Jean-Paul Payet

The Rights of the Child and `the Good of the Learners' A comparative ethnographical survey on the abolition of corporal punishment in South African schools

In contemporary South Africa, the abolition of corporal punishment symbolizes a break with the previous schooling system. A qualitative study in four formerly segregated schools south of Johannesburg showcases different realities and discourses on corporal punishment. The practices vary from its total abolition to its continued maintenance. Most learners in a Soweto-based school justify its use to maintain discipline in a hostile environment. Adding to conventional perspectives on the abolition of corporal punishment, a comprehensive approach provides a contextualized understanding of its function in the eyes of the school community, and reveals complex links between corporal punishment and a practice of care.

Transformations des systèmes éducatifs dans les pays du Sud

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3.7 Observing Schools in Disadvantaged Neighborhoods in France

Ethnography permits a renewal of interpretive frameworks as they have been defined and fixed at any given moment by a dominant ideology that saturates both public debate and the scientific community. Ethnography can change the conventional way of explaining some social situations or issues. It holds this power because it puts researchers in touch with the lived world of actors. In other words, provided that researchers are ready and willing to question their pre-established views, they find themselves facing a complex, ambivalent, multiple, partly indeterminate and shifting reality. Conventional interpretive frameworks therefore seem to them inadequate, reductionist, simplistic. The ethnographic experience challenges researchers to refresh their tools for describing and understanding, and that is what this chapter would like to illustrate through the author’s research works on disadvantaged urban schools in France and in South Africa.