Leila Kajee

Literacy journeys: home and family literacy practices in immigrant households and their congruence with schooled literacy

Major sociocultural contexts of learning such as families, communities and schools are imbued with power, and power favours some more than others. Given that schools are important sites of social and cultural reproduction, one of their major tasks is to teach learners to be literate. However, literacy is often viewed only as schooled literacy in the dominant language, and the role of the home has been undervalued in the past. In this paper I examine, through a sociocultural lens, the role played by the home and community in literacy learning. Through data elicited from observations of family interactions and conversations, as well as interviews with family members in two immigrant households, I examine their home and community literacy practices and ask how these practices intersect with schooled literacy. I conclude that immigrant children have far greater language and literacy skills than presumed, and that schools need to recognize language and literacy practices that children engage in at home and in the community, and emphasize that social justice for all requires educational shifts.

Students’ access to digital literacy at a South African university: Privilege and marginalisation

Abstract Lifelong learning has become associated with participation in the digital age, affecting everything from access to information technology, to its use in teaching and learning. It is therefore inevitable that educationists turn to digital literacy practices to examine their contribution to, and influence on, learning. This article explores the digital literacy practices of a group of higher education students with minimal previous access to digital resources, as well as how they compensate for uneven access, with a view to examining what they perceive to be challenges and possibilities offered by technology. Thus the article highlights how they are ‘caught-between’ two worlds: the technologicised and non-technologicised. The work is framed by New Literacy Studies, which suggests that literacy is a contextualised practice positioned in relation to social institutions and the power relations that sustain them (Gee, 1996). Emerging themes indicate that students perceive digital practices to have symbolic value, and provide access to cultural capital.

Disability, Social Inclusion and Technological Positioning in a South African Higher Education Institution: Carmen's Story.

In South Africa, higher education policy documents propose technology and resource-based teaching and learning to prepare youth for the knowledge and information society, and for a socially transformed society. However, the extent to which these policies are being implemented is still uncertain. This article reports on a technology-based English course that incorporates face-to-face and online modes of delivery at a South African university. The aim of the paper is to examine how the only blind participant among a group of sighted participants positions herself and engages with the technological practices of the university, as well as the course, given the recommendations of the policies. Included is a discussion of how she constructs her identity and negotiates meaning in the course. The construction of identity is explored from a post-modern view that old identities, which stabilised the social world, are in decline, giving rise to new identities and fragmenting the modern individual as a unified subject. I explore views of identity as how people understand their relationship in the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how people understand their possibilities for the future. I also draw on discussions of positioning and self. Finally, I suggest implications that such a study might have for pedagogy, practice and policy in higher education institutions in South Africa.