Aslam Fataar

Policy networks in recalibrated political terrain: the case of school curriculum policy and politics in South Africa

School curriculum policy and politics in South Africa are discussed in this article as a means of highlighting the nature of Governmental power and functioning in a post‐liberation developing country. The notion ‘policy networks’ is used as a lens to understand the ways in which specific constellations of policy interests informed the consecutive policy cycles that led to the curriculum policy trajectory. The article is based on a series of interviews with key policy participants. The two consecutive policy networks that dominated the policy processes established their influence relative to the recalibrated structural and discursive terrain of the 1990s. The article discusses the processes that led to the school curriculum policy that was authorized in 1997, as well as the basis upon which it was displaced by a policy review process during 2000. Key to understanding network functioning and displacement in these processes is the specific epistemic basis upon which the networks acquired and established their dominance.

Schooling subjectivities across the post-apartheid city

Abstract The focus of this article is on the subjectivities associated with the changing schooling landscape in the post-apartheid city. Urban practices in the city of Cape Town form the backdrop of this article. My premise is the view that what people become, their sense of self, can be understood by considering their daily interaction with the citys schools. I argue that the desire for quality schooling must be understood in the light of the lived practices that people establish across the citys geographies. Mobility is central to these practices. The article traverses a number of geographic spaces to provide a heterodox view of how schooling in the city is lived. It opens with a discussion of the interaction between “lived space” and the subjectivities people take on as they navigate the citys schools. Next, with reference to a specific geographic example, I discuss how suburban schools go about establishing their identifications in relation to the complex ways people access them from beyond the confines of their immediate neighbourhoods. I suggest that incoming students are assimilated into the hegemonic culture of these suburban schools. Third, I focus on the lived spatial dimensions of schooling and their attendant subjectivities in black township1 spaces. Finally, the article considers the movement across ‘lines of subordination’ by children who move from a black African township to schools in adjacent coloured2 areas. This form of school choice is marked by “truncated desire,” based on these students’ unmet expectations in the culturally alienating environment of their new schools. The article draws on my ongoing National Research Foundation (NRF) project entitled, “Educational renovation in urban spaces”, based on qualitative work in a number of school sites in Cape Town.

Can Social Realism do Social Justice? Debating the Warrants for Curriculum Knowledge Selection

ABSTRACTSocial realism (SR), as a movement that argues for ‘bringing knowledge back in’ to curriculum (Young 2008a), is significant globally, especially in South Africa. This article examines arguments from SR proponents that curriculum selection should privilege specialised disciplinary knowledge – as ‘powerful knowledge’ – over ‘everyday knowledge’, and how this is warranted through Durkheims distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ social bases for knowledge. The article asks how adequately curriculum based on SR warrants can do social justice. This inquiry stages debates between SR and three alternative approaches. The first is standpoint theories that knowledge – including that of scientific disciplines – is always positional and ‘partially objective’. The next is Vygotskian arguments for curriculum that, dialectically, joins systematising powers of scientific knowledge with rich funds of knowledge from learners’ everyday life-worlds. Third, SRs philosophical framing is contrasted with Nancy Fras...

Access to Schooling in a Post-Apartheid South Africa: Linking Concepts to Context

This paper focuses on the policy issue of expanding schooling in a post-apartheid South Africa. The Project of placing about two million children of school-going age in school is viewed as central to the rebuilding of South Africa. The paper argues that this project should be located within the peculiar history of this countrys educational underdevelopment. Challenging the constraining influence of the New Right context should be central in conceptualising the provision of expanded school access. Access policy should be based on a notion of educational development that is linked to the overall socioeconomic development of this society. The view is promoted in this paper that a policy of quantitative expansion of schooling should not ignore the quality of such schooling.

Neoliberal Governmentality, Schooling and the City: Conceptual and Empirical Notes on and from the Global South.

This paper applies ideas that emanate from the Global North, concerning neoliberalism and neoliberal governmentality, to the case of marketisation in South Africa. It also attends to the limits of Northern ideas that are both intellectual undertakings and policy manifestations. In the first part of the paper, we identify how rationales for school choice, many of which have been introduced in countries like England, the USA, and Australia, have also been introduced in post-apartheid South Africa. Despite the introduction of markets to address apartheid era racial segregation, we suggest that in South Africa marketisation operates as part of racial neoliberalism. In the second part of the paper we explore in more detail how neoliberal governmentality operates in relation to education policy more generally, and specifically in South Africa.

The reflexive adaptations of school principals in a ‘local’ South African space

This paper is an analysis of the work of three principals in an impoverished black township in post‐apartheid South Africa. Based on qualitative approaches, it discusses the principals’ entry into the township, and their navigation of their schools’ surrounding social dynamics. It combines the lenses of ‘space’ and ‘performance’ to analyse the reflexive basis on which they establish their principal roles. The paper suggests that their identities as principals were established in light of a range of engaged pedagogical performances. It is argued that these were enacted based on nuanced readings of their discursive environment and the enactment of strategic practices that provided them an authoritative platform for their principal roles.

The search for ecologies of knowledge in the encounter with African epistemicide in South African education

CITATION: Fataar, A. & Subreenduth, S. 2015. The search for ecologies of knowledge in the encounter with African epistemicide in South African education. South African Journal of Higher Education, 29(2):106–121, doi:10.20853/29-2-468.

Ambiguous Accommodation: Cape Muslims and Post-Apartheid Politics

This article explores how the elite among Muslim religious leaders in the Western Cape of South Africa, organised in the Muslim Judicial Council (MJC), have positioned themselves with regard to political power in the post-apartheid era. We argue that the MJCs positioning may be characterised as premised on a ‘loyalist-accommodationist’ relation to power, in which the comforts and religious freedoms of a religious minority are seen as best ensured by accommodation with the party in power, the African National Congress (ANC). This strategy is closely linked to the interests of the middle-class elite, from which the elite among the ‘ulama’ is largely recruited. We demonstrate that this loyalist-accommodationist stance has survived the ideological and discursive shifts within the ANC over the course of the post-apartheid era, and attempt to explain why a politics of direct challenge to political power from the MJC is unlikely in the ‘new South Africa’, in spite of the ‘ulamas’ ambivalence with regard to societal secularisation.1

Education Policy Reform in Postapartheid South Africa: Constraints and Possibilities

This chapter is an analysis of the postapartheid government’s policy vision that was meant to guide the reconstruction of South Africa’s inequitable education system. By assessing the period from 1994 until about mid-2000, this paper argues that education policy is characterized by a restricted vision of reconstruction, which failed to provide the necessary basis for developing an equitable and united education system. The dramatic narrowing materialized in a complex and circumscribed political context. The focus of this analysis is on the interaction between the structural dynamics that delimited the policy terrain and the political dynamics that shaped education policy. Specific developments in the sphere of education, given its relative autonomy, shaped the eventual policy outcomes. Given the interaction between the structural and political dimensions, the government made very definite choices in giving effect to its favored vision of educational change. In this light I raise some thoughts towards an alternative conceptual approach to education policy reform in South Africa. This interpretative analysis is based on integrating work written over the last few years (Badat, 1997; Christie, 1996; Jansen, 1998; Kallaway, 1997) and my own work on schooling policy (Fataar, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2003, 2006).

Turning space into place: The place-making practices of school girls in the informal spaces of their high school

This article explores the place-making and identifications practices of two high school girls in the out-of-classroom spaces of their school. We employ Henri Lefebvres spatial triad, consisting of the interaction between the physical, social and mental dimensions of space, as the conceptual foundation for understanding how these girls turn space into place at their school. The article is based on an ethnographic study in which we utilised a range of methods, including unstructured, semi-structured and photo-elicitation interviews; participant observation; focus group discussions; student-produced photography and photo-diaries. We found that the ways in which the girls inhabited and ‘made place’ in the schools out-of-classroom spaces are determined by their unique biographies, interactions with the schools expressive culture, and the subsequent social networks, movements and practices that they mobilise in these out-of-classroom spaces. Via these daily practices, they turn their school spaces into a place which, in their unique ways, they are able to call home.