In my remarks about elitist knowledge production, I firstly try to adjust the perspective from which the university could be analysed; I specifically explore the functions of the university in relation to Habermas's categorisation of knowledge. Secondly, with reference to Derrida's reflections on the university, I reformulate a conception of the…

Teacher clusters represent a recent experiment in the field of teacher professional development in South Africa. Increasingly, teacher clusters are being used as a substitute for the traditional approaches to professional development in helping teachers reshape their professional knowledge and change their classroom practices. What underlies this…

There is an abundance of literature on citizenship education. This essay is an attempt to show how deliberation is used in university classroom pedagogy, to engender in students a commitment to becoming responsible citizens of a post-apartheid South Africa. Firstly, I show that controversy can be attended to through deliberation, with specific…

In this article we argue that education in post-conflict and traumatised societies should be partly underpinned by the principle of "mutual vulnerability" as central to a humanising pedagogy. We explain the conceptual links between "reconciliation pedagogies", "mutual vulnerability" and "humanising pedagogies" and associate them with the broader…

In this article we draw on data from a two-cycle action research project, in which ways of teaching reconciliation in post-apartheid secondary school classrooms are explored. We undertake a detailed analysis of a selection of artefacts produced by South African students representing their understandings of reconciliation. Initially students' work…

Gender equity is one of the foundational principles of the national Department of Education, but there is not a shared understanding of its meaning. Based on interviews conducted in 2008 with officials in the Department of Education, we argue that there are two basic approaches to gender equity. The first, which we term "gender blind", equates…

This article addresses the issue of how to monitor and develop the quality of teaching in schools by identifying the international lessons of teacher appraisal, monitoring and support systems and by interrogating the recently introduced South African Integrated Quality Management System (IQMS). The aim is to show why teacher monitoring and…

Today, higher education has become a commodity in the global education market aiming to serve the knowledge society through "the production, transmission and dissemination of high-quality knowledge" (Simons, 2006, 33). One cannot dispute the economic importance of higher education, but to see the university as performing only this economic…

Students who are at high risk of dropping out of high school encounter serious difficulties and challenges in their school-to-work and school-to-school transitions. While acknowledging that the prevention of high school dropout requires a comprehensive and systematic helping approach, this article attempts to take a close look at one of the…

This article explores the extent to which funding is used to steer the public higher education sector towards meeting the social, political and economic imperatives of post-1994 South Africa. It argues that the design of the funding framework influenced the direction of higher education after 1994, and that funding mechanisms explicitly or…

This article reflects on six key themes that emerged from a teacher development conference whose theme was "Developing Teachers for Rural Education". The six themes are the concept "rural" in the South African context; the notion of "rural education"; beyond access, towards success; the practitioner-academic dichotomy; partnership in teacher…

In this article I point out that method is not neutral and innocent, but rather productive, performative and creative. In other words, method does not simply represent reality (the world) but distorts and reconstructs it. Conventional methods are useful but distort the world giving the imprecision that it is simple, predictable and decidable.…

The article questions why experienced MEd students, on a course in pedagogy in social justice education, resorted to actions that clashed with this approach. Drawing on student and staff accounts of the course, the authors, teachers on this course, pose questions as to whether these reactions resulted from increased safety in the class, from…

This conversation piece is intended to provoke thought on the relationship, if any, between education and thinking. It suggests that thinking requires more (perhaps less) than education.

In this response I argue that smart thinking would not necessarily engender democratic justice in our South African society. I contend that we need to cultivate responsible thinkers and that universities are favourably positioned to do so.