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ICAP is a framework that classifies learning processes based on students' explicit behaviors. The framework is developed for testing the hypothesis that interactive exercises are better than constructive exercises, and active exercises are better than the passive exercises for higher cognitive engagement and better learning outcomes. The ICAP Framework is intended to assist researchers, instruction designers and instructors in determining the activities appropriate for the aimed research and teaching. This study aims to evaluate articles based on or supported by the ICAP Framework from various aspects. In the study, employing the descriptive survey method, data collection was conducted through document analysis, while content analysis was utilized to analyze the data. The 71 articles reviewed within the study's scope were examined through the "data collection form" developed by the authors. In this context, the articles' general and methodological characteristics and themes and the findings related to ICAP contexts are presented. As a result of the research, no study regarding the ICAP Framework was conducted in Turkey. It was revealed that most of the studies, which have increased in number since 2017 in various countries, utilize the ICAP framework at the analytical level or create models-modules and develop toolsscales based on the ICAP Framework. Additionally, it was observed that mostly undergraduate and K12 students were studied in face-to-face education, with social sciences as the leading disciplinary field and teaching-learning approaches and design-development-evaluation as the most frequently studied topics, while in studies in which mixed and qualitative methods were the leading methods, exploratory and experimental approaches were more preferred. In line with these results, recommendations are presented to contribute to the field.

Background: Formative assessment is an essential element for improving teaching and learning in the classroom. During the COVID-19 pandemic and national lockdown, educators were confronted with the need to adapt to online assessment. South African educators also experienced challenges that made online formative assessment difficult. Aim: This study explores the experiences of intermediate-phase educators using online tools to enact formative assessment in the teaching and learning of social sciences. This research included a narrow spectrum of socioeconomically diverse schools. Setting: Data were obtained through interviews with a sample of six diverse intermediate-phase educators teaching social sciences from one district in the Gauteng North province. Methods: This research adopted a generic qualitative approach. Themes were derived from the data and five subthemes were identified to report the findings. Results: The results of this study identified factors that prevented the implementation of online formative assessment in the intermediate phase. The data also identified online tools that educators used for online assessment in their classrooms and some barriers. These barriers hindered the participants' ability to provide an interactive and stimulating learning experience for their students. Conclusion: Despite challenges, which included a lack of training and support, as well a lack of trust in their abilities, the participants demonstrated a willingness to incorporate technology in their teaching and assessment. The study highlights the need for ongoing professional development and improved infrastructure and accessibility to support the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in education. Contribution: Based on educators' perceived willingness to make use of ICTs for formative assessments, and their ability to even identify some useful tools themselves, findings contribute to the field of policy implementation related to teaching with technology at this level.

The supervision and production of a PhD thesis often presents a potentially interesting tension between PhDs as conforming to disciplinary epistemologies and PhDs as breaking epistemological boundaries. No academic discipline has been left untouched by decolonial thinking in the South African university space since the eruption of radicalized student protest movements in 2015. The Rhodes Must Fall student protest movement, which quickly morphed into Fees Must Fall, precipitated a new urgency to decolonize the university curriculum in post-apartheid South Africa. A new interdisciplinary conversation in the humanities and social sciences began to emerge which challenged established orthodoxies in favour of de-Westernizing, decolonizing and re-mooring epistemological and pedagogic practices away from Eurocentrism. Whether and how that theoretical ferment filtered into postgraduate students' theses, however, remains to be established. This article deploys a decolonial theoretical framework to explore the tension between epistemic conformity and boundary transgressing in journalism studies by analysing reference lists of PhD theses submitted at three South African Universities three years after the protest movement Rhodes Must Fall. With specific focus on media and journalism studies as a discipline, this article argues that the PhD process represents a site for potential epistemic disobedience and disciplinary border-jumping, and for challenging the canonical insularity of Western theory in journalism studies. The findings appear to disconfirm the thesis that decolonial rhetoric has had a material influence so far on the media studies curriculum, as reflected in reference lists of cited works in their dissertations.

The future of South Africa's economic growth rests on addressing critical scarce-skills labour shortages. Matriculants are called on to break the cycle of poverty by entering the scarce-skills workforce. The demonstration of a high level of mathematics, science, and technology competency is viewed as a gateway towards achieving this goal. The South African Department of Basic Education has invested much effort towards improving mathematics, science and technology competencies among learners by implementing various mathematics improvement strategies in public schools. The existing research, however, shows that these initiatives have yielded little success among learners from impoverished schooling contexts. Reasons for this limitation were explored by means of the systematic review reported on in this paper. The review focused on literature relating to mathematics improvement strategies in public schools implemented by the South African Department of Basic Education. The limitations of these initiatives were critically evaluated and gaps in various documented strategies were identified. The findings highlight an evident need for a shift in focus of future interventions if the national goal to address scarce-skills labour demands through educating the impoverished South African youth is to be successfully realised. Suggestions are offered on how this change might happen.

In this article we discuss a multiple case study, which investigates the frames of mind on sustainability of six Grade Nine Natural Sciences and Social Sciences teachers at three different urban schools in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The article consists of a theoretical and empirical component. Regarding the former, we firstly discuss contestations around sustainability as a policy, and secondly what sustainability as a frame of mind entails. This is followed by the empirical component, which enabled us to: firstly, determine the existing frames of mind of teachers concerning sustainability; and secondly, explore implications of viewing sustainability as a frame of mind for education. In conclusion, we open up possibilities that sustainability as a frame of mind has for taking us beyond the discourse that informed the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UN-DESD).

Employing empathetic-reflective-dialogical restorying as a teaching-learning strategy, pre-service teachers situated in two different geographical contexts, namely, South Africa and Norway, engaged in self-dialogue, self-narrative and in a Community in Conversation. Using Adobe Connect, together, they participated in a Community in Dialogue. By using this teaching-learning strategy in combination with a real-time, web conferencing app, this small-scale research project found that it is possible to facilitate online learning across geographical boundaries. Crossing geographical and contextual boundaries can possibly contribute to restorying pre-service teachers' understandings of what constitutes best practice in teaching. It can also lead to the emergence of further collaborative initiatives for negotiating entrenched positions with regard to other aspects of education and pursuing restorying for transformation. The participants were encouraged, empowered and energised by the collaborative engagement. The two groups of pre-service teachers found one another in their common humanity, in their both being English second language speakers, and in their common goal to teach well and to be responsible to their learners in their respective contexts. Encouraging reflective and reflexive praxis has the potential to be transformatory for the classroom.

Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) are referred to differently in different contexts and circumstances. Related conceptions include 'Traditional Knowledge Systems' (TKS), 'Endogenous Knowledge Systems' (EKS) and 'Classical Knowledge Systems' (CKS). A focus on IKS implies an archaeology and re-appropriation of those knowledges that were not allowed to 'be', to enhance our human understanding, and develop, protect, and promote them. Most exigent in a decolonised context is the transformative challenge of developing appropriate protocols, codes of conduct, and terms for any dialogue and integration. This paper argues that at a systems level, IKS demands: establishing an ethically sound and ecologically constituted way of thinking; affirming the multiplicity of worlds and forms of life; creating a shared paradigm shift; self-reflexive praxis; becoming critical explorers of human and societal possibilities; establishing new evaluation and appraisal criteria; and a transformation to new futures. Such a transformation recognises cognitive justice as a plurality of ways of knowing.

This is a theoretical paper that addresses the challenge of educational access to the Humanities and Social Sciences. It plots a theoretical quest to develop an explicit pedagogy to give "disadvantaged" students in the Humanities ways of working successfully with texts. In doing so it draws on Bernstein, Moore and Maton's work to theorize the nature of knowledge in the Humanities, and also on Brandom's analysis of inferential reasoning. It uses elements of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to analyse student texts. The empirical work reported on here is work-in-progress and represents no more than an indication of the approach advocated. The approach is illustrated by examples from comprehension exercises designed to promote students' inferential reasoning. Selected findings are presented to illustrate the extent of the challenge entailed in facilitating access to Humanities texts. The paper concludes by suggesting that mastery of ways of working with texts in the Humanities entails attending to the acquisition of both recognition and realization rules for reading and writing.

This article argues that poetry is an act of meditation, improvisation and exploration, and urgency is what guides the writer into (and through) the poetic journey. In the light of this, this article illustrates the features of a workshop that was designed to guide social and human scientists in the delicate process of turning raw data into poems. One of the chief objectives of the decolonial project is to bridge the gap between Westernised academia ("The Ivory Tower") and communities where research is conducted, and this article aims to show how poetic inquiry is a fitting research methodology that can serve this purpose. Through a description of the workshop process and specific poems that emerged from it, it suggests that poetic inquiry is an innovative and effective research methodology for social and human scientists engaged in the transformation of conventional knowledge production.

There is a dearth of research on primary school Geography in South Africa. With no Annual National Assessments (ANAs) being done in the subject, little is known about the quality of geographical learning and teaching in South African primary schools. This article begins to address this shortcoming. More specifically, it responds to the need for empirical research on Geography in primary schooling in the developing-world context of South Africa, where large scale education transformation has taken place since 1994. An overview of the national school system is given followed by a discussion of the major inefficiency characterising the South African school system, namely the low quality of learning and teaching in many schools. Our main contention is that the focus of research has been on understanding and addressing systemic factors associated with low learning outcomes in literacy and numeracy, with little attention being paid to Geography. Drawing on the findings of an exploratory qualitative study using semi-structured interviews, we provide tentative insights into primary Geography from the perspective of teachers. We conclude with some propositions for a future research agenda.

This paper examines two influential views within the sociology of knowledge, specifically in literature examining relationships between knowledge, curriculum, and social justice, located in the South African context of extreme inequality and poverty. The first emphasizes the role of disciplines in creating criteria of powerful knowledge, arguing that knowledge must be evidence-based, generalizable, and revisable. The second argues for the importance of the social origins of knowledge for reasons both of strengthening knowledge and creating curricula that foster confidence in young scholars. We then draw on what we see as the strongest claims of each view and explore the value they bring to thinking about knowledge and curriculum debates raised by community of practitioners within three disciplines in the social science -- economics, education studies, and history. Our brief consideration of these disciplines reveals that different disciplines face specific challenges which transverse, in different ways, the polarity which characterizes the debate so far. Strong aspects of each view feature in the development of each of the three disciplines, some in negative ways. This is an interesting finding, which demonstrates that principled debates couched in epistemological terms, when applied to specific disciplines, do not remain as a simple binary.

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of highly cited articles published in the Web of Science category "Education and Educational Research" in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). A total of 2091 journal articles published in this category and cited more than 100 times up to the end of the year 2016 were retrieved as highly cited articles. Distributions of highly cited articles per publication year, journals, institutions and countries were analysed, as well as the citation life cycle of the top-cited articles. The USA, its institutions and researchers are the absolute leaders in the category of Education and Educational Research according to the results of the conducted analysis.

This paper explores how the foundation phase subject area of "life skills" is being offered at (n= 9) higher education institutions (HEIs) in South Africa. The aim of the study, about which we report, was to identify similarities and differences in the curricula offered at these institutions and to establish the extent to which the different modules attend to the various aspects of life skills according to the most recent national curriculum. We conducted semi-structured interviews with participants who teach the subject at universities and we also analysed curriculum documents. We worked with a purposive sample of 9 respondents from the respective universities. The study found that although universities use the CAPS (national curriculum) document as guideline for structuring their curricula in teacher education programmes, some participants indicated that they follow an integrated approach, thereby implying that the different components of the school curriculum as outlined in the CAPS document are not specifically accommodated within their programmes. An additional finding was that there is a vast difference in the range of credits allocated to the various aspects of life skills that may restrict social mobility between various HEIs.

According to the South African curriculum, two of the aims of learning history are to learn the process of historical enquiry and to understand historical concepts such as the use of historical sources and examining evidence. This paper explores how a sample of seven social science South African textbooks uses historical sources to enable learners to learn the process of historical enquiry. The findings show that there were no primary sources presented in the Grade 3-6 textbooks, although there were many generic pictures and texts. There is an increase in the number and use of sources in the Grade 7 to Grade 9 textbooks, but issues of contextualisation and lack of provenance remain a challenge to the process of developing historical thinking. 'Pseudo sources' (a picture or text recreated to look like a primary source) and generic sources of information do not support historical thinking. The multi-perspective approach, which means understanding the diverse ways of interpreting the same event, is poorly developed in the lower grade textbooks but became more evident in the Grade 9 books. Thus, specialised procedural knowledge is only introduced to learners in Grade 9, suggesting that the primary school textbooks analysed in this study are not fully supporting the aims of the official history curriculum.

International studies reveal that students have more freedom, as well as unstructured and unsupervised time, which makes them susceptible to problematic internet use (PIU). Although students are a risk group for PIU, no evidence of local research on internet use among students could be identified. This article reports on a study on the nature and impact of internet use among students at a tertiary institution. A quantitative research approach was adopted and a survey with a group-administered questionnaire was conducted with 295 second-year students (between 18 and 25 years) registered for a module in a basic social science. Respondents were recruited through convenience sampling. The nature of internet use was explored with reference to internet platforms, reasons for internet use, devices for connecting to the internet, and the locations where respondents access the internet. The impact of internet use was explored through eight constructs adopted from two screening instruments in the public domain, i.e. the Internet-Related Addictive Behaviour Inventory and the Problematic Internet Use Questionnaire. The research results were calculated by means of descriptive and association statistics, specifically the chi-square and Fisher's exact tests. Ethical considerations, such as informed consent and voluntary participation, were observed. The research results revealed that the respondents preferred email and chatting as internet platforms, while they used the internet mostly for extrinsic reasons, such as for assignments and socialising. Online activities occurred mostly on campus and at home during the early evenings via mobile phones or laptops. The respondents scored relatively low on the constructs measuring PIU. However, two constructs 'escape from problems' and 'loss of control' presented with markedly higher scores and could be flagged as potential risk areas. Furthermore, association statistics indicated a statistically significant difference of some constructs with regard to gender and the romantic relationship status of respondents, which could be considered in the provision of student support services. The development and evaluation of evidence-based interventions for the prevention, treatment and management of PIU are recommended.

Designing assessment rubrics has become an important pedagogical practice for lecturers in the Wits School of Education (WsoE) in the recognition of writing as a valuable tool for teaching and learning across disciplines. This paper describes and reflects on the process of adapting the SOLO taxonomy (Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes) devised by Biggs and Collis (1982) into assessment criteria for two assessment tasks in Social Science Methodology and Inclusive Education (Learning Support 1) courses. Through a collaborative relationship between the course presenter (Rembach1) and the WSoE teaching and learning advisor (Dison) over a four-year period, a number of rubrics based on the SOLO taxonomy were created, revised and refined for specific tasks in order to determine how students were responding to the set tasks at different levels of cognition. The paper demonstrates several learning benefits that emerged from the process of adapting the SOLO taxonomy for different task requirements, such as better scaffolding of tasks, enhanced student learning, collaborative professional development and better modelling. Given the diverse student population in the School of Education, there is a strong need to establish a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how course and assessment tasks influence student learning. As assessment plays a fundamental role in shaping student learning in a course (Biggs, 2011), we need to understand how it can contribute meaningfully to promoting higher order thinking outcomes in education courses. The paper illustrates the central role of assessment criteria in strengthening the relationship between lecturer and student development in designing assessments for these two courses in the Wits School of Education.

This article reports on the results of a statistical analysis of the weekly working hours of academics in a Faculty of Human and Social Sciences at a South African university. The aim was to quantify, analyse and compare the workload of academic staff. Seventy-five academics self-reported on their workload by completing the workload measuring instrument. The results indicated that there were no statistically significant differences in the total working hours per week in terms of gender, schools, academic qualifications and positions. However, there were statistically significant differences in the hours spent performing core academic activities such as teaching and learning, administration and management, research and postgraduate supervision, and community engagement and services to the scholarly community. The results indicated inequalities in the workload allocation of academic staff, with some staff members being underutilized and others significantly over worked.

Purpose: This paper aims to highlight the value of research contributions that have focused on making visible the knowledge of those historically excluded from formal knowledge-making. It identifies key bodies of theory that have grounded these analyses, and questions whether we can fully do justice to this project if we continue to rely on established "canons" of social science theory. Design/methodology/approach: The article reviews research contributions to Researching Work and Learning conferences over the past decade, aimed at identifying those who have been invisible as makers of knowledge. It then considers a body of critique that our dominant epistemologies within the social sciences are rooted in unequal global and local power relations. Findings: In the literature on workplace learning, a few theoretical paradigms forged in the global north seem to predominate. The article concludes that we need to re-centre our sources of knowledge-making to what Homi Bhabha has called an "ex-centric" site, if we are to develop more inclusive theorizations of work and learning, and more socially just ways of working and learning in the future. Originality/value: The article invites researchers to reflect critically on their use of theory, and to be more proactive in developing theories with an angle of vision outside of the geo-political centre, so as to better understand the diversity of work and learning globally.

The purpose of this study was to explore and describe the experiences of vulnerable learners from child-headed households through an ecological systems model that includes their homes, community, and school. Special emphasis was given to the role of school psychologists as change agents within the context of schools. This qualitative study included a sample of 98 5th to 7th grade learners in a vulnerable school. Data were collected through individual interviews, focus groups, and a questionnaire with incomplete sentences. The findings provide a vivid description of their living conditions, changing roles, community fears, and school experiences which inevitably affect their psychological well-being and propagate the need for effective school psychological services. Against all odds, the vulnerable school in this study reflects how it can make a positive difference in the lives of the learners simply through the display of love, attention, and care. Based on the findings several lessons, transcending national boundaries, are presented for school psychologists to be successful in assisting learners from child-headed households in vulnerable schools.

The ?"biopsychosocial model"? is the education paradigm of knowledge that is expected to inform medical practice. Yet in medical education, medical science is the gold standard. Social science barely features in the formal curriculum, and when it does, it is considered best done through experiential learning. This paper analyses "?the social?" through the issue of language and culture following medical and dental student exposure to experiential learning in a primary health care setting. Using qualitative accounts set out in student reflections, it explores the insights they gain from their experience and the implications these have for medical education and professional knowledge. The evidence suggests that when social issues are not grounded in social scientific theory (through formal education) they are incorporated idiosyncratically into learning and, more often than not, are relegated to the bottom of the medical knowledge value chain. This weak or absent grounding in social science carries major implications for the ability of medical education systems to create skilled clinicians capable of working with the biological, psychological and social complex that is individual and collective health in the contemporary world.

A survey was conducted to analyse perceived stress, coping resources and life satisfaction among university students at an institution of higher learning. Seventy-three students randomly selected from third year Social Sciences class participated in the study. A self-report questionnaire was administered to the participants. The results showed that stress was pervasive among university students. The main factors that affected the students were personal problems, academic problems, relationships and environmental problems. Students mainly relied on emotion-focused and avoidance-oriented coping strategies. They were moderately satisfied with life at university. Future research with a more representative sample should be conducted to get generalisable findings. (Contains 3 tables.)

Drawing on the work of Bernstein and Maton and using a case-study approach, this study explores the formation of an undergraduate history curriculum at the University of Cape Town. This article focuses on two periods of curriculum formation referred to as history as canon and history as social science. With respect to these two curriculum periods the findings reveal the privileging of different kinds of historical educational knowledge, as well as the promotion of different student identities. The article also argues for the need for a more fine-grained conceptual framework for the study of knowledge and curriculum in higher education. The article concludes by highlighting the importance of this kind of research as pressure for curriculum reform intensifies in South Africa. (Contains 2 figures and 1 table.)

The following lines of arguments against the metrics of journal articles is developed: (1) Textual output should no longer be main valued output; (2) Digitalization enables other ways of advancing knowledge; (3) Measures by journal article favours the disciplines of Natural Science and Engineering (NSE) and moulds other disciplines of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) to their values and modes of working; (4) Bibliometrics based on citations should be modified by webmetrics; (5) Even within textual output, article writing is over-compensated compared to editing and reviewing and conference convening; (6) Incentives for textual output disregard output in other media; (7) The current incentives devalue output for public enlightment. As the writer is in South Africa, the main policy references and recommendations relate to the South African Higher Education system. This activity of writing a journal article against journal articles may at first seem dubious to those habituated to this prime measure of the academic career, but the changing media of publication make it worthwhile to challenge the current scenario in South African Higher Education. (Contains 1 note.)

This paper is drawn from a longitudinal case study in which the authors have tracked the progress of 20 Social Science students over the course of their undergraduate degrees at a historically "white" South African university. The students are all from disadvantaged educational backgrounds and/or speakers of English as a second language. The paper draws on post-structuralist and post-colonial theory to trace the process by which students position and reposition themselves in relation to disciplinary discourses over the course of their senior years. The students both absorb and resist the values of their disciplines. The authors argue that the process of writing in their disciplines is also a process of working out their own identities as they try to reconcile their home discourses with those of the institution and their peers, or in some cases, confirm or shed their home identities. (Contains 2 notes.)

This study describes the results of a survey and a description of instructional technologies in place in the social sciences in South African Universities. Lecturers in the social sciences reported a well-established practice of information and communication technologies (ICTs) use for general purposes (although frequent use tended to be for email and searching the Internet). They had a high self-efficacy in terms of using ICTs both generally and for teaching and learning, and a high enthusiasm for the use of ICTs for teaching and learning. Half the lecturers had started using ICTs recently with the introduction of learning management systems (LMSs) whereas the other half had established practices that preceded the mainstreaming of LMSs across universities. Only about a quarter of the respondents felt able to develop and update ICTs themselves which indicates that support is a necessary part of teaching with technology. In terms of different types of use the focus was on putting content on the web and course administration. Use of ICTs for teaching of skills (whether information literacy, problem solving or critical thinking) was infrequent. There were different types of ICT use across the different sub-disciplines. Lecturers reported factors which constrained their use of ICTs for teaching and learning, such as inadequate technology, pedagogical issues (e.g. plagiarism), and students opting out of lectures when materials were available online. It is argued that user studies in are relevant to the future delivery of educational material, in terms of removing barriers to use and targeting training and supportive activities. (Contains 1 table and 8 figures.)

The context of this research is an academic writing course for first-year Social Science students on a four-year extended curriculum at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. This course traditionally uses written formative feedback on drafts of students' assignments and the lecturers were frustrated by the students' negative, minimal responses to the extensive advice they were offering. Drawing from a wide range of perspectives and theories, one of the lecturers explored the reasons for the students' reactions and planned a curricular intervention to address them. A series of classes raised students' awareness of assessment issues, introducing some basic principles of assessment which were then applied in a peer assessment task. The data emerging suggest that students' school-based understandings of assessment were reframed and that this, in turn, had an impact on how they made sense of the writing process in a new academic context. This study also reframed the lecturers' notions of the "self-evident" value of written formative feedback on students' assignments--to be effective it needs scaffolded mediation within the particular socio-cultural environment in which it is offered. Another outcome was the lecturers' critical interrogation of some of the pedagogical "orthodoxies" which commonly frame academic writing courses in South African universities, like Process Writing and Genre Theory's notion of feedback as "expert" advice offered to "novices". Formative feedback may be more useable if novice writers are trained to peer-apprentice each other, thereby becoming more "self-regulated" in the process.

The Carnegie Corporation found its first great manager in Frederick Paul Keppel (1875-1943). Keppel's career is important to historians of education because interwar Carnegie initiatives, articulated through the Corporation's Dominions and Colonies Fund and Teachers College, Columbia University, internationalised American educational theories and practices throughout the English-speaking world. Keppel's concept of "key men", prominent authorities influencing events in their home countries, was central to these endeavours. Both products and advocates of modernism, key men put their confidence in the natural and social sciences, in turn melded into the grand themes of their times; the British Imperial Mission, American Expansionism, and shared Anglo-Saxon racial identity. The preparatory nature of Keppel's life and work experiences are first explored. The article then surveys how the complex, yet remarkably informal, network of overseas key men were established. An examination of the Carnegie legacy offers some conclusions. (Contains 3 tables, 2 figures and 92 footnotes.)

Generation Y students (born after 1982) have developed a different set of attitudes and aptitudes as a result of growing up in an IT and media-rich environment. This article has two objectives: firstly to discuss the learning styles preferred by generation Y students in order to identify the effect of these preferences on tertiary education in South Africa, and secondly to discuss strategies that lecturers in the economic and management sciences faculty can employ to address these preferences. It was found that Generation Y students prefer team-work, structure, interactivity and image-rich environments. From an exploratory survey it was found that a vast number of students at South African tertiary institutions have been exposed to technology while growing up to such an extent that they can be classified as Generation Y students. A critical learning outcome approach in designing, delivering and assessing courses is suggested for interacting with Generation Y students in the classroom to address many of the preferences of Generation Y students. (Contains 5 figures and 3 tables.)

Universities in South Africa face the challenge of redressing past (and continuing) inequalities in higher education by increasing accessibility to previously (and currently) disadvantaged students. One means of doing so is through 'access' or 'bridging' programmes. This article explores successful students' perceptions of one such programme at the University of KwaZulu- Natal by means of qualitative focus group interviews. This retrospective evaluation of the programme explores students' perspectives on the extent to which the Access Programme (AP) has 'bridged the gap' between secondary and tertiary education as well as any potential negative outcomes generated by the programme, e.g. perceptions of stigma. Results indicate that (1) interviewed students generally perceived the programme as beneficial and legitimate in preparing them for their degree studies, (2) the racial homogeneity and the isolation of AP students from mainstream students have resulted in some negative outcomes such as perceptions of stigmatisation and inferiority and (3) students enrolled in the programme and the programme management may have quite different perceptions of the nature of the 'articulation gap' that the programme aims to address.

This study explores the usefulness of reflexive photography for qualitative research in the human and social sciences. The investigation was done in the context of how male academics construct their world in a university during transformation. A group of white, male academics in the human sciences were provided with a camera and were requested to take pictures of the most meaningful aspects of their work environment. Thereafter photo-elicitation interviews were conducted, transcribed and analysed. The study illustrates the usefulness of reflexive photography to determine human interpretation of interaction with the environment. Participants commented positively on and helped to identify the advantages and limitations of the technique. The research indicated that photographs have no intrinsic meaning but serve as "symbols" of meaning that participants explain during interviews. Content analysis, a second level of analysis that is based on the first level, is useful in some ways as indicated. (Contains 5 figures and 1 table.)

Sociology invites transformations among first year students which go through at least three distinct levels. At the conceptual level, three basic concepts, debunking, relativizing and system-relating, challenge public opinion modes of thinking. But students in this course go beyond explicit course examples and perform these notions in a more implicit way. While these shifts are predominantly cognitive, there are, in addition, important psychodynamic currents which underlie them. So, relativizing and the ethnographic perspective (following Gadamer) lead from angry, pathologizing projection to tolerant, theorizing empathy, from monsters to forbearance. System-relating (following Jung) entails a diminution of an inflated ego, a move from grandiose hubris to humility. Debunking and critical theory (following Fanon) relate to the change from victimhood to effectuality, from self-negation and self-negativity to initiative and positive self-identity. (Contains 1 table and 2 endnotes.)

Due to a poor module evaluation, mediocre student grades and a difficult teaching experience in lectures, the Data Analysis section of a first year core module, Research Methods for Social Sciences (RMSS), offered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, was completely revised. In order to review the effectiveness of these changes in terms of student learning, a wide range of formative and summative evaluation methods were implemented. These indicated that module revision had largely been successful, although a number of areas for further improvement were highlighted. An analysis of the nature of the feedback of each method emphasised the importance of using a multi-dimensional approach as a means of obtaining reliable, authentic and valid data. Based on the findings of the study a procedural framework for module evaluation that considers issues such as purpose, sources of information, timing, methods, resource availability, implementation, action and critical reflection, is proposed.

This article is an expansion of an earlier investigation that the authors undertook in the wake of the democratization process in South Africa while universities were struggling to redefine their aims, roles, and identities toward the end of the twentieth century. The authors' research commenced in 1994 as a genealogy, tracing individuals on an institution-by-institution basis and collecting information on courses taught in comparative education and related fields at South African universities. The conceptual framework of this paper is built around the concepts of embeddedness and representations of knowledge within institutional, national, and international contexts. A major point of departure is the notion of discourses as complex fields of speech and action in social arenas, which both act and are acted upon--discourses therefore form and reform academic fields of study to become products of processes of re-embedding. For this article, the authors chose comparative education as a discursive arena for seeking to make sense of how South African academic discourses, the character formation of disciplines, and their institutionalized forms took shape as a result of practices and ideas transposed from North America and Europe during the last half of the twentieth century. In their analysis of re-embedding processes, the authors drew strongly on the work of Wagner and Wittrock for identifying three kinds of reembedding: epistemic alliances that characterize the development of the social sciences in the Western university tradition, discourse coalitions among the educational subsystem and other social systems, and the mediation of the development of individual intellectuals and divergences of academic traditions through institutional discourses. In seeking to explicate the re-embedding processes that have developed, they contend that comparative education, as part of the social sciences arena, became embedded in academic and public discourses in South Africa through the development of different comparative education traditions as a result of different "epistemic alliances." These alliances were infused with and formed as a result of traditions assimilated from continental Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world (including North American traditions).(Contains 2 tables, 4 figures and 1 note.)

The past two decades has witnessed the mushrooming of Islamic schools in Europe, the United States and South Africa. Initially, these schools were concerned essentially with providing an Islamic ethos for learners. More recently, however, they have begun to focus on the process of Islamization. The Islamization project was initiated in the United States by Muslim academics including Isma'il al-Faruqi, Syed Husain Nasr and Fazlur Rahman as a response to the secularisation of Muslim society, including its educational insitutions. In essence Islamization means including Islamic disciplines in the curriculum, providing an Islamic perspective on issues in the syllabi and locating, where possible, secularized disciplines within the Islamic "weltanschauung." Six international conferences have been held to date at different locations in the Muslim World. The first five generated conceptual papers on the Islamic approach to knowledge and education and inspired academics to write research papers on their disciplines from an Islamic perspective. Most of these have been published in the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences. The three universities which were established to drive the process have had varying degrees of success. The sixth conference which was held in South Africa took the form of workshops where South African teachers and international academics were brought together to generate Islamised syllabi for the major school disciplines. This article attempts to explain the rationale for Islamic schools and their attempts at Islamization of disciplines. In my view, this is an important development in the context of demands for the revival of indigenous knowledge systems.

Discusses the proposal by South Africa's grant-making National Research Foundation (NRF) to introduce a ratings system for the humanities and social sciences comparable to that which pertains in the natural sciences. Welcomes this development and argues for full and open consultation with the research community regarding appropriate ratings criteria, offering examples of these fields' unique research practices. (EV)

Introduction: Acquired brain injuries (ABIs) form part of the caseload of occupational therapists treating adult clients with neurological conditions. One adjunct to treatment of the upper limb condition following ABI is splinting. Little is known about the occupational therapy splinting practices in this field. This study aimed to describe these practices within a South African context. Method: A quantitative, cross-sectional survey design was utilised. A convenience sample of occupational therapists from across South Africa completed a survey. The survey comprised of demographic factors; types of splints used; wear schedule regimens during the motor recovery phases and influencing factors. Data were analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences. Results: Fifty-two participants (n = 115) completed the survey, representing a 45.2% response rate. Participants (52.9% (n = 27) indicated that splints are provided to 25% of clients with ABI. Splints are used to maintain soft tissue length and to ensure correct biomechanical alignment. Conclusions: Splinting for clients with ABI in South Africa is used as a preventative and maintenance approach. Failing more high-level evidence to support the use of splints for clients with ABI, therapists should consider the client-, therapist- and environment-related factors when determining the suitability and appropriateness of splinting clients with ABI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different forms of care work are essential for the practice of anthropology in South Africa. In this biographical commentary, I describe how I enacted care work in my anthropological practice. I suggest that what is good about anthropology is its potential to be attentive to the multiple ways in which care work is enacted by us as anthropologists, as teachers of the discipline, as well as by our interlocutors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]