Thirty years later: Education in a (still) Divided South Africa

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Thirty years after the end of legal apartheid, South Africa still struggles with deep divisions, inequality and conflict in the national education system from schools to universities. There are still Black schools and predominantly white schools. In 2015 Black university students across the country engaged in historic protests decrying the colonial legacies of education (the moment tagged #RhodesMustFall) and the exorbitant costs of pursuing a degree (tagged #FeesMustFall). On a regular basis, at the former white universities, there are reports of egregious acts of racism perpetrated by both white students and academics. And around the grounds of schools and the campuses of universities, violence has claimed the lives of students and professors alike, reflecting in this way the elusiveness of peace in post-apartheid society.
Under these conditions of inequality and instability, how do students, principals and employers of graduates do the work of teaching, learning, leading and recruiting in everyday life?
We address these critical questions through the medium of five research projects in Black South African education each offering complementary perspectives on the problem of inequality, division and conflict: [A] turning around a struggling school inside a violent township through the medium of science education; [B] leading disadvantaged schools through a pandemic; [C] pursuing postgraduate studies between home and university as first-generation women students; [D] acquiring digital literacy as pre-service teachers under conditions of resource and institutional constraint; [E] and finding a job in response to what employers signal as the well-branded student.
The methodologies deployed are diverse to include ethnographies of education [A and D]; individual case study interviews [B], narrative inquiry [C] and content analyses of job advertisements [E]. In the same way, the theories drawn on are different but complementary such as community cultural wealth theory [C], leadership presence theory [B]; assemblage theory [D]; personal branding theory [E]; and an emergent theory of working class education [A]. Each of these methodologies illuminates different facts of educational division and resilience.
Reading across the findings from the five research projects, there are strikingly similar themes emanating from these different but interconnected studies. The legacies of colonial and apartheid education run long and deep through these studies. We found resilient students, self-directed (prospective) teachers, and improvising principals together shedding light on the modalities of agency under conditions of social, emotional, psychological, and political constraint. And there is abundant evidence of how intersecting institutions (home, school, university, business) work together to enable and disable possibilities for leading, teaching, and learning in apartheid’s wake.
The scholarly significance of this work comes from the multi-perspectival lens that it offers to understand changes and continuities in education in the wake of centuries of conflict, division, and inequality through a focus on the agency of the subaltern and the possibilities it shapes.

Sub Unit

• Afrika SIG

Organizer

• Le-Anne Lezhaan Goliath, Sussex University

Chair

• Joel Samoff, Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• Teaching and learning high school science in unequal, unstable, and divided communities - Jonathan david Jansen, Stellenbosch University

• Principals, politics and the pandemic: How school principals led their schools during the COVID-19 crisis - TREVOR DAROCHA, Portavue Primary School

• Reimagining Support: How Black Families Create Academic Resilience - Le-Anne Lezhaan Goliath, Sussex University

• Practising Otherwise: Pre-Service Teachers and the Emergence of Desire Lines in Constrained Educational Contexts. - Delecia Davids, Stellenbosch University

• Soft Skills as Signals of Personal Branding: A Content Analysis of Graduate Job Advertisements in South Africa. - Nthabeleng Rammile, Stellenbosch University

Discussant

• Joel Samoff, Stanford University