'Poisoned history': a comparative study of nationalism,propaganda and the treatment of war and peace in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century school curriculum

This paper investigates the educational philosophy and practices of Achimota School, which was established in the Gold Coast Colony (the southern part of today’s Ghana) in 1927 as the governmental model school for leadership education. Achimota’s education aimed to develop leaders who were ‘Western in intellectual attitude’, ‘African in sympathy’. To fulfil this objective, Achimota attempted to develop a curriculum that took into account the sociocultural background of African students while trying to provide an education on a par with that available at English public schools. The paper first examines the discourse surrounding the establishment of a model secondary school for African leadership, which involved diverse groups of people – colonial officials, missionaries, European educationists, traditional chiefs and African nationalists – and then reviews the relevant educational philosophies of the twentieth century. Finally, the paper describes the Achimota education as experienced by students, a mixed product of English public school tradition and ‘African tradition’. Regardless of the efforts to balance the two ‘traditions’, what was actually created was a new Achimota culture that selected essences from different ‘traditions’ and remoulded them for a novel purpose.     

Towards social progress and post‐imperial modernity? Colonial politics of literacy in the Anglo‐Egyptian Sudan, 1946–1956

This article explores the politics of literacy in late colonial Sudan. Drawing upon hitherto untapped archival sources in English and Arabic, it focuses on two key questions: What were the purposes and uses of literacy in the eyes of colonial authorities? What means were used to spread literacy skills among Sudanese people? Positioning these issues in the context of British imperial policy in Africa, it is argued that mixed teams of British and Sudanese educationists came to view literacy as a central tool to foster social progress and political modernity. The analysis puts special emphasis on literacy campaigns and follow‐up literature as experimental means used to promote and perpetuate Arabic literacy in Northern Sudan. Examining both ‘nationwide’ and provincially based magazines, it highlights their multifaceted role as pedagogic materials, vehicles of political, cultural and ideological representations, social networks, as well as public platforms of expression for young Sudanese literates.     

Understanding voices from the margins: social injustice and agency in first-year students’ literacy narratives

Abstract

This article analyses literacy narratives of first-year students at a South African university. It uses excerpts from the literacy narratives to explain how this writing genre serves as an outlet for reconstructing experiences of social injustice and agency. The article discusses how students’ experiences of social injustice and their sense of agency intersect to influence their literacy development from primary school to university. The article contends that, although literacy narratives give lecturers access to students’ pre-university learning experiences and their discomforts with university literacy expectations, they also capture aspects of societal injustices and their responses to these injustices.     

Utilising creative methodologies to elicit the views of young learners with additional needs in literacy

The research described in this article aimed to explore and examine the dominant ‘assessment’ and ‘participation’ stories of upper‐primary pupils with long‐standing and marked literacy learning needs, their views on how their level of participation in the assessment and remediation of their additional needs might be increased and also how they perceive themselves as literacy learners. This qualitative small‐scale study adopted a case study approach and utilised creative methodologies in the context of focus groups to investigate sensitively the views and experiences of Key Stage 2 pupils with additional needs in literacy. The findings discussed here are based on the outcomes from the four Northern Irish schools that participated in the original cross‐border (Northern Ireland/Republic of Ireland) study. Findings are discussed in the context of strategies for promoting holistic and empowering pathways for learners with additional needs in literacy.     

移动学习环境下新生代农民工信息素养培养策略研究

信息素养是移动学习时代人们应该具备的一种基本能力。新生代农民工是一个庞大的群体,要想更好地适应信息社会的发展,应该把信息素养作为个人素质培养的重要环节。本文分析了移动学习环境下的信息素养以及新生代农民工的信息素养诉求,并探讨了培养其信息素养的策略。     

What Kind of Literacy? Reflections on the Experiences of Migrant Domestic Workers Negotiating Learning in London

This article is concerned with the literacy learning experiences of a group of female migrant domestic workers from Nepal and India who participated in weekly literacy support sessions at the Migrant Resource Centre in London. The article draws on qualitative research to explore the women’s engagement with different forms of learning, and considers how this was affected by the transnational nature of their lives and the way they navigate and negotiate identities across different contexts.     

Reading and writing between different worlds: Learning,literacy and power in the lives of two migrant domestic workers

Over the last decades, studies exploring women's literacy have highlighted the way in which literacy practices are embedded within social norms and structures of power. This article draws on research with a group of female migrant domestic workers from Nepal who attended literacy support sessions at the Migrant Resource Centre in London. It explores the way in which their engagement with literacy and learning interacts with the gendered relations of power they experience as they move between different transnational spaces and social fields. It suggests that a consideration of the opportunities and constraints that they experience as migrant domestic workers is critical for understanding their engagement with literacy, and for thinking about possibilities for greater gender justice in the lives of migrant domestic workers like them.     

Incorporating the notion of recontextualisation in academic literacies research: the case of a South African vocational web design and development course

This article describes a small scale ethnographically oriented research study seeking to contribute to understanding student academic literacy practices in a South African vocational, web design and development course. In this course digital multimodal assessments are the main means whereby students demonstrate their learning. The findings of the study provide insights into the contextualised ways in which student academic literacy practices are shaped by academic and professional contexts where digital and multimodal practices are privileged. The academic literacies perspective used in this study, while useful for exploring the nature of student academic literacy practices, has not paid enough attention to theorising how literacy practices are shaped by broader contextual influences. To address this limitation the paper speculates about how the Bernsteinian concept of knowledge recontextualisation might be used alongside an academic literacies frame. The inclusion of an empirical focus on recontextualisation can provide an opportunity to explore how knowledge construction and transformation processes in the academic and professional domains result in the privileging of particular academic literacy practices.     

Complicity and control in the workplace: a critical case study of TQM,learning, and the management of knowledge

This article analyses how a Total Quality Management process with an embedded workplace literacy programme was implemented in an industrial manufacturing plant. Designed as an insider/outsider team research project, data were collected through interviews with management personnel, education and training providers, and hourly workers. Findings reveal that the Total Quality Management process and the literacy programme were implemented under the guise of providing education and training for workers, but were driven by corporate policy to reduce labour costs. The study also examines the way in which adult education was complicit in controlling workplace knowledge.     

Narratives of agency: the experiences of Braille literacy practitioners in the Kha Ri Gude South African Mass Literacy Campaign

In this article, we locate the Kha Ri Gude South African Mass Literacy Campaign within the context of the problem of illiteracy and exclusion in South Africa, while concentrating on various post-apartheid initiatives designed to give visually challenged adults the opportunity to become literate. We shall provide a detailed account of focus group sessions organised in 2012; the aim of these sessions was to explore the experiences of blind literacy practitioners who were charged with the supervision and coordination of Braille literacy classes for blind, illiterate adults. We suggest that the way the practitioners expressed what being involved in the Campaign meant for them for an extended period (three years or more) gives us a glimpse of how, through their roles as literacy organisers, they were able to engender agency among blind adult literacy learners and themselves.     

African Universities and the African Heritage

This article deals with the role of the universities in Africa. What are the challenges for educators who want to root African education in African traditions? After a brief look at pre- colonial and colonial education the article goes on to describe the situation after independence and especially the effects on higher education of a concentration of resources on basic education. To what extent do the link arrangements built up between universities in the North and the South perpetuate a colonial situation? What can be done to restore the dignity and heritage of the African people through university training? Examples are mostly taken from Tanzania, the country in Africa the author knows best.     

African Universities and the African Heritage

This article deals with the role of the universities in Africa. What are the challenges for educators who want to root African education in African traditions? After a brief look at pre- colonial and colonial education the article goes on to describe the situation after independence and especially the effects on higher education of a concentration of resources on basic education. To what extent do the link arrangements built up between universities in the North and the South perpetuate a colonial situation? What can be done to restore the dignity and heritage of the African people through university training? Examples are mostly taken from Tanzania, the country in Africa the author knows best.     

African Americans in Urban Catholic Schools: Faith, Leadership and Persistence in Pursuit of Educational Opportunity

A review of research on US Catholic education reveals that race is not treated as an important area of analysis like class and gender. Black Catholics are rarely studied in education let alone mainstream writings. This article examines the social and educational history of blacks in the US Catholic Church and the dual reality of inclusion and exclusion within a Church and its schools. This paper focuses on the intersection of the Church and Black Catholic schools as enduring institutions of opportunity for Black families and their communities. This paper unearths the shared values, assumptions and beliefs about African American Catholics quest for literacy. The article uses Black Theology as a frame to explain how the intersections of culture, history and religion influence meaning and educational decision-making. African Americans pursued Catholic education for two reasons. First, they sought to be educated which both advanced their individual freedom but vastly improved their community’s economic, social, and political standing. Second, they inserted their own unique cultural and social experiences into Catholic schools which espoused service and academic excellence. Black Catholic schools well-defined values and academic excellence is still viewed by African Americans as places of hope and opportunity for students of color.     

“Verbal Ping Pong” as Culturally Congruent Communication: Maximizing African American Students' Access and Engagement as Socially Just Teaching

African American youth have been disciplined and dismissed from classrooms for engaging in culturally-based communication practices that teachers misinterpret and perceive as disruptive. Teachers have significant power in how they communicate with their students. White teachers should be especially aware of this power because misunderstandings around communication often stem from cultural differences. This study illustrates the promising practice of a white teacher who integrated African American students' culturally-based literacy practice of “verbal ping pong” into English subject matter instruction. Ethnographic methods that foreground the perspectives of student participants illuminated the significance of this highly interactive discourse, while discourse analysis showed how it functioned as culturally congruent communication to promote students' access to classroom discourse and engagement in subject matter learning. By showing how culturally congruent communication can provide equitable access to learning opportunities for all students, this study renders a promising representation of socially just pedagogy.     

“If you don’t have English,you’re just as good as a dead person”: A narrative of adult English language literacy within post-apartheid South Africa

This article centres on the narrative of Thuli, a 62-year-old black South African domestic worker taking English language literacy classes outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. For Thuli, English literacy is of vital importance because, as she claims, “if you don’t have English, you’re just as good as a dead person”. Drawing primarily on the methodology of narrative inquiry, this article employs human narratives to expose the links between individual, social and political histories. Specifically, it centres on the life narratives of Thuli and the ways in which her stories are integrated into the complex history of language learning and adult education within South Africa. Utilising these coexisting histories and HERstories, the author of this article seeks to understand the multiple forces that impact a learner such as Thuli to become literate in English. By highlighting Thuli’s narrative as well as demonstrating the roles that both the author as the researcher and Thuli as the narrator play in the creation of her narrative, the author attempts to exhibit the power of the narrative in further understanding nuances of language, power and identity. Moreover, the author ventures to expose the ways in which the links between these concepts continue to affect adult learners in postcolonial South African adult basic education (ABE) and language learning. Finally, the author links Thuli’s experience to two of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), namely Quality education (SDG4) and Gender equality (SDG5). In addition, the author attempts to reveal how the links between both goals are missing in policy documents. Using this narrative as an example of the complexity of English within South African ABE, what becomes apparent are the ways in which the desire to learn English is both individually nuanced and laden with historically (re)produced ideologies.     

The British and curriculum development in West Africa: A historical discourse

THE BRITISH AND CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT IN WEST AFRICA: A HISTORICAL STUDY – Only recently have African nations begun to make their way towards establishing genuinely autonomous education systems incorporating elements of indigenous culture. The present study examines the historical development of curriculum in British West Africa in its links with the educational activities of the early Christian missionaries and the imposition of British colonial rule. For over 300 years, the curriculum content was essentially European in nature. African interests and cultural practices were largely excluded, as “bookwork” was favored over “handwork”. The colonial curriculum also helped introduce a new social order to West Africa, leading to the rise of new local elites reading, writing, and speaking foreign European languages. This study explores how the idea of a “civilized” person, promoted through the colonial school curriculum, developed new local elites with different sets of values and expectations that often made them strangers in their own societies. It also describes the connection between this curriculum and the repeated failure of education-reform efforts.     

A Case Among Cases,A World Among Worlds: The Ecology of Writing Among the Kashinawa in Brazil

This article discusses the conflict between local knowledges and global knowledges in the specific case of indigenous literacy in northwestern Brazil, where global knowledges are represented by the "ideological" (Street, 1984) theories of literacy and "utilitarian" models of writing (Scollon & Scollon, 1995), and local knowledges are represented by the multimodal texts produced by the Kashinawá indigenous community. Whereas "ideological" theories of literacy purport to take into account local knowledges and practices, they are in this case incapable of understanding indigenous multimodality due to what I call a graphocentric habitus. I read this as an indication of the extent to which prevailing literacy theories are not sufficiently aware of their localness; this may be due to their insertion within the colonial difference (Mignolo, 2000) power and knowledge collusion, which tends to "universalize" dominant knowledges and subalternize local knowledges     

Home Environments and Parental Support for Literacy: Children's Perceptions and School Literacy Achievement

This study examined literacy in home environments and how children perceive literate events that occur in their families. Four children were selected from a larger study of 129 children. Two children (one African American and one biracial) were from a low income urban community. The other two were Caucasian and from a small farm community. Ninety-six hours of observations over eight weeks during the summer of the kindergarten school year were conducted. Data collected included field notes, tape recordings, parent questionnaires, awareness interviews and school achievement measures. Domains were identified and analyzed for literacy support in the home, The analysis indicated three major findings: 1) all the parents provided support for literacy but there were differences in the way literacy was constructed, 2) the differences in the children's awareness responses describing how they were learning to read at home reflected their home literacy experiences, 3) the home literacy environments of the four children who were from low income families were conducive to literacy development and school success.     

全球化背景下英语非洲工人运动与民族国家认同

西方主导下的全球化为获取廉价劳动力,先是借助殖民政权直接干预、以五大类措施限制非洲人工人运动,激发起非洲工人的共同体意识,该意识同民族主义意识相结合,形成非洲独立国家的稳定基础之一;之后又借新自由主义策略压低工人福利,破坏民族共识,工人运动再次兴起。非洲国家人民分三种路径重新凝结民族共识,谋求突破"新殖民主义"罗网。     

Primary Education in Sub-Saharan Africa--a moral issue,an economic matter,or both?

Generally, it is argued that economic factors explain changes in literacy and enrolment rates in sub-Saharan Africa. This article demonstrates that educational indicators vary as much with religious factors, i.e. degree of Islamisation and Christianisation, as with economic factors. Forty years ago, strongly Christianised countries had higher rates of literacy and primary school enrolment than strongly Islamised countries, regardless of economic level, typpe of state and colonial background, and they still have. The article ends with a number of assumptions which can serve as an agenda for research on educational development in sub-Saharan Africa.