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Background: Learners from predominantly less priviledged South African schools encounter English as a language of teaching and learning for the first time in Grade 4. The transition from the use of home language to second language, namely English first additional language, is complexly related to the learners’ inability to read text meaningfully. This complexity is traceable to the reading materials, actual teaching practices and learners’ cultural underpinnings. Learners’ inability to read text meaningfully impacts negatively their academic performance in general.Aim: This article demonstrates how a socially inclusive teaching strategy is used to enhance the teaching of reading in a second additional language to Grade 4 learners.Setting: A one-teacher public school situated on a remote private property with bad access roads. Learners from neighbouring farms walked long distances to school. The teacher’s administrative work and workshops often clashed with teaching and learning that received very limited support.Methods: The principles of the free attitude interview technique and critical discourse analysis were used to generate and analyse the data. Socially inclusive teaching strategy that is participatory action research-oriented and underpinned by critical emancipatory research principles guided the study.Results: The use of socially inclusive teaching strategy helped improve reading of English text significantly.Conclusion: Socially inclusive teaching strategy can help improve learning and teaching support materials, teacher support and learning.

This editorial is a culmination of various research on the area of posthuman theorization as applied to the field of education. It also focused on the need for borderless curriculum to circumvent global challenges such as genocide, terrorism among other things. It details the rationale of adopting a post human and borderless curriculum to respond to the ambivalence brought by the corona virus. The special issue gives alternatives which emerged during the pandemic and arms educators and learners with new models of learning that will ensure education system is not disrupted on the even another pandemic emerges. The argument of the special issue is that within the auspices of posthuman and borderless curriculum something else, and new is possible through working and thinking together.

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In this paper I show how bricolage as a theoretical framework is used to understand and enhance the learning of the postgraduate students and academics working as a team. Bricolage is described as a metaphor for a research approach which creates something out of nothing and uses that which is available to achieve new goals. It is about finding many and new ways to resolve real life problems using that which is present in the context. It is not linear research, but research that acknowledges and works with the contradictions and incongruences in order to weave a complex text of solutions to the problems. It uses multiple voices, different textual forms and different resources, blurring neat disciplinary boundaries. In short, it splinters the dogmatism of a single approach. This theoretical positioning provides the vocabulary to describe and understand processes and interactions among the research team of 28 PhD and 22 Masters’ students being supervised by 15 academics, across the two campuses of the University of the Free State. For example, while all the actors in this team come from diverse and sometimes contradictory theoretical origins and fields of specialisation they tend to coalesce around the theme of creating sustainable learning environments in their respective research sites. To this theme they ask different questions, hence diverse aims and objectives. They also read different literature informed by the diverse groups of participants in their respective studies. Rather than being the sole determinants of their respective research agendas, they treat the participants as co-researchers who direct and inform the direction of these studies. Their methodologies acknowledge the multiple voices of those who directly experience the problem under investigation and thus can assist in the resolution thereof. They listen to all, irrespective of their station in life and, like bricoleurs, they weave meaningful solutions out of fragments of data and materials from very diverse sources of participants with different ways of doing things.

This study, informed by the academic literacies approach, was part of a broader study that sought to establish students' perceptions of the efficacy of the English language interventions at a university using a case methodology. A sample of 142 students responded to a structured questionnaire on English Language Literacy Support Programmes for Students offered by the University's Writing Centre. The non-probability sampling method was used in selecting the students. Data were also collected through an interview with three university officials for triangulation purposes. Questionnaire data were quantitatively analysed (statistical frequencies) while interview date were qualitatively analysed by discerning themes. Paradoxically, the findings indicated that the students did not perceive themselves as weak in English (an aspect refuted by the interviewed officials) but indicated that they were in need of English language support. The study concluded that the English Language support services were therefore not as effective as they should be since few of the students made use of them. It is recommended that the English Language support services need improvement in terms of space, human and e-resources to support teaching and learning. Moreover university authorities should seriously consider implementing a compulsory assessment test for all new entrants whose mother tongue is not English to identify those in need of such support.

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