Item Open Access Teaching recent history in countries that have experienced human rights violations: case studies from Chile(Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2011) Toledo, María Isabel; Magendzo, Abraham; Gazmuri, RenatoIncorporating recent history into the educational curricula of countries that have experienced human rights violations combines the complexities of teaching history, teaching recent history, and human rights education. Recent history makes a historical analysis of social reality and a historiographical analysis of the immediate. It is located between history and present, between past and present, between witness and historian, between memory and history. This situation creates problems in teaching. This article investigates the teaching-learning process of the subunit ‘Military regime and transition to democracy’ in secondary schools in Santiago, Chile, by means of both a quantitative methodological strategy to identify six unique cases, and a qualitative strategy that is reported in this article. A variety of practices highlighted four models: constructivism, development of meta-cognition, historical discourse, and moral discourse. These models are described. Their diversity is due to the existence of different theoretical frameworks. This unit has gaps in content and historiographical knowledge, and there is no coordination with human rights education. The diversity of models is cause for concern because not all of them encourage students to understand the present as a result of a historical process and how to operate within it.Item Open Access (Re)thinking (trans)formation in South African (higher) education(Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2011) Le Grange, LesleyIn this article I outline two broad sets of changes characterising the South African higher education landscape. The first relates to, among other things, structural changes (such as mergers and incorporations), the reorganisation of teaching programmes (influenced by the mode 2 knowledge), and the introduction of performativity regimes, most notably a quality assurance body for higher education, the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC). These changes might be understood as outcomes of forces associated with the ascendancy of neoliberal politics and forces linked to a rapidly changing and globally interconnected world. The second relates to the need to transform higher education in South Africa so as to overcome legacies of apartheid as captured in policies that have been developed to redress past inequalities, including discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation and so on. It is in this area in particular that challenges remain, as reflected in the Soudien Report. I suggest in this article that both sets of changes relate to a broader crisis – a crisis of humanism. Moreover, education might be implicated in this crisis. And so I suggest that we might need to (re)think (trans)formation in (higher) education by replacing the term ‘education’ with the term pedagogy, where pedagogy is understood as a transformative event concerned with the person becoming present in context (Todd 2010).Item Open Access Book review - The burden of educational exclusion: ‘Understanding and challenging early school leaving in Africa’(Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2011) Wabike, PaulAbstract not availableItem Open Access Opinions of pre-service teachers towards community service-learning experiences(Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2011) Kucukoglu, AdnanThis study examines the opinions of 41 teacher candidates taking a community service learning (CSL) course. The implementation of this course and its contributions to participants’ personal, social and academic development were examined using qualitative methods. Data was collected using semi-structured interview questions, and an inductive coding technique and descriptive data analysis were employed. The findings suggest that the participating pre-service teachers believed that the CSL process met their expectations. Most of the teachers believed that the service-learning experience was beneficial and that they would be able to make use of the knowledge they gained during the CSL process in their social, academic and professional lives.Item Open Access Pathways through the education and training system: do we need a new model?(Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2011) Cosser, MichaelAnalyses conducted by the Education, Science and Skills Development (ESSD) research programme at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) reveal major areas of misalignment in the South African education pathway system. The majority of learners entering Further Education and Training (FET) colleges, nursing training institutions and learnerships have already achieved National Senior Certificates prior to enrolment. Higher Education is seen as the only viable option for further learning, contributing to the inverted triangle phenomenon in which a small FET college system is secondary to a much larger Higher Education system which struggles to retain inadequately prepared students. Against this background, this paper proposes a new model for student progression that broadens learning opportunities at the intermediate level.Item Open Access English education for young children in South Korea: not just a collective neurosis of English fever!(Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2011) Jahng, Kyung EunThe aim of this article is to rethink English education for young children in South Korea through exploring a great variety of complex, interrelated terrains in terms of its emergence and popularity in an era of globalisation. I critically examine the relevance of discursive and non-discursive conditions derived from social, political, economic, and cultural forces, for the current emphasis of early childhood education, with special reference to English education for young children in South Korea. This is expected to provide international readers with an understanding of the significance of reconceptualising early childhood English education in countries where English is not the native language, considering its complicated (re) constructions through power relations embedded in its constitutive discourses. Drawing on Foucault’s notions of governmentality and Bhabha’s term hybridity, this article explores a set of discourses, such as instrumentalism, developmentalism, and cosmopolitanism, pertinent to the reproduction of the social conditions and, simultaneously, to the constitution of subjects around English education. By politicising early childhood English education in South Korea, I argue that it has not emerged out of a “collective neurosis of English fever” (Kim, 2002), but is a discursively constructed product in a particular timespace.Item Open Access Formative assessment as mediation(Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2011) De Vos, Mark; Belluigi, Dina ZoëWhilst principles of validity, reliability and fairness should be central concerns for the assessment of student learning in higher education, simplistic notions of ‘transparency’ and ‘explicitness’ in terms of assessment criteria should be critiqued more rigorously. This article examines the inherent tensions resulting from CRA’s links to both behaviourism and constructivism and argues that more nuance and interpretation is required if the assessor is to engage his/her students with criterion-based assessment from a constructivist paradigm. One way to negotiate the tensions between different assessment ideologies and approaches meaningfully is to construe assessment as ‘mediation’. This article presents an example assessment rubric informed by John Biggs’ (1999) SOLO Taxonomy.Item Open Access Addressing the assessment dilemma of additional language learners through dynamic assessment(Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2011) Omidire, M. F.; Bouwer, A. C.; Jordaan, J. C.Many learners with an additional language (AL) as their language of learning and teaching (LoLT) have not acquired the level of proficiency required for them to demonstrate their knowledge and achieve the desired outcome on assessment tasks given in that language. Using instruments designed for fully fluent learners and covertly including proficiency in the AL when assessing them academically or clinically, is inequitable and certainly yields invalid results. The notion of language of learning, teaching and assessment (LoLTA) should replace LoLT to represent the dilemma more accurately. This paper reports on empirical research in Nigeria using curriculum-based dynamic assessment (CDA) as an alternative method of assessment of AL learners in mainstream education. The study aimed to determine the influence of the CDA procedure on the performance and affect of AL learners. Eight learners in Grade 8 selected from two schools participated in a process of debriefing and mediation during three continuous assessment cycles and the end-of-term examination in Business Studies and Integrated Science. The assessments were mediational in nature as they contained linguistic adaptations of the questions and incorporated a glossary of assessment terms. The results suggest a generally positive influence of CDA, although to varying degrees, on participants’ performance and affect. The school context also has a crucial influence on these two aspects.Item Open Access ‘Behind the doors of learning’: the transmission of racist and sexist discourses in a History classroom(Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2011) Wilmot, Mark; Naidoo, DevikaNow that the doors of historically white schools have officially been opened to Black learners, this paper presents a critical analysis of discourses of domination transmitted behind the doors of learning in a History classroom. While the official History curriculum (NCS, 2002) advocates multi-perspectival epistemological approaches, this paper illustrates the subordination of epistemic goals to racist and sexist ideological goals through the transmission of racist and sexist discourses. A teacher’s lessons were observed, audio-taped, transcribed and analysed according to critical discourse theory. The conventional Grade 10 topic, The conquest of the Aztecs by the Spanish, was mediated through racist and sexist formal and informal discursive strategies such as the use of teacher power to silence contestation of inaccurate statements; the use of metaphor, simile, and binary oppositions to convey prejudicial meanings, derogation, inferiorisation, ridicule, jokes, disclaimers, and stereotyping that subsumed the historical topic being taught. The analysis exposes the informal yet effective workings of power for the perpetuation of discourses of domination in the History lesson. Such discourses subjected learners to a form of symbolic violence which may lead students to ontological misrecognition of self and race.Item Open Access Doing justice to social justice in South African higher education(Faculty of Education, University of the Free State, 2011) Tjabane, Masebala; Pillay, VenithaThis paper attempts to develop a conceptualisation of social justice in higher education based on a close reading of the current literature in the field. An important assumption we make is that higher education is a valuable mechanism for social justice. We set the literature against policy documents that detail South African aspirations with regard to the achievement of social justice goals. Our aim is to stimulate debate on and engagement with issues of social justice in the local and global context that continues to manifest increasing socio-economic injustices. We argue that human liberation from global social injustice is intertwined at the individual and collective level and that it requires a collective human agency inherent in the radical tradition of social justice, which exhibits impressive credentials for facilitating the achievement of social justice.