Browsing by Author "Badroodien, Azeem"

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    Learning to resist: exploring habitus (trans)formation of critical teacher-activists before 1994
    (2025) Visagie, Ashley; Badroodien, Azeem
    This study aims to understand the enabling conditions for the emergence of teacher activism before South Africa's democratic transition in the 1990s. It does so by examining the life experiences of four teacher activists that became politically active in their childhood and youth, and who entered the field of teaching during apartheid. The study contributes to a growing body of literature about the lives of teachers during apartheid, while offering theoretical insight into the emergence of teacher activism under apartheid. Four teachers were selected for the study, all of whom were classified as ‘coloured' males under apartheid. All four identify as socialists and all four participated in the anti apartheid struggle and held various positions of leadership. While they began their teaching careers at different times and the length of their teaching careers differ for various reasons, including banning, imprisonment and dismissal, they embodied in their own ways what it means to be critical teachers. Methodologically, this study critically analyses life-stories, drawing from in-depth narratives produced through semi-structured interviews. This approach allowed for an engagement with rich data on personal perspectives and recollections, as well as broader social influences in the lives of the teachers in this study. The primary concern of the study is to understand the enabling conditions for the emergence of teacher activism during apartheid, which it explores through an analysis of the accounts of the four designated teachers. Treating memory as a repository of precious knowledge, the goal is to offer a variety of insights that serve as a heuristic framework to think about the arguable absence of teacher social movements in South Africa in the contemporary period. Leveraging conceptual resources drawn from Bourdieu, the insights which this study has produced demonstrate that the emergence of activism may be better understood by considering how times of crisis produce conditions under which taken-for-granted assumptions can be contested. Crisis produces discordance within the field between hegemonic social visions and the reality of the crisis, which renders plausible resistance discourses. Such times of crisis can be experienced at the level of the individual in moments that are referred to in this study as critical incidents, and they are also experienced collectively at the broader societal level, as Bourdieu has suggested. In the above regard, the primary contribution of the study lies in its engagement with the role of imagination as a form of intellectual labour at moments of crisis, where machinations of power are made more explicit but where imagining a more hopeful future is also catalysed. Both of these processes are necessary in converting crises into catalytic events capable of mobilising people, and that then spurs different forms of activism. A further contribution emerges from the study's engagement with different collective processes of organisation such as trade unions, history societies, or sports clubs that offer spaces that promote the acquisition of two forms of capital, namely critical capital and organising capital, and that create places where counter-hegemonic imaginations can be cultivated. The study shows how changing situations in the lives of different teacher activists simultaneously constrain possibilities for change and produce contradictions (or contradictory conditions) that provide the required room for activist intervention. These lessons, it is argued, offer important insights into how teacher activism is constituted and how, perhaps, it can arguably be revived in the contemporary period.
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    Open Access
    Representations of Pan-Africanism in the contemporary post-Apartheid South African high school history classroom
    (2025) Karadag, Esma; Badroodien, Nur-Mohammed; Badroodien, Azeem
    This is an interdisciplinary study on the representation of Pan-Africanism in history classrooms in high schools in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa. The subject History is part of the curriculum's stated vision to mould learners' identities in relation to key national and continental post-colonial foundations, such as Pan-Africanism (Department of Basic Education [DBE], 2011). Employing a qualitative empirical method, the study aims to gain insight into the contemporary responses to Pan-Africanism in South African high school history classrooms through the perspectives of teachers. How do they represent the concept in history classrooms, engage textbooks and students on the concept, and what do they report on the contemporary views of their history students on Pan-Africanism? Using reflexive thematic analysis, the study highlights significant and bifurcated variations that exist in the representation of Pan-Africanism through the perspectives of teachers across classrooms, intricately linked to social class. This key finding confirms Stuart Hall's (1997) cultural theory on representation, which emphasises the role of cultural and historical contexts in which meaning is ‘fixed' through the systemisation process of ‘encoding' and ‘decoding', thereby reinforcing or challenging existing power structures. The study illustrates the teachers' agencies in constructing varied representations of Pan-Africanism in the contemporary history classroom situated in contrasting post-apartheid socio-economic contexts, in which new shared and contested cultural codes and conceptual meanings are created.
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    Voices of transformation: unveiling critical pedagogy for social justice in South African classrooms through the lived experiences of educators
    (2025) Snyders, Angelika; Omar, Yunus; Badroodien, Azeem
    This dissertation explores how critical pedagogy in the educational landscape of South Africa presents itself in the teaching lives of five pedagogues in finding elements that amplify education as a public good and strengthen teaching for social justice. The discussion foregrounds concepts of critical pedagogy as the teacher-participants reflect on their teaching history which informs their pedagogic repertoires. In doing so, the dissertation introduces the voices and reflections of five teachers residing in the Western Cape of South Africa. The small selection of teachers from contrasting socio- economic communities offers the opportunity to tease out the similarities and contradictions in their teaching repertoires, as critical pedagogy posits that educational spaces are sites of contention intricately shaped by historical influences. It asserts the absence of political neutrality within schools and underscores the fundamentally political nature inherent in the act of teaching (Kincheloe, 2008). The goal of the dissertation is to present a window into the lives of five South African teachers who attempt to use their work as a social and cultural critique in arguing for a better and just world. By engaging their lived experiences and teaching repertoires, the dissertation draws attention to the opportunities, conditions, and contradictions within the educational landscape of South Africa that teachers often confront. The dissertation utilises critical pedagogy as a framework to consider the nuances, conflicts, and challenges that teachers in contrasting socio-economic schooling communities face. In doing so the study teases out the agentic power of teachers who critically engage education in South Africa and challenge the reproduction of injustice to be truly transformative intellectuals.