Towards a theory of pedagogy, learning and knowledge in an 'everyday' context : a case study of South African trade union

Includes bibliographical references (p. 260-273).This thesis aims to document and theorise processes of learning and forms of pedagogy and knowledge in the trade union organisational context. It seeks to establish how these vary across sites within the union and in the context of broader historical changes in trade unions' social and political role. The thesis also aims to contribute to the development of a conceptual approach that will allow processes and forms of learning, pedagogy and knowledge in informal or non-formal, collective, social-action contexts such as the trade union to be compared with those in specialised education domains. The study adopts a critical, interpretive, qualitative case study methodology, and is based on a single case of the Cape Town branch of the South African Municipal Workers' Union. Research was carried out in three organisational settings: the union's organised education programmes, sites of everyday organisational involvement, and the occasion of a national strike of the union

The Use of Oral History Methodology as a Means of Researching the Shifting Meanings of Worker Education in South Africa

No abstract available

Activists within the academy: the role of prior experience in adult learners' acquisition of postgraduate literacies in a postapartheid South African university

This is a post-print of the published version of a SAGE Journal article available on: http://aeq.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/08/27/0741713610380441.full.pdf.The article takes as a case study a group of disability rights activists who were given access to a master's program via Recognition of Prior Learning. The question explored is "Can adult learners' prior experiential knowledge act as a resource for the successful acquisition of postgraduate academic literacy practices?" The analysis is framed theoretically by Bourdieu's notions of habitus, capital, and field. It is argued that adult learners' acquisition of postgraduate literacies is an outcome of the interplay between three factors: (a) student habitus and dispositions, (b) pedagogic agency, and (c) the nature of the disciplinary field. Although the program under investigation made complex demands on students, lecturers' understanding of student habitus enabled students' prior experiential knowledge to be tapped as a resource. However, students also exercised agency in negotiating the forms of academic habitus acquired, and the trajectory of their agency involved a mix of accommodation, resistance, and challenge

Workers' education and political consciousness: a case study from South Africa

This is a post-print of the published version of a SAGE Journal article available on: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/103530460701700211.This article poses the question, who or what 'teaches' workers political consciousness? It argues that this question cannot be answered in the abstract, but must be located in historical context. Drawing on a case study of a South African local government trade union, it argues that radical education traditions within the labour movement remain, although the trade union movement has lost much of the militancy that characterised its early years, and its education work has been weakened and compromised. The case study union's education programmes are ideologically directive and transformative in intent. Radical learning does not only take place in these organised spaces, however; members' participation in ongoing union activities develops their political understanding and working class identity, while moments of mass action 'teach' workers not only about tactics, but also about political and economic power