One of the greatest challenges South Africa faces is rural poverty and education. Rural school principals face a number of challenges that are unique to their environment. These challenges stem from a number of sources, from within the school division structure from a community perspective, and from the school setting itself. After eighteen years of democracy, rural schooling has shown little improvement. Collectively the article illustrates the complexity, interconnectedness and intractability of the challenges that face rural schools and education in South Africa. The article explores the responses of school principals of rural schools in the Mpumalanga province and explores the responses of school principals of rural schools in the Mpumalanga province are especially in the Nelspruit and White River areas. The research is focused in grounded theory building, with the focus on the challenges and complexities of principals in the areas. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n20p1109
Corruption is a major drain on the effective use of resources for education and should be drastically curbed. Corruption in education is particularly damaging because it endangers a country's social, economic and political future. Corruption in education is more detrimental than corruption in other sectors because of its long-term effects. Corruption threatens equal access quantity and quality of education. Its consequences are particularly has for the poor who, without access to education or with no alternative but low-quality education, have a little chance to escape a life of poverty. Corruption is incompatible with one of the major aims in education – producing citizens that respect the law and human rights. If children come to believe that personal effort and merit do not count and that success comes through manipulation, favouritism and bribery, then the very foundations of society are shaken. The article argues that the problems posed by corruption in education have been neglected for too long. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p1308
Freedom of speech is the concept of being able to speak freely without censorship. It is often regarded as an integral concept in modern liberal democracies. If the liberty to express oneself is not highly valued, as has often been the case, there is no problem : freedom of expression is simply curtailed in favour of other values. Free speech becomes a volatile issue when it is highly valued because only then do the limitations placed upon it become controversial. The first thing to note in any sensible discussion of freedom of speech is that it well have to be limited. Every society place some limits on the exercise of speech because speech always takes place within a context of competing values. Stanley Fish (1994)1 is correct when he says that there is no such thing as free speech. Free speech is simply a useful term to focus our attention on a particular form of human interaction and the phrase is not meant to suggest that speech should never be interfered with. No society has yet existed where speech has not been limited to some extent. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p1363
At a time when human environmental disturbance is challenging livability on the planet—for humans and nonhumans alike—it is important to find better methods for engaging with the liveliness of landscapes, the relations with which they hang together, and the various ways they are interrupted. This dissertation explores the practices of tracking and gathering as methods for studying such issues facing Kalahari Desert landscapes in Botswana. These ecologically important landscapes are increasingly encroached upon and fragmented by the growing cattle economy and the proliferation of extractive industries into the desert. These trends have led to dramatic declines in wildlife populations and growing desertification of the already arid region. The Kalahari is home to small communities of people, many of whom are former hunter-gatherers whose rights to land and access to wildlife are increasingly inhibited. The government has banned hunting, largely in response to conservationists' concerns about wildlife. In addition, gathering is increasingly regulated, and cattle colonize areas that are significant for wildlife and San communities. In this context, rather than treating tracking and gathering as objects of study, I take these practices seriously as methods for noticing and theorizing more-than-human landscapes, their transformations, and contingent histories to address challenges facing people and their environments in the Kalahari and beyond.By focusing on the relational forms of noticing landscapes with San trackers and gatherers, I describe landscapes as always in motion, emergent more-than-human places where assemblages gather, histories are made, and politics enacted. This is in direct contrast to theoretical moves that treat landscapes as background on which histories and politics occur. My dissertation enacts tracking and gathering as a methodology. Beginning with an extension of the concept of tracks and following their movements out to their relations with other landscape actors in each chapter, I emphasize that landscapes are not merely contexts for politics and histories. Rather, landscapes do histories and politics, in spite of efforts to hold these landscapes still as underutilized expanses of resources. The dissertation itself unfolds, moving out through the landscape by tracking these emergent relations. I argue that tracking is a relational practice of becoming-familiar-with these multiple entanglements of emergent landscapes. The practice of gathering involves much of the same kinds of attention to landscape movements and their coordinations as with tracking. Here, I employ gathering in its double meaning: the practice of collecting and of coming together. The tracks of gathered truffles then lead to the worlds of grass and termites that, in turn, allow for a reflection on Kalahari rangeland ecology and the political economy of the cattle industry. Finally, the dissertation zooms out to the desert's geomorphology, tracking the movements of geological processes as they gather with the movements of humans and nonhumans to form lively landscape features over the longue duree. Tracking and gathering are methods that allow for an elaboration of these more-than-human landscapes-in-motion, together with their social, political, and economic histories and speculative futures.
Poverty is rife in many African countries and this has serious implications for the provision of quality education. Rural schools face severe challenges that are unique to their environment. A lack of parental interest in children's education, insufficient funding from the state, a lack of resources, underqualified teachers, and multi-grade teaching are some of the barriers to effective education. These challenges can be attributed to numerous sources, from within school structures and from the external environment, including local communities and education authorities. After 25 years of democracy, educational standards and learner performance in rural schooling has shown little improvement. This study illustrates the complexity and inter-connectedness of the problems faced by teachers in South African rural schools. Using qualitative research within the interpretivist paradigm, this article explores the perceptions and experiences of teachers in rural schools located in White River in the Mpumalanga province. This grounded-theory research focuses on effective teaching and learning. The findings reveal that most rural schools do not have water, sanitation, or electricity, and classrooms are in a terrible state. These issues have serious implications for effective teaching and learning.Keywords: deployment; education level; education quality; recruitment; rural schools
John Hartigan Jr., Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 376, 2017.Luisa Steur, Indigenist Mobilization: Confronting Electoral Communism and Precarious Livelihoods in Post-Reform Kerala. New York: Berghahn, pp. 302, 2017.
The post 1994 era brought many changes in South African Education System, including how schools should be governed henceforth. The South African Schools Act, no 96 of 1996 was enacted in the parliament and it challenged the schools to adopt a more inclusive and participative approach in running their affairs. But the school's hierarchical structure remained mandatory and continues to exist even today. It is against this backdrop that this study was conducted to explore the practice of distributed leadership (within school's hierarchical structure) from teacher-based perspective, rather than educational theorists or legislators' point of view. The three sampled secondary schools fall within Johannesburg North District 10 in Gauteng Province. The research design followed a qualitative approach. The data was collected through interviewing the teachers of different post levels (including principals) from the three sampled secondary schools, as individuals and in pairs. To triangulate the data, documents containing minutes of the planning sessions and the first staff meeting were also requested and used to check how duties and responsibilities are allocated to staff members in these three schools. The findings revealed that there are possibilities provided by distributed leadership, and also inherent and inevitable barriers to a distributive approach to leadership in the three secondary schools. The possibilities are that distributing leadership can raise school's collective capacities, empower staff, and can encourage collaborative school cultures and decision-making; and as a result schools can function effectively because of the presence of collective agency in the execution of tasks. However, the barriers posed by the school's hierarchical structure and the policy climate within which schools operate, cannot simply be underestimated or ignored, and it is naïve to assume that they would simply fall away to accommodate and support distributed leadership in schools. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p1445
The entry into force of the Nagoya Protocol of the Convention on Biological Diversity will lead to new legislation and regulations that could change international collaborative research in biology. This article suggests a new approach that researchers can use in negotiating international Access and Benefit Sharing agreements under the Protocol. Research on medicinal plants is used as a case study because it is a domain with many competing stakeholders involving non-commercial and commercial research, as well as national and international commercial markets. We propose a decision-based framework to aid all participants as they negotiate ABS agreements for non-commercial biodiversity research. Our proposed approach promotes transparency and builds trust, reflects the principles in the Convention on Biological Diversity, and respects and protects the interests of biodiversity rich developing countries. This approach is an alternative to often-used adversarial approaches.
In response to recent discussion about terminology, we propose "tracking science" as a term that is more inclusive than citizen science. Our suggestion is set against a post-colonial political background and large-scale migrations, in which "citizen" is becoming an increasingly contentious term. As a diverse group of authors from several continents, our priority is to deliberate a term that is all-inclusive, so that it could be adopted by everyone who participates in science or contributes to scientific knowledge, regardless of socio-cultural background. For example, current citizen science terms used for Indigenous knowledge imply that such practitioners belong to a sub-group that is other, and therefore marginalized. Our definition for "tracking science" does not exclude Indigenous peoples and their knowledge contributions and may provide a space for those who currently participate in citizen science, but want to contribute, explore, and/or operate beyond its confinements. Our suggestion is not that of an immediate or complete replacement of terminology, but that the notion of tracking science can be used to complement the practice and discussion of citizen science where it is contextually appropriate or needed. This may provide a breathing space, not only to explore alternative terms, but also to engage in robust, inclusive discussion on what it means to do science or create scientific knowledge. In our view, tracking science serves as a metaphor that applies broadly to the scientific community—from modern theoretical physics to ancient Indigenous knowledge.
