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Drawing on the quintile system of categorising schools, South African public schools are bifurcated into no-fee and fee-paying schools. Emerging research has shown that school principals in both categories of schools encounter several challenges with regard to school funding. In this article, we employ contingency leadership theory to examine how school principals respond to the school funding challenges they encounter. An interpretive, qualitative case study drawing on semi-structured interviews with 4 purposively selected principals was conducted. To augment the interview data, purposively selected school documents were reviewed. Through thematic analysis, it was found that principals in fee-paying and no-fee schools employ a cocktail of practices to respond to the challenges they encounter. From the findings, we learn that school funding challenges push principals to enact a form of transgressive leadership where they adopt a context-driven, as opposed to a policy-driven approach to school leadership. Furthermore, the funding challenges drive school principals to renegotiate their roles as professional managers of the school and as ex-officio members of the School Governing Body. This results in school principals becoming more entrepreneurial in their school leadership.

We offer an account of how we, a research team of three South African academics, have dialogued with multiculturalism and equity through collective poetic autoethnographic inquiry. The focus of the article is on our learning through reading and responding to published autoethnographies by three other South African academics. We share our learning about how poetry and dialogue can facilitate a generative entanglement with autoethnographies written by others. The article highlights the promise of collective poetic autoethnographic inquiry for opening up spaces for dialoguing with multiculturalism and equity.

There are many schools in developing countries which, despite the challenges they face, defy the odds and continue to perform at exceptionally high levels. We cast our gaze on one of these resilient schools in South Africa, and sought to learn about the leadership practices prevalent in this school and the enablements and constraints to the school leadership practice. Underpinned by a critical realist lens, and drawing on social realist theory, this case study of one school generated data through interviews, observation, document analysis and transect walks. The school principal, one head of department and two teachers, were selected as participants. The findings indicate that the school embraced an expansive form of teacher leadership comprising leadership within and beyond the classroom. Further, the structural, cultural and agential climate was receptive to the expansive leadership. We conclude that the professional capital of teachers, together with teachers serving as social actors rather than remaining primary agents, are key resources to change and transformation in an emerging economy.

We, a diverse group of South African academics, study embodied reflexivity through poetry, and this article is an account of poetic inquiry inspired by assemblages created by the participants in a symposium, Object Inquiry for Social Cohesion in Public Higher Education. As the symposium's cofacilitators, we wondered how and what we might learn from reading the assemblages poetically as embodied explorations of social cohesion. We describe the symposium before demonstrating how we used poetry to represent, analyze, and synthesize our responses to the assemblages. Through the presentation of dialog pieces derived from our discussions, we articulate the collective growth and development of our understanding. Then, we share a final poem, which encapsulates our learning. Finally, we consider how this poetic study could help us and others in higher education seeking to understand and strengthen social cohesion and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on evidence from five school principals regarding leadership practices that work in multiple deprived contexts. The South African educational landscape is complex, often described as a cocktail of first and third world institutions. Looking at the schooling system on a continuum, on the one end there are first class schools which can compare favourably with the best in developed countries. On the other extreme there are dysfunctional schools. However, along the scale there are few schools in multiple deprived areas which display high degrees of resilience and perform at levels comparable to first class schools in terms of Matriculation examination results. This paper draws from a study based on the proposition that leadership was the greatest factor to explain such performance. The study was then informed by a quest for knowledge regarding the nature of such leadership. Such knowledge is needed as the country fights to turn around the many dysfunctional schools there are. While there is a corpus of scholarship that "speaks" to this matter internationally, there remains need for home-grown insights in that regard. Two theoretical lenses (servant leadership and the asset-based approach) were applied. The study employed a qualitative approach involving individual face-to-face semi-structured interviews with five purposively selected school principals each representing their school. Findings suggest that the schools in question adopted inside-out development approaches involving the philosophy that they were masters of their own destiny. Time, commitment, and accountability were some of their greatest assets, things that did not have to come from outside the schools. Internal success paved the way for stronger and more fruitful synergies with the "outside world." We conclude that schools in areas of multiple-deprivation need leadership that moves them away from notions of victimhood and deficit thinking towards asset-based approaches.

We explore how the participatory, literary arts-based methodology of collective poetic inquiry can facilitate awareness of, and insight into polyvocality in educational research. Using found poetry and haiku poetry, we present a poetic performance in which we engage with diverse voices that manifest in multiple data sources: a student participant's photographic collage and unstructured interview transcript; audio-recorded discussions with research team members and a conference audience, and research team members' written reflections. We aim to contribute to methodological conversations about poetry as research, with a particular focus on understanding more about the potential of collective poetic inquiry for evoking polyvocality in educational research. Drawing on notions of "un-knowing," "not-knowing" and "productive ambiguity," we conceptualise our participatory research process as polyvocal and invite readers to join us in considering how cultivating polyvocality in educational research might bring about change in ourselves and in our ways of knowing as members of research communities. The article highlights our evolving understanding that how we research shapes and reshapes what we come to know and un-know and how we communicate that knowing.

This article provides a reflexive narrative account of a collaborative process of moving towards curriculum intellectualisingin the context of diverse understandings of African scholarship in a South African university. We reflect on the journey we took in trying to make collective sense of postgraduate students' conceptions of African scholarship. The article illustrates how we came to see thatour ownimplicit notions of African scholarship constrained our meaning-making. The article contributes to re-imagining of curriculum as a complex conversation that elicits uncomfortable questions, interrogates our own taken-for-granted ideas, and encourages divergence and dissidence (rather than conformity) in ways that offer valuable opportunities for discovery and growth. We draw attention to the centrality of polyvocality, reflexivity, provision of space and time, and the creation of comfortable, yet discomforting relationships as conducive conditions for curriculum intellectualising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]