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In the study reported on here the reflective journals of student teachers enrolled for the Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) were explored to determine what new learning they had acquired during their teaching practice. Reflection is a process of reviewing an experience of practice to analyse it for improvement. In this way, reflective journals could be viewed as a tool that moulds and harnesses the professional development of student teachers. Critical emancipatory research was adopted to reflect on student teachers' journaling as an important assessment tool to be used to empower students with pedagogical content to convey knowledge to learners. In the study we purposively sampled a selected group of 10 PGCE students' reflective journals. We found that students' reflective journals are important tools that shape student teachers' professional identities during teaching practice. Furthermore, we found that student teachers' journaling is an emancipatory platform that allows students teachers to think independently and innovatively to free their thoughts on real teaching and learning situations. We recommend that teacher training institutions should emphasise the importance of journaling in teacher training programmes with a focus on critical thinking and problem-solving innovation.

University student activism is generally characterized by protests and demonstrations by students who are reacting to social, political, and economic challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic revolutionized university student activism, and closed the geographical space for protests and demonstrations. The pandemic locked students out of the university campus, thus, rendering the traditional strategies of mass protests and demonstrations impossible. The COVID-19-induced lockdowns made it difficult, if not impossible, to mobilise for on-campus demonstrations and protests. It seems the pandemic is the last nail in the coffin of on-campus student protests. This theoretical paper uses a collective behaviour framework to explain the evolution of student activism in Zimbabwe, from the traditional on-campus politics to virtual activism. It discusses the challenges associated with cybernetic activism. The paper argues that, despite challenges, Zimbabwean university student activists need to migrate to a new world of digital technology and online activism. In the migration to online activism, students activists face a plethora of challenges. On top of the already existing obstacles, activists face new operational challenges related to trying to mobilise a constituency that has relocated to cyberspace. Student activists utilize the existing digital infrastructure to advance their politics, in spite of a hostile state security system and harsh economic environment, and other operational challenges.

The outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has caused unprecedented global socio-economic disruptions. One of the areas negatively impacted is the education system. The country's over reliance on traditional face-to-face teaching has brought about serious challenges to policymakers who have to decide how learning would proceed in the absence of physical contact between the teacher and the learner. This has been exacerbated by the general lack of access to textbooks and other teaching and learning materials which makes it difficult for parents to assist with home schooling. The potential use of mobile apps to support and enhance early childhood learning has received little attention in developing countries such as Zimbabwe, yet its impact in supporting early childhood education would be enormous during and post the COVID-19 pandemic. The study seeks to develop a numeracy-based app prototype that uses a local language (IsiNdebele) in a classroom or home-based schooling in response to the COVID19 pandemic or other natural disasters or man-made situations that may make face-to-face interaction impossible. The analysis showed that kindergarten teachers had positive opinion towards the app as they perceived the prototype to be useful, easy to use, simple and that learners would be eager to use it. The results of this study can inform policymakers and educators on optimising technology based early teaching and learning at school and home.

This paper discusses using bricolage to mitigate the struggles faced by progressed learners in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Most progressed learners perform poorly in many subjects, especially sciences. Their struggle has stimulated the need to find ways to enhance their performance. Reinvented artefacts and processes can be used for emancipation, and to transform agendas for improving the performance of progressed learners. To collect data, we used participatory action research, which uses a thematic approach to make meaning of data. We created a WhatsApp group to enable focus group discussions for collecting data, to circumvent COVID-19 restrictions. The group had 14 members, among whom teachers and learners from rural schools. The study found that the factors that contributed to poor performance were a lack of teaching and learning materials, too few teachers, less than optimal teaching methods and learners' attitudes towards science subjects. The main argument of the article is that, in this time characterised by the COVID-19 pandemic, embracing bricolage has the impetus to mitigate challenges relating to the education of progressed learners. Thus, it is important to emancipate teachers, so that they can bricolise the environment for teaching and learning.

In this article, we problematise the practice of appointing principals on the basis of comradeship instead of excellence, qualifications and competency. The appointment of principals in South Africa has, over the years, become politicised and unionised to the extent that it is contextualised within comradeship narratives, thereby negating the competency and qualifications that are required to champion quality education -- education that is essential to empower people. To cement its arguments, the article is couched in decoloniality, a framework that evokes the need to challenge coloniality, which has displaced professionalism and competency as criteria for appointing principals. The data for the study were generated through questionnaires completed by, and interviews with, 19 participants in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province. The article reports that most schools with comrade principals face challenges related to competency, learner performance and indiscipline. The article recommends that the Department of Basic Education revisit its appointment policy for principals to ensure that competent principals are appointed, regardless of whether they are comrades or not.

Focusing through the lens of the (COVID-19) lockdown which was enforced on the 30th of March 2020, it became apparent that students from rural resource-constrained educational institutions had to adapt to sustainable online learning platforms from traditional content delivery. WhatsApp a social networking app, but due to its low data consumption, it became a de-facto teaching and learning tool for Lupane State University (LSU) students in Zimbabwe. Prior studies have focused on the use of WhatsApp as an alternative lecture delivery platform but very few have evaluated its role as the sole platform for lecture delivery. With no government or institutional support for data acquisition, students failed to utilise other e-learning platforms that were in place due to exorbitant data costs. This study seeks to evaluate the success of WhatsApp mediated teaching and learning at LSU during the COVID-19 pandemic. This was a randomized evaluation of weekly lecture delivery through WhatsApp to LSU students. A questionnaire based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology's main constructs was delivered to 200 students that were randomly selected. The results revealed that student's attitudes, behavioral intention of using WhatsApp for learning as well as the platform's usefulness were rated highly, implying high adoption. The positive perceptions suggest that it would be easy for the institution to formally integrate the platform to augment traditional lecture delivery or for use during an event that disrupts traditional face-to-face lecture delivery. Results revealed that WhatsApp can support 21st century learning through autonomous, collaborative and learner centred education.

The study examined the relationship between activities of trade unions and management of tertiary institutions in a bid to provide empirical solution to the lingering industrial actions by the staff unions in various tertiary institutions in Nigeria. The population comprises all tertiary institutions in Ekiti State, Nigeria. Four hundred and fifty subjects consisted of 390 members of unions that were selected using proportionate sampling techniques and 60 top management staff of the selected institutions was selected purposively. Two self-designed instruments namely, "Trade Unions and management of Tertiary Institutions Questionnaire" (TUMTIQ) and "Management of Tertiary Institutions Questionnaire (MTIQ)" were used to collect relevant data from the subjects. The researchers and another expert in educational management and test and measurement did the face and content validity. In addition, the test-retest method of reliability was adopted with a reliability coefficient of 0.66 and 0.72 respectively. The data collected were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics and the three hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study revealed that there was a significant relationship between activities of trade unions and leadership style of management of tertiary institutions. The study also showed that there was a significant relationship between trade unions' dissatisfaction with conditions of service and management of tertiary institutions. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended that management of tertiary institutions should adopt a leadership style that is all-inclusive through a participatory system of management. Government should also provide funding for management to enhance conditions of service in the form of a better pay package, in-service training, overseas trips and their welfare packages for staff.

The teaching and learning of religion in most post-colonial states take place on an ambivalent and contested terrain, which has resulted in the amputation of religion from some schools and contexts. The new curriculum in Zimbabwe, as a state-making project that is arguably devoid of, or has covert policy networks, has resulted in religious curriculum resistance. In this paper, we juxtapose two questions: What are the challenges of the new religious curriculum, and how can the international practice of teaching religion be infused in the curriculum to address the contested terrain and to improve the policy network among religious players? The paper is couched in decoloniality theory, of which one of the agendas is to shift the geography of knowledge. Policy networks in religious circles can exorcise coloniality, which centred religion on a contested terrain within the mainstream curriculum practice. The paper argues that the teaching and learning of religion cannot be left to the state to control; instead, there should endeavours for the policy network among religious players to be contextualised in relations that have respect for difference. There is a need to reconfigure religions, so that they face the lived realities of communities.

This theoretical paper taps into Ball's view of the terrors of performativity in order to critique examination mafiarisation in Zimbabwe. Of late, the education system in this country has experienced a number of trajectories, characterised by examination leaks, cheating, and a decline in confidence in Zimbabwean education. I critique examination mafiarisation, using Ball's perspective, and in so doing, I attempt to answer two questions: What are the causes of examination mafiarisation? What can be done to mitigate cheating in examinations? The argument of the paper is that the curriculum faces ambivalence, because of an overemphasis on performativity. Consequently, teachers, learners, and parents have resorted to immoral behaviour to ensure performativity is enacted. I also argue for a need to embrace a rebalancing of pedagogy, which is characterised by social justice education, promotion of morality, comprehensive education, and task-based assessment, to regain credibility for what was once perceived to be a thriving educational system.

This article interrogates family and religious studies in the context of religious leaders who serve as regime enablers and resistors in Zimbabwe. Some religious leaders have overtly or covertly assumed the role of enablers of the current Zimbabwean political matrix, thereby threatening democracy, social justice, and accountability, by using religious narratives to buttress the status quo. I use critical emancipation research as lens to interrogate religious leaders as regime enablers. This theory allows me to name, expose and challenge oppression and injustice in and exclusion from social structures. I answer two questions: What are the trajectories of religious leaders as enablers in postcolonial political discourses, and how can family and religious studies tease resistor ideology among learners, to mitigate the challenges posed by enablers? There is always a price to pay when religious leaders become regime enablers, and there is a need for curriculum that can enact values, such as social justice, equity, and love for humanity, as a counter-hegemonic strategy to mitigate the challenges posed by religious leaders who act as enablers.

The article addresses the challenges faced in the implementation of the new curriculum in Zimbabwe. The new curriculum was rolled out in the midst of various trajectories (challenges), such as lack of resources, inadequate teacher preparation and resistance from teachers and parents, among others. We used relational leadership as a theoretical lens, which buttresses a need for school leadership that prioritises relationships within the implementation context. The study was qualitative, with 25 participants chosen through purposeful sampling and snowballing from five different schools in rural Zimbabwe. Data were collected through interviews and a focus group discussion. The data were then analysed using the lens proposed by Laws, Harper and Marcus (2003), where various themes were identified responding to the research questions. The study found that healthy school relations, though overlooked, are very important in the success of any curriculum implementation process and that there is a need for curriculum planners, school heads, teachers and learners to invest in healthy relations underpinned by social justice, emancipation and improvement of school conditions as alternatives to enhance a contested curriculum implementation.

This study undertakes a decolonial reading of the Zimbabwean history curriculum as an exemplar of how knowledge and pedagogy could be reframed as the basis for curricular justice in a global imaginary that is predicated on the epistemic hegemony of the Global North. The study which is framed as a conceptual research article introduces and argues for undoing historicide as a heuristic within the broader scope of the epistemic decolonial turn. The Zimbabwean history curriculum, as a unit of analysis, is referenced to exemplify entrapment within the Cartesian paradigm of knowing, despite the country's political independence. The argument developed is that history curricula that do not interrogate the geography and biography of knowledge entrench the hegemonic narrative of the coloniality of power and by extension colonial historiography. The paper suggests that the way out of the epistemic quandary that pervades the Zimbabwean history curriculum entails re-envisioning curricular practices in ways that ensure the emergence of a pluriverse in which we reclaim, restitute and legitimate our knowledges and histories, and affirm our ontological densities as equal to those of the Global North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the ecumenical conception of public life praxis in postcolonial Zimbabwe as well as the church's actions to salvage the deteriorating national crisis including the leveling of the political field in the early 2000s. The views of the church are derived from the experiences of the union of ecumenical church organizations formed in 2007 called the Zimbabwe Heads of Christian Denominations (ZHOCD). The ZHOCD, composes of the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops Conference, the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe Council of Churches, and the Union for the Development of Apostolic (and Zionist) Churches in Zimbabwe, Africa. The study uses literature, augmented by informal discussions that focused on how the church sought the protection of people's lives. The study found that the ZHOCD intervened at various critical periods when public life began to degenerate due to state-induced corruption, election violence, and crime. In fact, the church built up specialist organizations to provide required humanitarian services as well as provision of advocacy and protection of human lives by confronting political oppression in Zimbabwe. This forced the ruling party to engage in a palace coup to retain political power in 2017. The article recommends that churches use their power to intervene when accountability institutions have failed because their impartiality to the exercise of political power allows them to perceive public life praxis with a neutral eye. It is further recommended that the ZHOCD needs to engage far and wide groups of Christian organizations of all persuasions if a comprehensive Christian and religious response to a good life can be achieved. The study concluded that it is only the church and other religious organizations that can understand and provide solace to people living in difficult conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]