LOOKING AT PEOPLE AND ASKING "WHY?": AN ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH TO RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

This article argues that ethnographic research can provide direction as to both the processes and content of religious education. Crain offers advice on a research method that relies on interviews and focus groups and concludes with clues from her research about how religious education can be more efficacious.     

Globalisation and Its Malcontents: In pursuit of the promise of education

In the course of exploring critiques of globalisation, this essay will focus on two postures—each with its range of arguments—that have emerged as alternatives to globalisation, namely, the delinking position and the subverting position. The first argues for standing “outside” of globalisation and its educational cultures and apparatuses. It brings together positions found in black feminism (as in the work of Audre Lourde), various religious, cultural, and ideology-centred approaches such as Islamic education and Afrocentric education, and critical dependency theorists such as Samir Amin, all of whom argue in one way or another for delinking the “South” from the “North”. The second argues for working “inside” the globalised world. This posture, represented by an eclectic group of philosophies and approaches that span radical constructivism, different versions of multiculturalism, and, on the left, old and new interpretations of Marxism, argues variously for developing more authentic and relevant pedagogies and for making a case for mobilising social structures behind political efforts to change the curriculum. The direction that this essay will take, in the course of critiquing these “outside” and “inside” postures, is to argue that neither is sufficient, by itself, as a reply to the assimilative and exclusionary impulses of the form of globalisation that dominates the world today. It is suggested, instead, that a way towards an alternative imagination to the hegemonic culture of globalisation lies in exploring the relationship between an engaged “inside” and “outside” view.     

Student suspension: A critical reappraisal

This paper analyzes national level data, gathered for the Safe School Study, to directly address the question, “Why are students suspended from school?” Data are available on students in both junior and senior high schools from a representative sample of the nation's schools. Using a range of analytical techniques, the paper attempts to tease out the relationships between (1) student misbehavior at varying types of schools and suspension rates, (2) the effects of teacher judgments and attitudes, (3) the effect of administrative structures, (4) the effect of perceived academic potential, and (5) the effect of racial bias. It is concluded that suspension rates cannot be regarded as a simple reflection of student misbehavior in school, but rather as the result of a complex of factors grounded in the ways schools operate. Suspension rates are best predicted by (1) knowing the kind of school a student went to, and (2) knowing how that school was run.     

Dealing with race: Laying down patterns for multiculturalism in South Africa

Little is known about the nature of South African teachers' work with respect to race. On the basis of extensive interviews with teachers in newly integrated schools, this article attempts to make sense of the approaches being developed by teachers. It illustrates the range of content and teaching approaches being adopted and seeks to argue that the form of multicultural education that is emerging is characterized by a compromised critique: teachers encourage criticism of that which is distant and historically removed from the South African context, but manifest an attitude of compliance with that which is immediate and directly pertinent to South Africa. The effect of this duality, the paper argues, is to leave the racial common sense imprinted in the South African curriculum untouched.     

Discourses of Exclusion and Inclusion in the South: Limits and Possibilities

The primary purpose of the article is to lookat how current thinking in the social sciences conceptualizes discourses of inclusion and exclusion in education and what the value of this thinking is for policy development incountries like South Africa and India. The article argues that the main conceptual weakness of current understandings is a failureto adequately engage with social justice concerns. While current approaches promote the achievement of certain kinds of rights, they are often complicit in the denial of others.This is because, the article seeks to show, the policy text in many countries, including countries of the South, invariably defines individuals and groups in essentialized terms and fails to engage with the complexity of their identities.