mobility capital is structured by material and symbolic inequalities, which are frequently alienating and exclusionary. Finally, the paper emphasizes the importance of everyday movements and attachments between home and university spaces to the formation of student identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South African universities are required by the Language Policy for Higher Education adopted by the government on 6 November 2002 to implement multilingualism in their learning and teaching programmes. Multilingualism is recommended in this policy as a means to ensure equity of access and success in higher education, in contrast to past colonial and apartheid education policies that left a legacy of inequality, exclusion and failure. The implementation of this policy requires that universities develop language policies that clearly show how multilingualism will be promoted in their institutional environment and in their teaching and learning programmes. Whereas most universities have thus far developed language policies that indicate how multilingualism will be promoted in general communication and environment, the implementation of multilingualism in teaching and learning programmes seems to pose a serious challenge. The University of Cape Town has during the past few years developed its language policy and plan with the aim of implementing multilingualism in its environment and in learning and teaching programmes. The aim of this paper is to discuss the university's experience in this regard and to highlight the lessons for implementing a university language policy that may be drawn from this experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applies standard econometric techniques to evaluate the success of the University of Cape Town's Principles of Economics development course. High failure rate of students in South African mainstream first year economics courses; Need for strategy that focuses on various facets of learning economics; Application of the production function approach to the economic development programmes.

The article discusses the history of Indians in Cape Town, South Africa and the Cape Province in relation to higher education policy under South Africa's apartheid regime. Topics include the impact of South Africa's Extension of University Act of 1959, the ethnic identity of Indians in the Cape region, the attendance of Cape Indians at the University College for Indians at Salisbury Island in Durban, South Africa. The experiences of Indians at the University of Cape Town are noted.

The aim of the Numeracy Centre at the University of Cape Town is to develop students' quantitative literacy (QL) in a manner consistent with their programmes of study and intended roles in the community. Our theoretical perspective on the nature of QL is in line with that of the New Literacies Studies and sees academic QL as practices in different academic disciplinary contexts. This means that for us the ideal curriculum structure for developing QL would fully integrate it into the teaching of the disciplines. This is in practice not achievable in most cases, especially since many students do not have the necessary foundations of mathematical and statistical knowledge and skills. The unavoidable deviation from the ideal curriculum structure presents challenges to the design of QL interventions. Two illustrative examples which display different degrees of separation from the disciplinary teaching are described and discussed. This discussion is based on lecturers' reflections on the teaching experience and on student evaluations. The 'stand-alone' QL course for Humanities and Law students, which uses a context-based approach, is the least integrated with the disciplinary curriculum, and presents challenges in terms of tensions in the classroom between the contexts and the mathematical and statistical content, as well as challenges in terms of student motivation. The QL intervention for medical students is more closely integrated into the medical curriculum and presents fewer challenges. Both interventions are intended to provide 'foundations' in terms of QL and suffer from difficulties in providing students with authentic motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]