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Multilingual speakers' languaging practices are undervalued and problematised in formal teaching and learning spaces in higher education. The environment has legitimised monolingualism as the only acceptable practice, hence students often lack the confidence to recruit their full linguistic repertoires. In the third and fourth years of their Occupational Therapy studies, many African students faced challenges due to socio-historic-political factors that put them at risk of failure. These challenges were addressed in academic support tutorial spaces using pedagogical translanguaging. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the use of translanguaging as a socially just strategy, its affordances, and its challenges. This paper utilises data from a case study within a larger project aiming to describe the use of translanguaging in multilingual teaching and learning settings at a historically White university in South Africa. The case study comprised of eight African students. Linguistic ethnography and Moment analysis were employed. Pedagogical translanguaging and humour were used to create a space conducive to collaborative learning and co-construction of knowledge that granted epistemic access to occupational therapy discourse. Respect and dignity were fundamental in fostering cohesion, improving confidence, enacting speaking rights, and creating a sense of belonging among students who often felt alienated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The paper aims to shed light on the particularities of two national liberation movements - turned political parties and how they embraced their new role after the liberation struggle had ended and majority rule had been obtained. South Africa's ANC and Zimbabwe's ZANU-PF are analyzed in an attempt to ultimately underline why democracy was approached distinctively by the too. We also bring some arguments as to why South Africa failed to stop ZANU-PF's descent into autocracy, amidst internal and international pressures to intervene. After a short historical background of the two NLMs, we discuss the links between them, the particular political and social conditions which shaped their behaviours and the commonalities and differences in said behaviours. We argue that, as long as the democratic principles identified with ZANU-PF's struggle for the empowerment of a new elite, the former were pursued; when the two no longer overlapped, stronghold politics and policies took primacy. We also argue that faced with similar contestation as ZANU-PF, the ANC might chose to sacrifice democracy for the sake of regime survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Separation of powers among the three branches of government, in most Constitutional democracies, is a design to avert the tyranny of a personalized rule. With specific roles, in relationships characterized by separated but shared powers, each branch of government is a watchdog against the other in case of any abuse. In the South African governing system, the Constitution guarantees functional power relationships among the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary branches of the government. Nevertheless, the dominant party system, in practice, has weakened the legislative oversight and accountability powers to tame the excesses of the executive, contrary to the intendments of the drafters of the Constitution. Judicial review of the various legislative and executive actions, however, has created precedents that seek to reassert legislative capacity to hold the executive accountable. At one time or the other, the judiciary had indicted the legislature and the executive of dereliction of duties. Using primary and secondary data from judicial pronouncements, constitutional provisions, and other public documents, with extant literature, respectively, this paper reviewed the environment that prompted the activist posture of the South African judiciary. An entrenched culture of party loyalty and the incapacity of the legislature to enforce accountability have bolstered the need for assertive judicial review in ensuring accountability. The failure of the legislature to exercise its oversight power has provided the platform for the judiciary to rise as a formidable accountability instrument. Judicial independence, guaranteed by The Constitution, would continue to sustain the tenets of South African representative democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to access skills for adjusting to visual impairment (VI), individuals are drawn into the fabric of rehabilitation organisations and into relationships with rehabilitation workers. Through prioritising rehabilitation service user perspectives, this paper explores the question of what might be imparted to those undergoing VI rehabilitation about their value, their status and their place in the world. Foucauldian discourse analytic reviews were conducted on semi-structured interviews with 18 rehabilitation service users and 8 service providers at 4 rehabilitation organisations in South Africa. While much of value is gained in rehabilitation, service user accounts shed light on a series of tradeoffs individuals are exposed to, such as relationships, practices and structures within which they may also feel as though they are losing something fundamental related to agency and social status. In rehabilitation, individuals can receive powerful signals about who they are, which they are likely to carry forward into their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Media is a crucial factor in shaping public opinion and setting policy agendas. There is limited research on the role of media in health policy processes in low- and middle-income countries. This study profiles South Africa as a case example, currently in the process of implementing a major health policy reform, National Health Insurance (NHI). Methods: A descriptive, mixed methods study was conducted in five sequential phases. Evidence was gathered through a scoping review of secondary literature; discourse analysis of global policy documents on universal health coverage and South African NHI policy documents; and a content and discourse analysis of South African print and online media texts focused on NHI. Representations within media were analysed and dominant discourses that might influence the policy process were identified. Results: Discourses of 'health as a global public good' and 'neoliberalism' were identified in global and national policy documents. Similar neoliberal discourse was identified within SA media. Unique discourses were identified within SA media relating to biopolitics and corruption. Media representations revealed political and ideological contestation which was not as present in the global and national policy documents. Media representations did not mirror the lived reality of most of the South African population. The discourses identified influence the policy process and hinder public participation in these processes. They reinforce social hierarchy and power structures in South Africa, and might reinforce current inequalities in the health system, with negative repercussions for access to health care. Conclusions: There is a need to understand mainstream media as part of a people-centred health system, particularly in the context of universal health coverage reforms such as NHI. Harmful media representations should be counter-acted. This requires the formation of collaborative and sustainable networks of policy actors to develop strategies on how to leverage media within health policy to support policy processes, build public trust and social cohesion, and ultimately decrease inequalities and increase access to health care. Research should be undertaken to explore media in other diverse formats and languages, and in other contexts, particularly low- and middle-income countries, to further understand media's role in health policy processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction/Frame: (Contextualization/Justification) Viewing curriculum as discourse can enable educators to identify how historical markers of discrimination are repeated. Historical markers are archaeologically embedded in the various dimensions of a curriculum and find expression in preferred ways of thinking, speaking, doing, and being. Such historical hypernorms are often maintained by practical rationalities, or technologies of power that reify their taken-for-granted legitimacy as ‘truth regimes’. Research Question/Objectives: This phase of the study aimed to critically explore and disclose how the (socio/politico-historically constructed) rules of knowledge-formation in a contemporary occupational therapy curriculum-as-discourse, are reproduced and maintained as truths at a university that historically supported apartheid in South Africa. Methodology: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) approach was used to systematically craft a genealogy analysis method from foundational Foucauldian theory. Adjacent, a lens of the ‘dimensions of the curriculum’ was employed: i.e., the formal, the informal, the hidden, and the negated curriculum. Various data sources were categorized accordingly, e.g., overarching policy documents; social events; timetables and prescribed texts; physical teaching spaces; espoused values, and underlying assumptions modelled during assessment in teaching and learning spaces. Results: Following the four rules of knowledge-formation that ensued from an archaeology analysis, the contemporary reification of the historical markers was problematised through various technologies of power and self, as well modes of reasoning. Examples are pervasive white demographics of both students and faculty reifying cognitive monopoly and mono-cultural epistemologies; the rationalization of highly ritualized (over)assessment of students suppressing adult-to-adult transactionalism in andragogy practices; the reproduction of mono-cultural epistemologies in clinical training operating in the hidden curriculum. Final considerations: Consciously dismantling the rationalising strategies for the continuation of discriminatory patterns of inclusion and exclusion in a curriculum, can open a space for critical dialogue, disruption, and reconfiguration of a curriculum-as-discourse towards social justice, and epistemic freedom in (higher) education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in South Africa (SA) have formulated various e-learning policies. E-learning policies are neither neutral nor value free as they reflect policy makers’ ideas about the role of technology in teaching and learning. Although several e-learning policies have been developed in SA, few studies have examined the discourses that underpin them nor the implications they have on teaching and learning. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as its methodology and Feenberg’s typology of e-learning discourses as its framework, the study analysed the dominant discourses that underpin e-learning policies in HEIs in SA. The study’s findings show the dominance of deterministic and instrumentalist discourses in the e-learning policies. These discourses conceptualise technology as autonomous and value neutral. They also view technology as a magic wand that will solve all educational problems while fostering progress, effectiveness, and efficiency. Critical discourses on e-learning are largely marginalised in the policies. The paper contends that the dominant discourses in the e-learning policies analysed offer narrow technological fixes to nuanced educational problems in SA. They promote pedagogically poor applications of technology that perpetuate transmission models of education. These findings indicate the need to embed critical discourses in e-learning policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a signatory to the applicable United Nations declarations, South Africa is obliged to ensure that all children have access to quality education. The reality, though, is that there are many barriers that make access to education difficult if not impossible. School violence, an escalating worldwide phenomenon, is widely cited as one of the challenges that schools face. The problem, as research has shown, is most prevalent and disruptive in poor communities. Many teachers reportedly leave the profession because they fear school violence or after they have been victims of violent attacks at their schools. In this article we explore the effect that violence in schools can have on teachers, as experienced by a case of three teachers. An interpretative phenomenological design was used to examine closely the participants' experiences of school violence. The study used the concepts of care and support as theoretical lenses to explore the relationship between sustainable development goals 3 (good health and well-being) and 4 (quality education) of the United Nations in relation to teachers' health as inclusive teachinglearning environments for all school members. Data were collected through narratives that were thematically analysed. The findings revealed that school violence has a negative impact on the general well-being of teachers and can produce what we call narratives of disillusionment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of universities in South Africa are sharing teaching materials online making them freely available as Open Educational Resources (OER). The open sharing of teaching materials has been coupled with a number of institutional policy initiatives. This paper seeks to explore the institutional policy landscape of OER in South Africa in order to first understand the discourses and assumptions that underpin OER policies and second, to critique and problematize the major discourses and assumptions that underpin OER policies. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used as a tool for identifying dominant discourses in OER. Findings show that OER policies in public universities in South Africa are underpinned by three dominant discourses on access, collaboration and transformation. The extent to which OER can democratise access to education and redress socio-historic inequalities in the provision of educational resources is not guaranteed. Some scholars argue that OER could in some contexts perpetuate inequalities if the same barriers of accessing education in a traditional classroom have not been dealt with. OER policies are written as optimistic accounts on how to publish OER but they do not do a good job in encouraging reuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses email use in a South African primary school. A conversation analysis of children's interactions around email activities challenges assumptions about the digital divide. This approach suggests the advantage to be gained by viewing the context of children's use of technology as a shifting set of communicative possibilities, rather than something that is determined solely by the physical presence or absence of computers. The paper describes how children negotiate and communicate around scarce resources in their environment. These scarce and shared resources are not limited to the physical equipment in the computer lab, but include the communicative possibilities offered by software and other individuals. This paper focuses on children sharing email addresses and using email's affordances of privacy to gain or avoid individual attention from the teacher. Discourse is treated as 'talk-in-interaction' and provides evidence of children managing the limited resources available to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we focus on the narratives of black women early career academics (ECAs) who are confronting and negotiating the “publish or perish” discourse in their professional lives in the university. Through a qualitative interpretivist case study, we purposively recruited and interviewed 10 education academics in one research-intensive university in South Africa. We relied on Nancy Fraser’s social justice framework to think through and to theorise the complex positionality of black women academics in a South African university. The findings reveal that black women ECAs often have challenges when it comes to research and publication, with some of the participants rejecting the publish or perish mantra, questioning the usefulness of publishing, and to what extent their own research will make a societal impact. The findings also reveal the deeply embedded patriarchal and gendered nature of the publish or perish discourse in how it disregards the role of wife/motherly/societal care work that women academics often perform. We end the article with broader reflections on the emergence of the publish and perish discourse in the South African higher education system and its implications for the attraction, retention, and wellbeing of black women ECAs in the sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the discourse of an intercontinental on-line Master’s programme in adult learning, using English as the lingua franca of the programme and involving four collaborating universities in Sweden, South Africa, Canada and Australia. The programme is highly interactive, emphasising communication between students. Taking the variation in participation as the point of departure, a discourse analysis aiming at analysing the contingencies contributing to the pattern of communication in the programme was undertaken. Data consist of a variety of texts on-line web-documents, written notes, and narratives that participants wrote about their lives related to participation in the programme. The use of English as the lingua franca contributed to a mistake anxiety, which for some students was hampering their communication in the programme. Aspects of the material world such as the vast differences in the efforts and costs for participating in the programme were also highly interrelated to the shaping of socio-culturally situated identities among the students and thereby contributing to the variation in frequency in participation. The results show that the official discourse of the programme as a text, with its emphasis on equity, change and development, gets subordinated to the discourses produced and reproduced by the students in the programme as a discursive practice and social practice. The students’ accounts reveal that there are fragments of an alternative discourse emerging, based on mutual concern and friendship, which might suggest a potential for changing the communicative patterns in the programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been roughly five years since the #FeesMustFall student protests shook the foundations of higher education in South Africa. However, in the aftermath of these protests, students' demand for the decolonisation of the curriculum, despite initial energy, has seemingly lost momentum. Within the discipline of management and organisation studies, the situation is even more exacerbated, with efforts towards decolonisation being cosmetic at best. However, much criticism has been directed towards the notion of decolonisation for its lack of normative literature. This article suggests that Critical Management Studies (CMS) and, in particular, the CMS notion of denaturalisation, might provide a broad framework for achieving decolonisation. Furthermore, the work of contemporary philosopher Jacques Rancière is proposed as a pragmatic means to denaturalise management thinking to move closer to a truly decolonised management curriculum in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how visual methodologies might be incorporated into educational policy studies. By bringing together theoretical perspectives on critical policy studies and visual methodologies, we aim to demonstrate the ways in which the visual can be an important tool to help us interrogate how knowledge is produced through the constructions and representations of policy texts and discourses. In so doing, we suggest that the use of visual methodologies can help us to rethink policy, particularly in relation to studying social difference in globalizing conditions. While we focus here on one set of documents, the annual Global Monitoring Reports associated with Education For All (EFA), our aim overall is to highlight both the methodological and policy implications that could be applied to a variety of official texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the dominant discourse on adult gender-specific sexually explicit material resulting from the pervasive influence of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence and the possible constitutional harm which may result from an abstract liberal-inspired accommodation of sexually explicit material. It notes that the obscenity jurisprudence of the court has been characterized by key features such as the subscription to an abstract concept of free speech and the assumption that all individuals have equal access to the means of expression and dissemination of ideas. The definitive impact of the U.S. obscenity jurisprudence on the thinking of the South African Constitutional Court is also tackled.

The article explores the mechanisms and ways of knowing adopted by a teacher in South African for understanding what it means to be a teacher in a rural school. Particular focus is given to the daily lived experiences of a teacher named Hilton and the social realities of working in the context of rural education. It shows how the teacher chooses to negotiate the discourses dominating rural schooling and its culture, learners, teachers and communities.

There is a voice that tries to speak the truth. This essay will suggest that the discourse on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission [TRC] has perhaps ignored this most invisible of things, and has looked for the truth of the Commission everywhere except where it might be found, if indeed it can be found at all. To the extent that it is possible to oppose the truth of the voice to another truth, it may be useful to make use of a notion of poetics; even a sublime poetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]