Education Support Services (ESS) or psycho-social educational support services is a crucial pillar to uphold the policy of inclusive education in South Africa. This book interrogates the current standing of ESS in South Africa, and how the service can be re-conceptualised within the next 10 years to ensure fair and quality support to learners and teachers across the vast and differing provincial educational landscape.
Dramatic discrepancies in provincial services were found – and possible solutions suggested to overcome a number of dysfunctionalities present in the current ESS. Focused planning is needed to ensure more standardised and fully functional ESS across South Africa.
‘Higher Education in the melting pot: emerging discourses of the 4 IR and decolonisation’ is an engaging and timely resource for tertiary level academic researchers, post graduate students and policy makers who are caught up in the intricate matrices of transformation in post-colonial higher education systems including in South Africa. Both the 4 IR and decolonisation are seductive ideological stances, which few, amongst us can dismiss peremptorily. However, although they share some commonalities, especially in terms of their transformative power, their underpinning epistemological, ontological, axiological, and methodological assumptions are often at cross purposes. That both will constitute robust impetuses for transformation in not in any doubt. But whether there will be sufficient synergies to underpin the desired transformation is highly questionable.
The book draws from expert analyses of largely South African scholars who tackle a wide range of topics in areas such as ICTs in higher education, the potential, and implications of the 4 IR and decolonisation in the transformative purposes of higher education including their impact of specific disciplinary areas, the theoretical assumptions, and practical implications for professional degree programmes in universities.
It suggests a bold strategy for embracing the two ideological perspectives but warns of the possibilities of decolonisation being turfed out of the post-colonial momentum of transformation in HE.
There is enough in this book to appeal to the tastes of a wide variety of scholarship, including those with persuasions towards empirical institutional research, case studies, theoretical and conceptual analyses. It is, as the title suggests, a melting pot of current, stimulating and thoroughly researched contributions.
Quality education: The nexus of human capital development, economic growth and social justice in a South African context investigate the intersections between education, social justice, gendered violence, and human rights in South African schools and universities. The rich tapestry of scholarship and literature emanating from South African classrooms provides a fascinating lens through which we can understand the complex consequences of the economies of education, social justice imperatives, and gendered violence on the lives of women, children, and marginalised communities. The multiplex research and scholarship in the ten chapters here challenge readers to imagine alternative futures predicated on the transformational capacity of a democratic South Africa.
Contributors to this volume examine the many ways in which social justice and gendered violence mirror, express, project and articulates the larger phenomenon of human rights violations in Africa and how, in turn, the discourse of human rights informs the ways in which we articulate, interrogate, conceptualise, enact and interpret quality education. The book also wrestles with the linguistic contradictions and ambiguities in the articulation of quality education in public and private spaces. This book is essential reading for scholars and researchers seeking a solid grounding in exploring quality education, the instances of epistemic disobedience, the political implications of place and power, and human rights in theory and practice.
This scholarly book focuses on the relationship between information knowledge and technology concerning the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Technologies for digital transformation create the opportunity for Africa to bypass traditional phases of industrial development as the continent has done successfully in the past. Challenges addressed in the book are inequality, social justice, ethics, access and success, policy, infrastructure, and social justice. The book contributes to the ongoing discourse among scholars in Africa. It consists of 10 chapters where conceptual and field research is combined and written by eminent African scholars in the domain and therefore worth reading by college and university students, academics/faculty, and professionals working in the information, knowledge, technology, and development.
The contribution made by this intervention aims to turn the controversial concept of indigenisation for a positive change within and outside academic space. It provides readers with the practical ways and steps in which we can change both the content and terms of the conversation when it comes to the question of education. A truly decolonisation project. The Afro-sensed approach and lens have been used in this case. Written from the anti-colonial approach to the counter-colonial approach to matters of knowledge production and changing the problematic modern education system.
In this video the editors of the book entitled, Self-Directed Learning: An imperative for education in a complex society, discuss the contents of this addition to the NWU Self-Directed Learning Series. They relate how ten unique chapters contribute to the scholarship of self-directed learning in terms of the environmental context and praxis.
The editors provide a short overview of the different chapters while contemplating their relevance for classroom practice. Finally, some areas for future research are identified based on the findings of the research in this publication.
This video introduces the concept of learning through assessment within a self-directed learning environment in terms of recent empirical research done in this area. This publication adds to the scholarship of assessment and self-directed learning within a face-to-face and online learning environment. Hence, this resource would be a good introduction to the concept of learning through assessment which also focuses on the fostering of the self-directedness of students.