Re-Writing the Feminine Script: An Exploration of Women with Wings in ChiShona Literature Prescribed for Ordinary Level pupils

The paper explores the portrayal of female characters in ChiShona literature prescribed for Ordinary Level in order to determine their potential educational implications to pupils. The paper qualitatively explores two purposively sampled ChiShona literature texts, namely Chikanza’s Vakasiiwa Pachena and Nyambiri’s Ndiri Parumananzombe. It employs document analysis for data collection and uses critical discourse analysis and qualitative inductive content analysis for data analysis. An Afrocentric paradigm, African womanism, serves as the theoretical framework. The paper’s finding is that, through the portrayal of female characters, the two ChiShona literature texts portray femininity as self-invention rather than femininity as entrapment. The texts traverse essentialist paradigms of gender identity, dislodge masculinity from males and highlight female masculinities. The two ChiShona literature texts therefore portray an emerging re-writing of the feminine script in contemporary Shona society. The female characters, through agency and self-determination, take matters into their own hands. The texts, to a large extent, have therefore a potential of socialising female pupils to believe in agency regarding femininity

An Experimental Study into the use of computers for teaching of composition writing in English at Prince Edward School in Harare

This study was an experimental study which sought to establish how English language teachers used computers for teaching composition writing at Prince Edward High School in Harare. The findings of the study show that computers were rarely used in the teaching of composition despite the observation that the school appeared to be adequately equipped with computers. Teachers appear to prefer their traditional way of teaching, perhaps because of conservatism on their part. The study goes further to recommend that English teachers should be taught how to use computers at a general level then they should develop skills that enable them to use computers as a teaching tool in their subject area