Browsing by Author "Whitelaw, Emma"

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    Post-school education in an unequal society
    (2023) Whitelaw, Emma; Branson, Nicola; Leibbrandt Murray
    In South Africa, a country afflicted by conditions of poverty, inequality, and unemployment, a post-school education can be key to fostering upward mobility. However, many of the country's socioeconomic inequalities are replicated within the post-school education system itself. This means that, inter alia, inequalities in student access and success plague the sector despite strides made by the government to redress the educational and economic discrimination of the apartheid regime. In the substantive chapters of this dissertation, I explore inequalities in access, academic achievement, and graduate realities; considering each as an obstacle to equitable participation and success in post-school education, and thereafter. The first substantive chapter concerns access for the 'missing middle'; a group who do not qualify for financial aid but for whom university education is unaffordable. I operationalise the concepts of mobility, vulnerability, and economic stability to differentiate the socioeconomic circumstances of households in South Africa, and locate them within the context of the current post-school funding policy. Results contribute information to an important current policy priority; the development of a sustainable, comprehensive, and progressive financial aid scheme. The second substantive contribution concerns achievement, particularly as it relates to changes in university students' academic performance in 2020 and 2021. Achievement gaps between students funded by the National Student Financial Aid Scheme [NSFAS] and those not funded by NSFAS existed before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the extent to which these were exacerbated by institution closures speaks to issues of participation and success. In my third contribution, I analyse the extent to which financially supporting family and extended family networks is associated with the completion of post-school education. If graduates' realities differ once post-schooling is completed, this can hamper the extent to which post-school education can promote individual upward mobility. A connecting contribution of these chapters is to provide empirical evidence, through rigorous economic analysis, that builds an understanding of inequalities in access, achievement, and graduate realities. This evidence can be inserted into dialogues that shape policies, which ultimately have the potential to disrupt socioeconomic inequalities. Although concerning different stages of post-schooling, all chapters contribute to quantifying features of post-school education that have not previously been explored in-depth
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    Towards the Development of an IsiXhosa Adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory for Toddlers
    (2018) Whitelaw, Emma; Dowling,Tessa; Ribbens-Klein,Yolandi
    In this thesis, I draw on experiences of the isiXhosa segment of the pre-pilot research phase and first rural, toddler pilot for the adaptation of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) into Southern African languages. 1 The adaptation stems from the growing dissatisfaction regarding the dearth of speech and language assessments and therapeutic tools currently available in South Africa for isiXhosa or other local languages (Pascoe and Smouse, 2012; Demuth, 2007). Such tools are of fundamental importance since failure to accurately diagnose communication difficulties hinders appropriate intervention. If improperly addressed, communication difficulties can hamper the essential development of literacy skills and academic success (see Shonkoff and Phillips, 2000). Reliable research on child language acquisition is thus critically needed in order to inform culturally and linguistically appropriate assessments that can lead to accurate diagnosis and treatment of communication disorders, and ultimately improve children’s early childhood development trajectories. Data from the pre-pilot and pilot study informs discussions about monolingual isiXhosa-speaking toddlers’ lexical and grammatical acquisition. I furthermore discuss the need for the adaptation of such inventories to local circumstances, and I problematise the assumption that Western linguistic constructs, ontologies, and epistemologies are appropriate for the CDI exercise as applied to Bantu languages. The findings of this study furthermore contribute to existing scholarship on how children acquire words and morphemes. Findings as such will be of use to clinicians and speech pathologists, especially in informing vital language and communication rehabilitation in early childhood development. I additionally hope that the results presented will inform cross-linguistic scholarship on child language acquisition, paving the way for future research as well as the creation of bi- and multilingual CDIs.