In the past two years, higher education institutions (HEI) have been inundated with students' demands for a decolonised education. Their voice led to the resuscitation of debates on a transformed curriculum. Amongst others, the language question is an issue at the centre of these debates. What students were questioning was the hegemony of English, the slow pace in which universities implement multilingual policies, and lack of clarity on the positioning of African languages as languages of learning and teaching. In this paper, we argue that if higher education aims to address marginalised and new knowledge through a decolonised curriculum, fundamental questions are worth being asked. In particular the questions we are asking and responding to are: "How does student voice become a force for social change?" "How can student voice enable HEIs to deal with the issue of language?" We suggest and support the view that the issue of language should be recognised as a social justice issue, that student voice can enlighten curriculum designers and society on the dangers of reproducing inequalities through the hegemony of English, and that graduate attributes, as an essential notion, should recognise multilingualism as a core skill that students should acquire.
Recently, the South African Institute of Physics undertook a major review of university physics education. The report highlighted the necessity for further transformation of the teaching of physics, particularly in relation to the teaching of under-prepared students.In this article we examine how physics lecturers in South Africa reported how they respond to the teaching challenges that they face in terms of representational competence. We argue that the goal of any undergraduate degree is the production of disciplinary literate graduates, where disciplinary literacy refers to the ability to competently deal with the various representational formats used within the discipline. For physics the development of disciplinary literacy involves competence in a wide range of representations, such as; written and oral languages, diagrams, graphs, mathematics, apparatus, simulations, etc.Our interest in this study was the way in which individual physics lecturers described how they deal with their students' lack of representational competence. To this end, we interviewed 20 physics lecturers from five purposefully selected representative South African universities about their students' lack of representational competence and the educational strategies they use for dealing with this problem. These interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed for potential patterns.Iterative, interpretive analysis resulted in the identification of six qualitatively different response strategies that South African physics lecturers indicate they invoke to deal with their students' lack of representational competence. We suggest that an understanding of this range of possible response strategies will allow physics lecturers to better understand their own responses and those of their peers, and that this, in turn, may lead to changes in educational practice.Based on the differences in individual response strategies that we find, we further argue that inter-and intra-faculty discussions about undergraduate disciplinary literacy goals have the distinct potential for reforming South African undergraduate physics. Here, we suggest that the disciplinary literacy discussion matrix that we used to initiate dialogue in our interviews may also double as a useful starting point for such faculty discussions.
The study explored whether and how culturally sensitive stories can encourage resilience in young children orphaned by AIDS. The purpose of the investigation was allied to the paradigm of positive psychology, which focuses on the promotion of potential strengths to buffer children against adversity, as well as on social ecological understandings of resilience, which emphasise that social ecologies have a duty to facilitate children's positive adjustment to adversity. A pre-post-intervention evaluation was used to gather qualitative data on orphaned children's resilience to AIDS-related adversity by employing participatory visual methods. The intervention, called Read-me-to-Resilience (Rm2R), consisted of telling 22 culturally sensitive stories to the children. We compared the pre- and post-intervention data for each participant before thematically analysing the total findings. Our analysis indicates that the children's resilience had been bolstered in the period between the pre-test and post-test. We conclude that culturally relevant stories could be used by South African caregivers, service providers, and educators as an accessible, inexpensive and ready-made tool to directly empower children who have been orphaned by AIDS.
Appropriate data generation methods are key to a successful research project to attain rich and relevant data. When doing research with children, the methods selected should be age appropriate and enable them to contribute their ideas in the research process. However, data generation with children is not ''child's play''-it is a challenging task that requires careful design on the part of the researcher. We conducted a study in South Africa with children between the ages of 9 and 14 who were orphaned and rendered vulnerable by HIV and AIDS in order to explore if, and how, the use of participatory visual methods might enhance resilience. In this article, we provide a reflective account of the research process and discuss lessons learnt from our experiences of using drawings and collage as data generation methods when doing research with children. This article contributes to the literature on the use of participatory visual methods as data generation strategies with children highlighting some caveats and offering insight into how challenges could be circumvented.
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