Browsing by Subject "Education Policy, Leadership and Change"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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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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    The impact of learner transport on Grade 3 learners' physiological, emotional and educational well-being: a case study of a rural primary school in the Cape Winelands, South Africa
    (2018) Portwig, Carla; Gilmour, James David
    This dissertation examines the impact of various modes of transport on Grade 3 primary school learners' well-being in a rural school in the Cape Winelands district of the Western Cape, South Africa. The study moves beyond this narrow frame of physical transport to include the physiological, emotional, and educational domains of learners' lives. The individuals' physiological, emotional and educational well-being are utilised as analytical categories. The research used a mixed-methods design in a case-study approach. The qualitative data was derived from learner focus groups, open-ended interviews, and learner and teacher questionnaires. The quantitative data was derived from school records of learner attendance, Western Cape Education Department (WCED) term schedules and the WCED Systemic test results for the school. The main findings were as follows: (1) On a physiological level, irrespective of the mode of transport, access to school was found to be difficult but not impossible due to dangers and similar safety issues for all learners including pedestrians (2) On an emotional level, again all learners faced similar fears and trauma possibilities, and lacked the support of professional counsellors (3) Educationally, the bus passengers performed worse than other MoTs, whereas the pedestrians were the highest performing group. Also, seasonal change influenced learner absenteeism and similar attendance patterns were found for all MoTs in summer but in winter the pedestrians came to school more often than the bus passengers.
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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.