Background: Recent attempts to rekindle the decolonisation of education project in South Africa, is a reaction to perceptions that there are fundamental frailties in the existing curriculum. Childhood education is yet to take up the challenge in any substantive way. Aim: To explore the insights critical posthumanism might offer in attempting to…

In the reconceptualisation era of curriculum studies, scholars drew on a range of theories such as existentialism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, feminism, poststructuralism, and especially critical theory. They used critical theory as a lens to examine the influence of social and political forces on curriculum, in particular the role of dominant…

A documented transcript and a series of still images from two spontaneous, incidental and intra-active pedagogical encounters in a preschool are the focus and the source of this article. A turning over of data generated through a piece of doctoral research that explored intra-active learning as a phenomenon makes visible the agency of names and…

Higher education has been deeply affected by neoliberalism and corporatisation, with their emphasis on efficiency, competitiveness and valorisation of quantity over quality. This article argues that in the context of South African higher education, and in the Extended Curriculum Programme (ECP) more particularly, such commodification of education…

The perceived dichotomy between public or private benefits to higher education remains of growing interest in higher education research and policy. In this paper, I borrow from the African philosophy of "Ubuntu" as a conceptual lens to interrogate this binary within the South African context using the 'black tax' phenomenon. Gleaning…

In response to the call for papers for this special issue and the questions it poses, the authors show how the ontological posthumanist shift of agential realism does not erase but keeps the child human of colour in play, despite the inclusion of the other-than-(Adult)human in its methodologies. Through a montaging technique, the authors explore…

In this article I shall reflect on the issue of humanising pedagogy, taking a view that dehumanisation, in general, comes from two kinds of oppression. I shall argue that, apart from oppression of the political type, tertiary education is also a victim of another type of oppression which contributes to its dehumanisation, viz. the oppression…

This article explores how three well-known conceptual frameworks view child development and how they assume particular figurations of the child in the context of the South African National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four. This new curriculum is based on a children's rights framework. The capability approaches offer important…

This paper examines how WhatsApp can be used to build learning communities and facilitate interaction, through the lens of Ubuntu -- an African concept of humanness, which means that an individual person owes his or her existence to the existence of others. The Afrocentric concept of Ubuntu and interaction work concomitantly towards the…

Purpose: This paper aims to problematise the notion of social justice and the moral project that underpins critical literacy education. In plural societies, do we all have a shared understanding of what social justice is or how education, currently a dividing practice, might contribute to a better social order? Do we know what "better"…

This article reports on a qualitative research study on the feasibility of teachers using newspaper articles in advancing a humanistic perspective of science in teaching Grade 9 natural sciences to South African learners. Two key design principles were distilled in this design-based research: Newspaper articles can serve as a viable resource for…

Sometimes universities in general are criticised because of impersonal campus environments, or "academic incivility". However, research shows that this phenomenon is more common in medical schools, pointing to increased levels of stress and incidences of attempted suicide among medical students. The decay in humanitarian attitudes and…

The aim of this paper is to search for possibilities to change the terms and content of conversations on colonial/decolonial human rights education. The content of conversations consists of what we know about human rights. The terms of conversations are the principles, assumptions, and rules of knowing in human rights education. The terms and…

After more than a decade of democratic citizenship education in public schools in South Africa, the Department of Basic Education (DoBE) has still not produced sufficiently plausible ways for how democracy and citizenship ought to be taught in classrooms. I argue that the recent "practical guide" on how to cultivate "responsibility…

This paper uses Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis to interrogate concepts of social justice in relation to the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism by referring to the work of the Situationist International movement, the posthuman philosophy of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as well as Afrofuturism. Providing an array of new theoretical responses as…