Browsing by Author "Badroodien, Nur-Mohammed"

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    Academic Portability and Parity within the TVET and Higher Education Institutions in Western Cape
    (2023) Ansen, Ernestina; Badroodien, Nur-Mohammed
    After 1994, in South Africa the key education policy focus was how to reconfigure and transform the education system to create meaningful pathways and supports for school leavers to navigate sustainable incomes and life trajectories. Given the legacies of inequality and historical neglect, an abiding focus was on how better to connect education and work for the majority of South African school leavers. One of the identified pathways was to encourage the pursuit of skills in the occupational and vocational arenas amongst learners and school leavers. A significant challenge for the reconfiguration of the education system was how to give learners access to different kinds of education and training, not only at the school level but also at the Further Education and Training (FET) level and at university level, and to ensure that pathways were available for learners to easily move between the different levels. This required a new system and a National Qualifications Framework (NQF) that allowed levels of parity and portability across a basic education and training band, a further education and training band, and a higher education band, which were intended to better connect learners, education service providers, and industries throughout. This study explores the level of parity and portability within the education system developed after 1994, concentrating on the connections created between the further education and training band and the higher education band. The study more specifically examines levels of parity and portability between the National Accredited Technical Education Diploma (NATED) qualification offered at TVET colleges (at the FET band level) and those respectively offered via university of technology (higher education or HE band level) qualifications. It illustrates this by focusing on the NATED Report 191, which has an artisanal focus, to show how education-industry links operate differently in the TVET sector as opposed to the Higher Education and Training (HET) sector, and how this influences how portability and parity occur across the two sectors. Business Studies is used as a case study to demonstrate the unique relationships that exist between companies, education service providers, and learners, and to show how these tiers differ between the TVET and HET sectors. Using purposive sampling, the qualitative study conducted a variety of semi-structured interviews with provincial education officials and institutional education practitioners within the Western Cape, the purpose of which was to get insight into their understanding of the different programmes at the various band levels, and their connections. The overall goal was to better understand whether learners were being properly prepared - with a good balance of theory and practice, and appropriate courses at different band levels - to achieve a consistent, quality, and sound educational base on which to develop their further development (DoE, 1998). The study provides a variety of insights into why there is currently little or inadequate articulation or portability between TVET college business studies programmes and related university of technology programmes, and the role of the NATED Report 191 in perpetuating this. The study offers important concerns at a time where the South African state is urging post- secondary school learners to enrol in the TVET sector, claiming that this will provide equal possibilities to those who wish to pursue further education in university settings.
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    Arts and Culture focus Schools in the Western Cape: Insights into a music Program in low-income secondary schools
    (2024) Johnson, Ross; Badroodien, Nur-Mohammed
    This dissertation offers insights into an Arts & Culture Focus School music programme that was implemented at 10 low-income secondary schools in the Western Cape from 2005 to 2014. The motivation behind the initiative was to try to introduce and develop different kinds of skills and abilities at these schools. This was seen as a way of utilising the greater provision of vocational education in schools to develop human capital that improves the provincial economy. The Western Cape Education Department established the Focus Schools programme in the province in 2005 solely at low-income secondary schools. The pilot programme was deemed a provincial success and later came to serve as a key model that informed the introduction of the three-stream education model by the national Department of Basic Education in 2014. Arguably, the Focus School programme served as a prototype for the kinds of provision that would manifest itself as the occupational learning stream within the new Three Stream Model (the others being academic and vocational). For the dissertation, the study conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews at three of the 10 Arts and Culture Focus Schools in the province. Eight participants, including three headmasters and two members of the Western Cape Education Department, were interviewed. The participants provided a variety of insights on the Focus Schools model. The dissertation utilised the theoretical lens of Critical, Cultural, Political, Economy in Education to analyse the responses of the participants and to make sense of what they shared. This was done in the context of a neoliberal provincial mindset that viewed all learners as forms of human capital that needed to serve the South African and provincial capitalist economy. The dissertation suggests that while the Focus Schools programme was generally poorly resourced and offered little support for both Arts and Culture (especially music) teachers and learners in the programme in the period 2005-2014, the initiative did invariably lead to greater learner participation and performance at the designated schools. The programme continues to offer long-term benefits to the schools with the kinds of curricula and foci that the initiative provided. In particular, it can be said that the Focus Schools programme increased music education opportunities for learners in low-income secondary schools, which has helped embed and recognise the importance of music education within the larger national education and training landscape
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    Philanthropy, Scholarships and Student navigations in a changing South African educational landscape
    (2023) Day, Helen; Badroodien, Nur-Mohammed
    This dissertation explores the intersection of public education, philanthropy, and private sector funding in South Africa, and the different ways that students that receive scholarships via private funding navigate their respective educational spaces. The discussion focuses on how debates on scholarships, provided by philanthropic organisations, play out against the larger landscape of public-private educational partnerships in South Africa, and links that to the changing form of philanthropy in South Africa over time. In doing so, the dissertation introduces the voices and stories of 22 scholarship recipients scattered across the South African educational and geographical landscape (born and raised in 7 different provinces). This offers opportunities to tease out the different connections between philanthropic contributions and public education, and to question the growing influence of public-private partnerships and their stakeholders on the ways that public education and its role is conceptualised in South Africa. The goal of the dissertation is to highlight some implications that philanthropic scholarships provide for marginalised students within public institutions in South Africa, and the implications that they may have for the public education system in a context where global and local private interests have a firm agenda vis-a-vis the reconfiguration of overall public education systems. By engaging with the lived experiences and stories of 22 students receiving scholarships, the dissertation casts a spotlight on some of the opportunities, contradictions, struggles, and constraints that students within philanthropic public-private partnership spaces in South Africa often confront. The dissertation utilises the 3R framework (redistribution, representation, recognition) of Nancy Fraser, to consider some of the nuances, conflicts, and challenges that private philanthropy seems to bring to current debates about public schooling. The goal of using these is to tease out how emerging new pathways and approaches within the public-private educational domain may change how education provision for students in challenging and marginalised contexts is reconceptualised over the 21st century.
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    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.