Suchergebnisse

From text: This seminal collection of conceptual and empirical articles on the doctorate propels higher education scholarship in South Africa into new territory. We have simply not spent much time thinking about higher degrees and especially not about the doctorate. There is a wealth of scholarship on the governance and organisation of higher education, the founding legislation and policies that govern post-school education after apartheid, the problems of equity, access and success in higher learning given the poverty of the school system, and the persistent legacies of racism and authoritarianism inside universities. The formal arrangements for rearranging universities (mergers and incorporations, for example), inscribing new curriculum codes (the SAQA-inspired regulations), assuring quality (the industry spawned by the Council on Higher Education), and transforming patterns of racial enrolments and appointments have all enjoyed considerable "air time" in journals and some books.

One of the underlying concerns in the Study Panel on the South African PhD, a large-scale, overview investigation of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), was the negative consequences of signalling the need for more doctoral graduates to boost the presumed link to national competitiveness within a global knowledge economy. There was evidence that institutional behaviour in response to increased incentives for more accredited publications led to increased quantity at the cost of quality. Understandably, therefore, the panel feared that policy signals and incentives to produce more doctorates would compromise quality PhDs from the 23 universities. At the heart of this concern was the significance of doctoral research and not simply more PhDs. This article seeks to advance thinking about how significance in doctoral research can be attained against the background of this national study, and its concerns, about quality PhDs.

In 2015, students at the University of Cape Town used the slogan #RhodesMustFall to demand that a monument of Cecil John Rhodes, the empire builder of British South Africa, be removed from the university campus. Soon students at Oxford University called for the removal of a statue of Rhodes from Oriel College. The radical idea of decolonization at the forefront of these student protests continues to be a key element in South African educational institutions as well as those in Europe and North America. This book explores the uptake of decolonization in the institutional curriculum, given the political demands for decolonization on South African campuses, and the generally positive reception of the idea by university leaders. Based on interviews with more than two hundred academic teachers at ten universities, this is an innovative account of how institutions have engaged with, subverted, and transformed the decolonization movement since #RhodesMustFall.

"The articles in this collection, previously published in The Times, focus on education and the social realities of South African society. Jansen by turn horrifies us, inspires us and reminds us of the power of individual action." -- Back cover

"This book is written at a time of a paradigm shift in the African continent where dependence on western epistemologies and ontologies are giving way to African indigenous knowledge systems. Africa has been an importer of knowledge from the west since time immemorial and this book contributes to the body of knowledge on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from the African perspective. As a result, decoloniality and Inclusive Education have gained traction within the academic discourse, with University of South Africa (UNISA) hosting decoloniality annual conference and a summer school to stimulate academic discussions and debates with a focus on African indigenous knowledge systems and theoretical lenses as opposed to the western epistemologies. The book also demystifies some of the misconceptions that children with ASD are a curse and punishment from God or gods. Among others, Ubuntu seems to be the dominant theoretical framework underpinning some of the research studies reported in this book."--