Browsing by Subject "voice"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    An exploratory study of the experiences of student support officers offering counselling services to students at TVET Colleges in the Western Cape
    (2025) Naidoo, Sashen; Ward, Catherine; Titi, Neziswa
    This study explored the experiences of student support officers (SSOs) who offer counselling services to students at Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges in the Western Cape province, South Africa. Methodologically, the study employs a phenomenological approach as its focus is on experience-generated knowledge. It is thus located within the qualitative paradigm to give voice and the perspectives of the SSOs. Previous literature demonstrates that students historically sought counselling primarily for academic and career purposes. However, over time, the nature and type of counselling students required became increasingly complex with greater expectations of counsellors at higher education institutions. Therefore, further research is necessary to better understand this consequential phenomenon from the perspective of the SSOs through their meaning-making. This study found that SSOs experienced their role to be ill-defined, fluid and riddled with challenges of language and culture thus affecting the quality of meaningful counselling. This study offers recommendations emanating from interviews with SSOs. This study is germane to governance in TVET colleges in the Western Cape but may offer insights to other institutions of higher learning.
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    Moving-voicing-remembering resonating embodied memory through performance as research
    (2025) Jamisse, Adriana Laurel Rodrigues; Matchett, Sara; Job, Jacqueline
    In this written explication, I articulate a process-based MA journey which, through Practice- as-Research (PaR), has explored how the body remembers knowledge within an intentional cultivation of resonance. The emphasis on the textural and aural experience within my own performance practice, offered an opportunity to engage embodied memory as corporeal traces of sound knowledges that live within and are maintained by, a range of resonant relationships. Inspired by the works of German sociologist Hartmut Rosa and Indian American political theorist Anita Chari, I use resonance as a theoretical framework that aids in exploring relationality within a performance praxis. Borrowing from the social sciences, literature, somatic studies and performance studies, I unfold an incomplete conceptual discussion around MOVING, VOICING and REMEMBERING as interdependent, circular, emergent and integrative motions of my body-in-relation. I articulate my re-membering identity by engaging with the interdependence of memory, archive and knowledge through embodied practice. Influenced by South African scholar Uhuru Phalafala's concept of the matriarchive, I understand memory as embodied and relational and thus expand it towards the notion of matrilineally transmitted sound knowledges. The ritualised practices of wandering through ecology, tracing through materials and integrating MOVING-VOICING- REMEMBERING in my performance processes, inform the way that the conceptual discussion unfolds, further revealing the interlinks between body and world, voice and relationality, and memory and knowledge.
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    Risk in Postgraduate writing: voice discourse and edgework
    (University of the Western Cape, 2013) Thesen, Lucia
    This paper brings writing into the contested space of research and knowledge-making in South Africa. An often hidden dimension of research is that it has to find expression in a written product, increasingly in English. This creates challenges for both students, who have developed writing identities in other domains, disciplines and languages, and also supervisors and journal editors who are gatekeepers for the making of new knowledge. In a competitive and uncertain climate where discourses of risk management play an increasingly important part, people tend to play it safe when it comes to writing, conforming to a narrow image of scientific writing. This has consequences for knowledge-making as students often set aside the experiences, allegiances and styles they have developed along the way. Drawing on data from an international publishing project on risk in academic writing, the paper explores dilemmas around the process of research writing. These instances make the contradictions and tensions faced by writers and gatekeepers central, highlighting the importance of voice and risk. Both voice and risk are explored experientially and theoretically, with the emphasis on the potentials of risk. The concept of risk, not as risk management, but as risk-taking, offers new ways of thinking about writing that brings the decisions that writers and readers make to the fore. A focus on risk has the potential to offer new understandings about the changing landscapes in which writers and readers weigh up their options against notions of what is 'normal'. Finally I suggest edgework as a productive concept that can take work on risk forward in both research and pedagogy.
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    Student voice as a methodological issue in academic literacies research
    (Taylor & Francis, 2012) Paxton, Moragh
    Academic literacies research has been identified as an emerging but significant field in higher education. This article extends the discussions around methodology in academic literacies research by drawing on the current text and context debates in sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography. It uses illustrations from a recent academic literacies research project to reflect on methodology and to emphasise the importance of a prolonged engagement with participants' writing practices and experiences as well as the collection and analysis of a range of types of data to allow the researcher to become more familiar with the context. Methods such as allowing students to interpret their own writing, classroom observation and students' written literacy histories gave the researcher real insights into the way students made connections to their own familiar contexts in order to learn. The research also highlighted the manner in which communication between students and teaching staff can break down because teachers misinterpret student utterances when they do not understand or know the contexts that the students are drawing on. At the same time, however, the researcher sounds some caution about the use of dialogue in ethnographic methodologies because communication is a two-way process and allocation of linguistic resources has been unequal. Therefore, where students' resources do not match the context, they may struggle to communicate with the interviewer and to interpret their written texts. In these cases, interviewees who are first language speakers from privileged schooling backgrounds may be able to contextualise and interpret their writing more fully than interviewees who are speakers of English as a second or foreign language and who come from poorer rural schools.