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Background: Literacy education in the foundation phase is a global concern. Studies have shown that mastering literacy in the first three years of school ensured academic success and lack of it had negative effects academically, socially and economically. This research study sought to explore teachers' instructional practices for literacy in English in Grade 1 in the Shiselweni region of Eswatini. Objectives: The objectives of the study were to establish what instructional practices teachers used in their literacy classrooms, why they used those instructional practices, and how they experienced the teaching of literacy in English in Grade 1. Method: A qualitative case study design was followed where three teachers from two urban schools were purposively sampled and participated in semi-structured interviews and classroom observations. Focus group discussions with teachers who had experience teaching literacy in English in Grade 1 in each school were conducted, and document analysis was done. Vygotsky's sociocultural theory was used as a lens to understand teachers' instructional practices in literacy. Results: Data were analysed using thematic content analysis. The findings of the study showed that teachers' instructional practices reflected their lack of pedagogical knowledge for teaching literacy in English in the foundation phase. The study also found that the teachers' experiences were their rationale for their instructional practices. Conclusion: The study showed that teacher resilience was important for teachers to thrive under trying school conditions; developing a positive attitude towards literacy teaching enabled teachers to develop strategies to improve literacy teaching and learning.

This article argues that despite students facing obstacles when studying remotely and online through the COVID-19 pandemic, some are able to overcome barriers to achieve their academic goals. While formal methods are used to evaluate teaching and learning, the five teacher educator researchers in this study sought to understand pre-service teachers' experiences of this form of engagement. The South African pre-service teachers are studying to become teachers of English, and the article focusses on their experiences of studying a novel via remote online learning. Using qualitative content analysis and underpinned by the Technology Acceptance Model, the study showed that the pre-service teachers found the lack of peer collaboration and mentoring difficult, and their efforts were hampered by a lack of material resources. However, some demonstrated agency and resilience in the face of obstacles and were able to relate their experiences of lockdown to the events in the novel.

When Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer wanted to drag Rampolokeng off to her personal analyst, he questioned, ‘is it me or the things I write about that are sick?’ Indeed, Rampolokeng’s acerbic poetry, a mongrelized, polyglot invective against hegemonic Western discourses, social injustice, tyranny and corruption is striking for its grotesque and surreal imagery, scatological diction and the eschewing of conventional forms of poetry. The nihilistic impulse to destroy oppression, racism and its attendant ideologies is mostly situated in post-apartheid South Africa and is scripted in a macabre litany of activism and indignation. The narratorial voices of subversion/inversion of social and political hierarchies satirize, parody and decry inhumanity: ‘I look out on vultures pecking their souls fleshless’ (Rampolokeng 1990:1). His subjectivity deftly manipulates African oral stylistics, Jamaican dub poetry, American ghetto rap, jazz and contemporary popular music in irreverent, intertextual abandon. This study will critique Ramolokeng’s textual strategies of subversion that undermine hegemonic discourses and privilege the downtrodden masses. In doing so, it will reflect upon the nihilistic impulse to eradicate injustice, elitism and dogma and validate a thesis that the passion for destruction is paradoxically a creative impulse for a more humane, compassionate and just world order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of what is taken for education in Africa is not African, but rather a reflection of Europe in Africa. Our curriculum is a site where the English language is sacralised, and the internalisation of bourgeois European values in our curricula is interpreted as an index of progress. This study eclectically draws on decolonising scholarship to critique a curriculum that continues to perpetuate stereotypical and patronising views of Africans. It challenges overt and covert Eurocentric assumptions and rationality that alienate and 'other' Africans by referencing the rich cultural and linguistic heritage of Africa. It strategically draws on African folktales, aphorisms, and praise poetry that have been excluded from the curriculum by colonial and apartheid malfeasance. This study argues that this African corpus has profound and liberating pedagogical utility. Moreover, it provides a space in which Africans experiences of the social world are validated and in which Africans may recognise themselves. This study postulates that there is a plethora of African folktales, dirges, lullabies and other creative works that are transformative, speak to African ways of knowing and embody an ideology that honours and is progressive of the African psyche. Finally, this study adroitly rebuffs Eurocentric prejudices and fallacious assumptions that the linguistic heritage of Africans is not worth knowing. It does this by persuasively demonstrating that African aesthetics, philosophies and cultural artefacts should contest western capitalistic individualism and serve as powerful transformative agents in our curricula that motivate an inclusive, thoughtful, equitable and dignified existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The African consciousness has been subsumed mostly by western ideology and resurfaces only in misrecognition and habitual disavowal. Valorising everything European, a history of haplessly succumbing to the seductions of western rationality and perspectives has led to the denial and erasure of self and culture. In its place, the morbid African has birthed, confronting his othering in self-defeating acquiesce and accepting his servile status as natural and ordained. Indeed, there is no ready panacea for centuries of exploitation, domination, and telling to. This paper suggests that one way to counter these ideological formations is to provide pathways to recognise the self. There can be no better way of doing this than to rekindle the myth, folklore, and aphorisms long extinguished on the altar of western education. Consequently, this study explores African stories as artefacts that may shape our consciousness, remind us of cultural wisdom rendered invisible and barbaric by colonial authority, focus our attention on an African centred morality and value system and school us in the inherent dignity of being human and African. A case in point is the abundance of tales that promote social cohesion, adherence to rituals, and the rule of law as well as survival over seemingly insurmountable odds. The lessons from these tales may be modelled onto the coronavirus pandemic in an African centred advocacy. Recruiting the resources of bibliotheraphy and decolonising scholarship, this paper enthuses over African narratives that celebrate our own conundrums, our own angsts and engages with lessons to survive the coronavirus pandemic in an Afrocentric intertext. It also makes a persuasive claim that African folktales are an important decolonial tool in university English curricula. This, I argue are the first and necessary steps of emancipation from the shackles of western epistemologies and hegemony and in addressing the null curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]