# FeesMustFall protests in South Africa : a critical realist analysis of selected newspaper articles

Abstract: Using Critical Realism, this article looks at articles from selected South African newspapers which reported on the #FeesMustFall protests. The study established that, arising from the protests, was a culture characteried by tensions and distrust amongst stakeholders such as students, university management and the government. This, the article argues, was a result of how each of these stakeholders perceived, and went on to exercise, their agency in an attempt to resolve the conflict arising from the protests. To avert a recurrence of negative consequences of student protests such as the destruction of property and development of toxic and adversarial relationships amongst different stakeholders, the article recommends collaborative approaches to conflict resolution in South African higher education. These approaches need to be framed differently from those in which some stakeholders seek to use their agency to achieve outright victory over other stakeholders – a recurring mode of engagement during the #FeesMustFall protests

Going beyond the official domain in the search for the culture of employee learning : The case of junior support staff at a South African university

Abstract: Based on HCT (human capital theory), employee learning and the culture associated with it in South Africa and globally have generally been researched from the perspective of the normative government or employer-initiated policies and programmes. Using Bernstein’s (2000) theory of the pedagogic device, this paper suggests the existence of different domains of learning with respect to junior support staff at a South African university. The paper also borrows from critical realism to advocate an approach which asks questions pertaining to the influence of structure and agency on the form of the culture of employee learning in different domains with respect to the junior support staff members. The answers to these questions, the paper suggests, would help with a holistic characterisation of the culture of employee learning associated with this category of employees at the South African university

Shona metaphors created during the Zimbabwe crisis: A cognitive grammar analysis

Shona is a Southern Bantu language that is spoken by about 75% of Zimbabweans. This article discusses the nature of metaphors that were created by Shona speakers in speaking of the Zimbabwean political and socio-economic crisis. The data for this study were collected from August to December of 2008 and their analysis derives from Cognitive Grammar theory, which considers metaphor as a conceptual and linguistic phenomenonthat involves a mapping relation between the source domain and the target domain of language. We adopt the cognitive view of metaphor as one of the basic human strategies in conceptualizing our environment using concrete phenomena such as moto ‘fire’ and kudhakwa ‘to drink’ to represent abstract concepts such as difficulties and confusion. This type of metaphorical extension is worth examining as it plays an important role in the development of the language’s lexicon.Le shona est une langue bantoue du sud qui est parlé par à peu près 75% des habitants de Zimbabwé. Cet article discute des métaphores qui ont été créées par les locuteurs du shona dans leurs références à la crise socio-économique et politique de Zimbabwé. Les données linguistiques proviennent des enquêtes faites entre août et décembre 2008 et sont analysées dans le cadre de la théorie de la Grammaire cognitive, qui traite la métaphore comme un processus de créer des liens ‘cartographiques’ entre les domaines de source et de cible linguistiques. La métaphore est un stratège de base intellectuel qui sert à représenter le monde en employant des notions concrètes comme moto ‘feu’ et kudhakwa ‘intoxication’, et kurova ‘être battu’ pour représenter des conceptes abstraits comme les difficultés et la confusion. Cette sorte d’extension métaphorique mérite l’analyse car elle joue un rôle important dans le développement du lexique

Integrating ICTs into the Zimbabwean secondary school pre-service teachers’ curriculum

The need for nations to enhance their competitiveness by leveraging the imperatives of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) has seen major shifts in teaching and learning strategies employed by educators globally. Research in Zimbabwean education has pointed to a gap in teachers’ competences in the use of information communication technologies (ICTs) for teaching. Using the UNESCO ICT competency for teachers and Bernstein’s (2000) theory of the pedagogic device we propose a conceptual framework for the pre-service ICT curriculum at four Zimbabwean secondary school teachers’ colleges. This is in terms of the complexities present in the nexus of the curriculum’s architecture, pedagogy and delivery context. The framework suggests strategies on how this curriculum could address the teachers’ competencies gap through effective integration of content, knowledge, skills, technology and pedagogy into the salient contextual aspects of the country’s education sector such as the constraining shortage of ICT resources.&nbsp

First-year students’ perceptions of extended National Diploma Programmes: the case of a comprehensive South African university (2012)

This study compared how the cohort of extended diploma students enrolled at a comprehensive South African university in 2012 perceived the programmes for which they were enrolled at the beginning of their first year and towards the end of the year. Data were gathered using questionnaires and semi-structured interviews involving students enrolled for extended national diplomas in Human Resource Management, Management, Entrepreneurship, Logistics, Management Services, Transportation Management and Public Relations. The study established that while the students had negative perceptions of several aspects of the extended national diploma programmes, they had become positive about most of these towards the end of the year. The paper recommends strengthening of teaching and learning support to the extended programmes at the comprehensive university in order to positively influence students’ perceptions of the programmes for achievement of the ultimate goal of improving students’ retention and success rates

The culture of employee learning in South Africa: towards a conceptual framework

The shortage of skills amongst employees in both the private and public sectors in South Africa continues to be a topical issue as exemplified by the continued existence of a list of scarce skills which is published by the Department of Higher Education (DHET). However, the notion that there is a shortage of skills in the country has begun to be challenged with some scholars arguing that the real problem is a jobs shortage attributable to structural inequalities which are a legacy of apartheid and failure by the government post-1994 to address these inequalities. This, we argue, is the reason why unemployment, unemployability and wide workplace inequalities, especially as they affect people from previously disadvantaged groups (mainly women and black employees), persist. We further contend that what is missing from the debates around skills shortage in South Africa and the wider phenomenon to which these debates belong, that is, employee learning, is a holistic conceptualisation of the culture associated with it on the part of the government, employers, workers’ unions and even academia. Conceptualisation of this culture needs to go beyond the government and employer initiatives to the actual process by which employee learning takes place. In other words, it also needs to take into account the employees’ biographies, identities and subjectivities as well as the social interactions which they engage in as they learn in the workplace. We therefore propose a two-tier framework which integrates implications from two theories, that is Human Capital Theory (HCT) and Critical Realism (CR). Implied in HCT is the suggestion that the culture of employee learning is a function of the employer-initiated learning programmes, such as short courses offered by private employee learning service providers, Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET) and block-release programmes run by some institutions of higher learning. The basic aim of these forms of learning would be to increase profitability through improved productivity which itself is a result of employees having been equipped with the requisite skills. Using CR, and Bourdieu’s (1986) idea of habitus, we, however, argue that the final architecture of the culture of employee learning is not linear but a complex and multi-layered product of such factors as the employees’ family and educational backgrounds as well as individual and collective agency in addition to the government and employers’ initiatives such as the afore-mentioned short courses. We also draw on Bernstein’s (1996) notion of learning domains to suggest that attention be paid to employees’ lived experiences which also mediate their responses to the government and employee learning initiatives. This would help with aligning government and organisational employee learning initiatives and strategies to the employees’ individual and collective workplace learning aspirations

The Influence of Collective Agency on the Culture of Employee Learning: the Case of Administrative Assistants at a Comprehensive South African University

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