Agency, resilience and innovation in overcoming educational failure

This study seeks to understand how a group of boys in a Durban township achieved exceptional educational results despite the severe financial, social and educational constraints they faced. Their high school typified the worst failings of the South African educational system, but they achieved academic success in the matriculation and at university. Using resilience theory as a framework, it seeks to explore the strategies employed by the group and assesses the nature of their resilience. The group formed from a recognition that they were failing in their education. They responded by developing both individual and collective strategies to guide their learning. The strategies consisted of individual study, the debating of problems in their group, using whatever extra classes were available, locating material resources and taking on tutoring and teaching roles. The study draws on a series of interviews, focus group discussion and documentary evidence over the period 2011 to 2018. A thematic analysis of the data identifies four key themes: (1) Education and society have failed us (2) Responding to failure, we develop strategies and we appropriate resources (3) “Learning is within our blood” and (4) Our success. The only possible advantage the group enjoyed over their peers was that their families valued their education. In the process they developed confidence in their deep understanding of the subjects they studied and in their own intellectual capacity. It is argued that the principles they developed hold within them the potential for ongoing transformation of the systems that disadvantaged them. The significance of this study is that it demonstrates the need for officials, principals and teachers to value and support the capacity of young people in African contexts to achieve the fullest grasp of disciplinary knowledge

Crossing from violence to nonviolence: pedagogy and memory

This qualitative case study addresses the use of memories of violence in a workshop withten young student leaders in Durban. The pedagogy included the use of guidelines andgender-based groups as ways of enabling safety. A particularly direct discussion of genderand its relationship to violence followed, though violence in relation to other socialidentities was also explored. Walkerdine’s work (2006) on border crossing is used toanalyse the data from the records of discussion and evaluation comments. The argument isthat such a pedagogy enabled participants to address some of the sedimented connectionsthat held them to relationships based on violence. Generally, if we understand violence ascaught up in social identities, work on memories of violence will require attention todynamics related to the identities present. While gender’s relation to violence is central inthis context, further cases in which the pedagogy is structured around other social identitieswould extend our understanding

Class consciousness and migrant workers : dock workers of Durban

Despite the enormous apparatus of control at the disposal of employers and the state in South Africa, working class activity has not been eliminated nor organization erased. African migrant workers, such as those employed in the Durban docks, have held a leading position within the African working class for decades, absorbing the lessons of past struggles and putting forward demands which have led strike movements. These struggles demonstrate the uncompromising hostility of African workers to their class and national oppres- sion. With the growth of capital in South Africa an increase in class exploitation has been accompanied by intensified national oppression; the rule over African workers being enforced through vagrant, master and servant, and pass laws wh ich reproduce a cheap migrant labour force. Dock workers, for more than a century migrant workers, have shown a capacity for resistance in the city equal or higher than the level of class action by 'settled' urban workers. Their resilience is explained by their concentra- tion and commanding position in the labour process of the docks. During strikes the workers have laid claim to work and residence in towns in opposition to the employer and state strategy of expell ing strikers from th e urban centres. Decasualization has been introduced as a 'repressive reform' to reassert the control of the employers over an increasingly active workforce. Ironically, it has b~en accompanied by increasing priority to the development of contract labour in the docks and has also not eliminated the high turnover of workers nor the insecurity of employment. The consciousness of the dock workers has been shaped by the harsh discipline of capitalist production, national oppression, and the daily experience of international communications. These factors, combined with a long tradition of resistance, have encouraged the formation of a class con- scious section of the African proletariat

Education for the "African child": Distant illusion?

One of the key features of post-apartheid South Africa has been an ongoing debate around access to quality education. Educational policy experts have decried what they have often termed a “dysfunctional” schooling system that fails to prepare students adequately for independent thinking and future life prospects. Prominent amongst the circulating debates have been important, yet peripheral issues such as resources, curriculum change and general inequality, forgetting the very real and systematic ways in which racial ideological thinking came to drive education in South Africa during apartheid

Desktop analysis to inform the design for megafauna monitoring within the Reef 2050 Integrated Monitoring and Reporting Program: final report of the seabirds team in the megafauna expert group

[Extract] The current seabird monitoring strategy for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is the Coastal Bird Monitoring and Information Strategy - Seabirds 2015-2050 (CBMIS-2015). This strategy is built around monitoring breeding populations of indicator species that represent different feeding guilds at identified essential breeding sites. Patterns of visitation aim to maximise the likelihood of surveys coinciding with the breeding of 20 species while minimising operational effort. Of necessity, the overall strategy is a compromise between the number of sites, visitation rates and logistic constraints. The Reef 2050 Integrated Monitoring and Reporting Program (RIMReP) review process undertaken here assesses whether the CBMIS-2015 strategy, designed within these constraints, is adequate to meet the needs of the Reef 2050 Long-Term Sustainability Plan (Reef 2050 Plan)

Rodents in fire affected heather shrublands in Bale Mountains National Park, Ethiopia

AbstractA study on rodents in the fire affected ericaceous vegetation in the Web Valley of the Bale Mountains National Park was conducted during July 2008–March 2009. Five trapping girds were randomly selected based on the duration since the occurrence of fire such as 6-months, 2-years, 3-years, 4-years and Erica vegetation unaffected by fire. Full recovery of Erica vegetation was observed 4-years after fire. A total of 1088 individual rodents were trapped by Sherman live traps (990) and snap traps (98) during 4440 trap nights. The species and the relative abundance of live-trapped rodents were Lophuromys melanonyx (32.0%), Lophuromys flavopunctatus (25.4%), Arvicanthis blicki (18.1%), Stenocephalemys albocaudata (12.6%) and Otomys typus (11.9%). Tachyoryctes macrocephalus was observed in Erica vegetation affected by fire since 2–3-years, but was not trapped. L. flavopunctatus and O. typus were widely distributed in burned Erica vegetation and the habitat unaffected by fire. No rodent was recorded from 6-months post-fire Erica. Highest density and abundance of rodents were recorded in 2- and 3-years Erica post-fire and the least in the grid from unburned Erica vegetation. Biomass of rodents was also high in 3-year Erica post-fire habitat

Community development and engagement with local governance in South Africa

The issue of public participation is receiving increasing attention in South Africa, from both government and civil society sectors. We are witnessing acknowledgement from a wide range of public institutions that insufficient consideration has been paid to public participation, and that existing policy frameworks, institutional mechanisms and programme interventions are failing to comply with government's constitutional and statutory obligations in this regard. This article examines actual practice in one key invited space: the policy and legislative framework for public participation in municipal processes. The article also highlights community experiences of attempting to engage with municipalities in development planning and policy processes, and their aspirations and expectations in this regard. We conclude with a set of recommendations on how participatory development at the local level can be transformed to ensure that municipal planning and programme implementation processes are truly accessible, participatory and empowering for local communities

The Citizen Voice Project: An Intervention in Water Services in Rural South Africa

Despite a legal framework for participation in South Africa, poor citizens have not to date been able to access the public services they need, leading some to talk of a ‘second democracy’, the political system as experienced by the poor. This action?research study involved local government, non?governmental organisations (NGOs), community leaders and community mobilisation to develop Water Services Scorecards, in rural Mbizana in the Eastern Cape. Water services had been grossly inadequate and were worsening. Communities were facilitated to analyse their own water?related problems; to establish standards and to measure services against indicators adapted from national policy frameworks. The case study documents the process, and reflects on its outcomes. It notes disappointment that service improvements had not been immediate. A crucial constraint, it concludes, was weak inter?level local government coordination; these are higher?order problems that local civil society action of the Citizen Voice Project type is not well positioned to tackle

The expanded public works programme : perspectives of direct beneficiaries

Abstract: Scholarship on the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) in South Africa tends to focus on quantitative evaluation to measure the progress made in the implementation of EPWP projects. The number of employment opportunities created by EPWP, demographic profiling, skills acquired by beneficiaries and training opportunities related to the Programme form the basis of typical statistical evaluations of it, but exclude comment by the workers who participate in its projects. Based on primary sources, including in-depth interviews, newspaper reports and internet sources, this article seeks to provide a qualitative review of the EPWP from the perspective of the beneficiaries of municipal EPWP projects. Various South African government sectors hire EPWP workers to provide local services such as cleaning and maintaining infrastructure, but the employment of these workers can still be regarded as precarious, in the sense that they have no job security, earn low wages and have no benefits such as medical aid or pension fund. The interviewees indicated that, although they appreciate the temporary employment opportunities provided by the EPWP, they also experience health and safety risks and lack the advantages of organised labour groupings. Their main disadvantage, however, is that they cannot access permanent employment, which offers better wages and concomitant benefits