Browsing by Author "Omar, Yunus"

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    "But I want to teach?": A critical discourse analysis of the 2018 Funza Lushaka Bursary Agreement Form
    (2023) Watson, Carla; Omar, Yunus; Badroodien Nur-Mohammed
    Despite efforts by the government, the quality and retention of teachers in South African schools remain challenges. This minor dissertation explores the discourse(s) in the Funza Lushaka Bursary Agreement Form (NSFAS, 2018) and its impact on bursary holders, including newly qualified teachers. It asks two central research questions: (1) how does this document impact the bursary holders? and (2) to what extent does the discourse(s) it uses exert power over its applicants? The research approach adopted for the study is qualitative. The Funza Lushaka Bursary Agreement Form is analysed using Norman Fairclough's theory of critical discourse analysis and Michel Foucault's theories on embedded power and use of time to demonstrate control. This approach is supplemented by Bigo's (2018) concept of silence and its intended and unintended consequences.
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    Discourses of professionalism and the production of teachers' professional identity in the South African Council for Educators (SACE) Act of 2000 : a discourse analysis
    (2002) Omar, Yunus; Jacklin, Heather
    This study seeks to identify discourses of professionalism and the production of Teachers' professional identity in the South African Council for Educators (SACE) Act of 2000. These identifies are located in the context of their social impact on, and in the actualisalion of the political roles of teachers in post-apartheid South Africa. Central to the study is the conceptualisation that discourses coiistruct identities. The research methodology is derived from Ian Parker's approach to discourse analysis, which is premised to an extent on post-structruralist thought. The author summarises Parker's 'steps' to effect a discourse analysis, and constructs a set of five analytic tools with which no analyse the SACE Act of2000. The study's main finding is that two discursive frames constitute the roles of the post-apartheid teacher in South Africa. The first is a bureaucratic discourse of marketisation that defines a role for teachers in preparing students for participation in a global market economy. A second discourse which is identified in the study is a democratic professional discourse, which delineates a critical, independent professional role for teachers. The study suggests that the two teacher identities are in tension. The two identities are complex and are simultaneously constructed and actualised.
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    English teachers' perspectives on their agency for change: Striving to care in a neoliberal, ‘post'-colonial climate
    (2024) Steenkamp, Mikhaila; Omar, Yunus; Badroodien Nur-Mohammed
    South African and international reform agendas are guided by the goal of quality, equitable schooling for all. The achievement thereof, however, remains elusive. Included in discourses surrounding this goal is a focus on teachers, in recognition of the crucial roles they play in student learning. Teacher-focused research on education reform tends to foreground teachers as professionals or agents of change tasked with implementing top-down education reforms. Yet apart from a small body of literature focusing on teachers' professional motivations towards change agency, little attention is paid in the literature to educational change as teachers define it, and to contextual constraints and enablers of agency – particularly in Global South contexts. Guided primarily by Priestley, Biesta and Robinson's (2015) ecological approach to teacher agency, this dissertation aims to contribute to the literature on bottom-up perspectives on change. It does so by examining how four high school English teachers of historically disadvantaged learners in Cape Town, South Africa, articulate the sense of purpose which drives their change agency, in a context characterised by the inequality and narrow understandings of education associated with neoliberalism. Taking an interpretive, exploratory approach to research design, the study uses a thematic analysis methodology to explore the types of pedagogic practices that participants declare are influenced by their sense of purpose. The study then explores the extent to which these teachers feel they can act agentically to fulfil their purposes in practice. What emerges from the data is an emphasis on an expansive and holistic moral professional agenda, which I argue is largely consistent with ethics of care, particularly as conceptualised by scholars like Noddings (1992) and Grant, Jasson and Lawrence (2010). This expansive agenda has the potential to inform agentic practices which are responsive to students' needs and contextual realities, while countering narrow approaches to education. However, the agenda can negatively impact agency if teachers do not receive the requisite structural and relational support. These findings may advance understandings of ground-up perspectives of quality education and how these intersect with social justice and the realities facing disadvantaged school contexts. The findings also suggest avenues to better support teachers in the development and enactment of their agency.
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    "In my stride": a life-history of Alie Fataar, teacher
    (2015) Omar, Yunus; Soudien, Crain
    This thesis employs a life-history approach to investigate how a teacher-identity is cohered under conditions of education resistance in South Africa. The life-history is situated within the broad rubric of narrative studies, but extends this to investigating a teacher's life within its complex locations of class, race, gender and religion. Alie Fataar was a legendary teacher at the Livingstone High School in Claremont, Cape Town, was a founder-member of the Non European Unity Movement (NEUM), General-Secretary of the Teachers' League of South Africa (TLSA), founder-member of the African People's Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), and Joint-Secretary of the Unity Movement of South Africa (UMSA) in exile. He was banned in 1961 under the Suppression of Communism Act, and went into exile in 1965. The study tracks his teaching and political journeys in South Africa, and across three fledgling post-colonial African countries, namely Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The primary data employed in the study are the transcribed narratives of more than fifty hours of semi-structured interviews conducted with the teacher, Alie Fataar. The study also employs secondary data in the form of life-history documents sourced from the respondent, and is supplemented by photographs sourced from the respondent, as well as archival materials which supplement the narrative data. This vast body of data is analysed using a constructivist grounded theory approach. Data analysis was facilitated by the employment of QSR-NVivo 10, a qualitative data-analysis computer software package well suited to a grounded theory analysis. The study is the first known doctoral work in South Africa to utilise a life-history framework to explore the contextualised life of a teacher associated with the TLSA as this life engages with legislative frameworks, official policies, professional teacher associations, local communities, colleagues, personal networks, political movements and other social actors in the context of resistance in South African education. The study helps us understand the fluid discursive dimensions of a teaching life as it navigates complex personal, political and professional fields in the broader context of education resistance in fiercely contested social and political arenas. The study's main finding is that Alie Fataar resists several essentialising social forces, including class, racial and religious identities, and, in doing so, the study finds that Alie Fataar holds consistently to a central, life-organising identity of the teacher as the supreme public intellectual under conditions of resistance in education and the broader socio-political-economic framework in South Africa. The study contributes to the still-sparse academic literature on the teachers of the TLSA, and simultaneously contributes to Cape social history and the politics of intellectual marginalisation in the Muslim community in the Cape from the first quarter of the twentieth century. The study makes theoretical contributions to the academic fields of life-history and the literature on exile, and contends that the researcher-researched continuum must be made explicit throughout a life-history study if the authorial voice of the subject of such a study is not to be subjugated. In terms of teacher-policy formulation, the study finds that the complex and nuanced identity-formation of teachers makes it imperative that the teacher-policy arena incorporates the voices of teachers in policy formulation. This avoids policy mismatches with regard to the very group, teachers, who are expected to adopt and implement these policies in schools.
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    Perspectives of a Twitter public on disciplinary practices in a moment of classroom conflict
    (2023) Stephens, Frances; Omar, Yunus; Badroodien Nur-Mohammed
    This exploratory study utilises a qualitative narrative analysis to explore the relationship between online discussions centred around a viral mediated school disciplinary incident and policies related to school discipline in South Africa. The study found that online articulations reflected the gaps, ambiguities, and clashes within educational policies related to school discipline, and shows how multi-disciplinary approaches to education policy research can offer researchers new tools of inquiry. This study set out to answer the following research questions: 1. How is school discipline in South Africa conceptualized in a non-specialist social media space? 2. What is the articulation of a social media conceptualization of school discipline and South African educational policies related to school discipline? 3. How can school discipline be re-conceptualized in relation to pedagogy? The research was carried out using a conceptual framework derived from school discipline related literature. A selected sample of 485 tweets were gathered which were anonymised to conceal the identities of the tweeters and the school in question. The narratives emerging from the tweets were then deductively coded into one or more of the conceptual frames. Findings from the narratives were extracted and discussed in relation to both the literature and South African policies related to school discipline. Key findings in this study include the need for the role of parents as stakeholders in school disciplinary policy formulation to be more clearly defined and expanded in school, provincial and national policies and guidelines. There is a need for discipline to be defined in policy documentation in relation to a consolidated vision of the ontology and epistemology of school discipline. Despite policy ideologies which situate the child/student as a citizen, the discursive field of school discipline policy favours the interpretation of discipline as ‘order and control'. Narratives of 'respect' frequently relate to student subordination and obedience rather than as a mutual responsibility between two people. Overarchingly, this study found that the infiltration of corporate-managerial philosophies in education contribute to school dysfunction and interfere with the actualisation of a non-violent and democratic school disciplinary system.
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    Rural,black and female: Educational Possibilities under severe conditions of constraints
    (2023) Andreas, Letitia; Omar, Yunus
    The purpose of this minor dissertation is to investigate how a rural Black female from the Eastern Cape Province in South Africa achieves academic success in relation to a Historically White University (HWU) despite conditions of severe constraints. A narrative methodology is employed to contextualise the life experiences of three rural Black females in the broader context of South African histories of education, race, rurality, and gender. The study tracks the complex educational journey of a rural born South African female learner as she navigates between two disparate geographical, educational and social spaces. In this study, the data forms used are interview narratives generated from semi-interview transcripts and personal diary notes from interviews with the three rural Black females from the Eastern Cape. This research contributes to the fields of education, sociology, history, gender, rurality, and postcolonial studies. For data analysis of the three Rural Black Females' narratives, a narrative analysis is employed. The study shows how a rural Black female learner aspires to academic success in relation to schooling and a/an Historically White University (HWU) by drawing on a range of resources. In the face of many socioeconomic conditions of poverty in the Eastern Cape, a province still impacted by the violence of the Dutch and British settler colonial projects in South Africa, she frames an aspirational disposition. The aspirations of the rural Black female learner born in post-apartheid South Africa emerge from the rural context and schooling conditions that have socially and economically deprived the Black female aspirant body of adequate resources. The study finds that the rural female learner who attends a Historically White University is committed to academic success because she draws from the cultural context of an impoverished rural community in the Eastern Cape that is deeply underresourced, but more importantly, she draws from the humanness that is the 'human resource' (social network) around her that comprises her mother, sister, teachers, friends, peers, and a university support programme. She relies on her strong social relations and networks, as well as her agency and resilience, to navigate the legacies of racism, rural and urban spatial realities, personal dilemmas, patriarchal systems that discriminate against female bodies, and a range of family circumstances such as landlessness, livestock theft, poverty, unemployment, and migration. The study advances that rural learners' educational journeys are often undertheorised in relation to what constitutes ‘resources' available under conditions of resourceconstraints, and posits that the network of human-centred support is crucial to insert into such studies. The study demonstrates that, despite many constraints, there are a range of resources available to rural-born learners in order to foster an aspirational disposition toward achieving academic success.
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    The R/Evolution of South Africa's Public Education System Post-1994 in an Era of Privatisation
    (2023) Chetty, Pagiel Joshua; Omar, Yunus; Badroodien Nur-Mohammed
    The purpose of this study is to investigate how the concept of education as a public good in South Africa has been affected by privatisation since 1994. This study locates itself within a human rights framework, which is premised upon South Africa's (seemingly progressive) Constitution of 1996 and seeks to investigate the potential shift of education as a public good (that truly benefits the public) towards a more market-based and neoliberal approach to education provision. In this regard, I analyse the annual South African education budget vote speeches presented in the South African Parliament by successive post-apartheid Ministers of Education from 1994 to 2021. As its core focus, this study theorises that the notion of education as a public good has shifted and changed in meaning since 1994. I investigate this by tracking its perceived change in meanings using a qualitative research design known as the Narrative Policy Framework, which I leverage using a Thematic Analysis approach. This approach is used as a data reduction and analysis strategy. This study argues that the rearticulation of public education under the broad rubric of neoliberal thought has fundamentally impacted the concept of education as a public good and education as a fundamental human right in South Africa in the post-apartheid era. Furthermore, despite the goal of making education universally available, the increasing encroachment of ‘the market' in public education provision consolidates and creates new forms of inequalities, thereby enlarging the general inequality gap.
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    The relationship between public and private higher education in Zambia with a specific focus on the movement of lecturers across public and private universities
    (2023) Chisembele, John; Omar, Yunus; Badroodien Nur-Mohammed
    Studies conducted on the political economy of higher education in Zambia have inadequately tackled the impacts of neoliberalism on public universities in relation to public lecturers' motivation to teach for both public and private universities and implications for students' learning experiences in public universities. This study investigated the motivations of public university lecturers to teach for both public and private universities. The study also determined the implications of learning for students at the Public University where these lecturers were full-time employees. The main research question driving the study is: What are the implications of lecturers at public universities working simultaneously at private universities? This study is qualitative and phenomenological in nature in that it reported the participants' lived perspectives. The participants in the study comprise four lecturers and four postgraduate students. The responses from the participants were collated according to themes. The findings indicated that the motivations of public university lecturers to teach for both public and private universities were: socio-economic in that lecturers stressed the importance of additional remuneration that public university lecturers received from private universities; benevolence in the form of lecturers offering their service for purposes of creating capacity in new private universities; and management skills gained through positions of leadership that junior public university lecturers were given in private universities which they otherwise would not hold in public universities. The Public University postgraduate students perceived their lecturers' teaching for both public and private universities as retrogressive to the student learning experience in the public university because of: inadequate supervision of postgraduate studies due to teaching overloads by lecturers; time overrun of writing of postgraduate research theses; cost overrun through payment of additional annual tuition fees and inadequate academic mentorship which compromised the quality of their education. The results lead to the conclusion that dual employment practices by some public university lecturers engaged in both public and private universities have distinctly negative implications for the learning experiences of their students at the Public University. This study provides insights for policymakers, policy analysts and academic researchers on higher education in relation to the impacts of neoliberalism and privatisation on the political economy of higher education in Zambia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Global South.