Introduction: This study provides comprehensive insights of how the education system in South Africa evolved. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to provide a brief analytic insight into the legacy of the apartheid education system. Secondly, the study scrutinizes and explores the systemic failures of the democratic administration in redressing…

This contribution reports on the design phase of the Jam, a short, fast-paced, cross-institutional online programme over three days. Its focus is on social justice and specifically access, use and management of community space, as integral part of sustainability. This novel programme aims to enable learning, generate ideas to address complex…

Globally, the appraisal of educators remains a contested issue as the process, which aims to provide support and development to educators, is generally considered a punitive measure for educators. Within the South African context, the Integrated Quality Management System is used to evaluate educators. Drawing on Fraser's theories of social…

In South Africa, the scholarship of epistemic justice has taken on an historical gaze with higher education framed as a social institution that might ameliorate the historical traumas of colonialism. Undoing the legacies of colonialism has been framed as the democratisation of the knowledge project. Using the White Paper 3 of 1997 that posits…

The paper contributes to current debates about decolonising curriculum and advancing corresponding 'humanness pedagogies' in South Africa by developing a capabilitarian approach and foregrounding epistemic justice capabilities. This is aligned with and to fostering a shared African ethic for individual transformation-in-context and for building…

In this article we will share the impact of mindfulness pedagogy on students in a short-term study abroad course in South Africa. During a one-month program for undergraduate and graduate students, we implemented an explicit critical contemplative pedagogy (Kaufman, 2017) that included daily mindfulness exercises and reflective journaling as a…

In this qualitative article, we argue that marginalized spaces in historically disadvantaged school settings, such as in the case of a marginalized group of people, an out-group in the South African society, can become counter-spaces of comfort and nurturance. Spaces in historically disadvantaged communities are usually perceived in the dominant…

Science teaching and learning is facing a new dilemma. It has to move from its old perception of science as a purely positivistic and value-free enterprise into regarding it as what it really is: a value-laden human endeavour characterised by historical, cultural, social and political parameters. Science teachers now have to deal with ethical, and…

Post-colonial higher education contexts experience a never-ending recuperation from the multiple violences imposed by colonisation. Coloniality has largely been successful in maintaining a hegemonic hold by white settler colonisers in various facets of higher education despite attempts to decolonise this sector and attempts at transformation. The…

Higher education institutions have been complicit with the ongoing coloniality project that reinforces and perpetuates inequities, dismisses interests, knowledges, alternative discourses, and world views different from Western European thought (Bell, 2018; Dastile & Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013; Harms-Smith & Rasool, 2020). Education is rooted in…

Drawing insight and inspiration from our comrade Aziz Choudry, in this paper, we explore the role of political education and knowledge making in social movement struggles to contest the state and capital around access to water and other public services. Drawing on a decade of organising work in the city of Cape Town and at wider scales, we…

Epistemicide occurs when one knowledge is exalted at the expense of local or indigenous knowledge systems leading to the demise of such knowledge systems. In this article, I focus on how some conceptions and ways of incorporating indigenous knowledge systems seem to be entangled in the same misnomer to which they owe their existence (i.e. a…

This paper presents findings from a review of 19 national curriculum policy frameworks (NCPFs) across the globe and discusses dominant and culturally specific discourses that shape early childhood education (ECE). We combine two frameworks of developmental universality and specificity and culturally contextualised pedagogy to explore whether and…

On 20 September 2019 in Cape Town, as part of the global protests on inaction on climate change, the African Climate Alliance submitted a memorandum of demands to South African government representatives, one of which was 'the creation of a mandatory climate-education curriculum for South Africa'. This raises the question of how this imperative…

Given South Africa's colonial and apartheid past, postgraduate supervisors are encouraged to explore decolonial and socially just ways of supervision. I draw on Freire's adult education theory and Hackman's tools of social justice education to reflect on transformative supervision workshops held at a South African university School of Public…