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We set out to address the question--what does it mean for educational knowledge to be 'powerful'? We compare the Anglo tradition of curriculum studies with the "Didaktik" tradition through the lens of an analysis of curriculum structure in postgraduate courses in South African universities rooted in either the Anglo or "Didaktik" tradition. This analysis of curriculum structure affords a view of each tradition that we argue is 'powerful', but in different ways. While "Didaktik" provides a humanities-based curriculum coherence in teacher education, curriculum studies offers social scientific possibilities for empirical inquiry. We make the argument that a strategic entente cordiale, or pedagogic compact, would strengthen the professional position of teachers and education academics in the respective countries. This is particularly so in the context of threats posed by instrumental trends driven by educational sciences underpinning TIMSS, Pisa and the like.

Since 2011, the Department of Basic Education (DBE), has provided all Grade 1 to 6 learners in public schools with literacy/language, numeracy/mathematics and life skills workbooks. This study provides an assessment of the purpose to which the workbooks are best suited by analysing the Grade 3 Mathematics and Home Language English workbooks for 2015 in the light of the DBE's intentions for the workbooks. The study considers alignment of the workbooks with the official national curriculum, the Curriculum and Assessment Policy (CAPS), as well as 'conceptual signalling' and progression in the content of the workbooks. We then evaluate the kind of 'curriculum tool' the workbooks in their current format conform to. We explore three possibilities in the light of the DBE's proposals for the workbook use: a practice tool; an assessment tool; and a monitoring tool. We also reflect on the workbooks as a teaching tool. Our analysis suggests that, in line with the DBE's intended purpose for the workbooks, that the workbooks best represent a practice curriculum tool. We highlight the significance of the high level of curriculum compliance of the workbook, and indicate that this would render them an effective monitoring tool for assessing the quantitative coverage of the curriculum at a systemic level.

This paper explores methodological insights from a mixed methods study that aims to understand how school leaders promote literacy development in their schools. The study findings consider both the complementarities and the challenges of the qualitative and quantitative approaches to measuring leadership practices and their linkages with learning across schools. We begin by identifying a conundrum in school leadership and management (SLM) research -- strong effects found in qualitative studies and weaker effects in quantitative studies. From the literature we identify some of the central challenges that account for these differences. We then show how these challenges were and were not addressed in the mixed method research we conducted in an SLM study of South African primary schools in challenging contexts. We consider why the central aim of the study -- to develop a scalable instrument for measuring SLM -- remains elusive.

This paper suggests that advocates of the 'knowledge turn' have been united in their opposition to Young and Muller's (2010) Future 2, but that this 'union' has masked very different views of the relations between Young and Muller's Future 1 and Future 3. Whereas some who subscribe to the 'turn' see a 'weak boundary' between Futures 1 and 3 (and therefore consider them similar), others construe these Futures as very different and strongly bounded. We argue that these positions are often underpinned by irreconcilable political persuasions and conceptions of education, society and the curriculum. In order to illustrate the argument, we discuss the political project of the UK-based Academy of Ideas, many of whose members have been involved in advocating implicitly or explicitly for a weak boundary between Futures 1 and 3. This position is then contrasted with those in the UK who are more strongly committed to exploring a distinctive Future 3, and the situation in South Africa, where the tensions between different educational Futures are acutely visible due to the social, cultural and political context and academic and policy debates around the curriculum. We conclude with some implications of our arguments for the Future 3 principles of disciplinarity and sociality.

Why has large-scale standardised testing attracted such a bad press? Why has pedagogic benefit to be derived from test results been downplayed? The paper investigates this question by first surveying the pros and cons of testing in the literature, and goes on to examine educators' responses to standardised, large-scale tests in a sample of low socio-economic status (SES) schools in the Western Cape, South Africa. The paper shows that teachers and school managers have an ambivalent attitude to tests, wary of the reputational costs they can incur, but also curious about the differentiated picture test results can give them as they learn to "read" the underlying codes embedded in the results. The paper concludes that a focus on what tests make visible and a recognition of the pedagogic agency of teachers points to potential pedagogic benefits of systemic tests.

The paper addresses the question of what we should make of Michael Young's recent work with respect to curriculum theory by considering the particular case of South African curriculum reform. The paper thus traces two trajectories: the evolution of Michael Young's ideas over time and South African curriculum reform in the post-apartheid period. The paper shows how the two trajectories have run in parallel, not least because of Young's ongoing involvement and interest in South Africa. Three broad periods in Young's career are identified: the new sociology of education period; a middle period where he engaged in substantial policy work, focusing predominantly on the relation between schooling and the economy; and his social realist phase, where much of his work has focused on an educational notion of specialized knowledge: "powerful knowledge". The possibilities and limitations of this notion as it has been taken up in the research literature, and in relation to the South African case, are explored.

This article reports on an empirical study of the management of curriculum and instruction in South African secondary schools. Drawing on data collected from 200 schools in 2007, a series of regression analyses tested the relationship between various dimensions of leadership and student achievement gains over time. Whilst the research confirms what we do know about school management in South Africa, and aligns with much of the international research base, the strong emphasis that emerges on school-community relations offers important insights for school management development. (Contains 2 tables and 2 notes.)

Low teacher morale, coupled with extremely poor schooling outcomes for students as measured on standardized tests have increasingly been reported in the media in South Africa. As elsewhere, there is growing demand for the reorganisation of teachers' work in order to enhance school performance. The paper investigates the ways in which current market-led government policies have sustained past inequalities between schools and between teachers. Drawing on Savage's notion of assets, the analysis focuses on how the material and organisational conditions of teachers' work combine to affect teachers' morale. The analysis is based on available sets of data on inequalities--at the societal level, at the level of the homes and communities of the children that attend school, at the level of schooling system and at the level of teachers. It proposes a conceptual typology in relation to the four levels of data we provide, which shows interesting differential effects on teachers' morale and the transformation of teachers' work in South Africa. We argue that the relations between enduring economic inequalities in South Africa, an underspecified new curriculum and the bureaucratization of teachers' work have created an intractable pattern of accumulation of educational disparity among teachers in South Africa. Teacher morale needs to be considered in the context of these structural conditions. (Contains 7 notes.)

This article addresses an enduring concern in the sociology of education: how social class differences are reproduced through schooling. In particular it focuses on the functioning of pedagogy in this regard. The article presents a model that elucidates the inner logic of pedagogy in order to reveal the structuring of inequality with respect to different groups of students. Theoretical concepts are drawn from the work of Bernstein, Dowling (1998) and Pedro (1981). An analysis considering the relay of social class differences, what is relayed, and its organizational form is undertaken with respect to working class and middle class children learning literacy in a sample of South African primary schools. (Contains 3 tables, 1 figure, and 3 notes.)

It has long been clear that the school reproduces social class differences. However, how this happens remains something of a black box. I set out to contribute to our understanding of schooling processes and the reproduction of inequality by focusing on pedagogy. I elaborate a technique for the analysis of classroom observation and student performance data that is rooted in sociological theory. The purpose is to develop an analytic framework capable of capturing a wide variation in pedagogic practice, and show the implications of this variation for student learning. The focus is on how the structuring of social relations relates to the structuring of knowledge, and what the implications of this are in terms of how children of different social-class positions are socialized into school ways of knowing, or the "school code". I address the equity debate in mathematics education and schooling more generally, by showing how inequalities are reproduced through pedagogy. The focus here relates to broader debates on the relation between everyday knowledge and school knowledge in mathematics. (Contains 7 tables, 3 figures and 4 notes.) [The research reported here benefited from support from the National Research Foundation.]

The article reports research in two South African grade 3 classrooms, one located within a disadvantaged school and one in an affluent suburban school. The research examines the pacing rules of different transmission practices: weak pacing (a slower rate of transmission) is associated with pedagogy in the working-class school, and strong pacing (a faster rate of transmission) in the middle-class school. A further dimension to pacing, that of differentiating (between different student learning rates and different learning contexts), is identified. The discussion is developed through an analysis of how time use differs in different socio-economic contexts and points to possible relations between the internal control of the pace of learning in classrooms, and the external control of teachers' pedagogic practices. The article examines the social relations within which the different transmission practices are embedded and points to a possible relationship between teachers' transmission practices and the social relations that constitute teachers' work. (Contains 1 table and 2 notes.)