Linda Chisholm

The making of South Africa's National Curriculum Statement

This paper explores the social construction of the Revised National Curriculum Statement (Grades R–9) in South Africa between 2000–2002. The author, a participant in the process, uses the experience of the insider to tell the story. The paper discusses the relationship of different lobbies, voices, and interests to the curriculum, and argues that a neat translation between interests and curriculum outcomes is not possible, but that the echoes of struggles, which take both a material and symbolic form, are evident within the final version. The paper describes the influences of a vocational lobby, environmental and history interest groups, university‐based intellectuals and non‐governmental organizations, teachers unions, and the Christian Right. It contends that there was no neat alignment of interests; they were sometimes internally fractured and alliances were unstable over time.

The politics of curriculum review and revision in South Africa in regional context

This article takes the case of the South African curriculum to examine the role of national politics and power relationships in giving internationally borrowed ideas their meaning and shape. It discusses the circulation of ideas between global, national and regional levels. In exploring the particular dynamics shaping the South African curriculum, it argues that there were three dominant influences on South African curriculum‐making between 2000 and 2002: the African National Congress, teacher unions and university‐based intellectuals. The ANC introduced a reforming, pragmatic approach to curriculum reform. Teacher unions reasserted the importance of outcomes‐based education as foundational philosophy, and established the necessity for a workable and implementable post‐apartheid curriculum. They united around a secular, humanist, rights‐based curriculum. Radical intellectuals created the context for democratic debate and discussion of the post‐apartheid curriculum and the theoretical and empirical climate for reform of the curriculum. The article uses primary and secondary sources collected through participation in the processes described and includes a discussion of the methodological issues involved.

Diffusion of the National Qualifications Framework and outcomes‐based education in southern and eastern Africa

This article explores policy and curriculum diffusion in southern and eastern Africa through an examination of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and outcomes‐based education. The article argues that the NQF was adopted for different reasons in different contexts, but that discourse coalitions and conferences have been critical in spreading these ideas in a new regional political and economic context. It shows how South Africans have tried to export the idea at the very moment when evidence is revealing little relationship between policy intention and outcome, it is contested at home, and there is a retreat from it in some sectors of education.

Migration, Citizenship and South African History Textbooks

Abstract This article examines how the nation and citizenship are addressed in new South African history textbooks with reference to two key issues: changing approaches to textbook analysis, migration and xenophobia. Constructions of the nation take on special significance in this context. The article uses an approach that considers both representational issues as well as the uses of textbooks in classrooms. It examines discourses of the nation in nationally distributed texts and explores uses of these and other texts in specific classrooms in urban schools. It argues that the textbooks embrace ‘nation-building pluralist’ and ‘critical skills’ or ‘model textbook’ conceptions. Although new textbooks appear to foreground broader notions of South Africanism incorporating inclusionary, Africanist identities and embody understandings of history textbooks as sourcebased in order to promote critical thinking, teachers appear to make limited use of them, preferring to rely on their own notes. The article uses a combination of secondary and primary sources to arrive at these conclusions.

Educational change and evaluation in Eastern and Southern Africa

The articles featured in this Special Issue of Compare are revised or reworked versions of papers presented to the 7th Oxford International Conference on Education and Development in 2003, ‘The state of education: quantity, quality and outcomes’. Every two years, the annual BAICE Conference is nested within the larger Oxford Conference framework so, reflecting this relationship, this is the second set of articles to be published in Compare from this event. This particular collection stems largely from a section of the conference on the theme of ‘Culture, context and the quality of education’, and, more specifically, from an integral Southern and Eastern African Symposium that focussed upon the evaluation of policies, programmes and classrooms. The pertinence of these issues is well reflected in the promotional literature produced in advance of the Oxford Conference itself:

The politics of testing in South Africa

This article considers the politics of adoption of a testing regime in South Africa. While the broad features of this regime are similar to those in developed countries, there are features specific to the South African context. These emerge from a combination of external and internal pressures. External pressures derive from international testing results and target-setting regimes of international agencies. Internal pressures arise from the arrival of the ‘evaluative state’ and ‘quasi-market’ in schooling in South Africa, the abandonment of outcomes-based education which created the space for reintroduction of traditional forms of testing, public political pressure as well as teacher, teacher union and education NGO support for testing. To date the result has been the emergence of a hybrid system in which the purposes of standardized tests at primary levels are primarily informative and diagnostic, providing a rationale for teacher development and textual resource interventions. Information is considered as enhancing the public right to know rather than competition between schools. Multiple forms of assessment are retained and have not been displaced by standardized tests. The jury is out on whether the interventions introduced will have the desired results or not.

Curriculum Reform in Sub-Saharan Africa: When Local Meets Global

Educational change in sub-Saharan Africa since the 1990s is a diverse and complex issue. Not only are the societies, their socio-economic and political profi les extremely varied, but heterogeneous external and internal forces have also infl uenced their trajectories of educational change. If anything can be said to bind such diverse contexts, it must include the history and impact of colonial and postcolonial endeavours. On the one hand, the legacies of colonialism continue to hold great power over the imaginary and real lives of states and citizens. On the other hand, the political transitions that swept over many parts of sub-Saharan Africa from the 1960s were accompanied over the successive decades by growing political instability, debt and poverty. The region’s real GDP per head fell by 42.5% between 1980 and 1990; its income distribution has become more unequal. Although the growth rate has improved since the mid-1990s, “sub-Saharan Africa has found itself retreating economically while other developing areas of the world are advancing strongly” (Sparks, 2006). The causes are both external and internal and economic and political (see Williams, 2006; Jennings, 2006; Sparks, 2006). New education systems and especially higher education institutions were established in the immediate postcolonial period as key projects of national pride, aspiration and affi rmation. These also experienced increasingly serious diffi culties as political crisis combined with economic crisis. In the early 1990s, the seemingly distant event of the fall of the Berlin Wall and gathering pace of globalisation also had distinct implications for Africa. Not immune from world currents, many countries in Africa held multiparty elections in the early to mid-1990s to signal commitment to liberal democracy and market openness consistent with world developments even though authoritarianism remained part of many political systems. These elections legitimated the new market orientation that had begun to take hold in the 1980s and paved the way for educational and curriculum reform, including demands for greater accountability with regard to the spending of development aid on education. They ushered in new processes for educational and curriculum reform. This article examines curricular reform, and specifi cally learner-centredness, outcomesand competency-based education and the National Qualifi cations Framework. The analysis encompasses evidence for sub-Saharan Africa, but provides a specifi c focus on Southern Africa.

Bantustan Education History: The ‘Progressivism’ of Bophutatswana's Primary Education Upgrade Programme (PEUP), 1979–1988

Abstract The historiography of South Africas apartheid-era Bantustans has commonly focused on their repressive role. New approaches to this history have suggested that some undertook educational initiatives that broke with the dominant apartheid model. Bophutatswanas Primary Education Upgrading Programme (PEUP) was such an initiative. This article focuses on the actors, origins, aims and practices of the programme and assessments by contemporaries and its strengths and weaknesses. Using documentary evidence on the project, interviews with its initiators and participants in the programme, as well as assessments by contemporaries at the time, it argues that the project involved a contradictory alliance of conservative Bantustan leaders and Christian liberals. The project drew on progressivist, child-centred ideas borrowed from Europe and the United Kingdom but these were encased within the broader ethnic apartheid project and served a legitimatory purpose. PEUP included both innovative aspects within the context of Bantu Education but also continuities with its broader ethnic purposes. Miserly budgets, Bantustan politics, and limitations specific to progressivism ultimately undermined the success of the PEUP. Nonetheless, the project survived in memories of teachers.